Can you bear so much bliss?
After your Earthly mere decades of misery and mud, does a million years of complete joy seem too much to stand? Two million? You just can't believe this kind of reward?
We hear that if you go to heaven, you’ll be happy. But how seriously do most people understand that promise?
God’s not talking about giving you 100 years of banquets and vacations, or 300 years of staggering satisfaction and love, but then you have to go back to paying on the mortgage and utility bills.
Not some happiness for a bit. He means ecstasy forever.
Forever means never-ending.
Human beings can get bored with anything. Does someone with one mansion settle in with contentment? Or does he, regardless of political beliefs, want a second mansion, and envy someone else who has three mansions, or larger ones?
So someone receives his (or, of course, her) long-dreamed-of entry into heaven, but after a while he gets edgy?
No. Because life is transformed forever. You’re not just you with a new set of clothes, or successively wearing long hair or short, depending on the current style.
Getting enlightenment at the Gates
Sure, this is hard to understand now, because we’re still thinking with limited human minds. But the age-old dream of complete enlightenment is something else we get at the metaphorical Pearly Gates.
“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
Too good to be true? No. Too hard to comprehend with only limited understanding now? Sure.
Many people who regularly go to worship services expect to go to heaven. But ask them to explain what they’ll see and have there. If they’re Christians, they perhaps might say walking beside Jesus in a nice garden. Or, if they’re not Christians, expect other spiritual triumphs.
Is that about it, the extent of what they feel safe at imagining? They expect to walk next to Jesus along a path for 25 million years? (Which, after all, is a shorter time than forever.) And not even having to run errands to some stores along that path? No more haircuts needed, or shampoos, and you won’t be bald. No more checkups at the doctor’s?
Time simply ceases to exist. You’re always in a present moment. You’re not repeatedly checking your watch and piling up old calendars in the closet, and then finally having to pile up the calendars until they fill the ocean because you’ve got 40 million of them and have run out of space.
Too much bliss to endure?
Forty million years of bliss is just too much? Your poor body can’t endure it anymore? Well, God said forever, and that’s what He meant. He’s not doing it to be mean but to be marvelous. But it’s not having to endure forever for a time-bound fan of sports teams and player trades and new automobile models and closets overflowing with dresses. Those amount to Earthly cobwebs trying to hold you back.
God is trying to give us too much goodness? No. Just more than we can comprehend now. He’s God, and not limited by our current restricted thinking.
A very few times, for a few short moments, I experienced this timelessness. It is different. But it’s not ours to keep yet.
It this seems too good to be true, think of the flip side (to use an Earthly metaphor), evil and injustice.
One of the difficulties of Earthly life is seeing raw injustice not merely succeed but flourish; suffering endure and expand. How could God be around somewhere if He lets this happen?
The possibility of choosing sin started back with the Garden of Eden, the place of perfect happiness. Adam and Eve were created to love God, but they weren’t robots. He didn’t tie their arms to their sides and say they must let Him kiss them while they were bound to the stake. He told them a big temptation to avoid. But the Tempter slinked into the Garden with his lies about that temptation and about their becoming God, too, and they fell for it.
Hard work to restore bond of trust
The evil wouldn’t triumph forever, but Adam and Eve had broken a bond of trust that would take hard work to restore. Other traditions have acknowledged the same burdens while attempting an explanation, such as the Greeks’ tale of Pandora, whose fallible curiosity led her to open a container, thereby releasing curses upon us.
Visionaries of heavenly beings and Divine Persons have told of immense, wonderfully reassuring love expressed by them for us, but also of challenges to endure first. Sometimes the challenges are worse for some. But that may be like, for instance, some people having more aptitude than others to learn foreign languages. The accomplishment is worth attaining, although harder for some.
The attributes of God are all perfection. He is perfect knowledge, justice, understanding, patience, wisdom, love, glory — the list is as endless as God.
The physical universe seems to go on forever, all called into existence by one Creator — Whose presence not only seems to, but does, go on forever.
He created everything. I cannot even create a blade of grass. I can plant a grass seed, but I can’t make the grass seed appear from out of nothing and nowhere. I can pick an orange or pound a boulder down into pieces of rock, but I cannot call oranges or pieces of rock into existence from nowhere.
God always thinking about us
Because God always existed, He was thinking about each of us individually 25 million years ago, and will be 25 million years from now. He cares about each of us and our welfare and happiness now and always. But, as with Adam and Eve, He cannot tie us up and demand that we must love Him. We have free will and aren’t robots. The all-powerful God created the angels themselves, but the pride of some of them led them to reject Him and become the filthy devils of hell.
God didn’t create anyone to go to hell, but some people make that choice, out of pride or ambition or other moral ills. They have a fallen nature, wounded in the Garden of Eden, that doesn’t turn to Him. Jesus spent more of His time on Earth warning people of the dangers of hell than the joys of heaven. They already were guaranteed heaven if they followed Him. But He knew some would be tempted strongly to the contrary, and He wanted to do all He could to warn them away from the Abyss.
_____
(A note that to refer to God as He is only to acknowledge how His Son recognized Him — as His Father. Neither the Son nor the Father disdains women or men. When the Son needed to arrive on Earth, God chose a remarkable woman, not a man, to be the Earthly parent. That woman is the sister of all.)
On May 28 I added at the end of the 11th paragraph: Or, if they’re not Christians, expect other spiritual triumphs.