This World is Hopeless!

How many times has a description been given to some location, some activity, or even some piece of pie where you’re promised to experience ‘Heaven on Earth’?  There’s two, at least, issues with this promise:

(1)    Earth – This world was never meant to be an eternal home for us.  Never has been, never will be.  It does not matter what advances are discovered in science, it does not matter who the ruling political leaders are, it does not matter if all physical and mental illnesses are all cured.  We all die.

(2)    Heaven – No one ever takes issue with this part of the phrase, we all seem to have an innate sense of ‘after’, we just can’t wrap our arms around it.  We can travel though, we can try new activities, and what could possibly be harmful in trying that piece of pie?  Inevitably, we try, and as good as the experience may be, the promise fails to deliver.

The point is we live on Earth.  We’re comfortable on Earth.  It is familiar.  We would like to explain everything using familiar terms, but the fact that no human being has lived for eternity on Earth may be the one fact that needs remembering before you commit to trying to experience heaven on earth.

Here’s an example of describing the unfamiliar with the familiar.  If you were to draw a circle on a piece of paper to describe a ball, you would get your point across.  But to add three-dimensional perspective to that drawing where you could show a sphere would be far superior.  But your dog is not going to fetch that!  Rendering third dimensional aspects on a two-dimensional drawing may give you the picture of the ball, but it’s not real.  Luckily, we live in a 3-dimensional world so we can bowl, or golf, or play catch.

But this same 3-dimensional world is also where we LIVE.  There are many groups of people promoting profound love or agape love or planetary-wide coexistence.  Groups like these have the best intentions and greatest objectives; they promote a worthy, but misguided and dangerous message.  The danger lies in the objective that loving each other is enough.  They promise that love is the answer to achieving Heaven on Earth.

Let’s just imagine that earth-wide peaceful coexistence was to begin tomorrow.  Your neighbor stops by in the morning with extra breakfast burritos, just because.  Your online friends have nothing but family pictures to share and beautiful inspiring messages to encourage your spirit and brighten your day.  Radical terrorists destroy their weapons. You pay for the Starbucks customer behind you.  Life is so good.

Does that unbounded love end cancer?  Does it stop that freak misstep while hiking a mountain?  Does it end tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and other forces of nature?  Does it guarantee that 105-year-old to reach 106?  No.

Great… now we made the world, our symbolic ‘paper drawing’ life, fantastic.  But we still died and never addressed our eternal, other-dimensional life, because we were too uncomfortable with being unfamiliar with it.

Eternity is NOT of this world.  If we could achieve unbounded love in this world, we would have accomplished the single most important worldly objective.  Undoubtedly, we could end hunger and homelessness with the power of love.  But we’d still be trying to fight the same battle that has already been fought for us.  It has already been won for us.  It took an un-earthly entity, a God, to win this battle.  The battle of securing a heavenly eternity for us.  It took Jesus to surrender His life, because of His unbounded and unconditional love for us.

While Jesus lived, he was asked which of the commandments were the most important.  In Matthew 22:37-39 Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

Okay, we seem to have a current culture that is willing to accept and promote the ‘Love thy neighbor’ part.  But, there is a 1^st commandment specified too.  It is not optional, in fact, it’s the first and greatest.  You don’t get the same results when you just promote the second part, ‘Let’s just love everyone’.  You just get a nice life here… on earth… until you die.

In John 14:6, Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

He is telling you that to get from your paper-life to your eternal-life… HE IS the way to get there.

If mentioning God is unpopular, makes you uncomfortable, makes someone you know uncomfortable, then accept the task at hand.  If you love someone and God has given you one talent, then don’t hide it.  Use that talent and introduce God to those you love, you may just be saving their (eternal) life.