I’m loving this new Rainbow-themed campaign, building on the way people have used the Rainbow as a symbol of hope during the current Covid-19 crisis.
Check out the video, and download the rainbow colour-in sheets for your window.
Pre-coloured (you can print this and stick it in your window).
Black and white – colour it in yourself (and stick in your window)
Adapted from an article first published in the Bridge Magazine, September 2019
For a lot of people, the word “Heaven” conjures up images of white-clad angels sitting around on clouds playing harps: an old-style Philadelphia cheese advert on steroids. But is that really what the Bible tells us awaits us beyond the grave? What does the Bible really say about life after death?
Let’s start with angels and clouds, an idea that owes less to Christianity than it does to a 2nd-century religious movement called Gnosticism. The Gnostics hated the body with all its longings and urges. For them, death was a beautiful release: freed from its body the soul could soar heavenward and float uncorrupted forever among the clouds with the angels, and presumably the Philadelphia…
So what does the Bible tell us about what happens when we die? Well, perhaps the most important thing it says, is that heaven is not the final destination for Christians after death! And here’s something else that might surprise you: the Bible doesn’t really talk very much about “going to Heaven when we die” at all.
Instead of “how to get to Heaven when we die” and that Gnostic ‘cloudy floaty’ idea of disembodied souls, Jesus and the early Christians taught that after death, we could look forward to full bodily resurrection. That’s why they called Jesus “the firstfruits” of the resurrection (1Cor.15:23) and “firstborn of the dead” (Revelation 1:4). They saw Jesus rise from the grave, and because they were “in him”, they too would rise from the grave. Just not immediately. That wouldn’t happen until Jesus returns in all his glory at the second coming.
So what happens to us if we die in the meantime? Where do we go if we die between death and the Jesus return? The best answer Jesus gives is in John 14:2, where he tells his disciples not to worry because he was going to prepare one of the many rooms in his Father’s house for them. And what’s really striking about that statement is that the Greek word he used for room (mone) is the word you’d use for a room in a Travelodge, a temporary stopping-off point on the journey to the final destination!
So what’s the ‘final destination’ for the Christian? The final three chapters of the Bible (Revelation 20-22) tells us three things will happen.
First, the resurrection. Jesus returns in his glory and everyone who has ever died is raised to life.
Second, Judgment. The resurrected come before God’s throne for judgement, a judgement we’ll all fail because of our deeds (our failure to love God and our neighbour).
Third, our final destination: either eternal separation from God (Hell), which is our destiny if we’ve rejected God’s offer of mercy made available through Jesus’ death on the cross, or, “the new earth.”
And this idea of a “new earth” is the focus of the end of the Bible’s story of what happens when we die. The new earth is where Christians spend their forever, and here’s how St John describes it:
Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” (Revelation 21:1)
The “first heaven and earth” he refers to is the world we know today, with all its brokenness, pain and suffering. And God promises that one day, all of that sadness and brokenness will be gone forever. And then something hard to comprehend happens: God will bring Heaven down to the new earth, and make his home among us.
Many years ago, St Augustine wrote of God,
You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you.”
Well when God makes his home among us, we’ll finally be truly satisfied in him, and as we experience him fully for the first time, he’ll wipe away every tear from our eyes, and
there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Revelation 21:4).
Then there’s a banquet – a royal wedding feast with the finest food and wine ever. And we’ll live in a beautiful city, with extensive parklands, rivers and trees, and God at the centre. The Prophet Isaiah (Is.65:21-25) speaks of us building homes for ourselves, planting vineyards and enjoying good food. There will be animals, and they’ll live in harmony with each other, and with people. If this is sounding a bit like the Garden of Eden, that’s the point: it’s God’s original creation but made new. And this time it will never break, but go on getting better and better, forever.
So that’s the Christian hope in the face of death: a real resurrected body, living forever on a renewed earth, a place of eternal peace and joy and life, that will remind us very much of this world, but without all the bad bits, because God will be at the very centre of everything. I wonder if you would like to be part of it?
If you’d like to talk more about any of the issues raised in this article (or any of my other big questions), please get in touch: barry@hopechurchfamily.org.
Further reading: Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, SPCK, 2007
At our newly launched youth group (“The Deep End” – for young people in the yr5 to yr10 age range), one of the young people asked me a great question, “Did God create evil?”
