Okay, been over a month. Way too long between posts, but I'll be honest, I haven't had a whole lot of motivation to write the next post in this series that I'm doing on heaven and hell. I suffer from a bit of indifference on the subject. I hate to put that in the beginning of this post, and I'm betting that I won't get many responses to this one. However, I need to be honest. After all, this is my confessional.
Heaven is another one of those subjects in scripture filled with metaphor, allegory, symbolism.. and it's very difficult to know what is, and what isn't. So streets of gold, crowns, mansions, no tears, no pain/suffering.. these are the carrots that get dangled in front of us as if somehow we are to be motivated by these things. I'm not sure about you, but I could care less about a crown, a mansion, or what the surface is that I'm walking upon. If these things are supposed to be motivators for Christians, we would all be called materialists. So why is this stuff used to describe heaven and eternity with God? Are they supposed to be motivators? I don't think so. In the same way that the language of hell is only an metaphorical picture that is trying to convey a suffering or a place that can't be described by our limited vocabulary, so it is with heaven.
I'll be honest, I do not know whether or not my opinions on heaven or hell is remotely accurate. It isn't the point. But I do know that just as the language of hell and how it translates to "reality" is unknown to me, the same thing is true for me with heaven.
I get reminded often about how limited our understanding is and our ability to reason or "know" things like the problem of evil, predestination/free will, limits of omipotence, omniscience, omni-whatevernece, and yet somehow this isn't true with heaven and hell. We can know... it's clear as day... right? I don't think so. If we truly are limited in our ability to know God in one area, shouldn't it follow we are limited to know God in all areas? Where does that leave us? Ambiguity, anarchy, subjectivism? No... and yes.
More on this in my next post. Stay tuned.... It won't be as long as the time between my last post and this one.
