“Take off your shoes and stay awhile”
I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying ‘Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. - Revelation 21:3, NLT
Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about. - N.T. Wright
Heaven is God's domain, so wherever God is, there is Heaven.
Our human domain is earth, and so will it be forever (in due time), which is precisely why Jesus taught us to pray, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”
We were made from the dust of this planet, and we will return to that dust, but only temporarily, for one Day, when God is ready, Jesus will return to conduct the Great
Resurrection of all the dead in Christ and the general restoration and renewal of allcreation.
Revelation 21 says so, and it also says that God will descend to the earth to make His eternal home among us. God will be with us, and we will be with God on the New Earth, forever together. Rather than this earthly home of ours being obliterated, it will be liberated of all that ails it—especially our chief nemesis: death.
On the New Earth no more tears, no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. Those will be gone forever as God makes “all things new.”
Due to its esoteric mysteries and frightening imagery, many of us have avoided the Revelation of John, and because of that wariness we have missed the opportunity to celebrate the culminating, full of hope, message that God is returning to live among us. It’s His plan, His desire, His joy to dwell among His creation that, from the beginning, He pronounced “good” and “very good.”
So, when you think about eternity and our “heavenly home,” think biblically. It isn’t going to be some far away mystical, “ghostly” abode, without form or substance. Quite the contrary; it’s going to be very familiar to us, for what God created in the original Eden He will re-create in the New Eden—plains and deserts and mountains and rivers and oceans—our now despoiled earth made gloriously new!
We will do then (on the New Earth) what we do now, except without any threat of harm, disease, or death. We will live real lives, with real things to do, real places to go, and real people to see. Two of those people will be Adam and Eve, whom we just might overhear saying, “You know, this place looks incredibly familiar. Why don’t we take our shoes off and stay awhile.”
Sounds good to me. I think I will. Why don’t you join me?
A fellow beggar along the way,
Greg