Some people would answer the question “Yes.” After all:
That’s actually a pretty handy thing to be able to claim, because if God is the inventor of evil then he’s responsible for all my failings, and “I was born this way” becomes the perfect excuse for everything from burping in public to mass murder!
The thing is, the Bible says loads more about the problem of evil than just pinning everything on the creator. For starters, it tells us that God is good and that all his works are perfect and just. He is:
“a faithful God who does no wrong” (Deuteronomy 32:4).
So he can’t have created evil.
It also tells us that God’s original creation was completely good (that is, there was no evil in it):
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” – Genesis 1:31
And into that very good creation, God placed the first people, giving them the freedom of a beautiful garden with everything they needed for life, joy and family. But with that freedom came two responsibilities – one was to take care of creation (Genesis 2:15). The other was to obey God’s very simple rule about the garden – they could eat food from all the trees but one. Eat of that one, and they would surely die (Genesis 2:17).
And that second responsibility is the key to understanding the whole question of whether God created evil. By creating a rule that could be disobeyed, God created the possibility of rule-breaking, evil, or sin, as the Bible calls it. Understood this way, evil isn’t a supernatural force like it is in the horror movies and some religious traditions – which tend to portray evil as a ying-yang style balancing force to good. Instead in the Bible, evil is at heart, disobedience to God’s moral law. And tragically the people God placed in that wonderful garden broke his moral law (Genesis 3), and people have carried on in much the same vein ever since.
So God didn’t create evil. But there’s another question we need to ask: Did God do a proper risk assessment on the Garden of Eden? After all, if you create a world in which evil is possible, and put people who are capable of evil into it, don’t you have some responsibility for what happens? Does God have a duty of care?
I’m writing this on the first afternoon of the World Cup, and so I hope you’ll indulge me a footballing analogy…Back in October 1863, the Football Association pulled together the various strands of football to create a unified set of rules for Association Football. I mention this because 47 seconds into the first World Cup game, Russian winger Aleksandr Samedov was hacked to the ground by Saudi defender Omar Hawsawi. So who is responsible for what happened? Was it the Saudi footballer, or the Football Association? Like the referee, I hope you choose to blame the footballer! And it’s just the same with God and creation. Although he created a world where it is possible for us to do evil, God holds us responsible for what we do in that world. One day we can be sure that judgement will come.
But God does still have a duty of care. That’s why the main story arc of the Bible is all about how he responds to the mess we’ve made of his world. He makes a series of promises to put the world to rights and then comes in the person of Jesus to do it, by dying on the Cross to deal with the sins of the world.
But benefitting from God’s duty of care isn’t automatic. As we saw earlier, he created us to be morally responsible choosers, and his rescue plan involves a choice too: a choice to admit our part in the world’s mess and ask for the good gifts of forgiveness and life that Jesus offers through his death and resurrection. And if we’ll do that, something amazing happens: God takes responsibility for the evil we have done, and we’re set free.
So did God create evil? Did he create all the mess in the world? No, we did.
But through the Cross God ends up paying the price to fix it! And as any parent will tell you, that’s what you’ll do for your kids if you really love them!
First published in the Bridge Magazine July 2018
If you spend any time on social media, reading the comments of what policy-makers like to call “opinion formers”, you will encounter many furrowed brows. There is grave concern about the times in which we live. Our problems apparently stem from ignorant people voting the wrong way on the basis of being misinformed about the facts. They’ve been given “fake news” invented by mud-slinging liars. Or, worse, they’ve looked at true facts and are unmoved or unconvinced. Surely facts should end any debate?
This state of affairs should be no great surprise. We have been living in a society which has been rejecting absolute truth for decades. It began in academia with post-modernism, and so slowly spread to the rest of our culture. Truth with a capital “T” has been undermined for decades. So now when presented with facts, why shouldn’t people shrug or ignore what has been put in front of them?
Moreover, when Truth is demoted or destroyed, what do we expect to emerge other than lies? Our media lies, telling lies about our leaders who in turn lie to the media, sometimes about the media and other things too. It is clear that our nation has never been hungrier for truth.
[This is part of an article by James Cary at www.thegoodbook.co.uk You can read the rest here.]
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