Judgment: Heaven Love Unending

When we think of the end of the world, we don’t tend to think of a loving God. Rather we think wrath, and destruction, and whatever else might have been in those Left Behind books that were popular a couple decades ago. Depictions of the end of the world in our culture are scary things, things like asteroid strikes or tidal waves or nuclear war. But from the Christian perspective, the so-called “end of the world” is not an end at all, but a beginning. It is the culmination of Jesus’ saving work on the cross, as all creation is renewed and the faithful departed are resurrected into glorious new bodies. The book of Revelation speaks of “a new heaven and a new earth.” The true heaven is not the disembodied state, but one of the material world brought into union with the spiritual world. It is a world seemingly like ours, but one where all acknowledge the rule of God.
 
The exact nature of this is hard to understand, and most images we have in the Bible are deeply symbolic. We are rightfully hesitant to speak definitively on what this world to come will be like. But there is one certainty about this final destination of ours: It is a place where we experience the unending love of God, and participate in that love. For this whole story is about how that Divine Love has been constant and unending: from the origins of humans as beings in His image and likeness … to Jesus’ rescue operation through His incarnation, death, and resurrection … to our state now as followers of Christ and vessels of the Holy Spirit. That love is no less constant and unending even when everything else we know comes to a close.
 
Challenge: Imagine Jesus were to come back right now. Is there anything in your heart that you would feel you lose by His coming? What might you be valuing over the love of God?