On Becoming

Life changes us. Some people get better, some get worse, but nobody remains unchanged. At least, that’s the conclusion I’m coming to. Either my memory is failing me — a possibility I won’t completely discount — or my old friends and acquaintances are different people than they were in their teens, twenties and thirties. Time and circumstances have either refined or greatly eroded their characters, depending on how they responded to what life has served up.

That can be a scary thing to witness up close.

Going Home

I had a dream this morning. I was walking down a small-town sidewalk when a middle-aged man carrying a big, well-thumbed soft-cover Bible passed me by. He stopped suddenly and spoke to me, and I turned around to hear what he might have to say. He had a twinkle in his eye and an appealing manner about him, and my usual instinctive reluctance to engage in such situations instantly fled. He asked me a question I can’t completely recall, but it was something about the Father’s house. He wanted to know what I thought about it. I began to try to put my ideas into words, and realized nothing coherent was coming out of my mouth.

I started and stopped three different times, then gave up.

Too Hot to Handle: An Undersized Eternity

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: Earlier this week I poked around the subject of Christian hope a little. My sister had kindly linked me to Todd Billings’ recent post at Christianity Today entitled “The New View of Heaven Is Too Small” in which Billings talks about Michigan deer hunters who expect to continue enjoying their favorite pastime in heaven.

I’d rather not spend more time debunking other Christians’ cherished heavenly speculations, so I’ll trust that my own post didn’t completely fail to make the case that a New Testament view of our hope in Christ is rich, multifaceted and real.

A Flashlight in the Eternal Sun

It has been pointed out that when God gave Eve to Adam, it was for eminently practical reasons and not merely on account of the typological significance of being “one flesh” with a complementary created being. So the primary purpose of marriage is often taken to be companionship — “It is not good that the man should be alone.”

Companionship is indeed of great importance, but we should not miss the point that this gracious gift was provided by God with a specific end in view — helping, and helping in a way that was appropriate to Adam’s needs.

It is logical to ask ourselves what exactly Eve was intended to help with.

Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (4)

Sometimes Christians make arguments which are broadly correct, but wrong in the specifics. They reach the right conclusions, but do it by wrong reasoning. More often than not, they do this by inadvertently making false claims about the meaning of Greek or Hebrew words, usually for lack of careful research.

Now, it may be argued that perhaps this sort of error is not a big deal, since the listener gets to the correct place in the end regardless of the road used to get him there. Unfortunately, one of two things occurs: (1) the listener cannot navigate to his interpretive destination again without his misguided mentor, or (2) he can, and in doing so he too becomes a proponent of errors in method, if not actual errors in doctrine.

Either outcome is undesirable.

A Place of My Own

One thing is absolutely certain: we are all going someplace when we die. It may be nowhere more exciting than the digestive systems of worms and soil microbes, thereafter to be distributed throughout the earth’s ecosystem over time, but it is certainly a place. Or places, if you prefer.

Biologically, we do not choose our place. It is imposed on us. Spiritually, however, we do; moreover, we testify to the choices we have made with every daily act we perform. Death makes all choice irrevocable.

This is true even when we are not aware we are making any choice at all.

Too Hot to Handle: An Undersized Eternity

The most recent version of this post is available here.

What’s Across the Finish Line?

Christianity Today’s Todd Billings on people who have “too small a view of heaven”:

“A pastor in my home state of Michigan mentioned to me that many members of his congregation assume that there will be plenty of woods and deer in heaven. So naturally, they fantasize about shooting a 39-point buck in the heavenly woods.”

It’s a thought provoking article, worth a few minutes of time if only to draw attention to the extent of what seems like a massive blind spot in modern evangelicalism.

I’ll Tell You Later

Not everything is instant ...

We live in the age of instant gratification.

If I want to watch a movie, I can skim Netflix and play one in seconds. It takes me longer to make up my mind than it takes to start playing my selection once I’ve decided. If I want to listen to the Strolling Bones’ hot new CD, I don’t have to rush to the mall (assuming I can find a record store still in business) or wait for Amazon to deliver it to my front door, I can stream it right now or download it from iTunes in seconds. If I want dinner, I can microwave something in five minutes, or, assuming I have unusual patience, have it delivered in forty-five.

Spiritual insight isn’t like that. Not at all. Sometimes God says, “I’ll tell you later.”

Recommend-a-blog (21)

Michael Patton is a writer, blogger and president of Credo House Ministries. He is also, as he puts it, “waiting to die”.

This is where our readers usually check out, and I don’t blame you. On this blog, posts that are obviously about death are among our least-read, a fact that doesn’t surprise me at all. I suspect this is true across the board: after all, who wants (naturally, at least) to think about dying? In some ways, even Christians can be as uniformitarian as atheists: we know full well that we are all “waiting to die”, but a world without me in it still seems difficult to imagine.

I’ll see if I can find a great big gravestone picture to make the post’s subject especially obvious.

Posing on the Precipice

At age 69, when you put on a bodystocking for a music video, you may be trying to communicate all sorts of things.

You may be saying, “I’m in really good shape for my age”.

You may be taking a political position: “Every age is as valid and important as every other, and therefore the fact that I look ridiculous in this thing should not be noted. I am making a social comment about ageism”.

Dogs, Sorcerers and Saints

I have a Catholic friend who is not a fan of the name Peter. She almost flinches at it. The name has associations, you see.

I think she’s sorta half expecting to meet him someday. Maybe.

In the tradition in which she was raised, Peter stands at the gate of heaven as an endless stream of the dead parade before him. As the man with the keys to the kingdom, she was taught, he personally gives the final decree on whether you go “up” (in her words) or “down” (presumably with his thumb, being the hip fellow Peter is reputed to be), all on the basis of the things you have done in this life.

