Heaven

I was reading the introduction to the books of 1 and 2 TThessalonians this evening. I found it rather fascinating considering a journey I had just taken through a book.

Here is what it said,

"The way we conceive the future sculpts the present, gives contour and tone to nearly every action and thought through the day. If our sense of the future is weak, we live listlessly. Much emotional and mental illnesses and most suicides occur among men and women who feel they 'have no future'. "

I just finished a 473 page book entitled Heaven by Randy Alcorn. I have to say it's the best book I have ever read. And I've read A LOT of books. I've even read some of Mr. Alcorn's other books. And they were REALLY good. But this one...well for me it had a major effect on my anticipation of Heaven. I had gone along with our culturally accepted perspective of a very boring place. Who looks forward to an eternity of that? I certainly did not. But I also had never studied what the Bible actually had to say about Heaven. I thought it was pretty vague and we'd know when we died. I still think that we won't know fully (that being the key word in this sentence) until we die...but I heartily disagree, now, that the Bible is unclear about Heaven.

The first half of the book is theology (a study of God's relation to the world) and the second half is a Q & A. I know that sounds boring but it's anything but. I couldn't put it down. To begin with it's such a fascinating topic for everyone. I really grappled with some of the topics presented.

I'll give you just a taste...here is the first paragraph of the introduction!

"The sense that we will live forever somewhere has shaped every civilization in human history. Australian aborigines pictured Heaven as a distant island beyond the western horizon. The early Finns thought it was an island in the faraway east. Mexicans, Peruvians, and Polynesians believed that they went to the sun or the moon after death. Native Americans believed that in the afterlife their spirits would hunt the spirits of buffalo. The Gilgamesh epics, an ancient Babylonian legend, refers to a resting place of heroes and hints at a tree of life. In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies had maps placed beside them as guides to the future world. The Romans believed that the righteous would picnic in the Elysian fields while their horses grazed nearby. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said, 'The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity.' Although these depictions of the afterlife differ, the unifying testimony of the human heart throughout history is belief in life after death. Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a god-given, innate sense of the eternal-that this world is not all there is."

Us humans have a 100% mortality rate...the question is not IF but WHEN are we going to die. The next question is "Then what happens?"