Final Excerpt -- God with Ten Words

I finished my project to write a short book capturing my basic thoughts on God, using ten key words. I'll probably self-publish it this next week. Below is a final excerpt from near the end of the final chapter on God as Savior.

Here are previous excerpts from God with Ten Words:

• Mystery
• Love
• Power (excerpt 1)
• Power (excerpt 2)
• Knowledge (excerpt 1)
• Knowledge (excerpt 2)
• Presence (excerpt 1)
• Presence (excerpt 2)
• Immanuel (excerpt 1)
• Immanuel (excerpt 2)
• Good (most of the chapter)
• Parent (excerpt 1)
• Parent (excerpt 2)
• Justice (excerpt 1)
• Justice (excerpt 2)
• Savior (excerpt 1)
• Savior (excerpt 2)

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It is interesting to remember my own path on the location of eternity. I grew up thinking that eternity was in heaven or hell in some other dimension. Having grown up on Star Trek, I never thought that eternity would be in this universe.

I remember reading a Christian comic book in high school that mused whether a particularly beautiful galaxy could be where heaven was. I chuckled, amazed that the comic writer would think heaven was in this universe. If God created this universe, then surely heaven—where God is—is somewhere outside of it!

Then again, I was amazed to find out at one point that my father did think that hell was in the middle of the earth. I had always assumed that hell must also be in some other dimension. After studying the Bible now for some time, I have realized that my father probably wasn’t wrong on where the New Testament writers pictured hell or at least the realm of the dead. Paul says those things “under the earth” will bow before Lord Jesus (Phil. 2:10). But surely this is a picture rather than something we should take literally.

So there are people that take this biblical imagery literally, with heaven up somewhere and hell in the middle of the earth. And for some reason, I grew up thinking that heaven and hell were in some other dimension. I also grew up thinking that, when we die, we went to that other dimension for eternity. I believed in the second coming too, but apparently, it was just a gathering expedition before Christ destroyed the earth.

As I further studied the New Testament, I came to realize that most of the New Testament does not picture eternity as off in some other place at all. It pictures eternity on a transformed earth. At first, this idea seemed heretical to me. After all, isn’t that what Seventh-Day Adventists think? I guess I took Revelation 21 as a picture rather than literally, the new Jerusalem descending to earth.

But Jesus speaks of people coming from north, south, east, and west to feast with him in the kingdom of God (Luke 13:29). When Paul talks about the creation being freed from corruption (Rom. 8:21), he seems to be saying that the material world has been damaged by the power of Sin and needs to be “saved” too. We already mentioned that, when he talks about the power of Sin over our flesh, he seems to be saying that Sin somehow has a foothold over my body (Rom. 8:14). Scholars like N. T. Wright have particularly emphasized the transformed earth focus of the New Testament.

As is often the case, continued reflection leads to new questions and new possibilities that almost take you back to where you started. What has especially done this for me is reflection on the vastness of the universe and the possibility that there might be beings elsewhere in the past and future who will need redemption. The authors of the Bible only knew of the relatively flat “land,” probably not even that the earth was a sphere. Why would God doom the rest of this immense universe upon the sin of two people on a small, insignificant planet? And therefore, why would God transform all the rest of this universe because of the moment of salvation on one tiny little planet?

Perhaps the idea of a new earth in another dimension is not so ignorant after all. It would be a transformed earth, not least because it would be freed from the power of Sin over it. At the same time. it would fit with the sense that Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us so that where he is, we may be also (John 14:3).

Perhaps that other dimension is still part of this universe in some way. After all, it is hard to imagine that we would be able to exist in “wherever” God outside this universe might be. We can even wonder if the angels as we know them are part of this universe, just in the spiritual part of it. These are all things above our pay grade, and no doubt we will laugh in heaven at how foolish I was even to speculate.