When We Have Been There Ten Thousand Years . . .

Here is bad news: God exists.

Why is this bad news? Someone is watching and it seems more than a little scary that He sees us when we are sleeping, he knows when we are awake. We are never alone and this, at least initially, horrified me.

Here is better news: God is good, all knowing, and all powerful.

If God existed, then He might be wicked, delighting in our torment. That possibility is one reason the ancients invented atheism: fear of God.

Thank God, God is good.

If a good God exists, then He might make mistakes out of ignorance. What would be worse than a well meaning being trying to help? This is the God of Obama-Care, well intentioned, but clumsy. Reason shows God is all wise so His solutions which must deal with polar bears, politicians, and people are well intentioned and as good as they can be.

Here is the better news: the all wise and good God is all powerful.

Plato understood that God might be loving, good, and all knowing, but unable to do what he wished. The perversity of the cosmos might be able to defeat God’s best intentions, but fortunately God is all powerful. He can do what needs to be done. If it is doable, God can do it, which leads to the hope that if He can does not, then it must be better so.

Blessed comfort!

The best news is that the all wise, good, and powerful God loves us and became one of us. Smarmy politicians and preachers bite their lower lips and “feel our pain,” God came and lived our pain. He did not sit apart loving us, He made a way to know exactly what it felt like to be us. 

There is no other being like this Sovereign God.

He loves us so much that God will bring us to Himself and cause us to live with Him for eternity in bliss. We need only be healed so that our beings can stand the joy of Paradise. And yet in Paradise, we will not be angels, we will be us. We know so little of Heaven, but this is what we do know.

When we have been there ten thousand years, we will not know everything.

In Indiana Jones IV when the Russian asked to “know it all,” any reader of a fairy tale knew she was dead. Men and women cannot know it all. We are too small for this much knowledge. In Paradise, we will still be humans and not God. We will be gods, super-beings compared to men today, but not God. Hear me: God is one and the only one.

This is jolly  because it means the pleasures of learning will continue through eternity. Mistakes and pains we will have there, just not the mistakes and pains of sin. Mourning will be no more, but learning will be forever. This is part of the glory of humanity!

When we have been there ten thousand years, we will still be us. 

We will be who we were meant to be with the genetic, psychological, and social harms removed. We will be the best us, but that is not the end. If a baby could be born perfect, as Jesus was, then that Baby still must “grow in grace and knowledge and in favor with God and men.” We will have all of eternity to grow more and more like ourselves.

I cannot wait to see my Papaws and my Nana and Granny, because they will be themselves better. 

When we have been there then thousand years, we will not be all powerful. 

There is no reason to think we will be able to fly or leap over tall buildings in a single bound. We will not be supermen, but human beings. The challenges will still be there, but without being cut off from the regenerating power of the Spirit. We will have the knowledge we need to avoid fatalities, but not all power or all knowledge. 

Maybe I will be able to climb Mount Everest (if it exist in the new Earth), but there is no reason to think it will be easy. It will not be fatal to fail. Since I am not the Everest climbing type in this life, I doubt I am in the life to come. I don’t think my lack of desire to mountain climb is a wage of sin (though one cannot be quite sure). If I had to guess, I will get eternity to wrestle with dialectic problems that would make the challenges of Republic look childish.

I will be in the place where all truth is knowable, but I will not know all the truth!

This much is positively true.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the Sun, we will have no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.

I cannot wait.