August 5 2023
Angels will do the weeding:
Heaven: yes, but where is Hell?
Just as I am struggling with soil that produces weeds as well as beets and onions, beans and potatoes, so too the professional Bible explainers on Sundays, struggle to produce a message that explains our time in relevant terms. I have yet to hear a sermon on Matthew 24 and the End-Times. Clive Hamilton, an Australian Professor wrote, Requiem for a Species, Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change. The church too has a similar reluctance to preach on the END TIMES and The New Creation, a theme persistent throughout the Scriptures.
The KINGDOM.
In my garden, I use cardboard between my 5 elevated growth areas to stymie the weeds, but they came anyway because that sturdy paper suffered from the rains, which, actually, were a garden blessing. The Bible has a passage where angels are the weeders. This happened when Jesus offers an explanation of the parable of the weeds – which also are a constant menace in my garden – Matthew 13: 41 gives a direct pointer to what constitutes God’s Kingdom: “The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil…..then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father. They who have ears, let them hear.” The last phrase, “they who have ears to hear”, emphasizes that this is true but often misinterpreted. This also is a direct indication that Heaven, Paradise, the Garden of Eden, will be HERE where we now live.
I repeat: Our world is God’s kingdom!
There’s no doubt: creation, the world we live in, is clearly indicated as God’s Kingdom. We, all 8 billion of us, live, love, work, pray, eat, sleep in God’s kingdom: We are guests in God’s realm, his dominion: Guests: ‘by the grace of God’. Guests are supposed to have respect for the owner’s property, but, as Climate Heating tells us, we forgot our status as invitees and took over the whole shebang, and, sure enough, wrecked the place.
Angels.
So, what’s the next step, the final phase, after we have made the earth basically uninhabitable? We all agree that creation, the universe, needs cleaning up, a constant UN concern.
God wants his world back, as we failed to beautify it. John 3: 16 tells us that: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” He is giving us a second chance! Grab it!
Soon myriads of angels will receive direct commands from Christ, to weed out evil, evil persons, evil matter, evil air, evil water, soil, television, computers, engines. It is not too late to start loving God through his creation!
We went wrong. Influenced by Greek philosophy, ridiculing resurrection, as Paul discovered when he was in Athens. By and large Christianity has become Gnostic, shunning the earth, desiring heaven. We want to be like God and sit on thrones in heaven. The Bible, however, is quite explicit on that score: John 3: 13 distinctly states that nobody has ever gone to heaven.
Satan, God’s ultimate enemy, has scored his greatest triumph by selling the church on heaven, thus giving him absolute authority on earth, where his latest triumph is AI, representing the intellectual equivalent to the Tower of Babel, again an absolute challenge to God’s authority, God’s beloved Kingdom.
But, where is HELL?
Picture the scene: let your imagination go wild! Visualize Billions of people, lined up, on earth where they lived and died. Imagine one of God’s helpers: tablet in hand: approaching a person: his screen lights up: Instant face recognition, instant life-story; Ah, ah: A Green Light, signaling Grace, heaven on earth, a new Eden.
There’s also is Red, rejection.
Back to Jesus, who calls ‘sleep’ what we call ‘death’. What does that mean?
Again: let imagination move in! To me it suggests that the mind/spirit lives on. During that inert corporeal state, the ‘sleepers’ are forced to review their lives, are confronted when their bodies were alive and well. Now their sins of commission and omission are revisited within them: in other words: hell. Hell is being exposed to the constant harm sinners have caused. It used to be called ‘purgatory’.
This could explain hell: in total isolation persons are exposed to their previous lives, exposed to the misery they caused, the pain and destruction they inflicted, as well as their failure to do good.
God’s children, however, (Daniel 12: 13)
“You will go your way to the end. You will rest, and then at the end of your days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.”