I was listening to"This Is Not the End" by Gungor the other day.
One line in the song says "we will open our eyes wider". As simple as this line is, I hints at a profound spiritual truth. That truth being, we will be made whole in Christ.
When we think of the afterlife we think of harps and clouds. We think of a quiet place full of little cherubs and silent whispers. We think of a haze where the spirits of loved ones quietly hover around and smile at us while we all glide across mists of light.
This view of eternity is not based in scripture though. Jesus told the thief at the cross that he would see him in Paradise. Paradise. (Luke 23:43) That doesn't sound like a vale of white to me. That sounds like an abundance of life and color. Now, I know that's stretching it a bit. But the Bible does say more.
Check this out;
Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail. -Revelation 11:19
But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we
await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body
to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to
subject all things to himself. - Philippians 3:20-21
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the
Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine
on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By
its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring
their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there
will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor
of the nations. - Revelation 21:22-27
I think it can be summed up with this quote by CS Lewis:
"Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to
arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care,
on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly
blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something
else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must
keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not
find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned
aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other
country and to help others to do the same."
We tend to think of this current existence as a reality, and eternity as the dream. In truth, we have it backward. We will be made whole, and be able to experience the joys of God in full through it. For all the beauty and life this world holds, we look at it all through what Paul calls a "dim mirror" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Let us not run through life grabbing what joys we can before death because we feel this is the only time to experience it. Let's instead look forward to the day when we finally get to wake up and truly live.
