WHY 30 MINUTES OF SILENCE IN HEAVEN? (Revelation 8: 1)
But first a Rapture wrap up.
More than 50 years ago, for 6 years, from 1959-65, I served on an Ontario-wide Christian School Board with a man who became a good friend: he was the chairman and I the secretary. Fifty years is a long time and a lot can happen, and a lot did happen.
When I talked to him a few months ago he told me that he believed in Rapture and would be taken up to heaven just before the Great Tribulation would take place.
Well, the Great Tribulation is about to happen: Trump? Famine? Extreme Weather? Pandemic? Financial Collapse? All of them? Take your pick.
So will Rapture appear? Rapture is based on a single text in the New Testament book of 1 Thessalonians 4: 17, where it says that the believers still alive when the Lord returns “will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” That’s all. That the Lord has booked a one-way ticket back to earth is conveniently forgotten.
Nowhere else in the Bible is there any other reference to this event, and only the Pentecostals and the Southern Baptists in the USA take this as the gospel truth, as they fanatically believe in HEAVEN, a doctrine that, actually, all mainline churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, have adopted as God-given on even more flimsy evidence, but that is mostly due to Greek philosophical brainwashing (more about that later), ignorance and lack of pastoral guidance.
The sad truth is that what I call the HEAVEN HERESY is deeply ingrained in all churches. Even many hymns in the two song books I have, Presbyterian and Christian Reformed, two staunch Calvinistic churches, contain the heaven line, as in the well-known FOR THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH, a song which praises the glory of the earth and sky, but still sees heaven as better, as is evident from the lines below.
For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
FRIENDS ON EARTH AND FRIENDS ABOVE!
All oh so pious, but it is, as Bonhoeffer coins it: plain pious secularism. According to this hymn and scores of others, the earth is beautiful, but heaven beats the earth hands down. What kind of proof is there? Nobody has ever been there or has come back to boast, but still the hymns and the prayers and the cemetery sermons keep on repeating the lie.
The church is completely sold on the ’heaven’ deception, with immense consequences not only for the fate of the earth but especially for the entire gospel message. Jesus’ explicit message is to ‘first seek the kingdom’ which comprises all of creation, and once that is attempted, Christ promises that our entire life will fall into place.” (Matthew 6: 33). “Seeking the kingdom” means pursuing the welfare of God’s creation, living a life that benefits the trees, seeking the best for all waterbodies, has at its aim promoting clean air and improving the status of animal life, and I could go on. That’s far too God-honoring, so we take the easy way out, have heaven as destination, then we can pollute to our heart’s content.
That the church has robbed itself of the opportunity to preach hope to a world desperate for answers is totally forgotten, because proclaiming as our ultimate destination a renewed earth is vastly more appealing to the unconverted than going to some undefined pie in the sky heaven, wearing white robes, endlessly singing songs: totally boring!
Fact is that today the church proclaims the LIE. There is no other word for it. The TRUTH with capital letters is that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”, now and always, into eternity. So how about the LEFT BEHIND movement? It too is pure bogus. Why is it false?
It is right there in Matthew 24: 36-39. There it relates how the people in the days of Noah had no clue what was going to happen – even though the ARK, under their very noses, was under construction for years on end. However the ruling opinion then was that Noah was a complete neurotic and was made the butt of many a joke, “until the flood came and took them all away.”
Who were taken away and who were left behind? The sinners all drowned and the righteous were LEFT BEHIND! The Rapture enthusiasts made a number of films and wrote books, called the LEFT BEHIND series. These Rapture prophets claim that the good people will be fetched into heaven, while the sinners, people like me who deny and even ridicule this entire concept, are left behind. Now, look again at Noah: Who were taken away? Who were raptured right into eternal death and drowned a miserable death? The mass of unbelievers who had made Noah and his family the center of their derision.
THE HEAVEN HERESY CONTINUED.
Rapture and going to heaven upon death are two sides of the same coin. Nowhere in the Bible is there one line that tells us that when we die we join God and his angels. Actually it is the other way around: God and his angels will join us on earth!
There still is a hymn out there with the horrible line: “Prostrate before Thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on Thee.” I call this horrible because it totally contradicts the Bible, but, nevertheless the Billy Graham crowd swallows this as if it were a piece of cake. I remember Billy Graham, the Presidents’ pastor, being interviewed by Larry King on CNN. Skeptical Larry asked Bible Billy what would happen when he died. The ‘great’ evangelist responded: “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God”, forgetting, or more likely not knowing that “God lives in inapproachable light, that nobody can see or ever has seen God” (1 Tim. 6: 16).