“In case I don’t make it back …”

Heading out to the airport last Saturday, a friend stopped by my desk, put her arms around me and said, “I’d better give you a hug in case I don’t make it back.”

She said it lightly but not frivolously. We’ve both watched a number of people slip into eternity in the last 12 months: her health-conscious forty-something dentist from a sudden stroke; a small businessman I used to say hello to every week unexpectedly diagnosed with a brain tumor; a friend’s mother whose passing was medically predictable but still jarred family and friends; and a fellow employee with some kind of wasting disease that remained undiagnosed until it was too late. There are probably more; those are just the recent ones.

(Maybe Not So) Far Kingdom

Anyone with their eyes on eternity is usually alright by me. Like these folks:

I don’t know what the rest of their music is like, but this got to me in a big way.

“There is a far kingdom on the other side of the glass
And by a faint light we see
Still there is more gladness longing for the sight
Than to behold or be filled by anything.”

Inbox: Subordination in Eternity Past

Forgive the “eternity past” reference in the title, please. Eternity is eternity. Calling it “past” or “future” is an accommodation to a linear existence taking place within time, at least so far as our senses permit us to determine, a state of being that seems highly unlikely to accurately describe that which characterizes God.

Tertius is causing trouble again. I’m paraphrasing here, but he’s asking, in connection with this post: 

“Can you show from Scripture whether the roles within the Godhead (specifically the submission of the Son to the Father evident during his life on earth and subsequent glorification) were characteristic of the relationship between Father and Son in [eternity past, as we have agreed to refer to it, for the sake of distinguishing it from the eternity we have to look forward to].”

When faced with a theological dilemma of this weight, I know where to turn for help. My mother tosses her hat in the ring:

“How about, ‘Then I said, “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book”.’ ”

Debunking Heavenly Mythology VIII: Captain Kirk Was Wrong

“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”

— John Milton, Paradise Lost

I know, I know, it’s Satan’s famous line from Milton, but the first time I heard it, it was delivered by William Shatner’s Captain Kirk in the original 1967 Star Trek episode Space Seed. In my frequently-inaccurate childhood memory the line belongs to Ricardo Montalban’s villainous character Khan, but thanks to YouTube, I stand corrected: Montalban doesn’t ever actually get to say it. Rather, with unusual subtlety for the genre, Khan, offered the choice between a comfy prison or the challenge of taming a wild planet, asks Kirk, “Have you ever read Milton?” Kirk, being a renaissance man, replies “I understand”.

Thankfully for my fascinated pre-teen self (and most of the audience, I’d suspect), Kirk later explains the significance of the reference to his engineer Scotty (who, despite spectacular feats of speed-engineering, is apparently not a renaissance man).

And really, it’s Shatner, so who better to deliver the line?

But that line stuck in my head. I thought it was really cool, and defiant, and independent, and all those things the TV screenwriters thought it was supposed to evoke (hey, I was probably twelve, okay?). Anyway, it worked.

But whether you choose to attribute the line to Kirk, Khan, Milton or Satan himself, it’s still wrong: Nobody reigns in hell.

Debunking Heavenly Mythology V: Heaven Is Boring

I know, I know — nobody comes right out and says it that bluntly. Of course they don’t.

But lots of people think it. Or, more accurately, are a little afraid it might be.

Here’s one example of someone who does, and I’m sure you’ve heard dozens of similar comments, often at funerals:

“… if there is a heaven, and right now I am sure hoping there is, I like to think my grandfather is just making the turn at nine. A smile on his face from ear to ear because he can walk carrying his own golf bag. His eyesight that was taken from him in the early 90s is back and he doesn't see the world in shadows anymore. That his hearing, taken from him at about the time as his sight has returned. He can hear the birds singing in the trees and the sound of his persimmon driver compressing a golf ball 300 yards down the middle of the fairway.”

Of course there must be golf in heaven. And hockey. And beer. And rock ’n roll.

Because if my favourite thing isn’t to be found in heaven, I simply can’t imagine living for eternity without it. And life without it would be … well, if not ‘boring’ exactly, at least deficient in some way.

Or just maybe my concept of God’s love is a few sizes too small.

Debunking Heavenly Mythology IV: Christians Will Spend Eternity In Heaven

Does it really matter where we’re going to spend eternity, frankly?

I mean Christians, of course. It matters a very great deal indeed to the lost where they end up, whether they recognize it now or not. Time will tell, but if the teaching of the Bible turns out to be the truth, the fact that a person doesn’t see fit to believe in or respond to that truth does not mean he or she can escape the eternal consequences of his choice, or of hers. And those who fail to value the Lord Jesus Christ at his true worth — who fail to see him as his Father sees him — will spend eternity without him.

If that doesn’t seem like a big deal now, bear in mind that there is no cause/effect relationship between what is coming to us after death and your opinion or mine about it. That is the nature of objective reality. The idea of “true for you” or “true for me” is a vapid modern platitude to which no rational person genuinely subscribes, though it makes for a great means of deflecting enthusiastic truth purveyors one doesn’t really feel like dealing with.

Trust me, spending eternity without the Lord Jesus Christ will definitely be a big deal when there no longer exists the opportunity to choose it or reject it.

But to Christians, to those who believe, Paul says, “[T]he Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”

We will be “with the Lord”. That is our destiny as believers, and the goal, the true hope of every believing heart. So for Christians, does it really matter where we spend eternity as long as our Lord is there?

Yes and no.