Heaven, Hell and Here

This isn’t theology, as if God and His revelation could be subjected to human reason. This is doctrine in the sense of teaching that serves to characterize my limited understanding. Teaching is pulling down out of my heart the moral imperatives that arise from my communion with the Spirit of God. When I pull those things down into my conscious awareness, they have to fit somewhere inside my mind in some way so that I can act on them. It requires a certain organization, and I have a powerful peace that it is all completely self-consistent. That’s because it rests on the heart’s discernment of the Spirit, not the mind’s rational structure. I am equally aware that as I go back and test all the things I’ve been taught in terms of theology, I end up throwing out a lot of junk. I’d like to share with you some of the process of taking out the trash so that you might ponder in your own soul a similar process.

The Flaming Sword east of Eden (Genesis 3:24) is the same Sword of the Spirit (Hebrews 4:11-13; Ephesians 6:14-17) noted in the New Testament. Keep that in mind. The imagery in the Bible is self-consistent even as it shifts in context. Divine moral logic is symbolic, not at all concrete. Rather, it offers the means for the individual to come to a rather concrete decision in the context of his/her own service to God. Symbolic logic is the logic of the heart-mind and remains vivid and alive on its own.

So I want to help you learn something about how that Sword cuts by giving an example in my own soul. You don’t have to buy into my answers, but these doctrines will provide some context for the rest of what I write.

I speak often of the need for awakening the link between mind-intellect and heart-wisdom. In my recent series on the Cult, I noted that Western Civilization is unique in denying the existence of a heart-mind, versus how virtually every other civilization simply assumed such a thing without much comment. The people in those other civilizations never had to deal with the idea of denying it, so they didn’t spend much time defending it and offering explanations of it. They all agreed on it. Here’s what makes it tough on us today as followers of Christ: The New Testament fell into that period of transition when the link to the heart was dying in human consciousness. So we see precious little in the New Testament discussing that as an issue. What we do have on the subject does not use the terminology that seems to work for us today as we go back and reclaim it. It’s there, just hidden in foreign contextual expressions.

So let me reassert for us today in our context: Whatever it is the New Testament teaches, particularly in terms of walking the path of Jesus, is simply not possible without awakening your heart as the ruling faculty in your consciousness. The only link God gave on this earth between us in our fallen state and Him in Eternity is a moral awareness that is not possible with mere intellect. God does not speak directly to the intellect. You can only hear His voice through your heart. Cognition is distinctly second-hand. This is why so many Western Christians have no clue how prophecy, miracles and a host of other things mentioned in the New Testament work. They all come through the heart first, and then register in the brain.

This is also why Western Christian theology sucks so badly. It presumes the brain is somehow magically linked to the Spirit of God, so it presumes to arrange a proper understanding with what amounts to a dead heart, in that it might as well be dead if no one pays attention to it. Sure, God has chosen at times in the past to blast through and let some few things register in the human soul as conviction, but it always seems to defy reason and people can’t explain why they simply must go this or that way on something. So while a significant portion of Western Christianity does have some limited awareness of non-intellectual imperatives of the Spirit, they have no structure for dealing with it. It remains a complete mystery, a sort of spooky superstition kind of thing that is very hard to apply to behavior. We are left with a whole raft of religions lacking the means to discount their intellectual differences because intellect and theology is the best thing they have going.

Inevitably, it means an awful lot of Western mythology gets sucked into it. The problem of Western bias gets a lot of electrons on this blog because it looms so large as a major barrier to genuine faith.

Let’s review some of what I’ve already said. Paul writes flatly (Romans 8) that we cannot possibly comprehend how God decides who goes to Heaven and who doesn’t. We can’t begin to understand Heaven and Hell, and we know for a fact that Jesus referred to them in terms you could not possibly take as literal. Evil souls don’t get tossed into the flaming garbage pile in the Hinnom Valley (“Gehenna”) on the south side of Jerusalem. And when Jesus affirmed that the confessing thief would go to Heaven with Him, He used a Persian loan-word that translates as “Paradise.” We know from rabbinical traditions that the terms were already common before Jesus was born. We also know that it was the Hellenized Pharisees who tended to take them literally, not those with a more ancient Hebrew bent. At no time did Jesus affirm the teachings of the Pharisees where they departed from the Old Testament Scriptures. On the contrary, He pointedly argued with the whole business of departure from the ancient Hebrew understanding of things.

So let’s clear away all the contextual verbiage and grab some ancient Hebrew thinking here. God presents Himself consistently as a sheikh — an eastern nomadic potentate whose “palace” is a tent. He owns the people (family and servants); the turf is merely an issue of space his people occupy. He hardly worries about other folks passing through, so long as they don’t hinder his operations. The whole existence of those in his domain is characterized as “in his presence” or sometimes “before him.”

So if you stand before our God as family, how is He likely to treat you? And if you are just a servant? How about if you are an enemy? And how would it feel for you? Heaven is a nice imagery word for standing in His divine Presence as family. Hell is an ugly imagery word for standing in His divine Presence as an enemy. If God and the Spirit Realm are ineffable in the first place, how would we expect to describe what it’s like to continue as an eternal soul that He made, but no longer on this plane of existence? So long as we realize that the words we use for that could never be more than parabolic or symbolic, it’s not so bad. It’s when you attach a wealth of heathen meaning to those terms that you get lost. That is, your divine service in His glory here in this world will be hindered because you keep expecting things that simply ain’t gonna happen.

And as for the final disposition of all things, when God brings forth a new heaven and new earth — what could we possibly make of such words? I submit that the whole point is to jar you loose from trying to put them into an concrete definitions. We’ve got all we can do dealing with stuff in the here and now. Just what do you suppose the text in Genesis meant when God said the serpent would wallow in the dust and eat the dust? If you insist on taking the Eden narratives literally, there is nothing I can do for you. The Serpent is a symbol for Satan, and Satan’s part in the curse was to be stuck here in this realm. That pretty much limits his operations and removes an awful lot of angelic privilege. And perhaps you noticed that narrative says we are dust, so that’s what Satan is consuming. He can’t consume our eternal destiny; Paul flatly says that’s not part of the picture (Romans 9). Satan can only eat what’s left, and that’s the blessings God has for us here and now.

So while the New Testament does talk an awful lot about the correlation between following Jesus and going to be with Him after this life, it never once talks about the mechanism that connects them. Instead, everything is a matter of laying claim to the blessings that God offered from the very beginning, and mentioned in each of the Law Covenants. Have you not noticed that every miracle of Jesus took place under the Law of Moses? Whatever this business of “divine grace” means in human terms, it includes having that heart awakening offered up-front instead of having to wade through all the Law and Prophecy. Yet that Law and Prophecy are not out of the picture; rather we bring to them the moral discernment that others had to work hard to get out of them. The meaning of revelation is written on our souls first. Our Western culture hinders us from recognizing the fullness of that divine enlightenment that allows us to connect to the higher faculty of the heart.

Our mission is not to reorganize revelation to suit our reason and logic. The mission is to reorganize our thinking to match revelation. Jesus grants us the heart connection at the start if we’ll just lay hold of it.