In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile
than usual.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon makes the argument that God has put a longing for the eternal into the human heart, yet seems to have provided less revelation about eternity
than some of us might wish. And notwithstanding the fact that we’ve had plenty
more prophetic revelation since the book of Ecclesiastes was written, we still
have a tendency to speculate about what lies in store for us at the end of
history as we move into eternity.
Tom: We’re discussing a recent Todd Billings post at Christianity Today entitled
“The New View of Heaven Is Too Small”. What was your last point, IC?
Immanuel Can: Serious Christians need some kind of counter
to the common misconception that the eternal state involves a lot of unrelenting,
undifferentiated, disembodied, white-clad, purposeless hanging about on clouds …
Dull and Undifferentiated
Tom: Oh, I absolutely agree. That’s a pretty bleak way to spend eternity.
When we speak of the “Christian hope”, the
only honest way we can present that is by using the language of scripture. The
problem for many Christians, I think, is not that we don’t have adequate
information from God to fill us with hope, but that we tend to ignore, distort
or make false assumptions about the information we do have. That’s why I wrote a post two weeks ago or so laying out the things that Peter and Paul tell us we
may “hope” for. Speculating about what else may happen in the absence of
further information from God is a fruitless and counterproductive exercise.
IC: Worse than that,
I think. It’s actually very discouraging to anyone who might otherwise be
attracted to the true hope God has given us.
Tom: Yes, I was too polite. In any case, if we are to avoid dull,
undifferentiated concepts of eternity, we’re best to pay greater attention to
the details we HAVE been given. And there seems to be a lot of confusion even
there. I’m not speaking of whether we understand any particular image found in
Revelation allegorically or literally. But sometimes our popular ideas about
eternity are completely disconnected from the text or pulled right out of
the air.
Eternity in Heaven?
One example: the idea that we will spend eternity in “heaven”. That’s just inattentive to the language of scripture. If
we use words biblically, it is simply untrue. Revelation 21 says the city
which is to be our home comes “down out of heaven from God”. That’s stated
twice, and it means something. We are not being taken up to live in God’s home, God is
coming to live with us in ours, and he’s bringing us a new, perfect dwelling to
inhabit. This is explicitly stated: “Behold, the dwelling place of
God is with man. He will dwell with them.”
That’s a powerful idea. I find it very exciting, and it’s stated very plainly indeed. We’re not pulling it out of the subtext. So how is it that so many of us get the basics wrong?
Useful Untruths and Unexplored Territory
IC: Well, I’m not too much of a conspiracy theorist. But I would say this: the popular
depiction of eternity certainly serves an agenda.
It serves the agendas of those who reject God, starting with hardened human cynics
and going all the way down to the program of the Enemy of Souls himself.
Meanwhile, to those ordinary folks who may be struggling under conviction of
their sin it offers a welcome relief in the form of ridicule, or just of the
balm to their anxieties: the intuition that they are, after all, not going to
miss so much if they miss out completely on eternal life — that the
believers “won’t be having much fun anyway”, as some have derisively put it.
But the picture one finds in scripture, incomplete as it may be, promises much,
much more — and a far greater tragedy if anyone misses out on God’s plan.
Tom: One of these days we’ll have to take a post and dedicate it to exploring what the prophets say
about the millennial reign of Jesus Christ. There’s enough detail in the Old
Testament to vividly flesh out the bare bones given us in Revelation, and some
fascinating details that make it come alive for the reader. That in itself is a
very exciting study.
IC: Yes, please, soon. Another subject worth chasing would be why some Christians believe in the
‘rapture’, a return of Christ that is not the same as his second coming.
I’ll bet a lot of people don’t know about that these days … but it’s
really the greatest Christian source of hope.
The Father’s House
As for the millennium, that’s a much understudied topic.
Tom: Well, 1,000 years is a relatively short period when compared to eternity, and there’s more detail
to be had in Revelation about the eternal state. The vast majority of the
details about the millennium are stashed away in the Old Testament prophets,
which nobody reads.
Anyway, we were observing the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. That’s
an interesting closing to scripture, because it doesn’t transport redeemed humanity
into those terrifying, mysterious, almost alien surroundings glimpsed by Isaiah
or Ezekiel, but into a place
“prepared for you”.
It’s the Father’s house, sure, but one designed specifically with us in mind by the
member of the Godhead who has assumed humanity into his own being, if we can
put it that way. It isn’t “heaven”, but something even better and more
suited to our constitutions; crafted in love to accommodate humanity with God
himself at its center. And since it has been designed for us by a Creator who
knows us intimately, I do not expect to find myself bored there.
A little trust is in order, is it not?
This Is Going to be Amazing!
IC: Yes, and that’s an important point. The Bible doesn’t tell us a lot about the eternal future
because, as it plainly says, “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered the heart of man …” That makes such things awfully difficult to describe, since no term of comparison or metaphor
even exists on earth whereby they might be explained adequately at present. On
the converse side, to explain them inadequately would be to reduce them,
trivialize them, impoverish them, and to sell the joys of the future badly short.
That’s not the type of thing to which the Lord is likely to resort, is he? He’s not
going to give us an unjust, off-point, confused or insufficient version of
these things in lieu of the real joys they involve, just because we really can’t
“get” this stuff yet.
But if that’s how great the real distance is between what we experience now
and how things are eventually going to be, then what can the Lord in fairness say to us for the moment, except, “Trust me; this is going to be amazing”?
I’ll take him at his word. Wouldn’t you?
Tom: I would.
Israel vs. the Church
Maybe since we’re talking about the eternal state, we should take a moment or two to
discuss one other issue, and that’s this: Are you familiar with the debate as
to whether the New Jerusalem is either: (i) the Church, or (ii) Israel?
