Heaven with Us

 

This is going to be a mashed-together post. This will not be a post that makes everything crystal clear. This will be a thorny post that rebukes but leaves it up to someone out there to seek, ask, and find.

This also is with prayer that someone is going to go to a mature Christian church, at least for a little while, to study the Bible, to listen, to learn, and then to sometimes ask questions, especially if there is a mid-week Bible study.

This post comes at a truly troubled time in the life of our nation, in the life of the church, in many of our lives as individuals and families. When we look at a Bible book like Judges, a book that chronicles a time when everyone among the Hebrew people had begun to do as seemed right in his or her own estimation, we see a time of struggle: struggle, at that time, because ancient Israel, beginning to turn to their own understanding, was less attentive to the prophets, and, more importantly, less attentive to God alone.

Israel was beginning to want a king like the kings they beheld of other nations. God alone wasn't enough. And, in time, God gave Israel what they wanted. But God, who did speak to this nation, pouring a little of Himself or the Holy Spirit out to Moses and only a few others who were real prophets, did counsel Israel, warning that it wasn't His divine will that Israel be led by a king in the way Israel understood a king; but, Israel's stubbornness gave Israel a long history of imperfect and even godless kings.

Yet, there came a prophetic whisper. God was turning around Israel's covetousness of a king, to use that time in history for His ultimate good. God whispered to prophets that He would give the whole world Himself as king, that He would send Himself in the person of an only son, that He would deliver the world from its spiritual darkness. And so, many believed they would see this dayspring from on high, that they would see the Messiah, the Savior, God with us (not as a worldly king).

Many caught the vision hundreds of years before it came to be. And when it came to finally be, it was during one among many dark hours in Israel's struggle. The Roman world was one of conquest, and it gave credence to a man named Herod, who lorded over Israel with such fierce jealousy that he killed every Hebrew boy that could be found of a certain age when God, our heavenly maker, did birth Himself in the person of Jesus.

God had sheppherded ancient Israel through thousands of years, years clouded by their interactions with nations that believed in other gods, years they began believing in everything from orgies to child sacrifices.

Ultimately, the ancient Israelites were God's own people, because He knew they would heed Him after a while, He knew those who remained, those who did not perish, would indeed be faithful.

And hasn't it been that way with many of us in the African diaspora? God reached many of us almost last out of this world, but He knew He would save us.

We're in a time now of spiritual upheaval none of us ever have known before. We're in a time of mass shootings, godless weather events (1 Kings 19:11), and worse. And yet we have this hope, this Savior, who we've grown to know.

He is not an idol. He is not any of the graven images that men have made Him. I believe some of those images are unpardonable, by the way, but that others were rendered with so much childlike faith that God has smiled or maybe even laughed about some images.

One place I know Heaven isn't smiling about today, however, is the Redeemer statue in Brazil. In 2024, Brazil began debating a legislative bill to decide whether the Catholic church could take over maintenence of the statute and its grounds. A national forest and wildlife conservation park is all around the statue, so the federal government there eventually took on responsibility for the statue, and levied park fees to visit the statue. In federal hands, the fees were only about upkeep of the grounds.

But amid debate in 2024, some in the church dreamt of being responsible for bringing corporate sponsors to put their signage on bathrooms at the statue, to ensure the bathrooms wouldn't fall into disrepair again if government priorities would take funds away from the national park again, and all of this while the church diocese there was saying the church's goal was for visits to that part of the park to be thought of as "sacred"!

It was a battle for money to keep a park feature in good order, not a battle for the sacred.

And yet, there the statue, only a statue, not God, does loom, a reminder to some of childlike faith that the Holy Spirit did convict an apostle of the New Testament to say, "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all."

Spiritual darkness is of mankind, you see. But because our triune God (our only heavenly Father, Himself in the person of His only Heaven-begotten Son, and His promised comfort to us, His Holy Spirit: all three spiritual portions of God existing as the only God, before there was ever mankind) has made His church available to all who want to believe, we have a light within that this world doesn't comprehend, the Bible says.

From a practical viewpoint, that means you can be physically dark as some mineral salts, physically dark as an ancient black sheep with wooly white hair, but have the light of Jesus, the Savior, in your heart, even in this time of turmoil, knowing that one day, long after the meek inherit the earth, when both lion and lamb dissolve like snow, and earth as we know it is no more, there will be that perfect heaven and earth, all new, where no worldly king lives, where all that is earth, light, and all of Heaven.