The heaven-destination, just like RAPTURE is of pure pagan origin, an inheritance from Greek philosophy of which Plato and Socrates were the chief proponents. When Socrates died, he welcomed death. In The Trials of Socrates, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”.
Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”. Socrates died to celebrate death.
Socrates gladly drank the chalice filled with deadly poison, seeing death as better than life.
Since Christianity became a global phenomenon, who has been more influential: Jesus or Socrates?
Sad to say: The Greek ‘heaven’ philosophy has blindly been assumed by Christians thanks to Socrates. That’s the reason why most of Christianity – almost every expression whether that is Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, left wing or conservative – has suffered from a form of dualism, splitting body from soul, sacred from secular. Socrates, as recorded by Plato, is the author of many ideas which are still regarded and accepted as the pure unadulterated essence of Christianity, such as the doctrine of an immortal soul, a self-denying attitude towards matters involving our body, and the view of sexuality as in itself ‘the sinful lust of the flesh’.
The Bible again.
Just as Donald Trump calls the Bible his favorite book, so do millions of Americans, who proudly carry it to church or prominently display its presence on the coffee table in the dining room, but they have no clue what’s in that book. For one thing, it never states that people go to heaven. What it does say is that death is like sleep.
Numerous Psalms simply say that death means going to the grave. Period. Jesus himself always sees death as ‘being asleep’. The last words in the Book of Daniel leave not a grain of doubt about our final destination: “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” Daniel, David, Isaiah, Paul, Peter, their remains are still out there, waiting for the Lord’s return.
Still unsure about heaven? Jesus direct words in that famous Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John, verse 13: “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven, the Son of Man.” Need I say more?
That same Paul, to whom the Pentecostals attribute RAPTURE, extensively writes about DEATH in 1 Corinthians 15 where he first talks about ‘those who have fallen asleep’ meaning, of course, those who have died. Their dead bodies are like seeds buried, to be resurrected when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead. Just as a seed dies in the earth, to later appear as a tree or whatever, so the bodies of the Lord’s elect will rise in a glorified state.
The church has erred.
I am not exaggerating when I write that the FATE OF THE CHURCH hangs in balance here because escaping to Heaven either at death or in the so-called RAPTURE event really means that we have no basic commitment to the earth. The heaven heresy distorts the entire message for which Jesus came to earth and for which he died on the cross.
So what is so particular about the earth? Both J. H. Bavinck and Dietrich Bonhoeffer repeatedly say that God formed us from the earth and even named the first human in the Bible ADAM, which signifies Adamah, the earth out of which God fashioned us. Our bodies are earth, which feeds us, which provides all ingredients of life and is the place where we will sleep until the Lord wakes us. Both these theologians say that God- humanity- and the earth form an unbreakable unity.
SILENCE IN HEAVEN. WHY?
There’s something seriously wrong with the church. It is not the people. They are like those about whom Jesus, at Calvary says that “Lord, forgive them: they do not know what they are doing (Luke 23: 34).
It is the leadership that stands condemned. No surprise that James singles out the preachers: “they will be judged more strictly.” (James 3: 1).
If only the preachers had listened to Bonhoeffer, who wrote in CREATION AND FALL: “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
The church of all ages has been far too preoccupied with worldly affairs, far too much involved with what ferments and foments here in the goings on in the world. The church of all ages has been too tied in with her present plight and not sufficiently geared to the final ending, not enough yearned for the completion. Heaven is waiting in vain for the church to do her thing: is waiting in vain for it to preach the coming of the Kingdom, is waiting in vain for the church to realize that it does not belong to a world ruled by the evil one, but belongs to the new earth to come.
That’s why we read in Revelation 8: “there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” Why? I believe that Heaven is mourning the death of the church for failing to preach the Kingdom. Heaven mourns for half an hour. When we remember the millions died in the wars, we take two minutes. The angels needed 30 minutes to recall the “many billions who were called but the few who were chosen” (Matthew 20:16). During that 30 minute period of recollection also Jesus’ prophecy came to mind: “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18: 8).
Yes, the world is ready for judgement, but the church has failed to bring the message of judgment and the Good News of the Kingdom. If it only had confessed more ardently, if it only had prayed more fervently, if it only had looked forward to the coming of the King more eagerly, then it all would have fallen into place because God is capable to make all other matters come to pass. But the church has not done that, has been too preoccupied with going to heaven and has not been concerned enough for the earth. Now the SILENCE in HEAVEN signifies the death of the church.
And yet, there is the great paradox: extra ecclesiam nulla salus: outside the church there is no salvation.