For this reason, they stand before God’s throneand worship him day and night in his temple.
The one who sits on the throne will shelter them.
They will not hunger or thirst anymore,
nor will the sun or any heat strike them.
For the Lamb who is in the center of the throne
will shepherd them
and lead them to springs of life-giving water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Revelations 7:14-17
This
week’s readings are all about heaven.
Many Christians who wish to appear modern and intellectual nowadays
dismiss heaven as wishful thinking. They
make heaven a moral issue by asserting that we can create heaven on earth by
imitating Jesus’s good example. For them,
heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.
I
see no reason for this pessimism.
Judaism and its belief in God arose, survived and thrived for many
centuries without the concept of heaven.
If anything, our ancient predecessors in faith believed that at death our
bodies descend into Sheol - a shadowy world where we persist in a state of
semi-consciousness. It was not something
to look forward to. But despite offering
no comfort in this area, faith persisted and continued to develop. By two hundred years before Jesus’s birth, the
concept of heaven had firmly taken root in Jewish theology, relying on passages
of Scripture that hinted, but perhaps did not outright assert that it is our
final home. In Jesus’ time, the
Pharisees were known to believe in heaven while the Sadducees continued to
believe only in Sheol. In Matthew (22:32),
Jesus makes an argument against the Sadducee’s lack of faith in this
regard. Paul tries to throw his trial
into confusion by playing the Pharisees’ and the Sadducees’ beliefs against
each other (Act 23:6-9).
Photo Credit: Missy Grasso
