Charles asked: I watched a presentation by Jack Van Impe on television the other night. He spoke of Heaven changing its location four times between Creation and the End of All Things. What do you make of this?
One of the greatest problems plaguing the Church today is the strong strain of literalism among those still holding a commitment to the Bible as the Word of God. Bad enough that there are so few today who take God's Word as the word from God. Literalism can only serve to discredit this true message of God to a dying world.
By "literalism," we are referring to the habit of reading the entire Bible from a baldly literal viewpoint, ignoring all manner of style and cultural content. It is often said the Bible is the record of God's revelation, wholly reliable and trustworthy in all it addresses. It is also said often that the events in Scripture did not take place in a cultural-historical vacuum. It is a record of events in a world far away, from a perspective we do well to study, even as we realize that we can never completely grasp it.
Much harm and foolishness has been done in the name of a Christ few take the time to know well. They have abstracted His teachings from the setting in which He gave them, so much so that they offer some of the most outlandish notions as His Word. Their claims include a God who has a humanoid form, and that He experiences human emotions. How have we come to the place where we claim our Heavenly Father is little more than a mere super-human, an extension of our own selves? Sometimes the criticisms of secular rationalists -- that we have made a god in our own image -- comes too close to the truth.
The concept of afterlife comes late in Bible History. We hear nothing of it until Jesus teaches about the life that follows this one. Indeed, he told the thief on the cross beside Him that he would that very day join Him in "Paradise," a word taken from Persian. Jesus appeared to mean the term as an unspeakably wonderful afterlife. We often assume that term is the same as "Heaven." Here we come up far astray from the path of His teaching.
We know He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven. While the words He used may well reflect terminology as far back as Genesis -- His teachings were probably in Aramaic, but recorded entirely in Greek -- we often fail to realize He was using a reference to the sky. With a few exceptions, the root meaning of the word for Heaven, in both the Old Testament and the New, is simply "the sky." Now, anyone with a small amount of wisdom realizes that God's throne does not literally float in the atmosphere above the earth, nor is it likely to be found out in space. Indeed, it's highly doubtful anyone could argue Jesus' contemporaries had a concrete knowledge of what existed beyond the air above them. The mental picture of angels resting upon billowy clouds arises from taking biblical phrases too literally.
Indeed, it is not until John's highly figurative description of Heaven in his Revelation that we see it described in terms of having a geography. If our theology of Heaven is built on this most debated book of Scripture -- in terms of whether and how much can be taken at face value -- then we are on the shakiest of ground. How is it that the same folks who make so much of the metaphorical language of John in one part insist that another must be taken literally? If the first few verses do not assure for us that the whole book is rather allegorical, then we would best avoid interpreting any of it very much.
A whole shelf of books have been written on making sense of John's Revelation, and I won't try to duplicate any of that here. It's enough to note from Jesus' own teaching that Heaven was intentionally ill-defined. He spoke little of it because there was no workable explanation for it. It was all He could do showing what the truth of Heaven demands from us while we are here. It is referred to as the place where God is, where His throne sits, where His hosts of angels gather about Him. It is therefore, as His royal courts, the source of all that we seek in life. He is the Creator of all that is, and Himself the source. Thus, we see that Heaven is just a picturesque term, a device for speaking of God and His rule.
Our modern evangelical mythology of Heaven, and the simplistic tendency to make more of it than Jesus or His disciples after Him, is a trap to the mind. Our songs and hymns often reflect this silly pre-occupation. Rather than reams of words about "when I get to Heaven," there ought to be much more about the pathway we must follow here while we are en route. For in making Heaven a thought too concrete, a "literal place," we bring it down to the level of humanity. It is no longer that mystical "somewhere" far above and beyond our simple reality. If we expect to find a literal street with a literal pavement of gold, we have sold the truth cheaply.
The extravagant description in Jesus' world was meant to turn your attention away from it. The intent was to make it so unrealistic, so paradoxical, so incomprehensible, that you would not waste time dawdling over the details, but shift the focus onto something far more important: the personality of the God who rules there, and here, and in our hearts. Thus, in a very real sense, our own hearts become "Heaven" because it is there He sits enthroned.
Got Heaven?
As for Jack Van Impe, I no longer pay much attention to him. I believe he has so thoroughly compromised in many areas, and cannot be trusted to teach from a pure motive. His ministry appears for all the world to be primarily a first class marketing machine. While I do not endorse the whole content, here's an extended critique of Van Impe's fall. He follows Billy Graham's slide into compromise with Catholicism.
Ed Hurst
24 May 2003
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