IC: The writer of that article seems to believe in both the ‘rapture’
and the millennium. But he sees the Bride and the New Jerusalem as exactly the
same, and both as identical with the universal Church, if I’m reading him
correctly. He also seems to think Israel remains permanently in unbelief, so
cannot be considered there (the mention of the tribes’ names on the foundations
notwithstanding). And he does not have a “remnant” view of Israel, it would seem; Israel, to him, means only the entire unbelieving nation. Have I got that right?
Tom: That sounds close, yes. But I’m speaking particularly to the idea that the city and the Church are identical. Matthew Henry would be the point
man for that notion (“This new Jerusalem is the church of God in its new and
perfect state, the church triumphant”), but it’s managed to hang around for centuries. And of course when you make the
entire city a picture of the Church, your explanation of the details of the
city is necessarily a bit nebulous. You end up with nothing solid at all.
The Emptiness of Overallegorizing
As he puts it:
“These foundations are set forth by twelve sorts of precious stones, denoting the variety and excellence of the doctrines of the gospel, or of the graces of the Holy Spirit, or the personal excellences of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
So which is it, Matthew? Do the precious
stones represent the gospel, the graces or the excellences of Christ? Who
knows? To Henry (and to most other allegorists), it doesn’t much matter. It’s
all just a giant ball of figurative mush.
IC: Wow. Talk about working too hard to allegorize. He needs at least a little warrant for
any such jumps in semantics and logic.
Tom: I think there’s a better way to look at this, and that is that New
Jerusalem is the place the Lord Jesus
has prepared for his Bride to dwell. When the angel says to John, “Come, I will
show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb,” the figure of speech involved
is metonymy. The city stands for all who are to make their eternal home within
it, united in Christ. There is a real place prepared for us, and the Church is
to dwell in it (perhaps among others), enjoying eternally the presence of God.
I Will Show You the Bride
IC: Ah. I see what fools him. The angel says, “I will show you the Bride,” and the next thing
mentioned is the New Jerusalem. So Henry thinks that New Jerusalem is not a
city at all, but some kind of spiritualization or symbolic representation of
the Church. But, of course, that makes it really hard to see why it has
descriptions of streets and gates, why people go in and out of it, and what the
city’s particular features (no temple, foundations, materials, measurements,
walls, visitors ...) might “mean” in Matthew Henry’s view.
Worse still for his case, just a few verses later the residents of the city are
named: “those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” Those are more natural candidates for us to understand as “the Bride”. So we might ask him, “Is the city itself the Bride, or does the angel mean
that the residents of the city are the Bride?” Your understanding —
that the angel is using metonymy — makes more sense, both in terms of
literality and in terms of plain logic.
Tom: Right. In Henry’s view we’ve got a “marriage” metaphor for the Church, and a “city” metaphor for
the Church, and “foundation” metaphors about stuff related to the Church …
we’re stacking metaphors on top of metaphors. Look, literalists and allegorists
all agree there are word-pictures in Revelation, but figurative language always
has to point us to something tangible and substantial, even if it leaves us
with the occasional loose end to mull over. If everything is a loose end …
if it fails to leave us with any kind of clear picture at all, well then, ‘spiritualizing’
everything you come across is simply not very useful as a mode of
interpretation.
A Giant Walled Garden
IC: Well, if it really results in no greater clarity, then it’s hard even to say in what sense it’s an
“interpretation” at all.
Tom: Precisely. The literalist says, “Aha, the Lord Jesus has built me a city; an actual dwelling
place like he promised; a giant walled garden like the Garden of Eden, only
better. It’s bursting with life, and it’s big enough and complex enough to keep
my interest for eternity. Then he’s stacked that city full of people from every
possible background who all know him in different ways, and who show off
different facets of his glory, and who are equipped to love one another and
relate to one another without politics or friction. In that city we will
worship and serve him and increase daily in understanding and joy as we do,
because our great Creator and Redeemer is present with us forever to anticipate
every possible physical, spiritual, intellectual and emotional need, and meet
them all with his personal abundance; with all sin and impediments to understanding
and love forever removed.
IC: All that’s there. It’s in the text. It requires no wild, mystical speculations; and to say the
least, it sounds really, really good.
Tom: Exactly. It’s good enough for me, and then some. It’s enough information to motivate me and
give me hope.
Play Me Something Familiar
But with all its stacked metaphors and intangibilities, I believe it’s the
allegorical view of prophecy — this exceedingly popular view among
denominations with a Reformed influence, which form a significant percentage of
evangelicals — that has created such a felt need to concretize our view of
eternity, even if solidifies into something a little more trivial and earthly
than Todd Billings might like. At least it makes it SOMETHING. Those of us who
take prophecy more literally don’t have that same crying need to find
something — anything! — to look forward to, even if it’s deer
hunting. We already have solid ideas about eternity.
IC: So in their urgency to have something familiar they can analogize to “heaven”, these “deer
hunter” types end up trivializing our conception of God’s plan for our future.
They mean to give themselves something to look forward to, but it ends up being
something absurd, unrealistic, unscriptural and ultimately unmotivating. Ironically,
this is the precise counterpart to what the hell-trivializers do: they say, “I want
to go to hell, ’cuz all my friends will be there, and we’ll have a party.” Both
are seizing upon inapt human metaphors and thereby downgrading everything God
has really intended. The result is that the Christians lose their longing for
what God is preparing for us, and the wicked lose all fear of hell.
Wouldn’t we be better just to stick with what God has revealed to us, and avoid
speculating beyond that?
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