Whats your particular view on heaven? Do we get judged after we die? Do we wait till the second coming?
Is there another view that you hold? Please feel free to share im interested
Edgar and I had an extended conversation about that here (search for his posts and mine), and it was also discussed pretty extensively here.
My take is that when we die, time is different and warped or short-circuited. Jesus said to the repentant thief, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
I’ve always liked C.S. Lewis’ visions of heaven such as you might find in his Narnia Chronicles or other writings. And along that theme - imagine (you extraverts) how much you enjoy laughter and society at a great party, and you intraverts … how much you enjoy solitude. Only there (like here) you find delight in your desired blend of both. Only the party is minus all the embarassments and image maintenance concerns that preoccupy most of us most of the time around others. Because there we’ve all seen all the worst about each other and nothing remains hidden any more. It was all dealt with and we feel totally free to just laugh heartily with everybody at ourselves and at everybody else too because nobody is hurt or threatened by it any more. The perfect communion of love will be indestructable. Intraverts would discover new delights and unexplored intimacies with society - no fears or lack of energy or impatience holding them back any more. I imagine we will be able to encounter the beauty of every other human spirit we see and know them even more deeply than even a husband or wife could know each other in this life. And the reconciliations with those we’ve hurt or known only as “our enemies” as we can truly see their hearts - and they ours (after the initial pain of judgment, revelation, sorrow, penitence, and forgiveness) - the joy to follow that reconciliation will itself be a paradise to overwhelm us. We get tastes of that now already too when we are about God’s business - leaving our gifts before the alter to go and attend to more important things.
God’s kingdom is already here among us now, but not the fulness of it as will become possible after we’ve been transformed.
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I’m reminded of Reepicheep:
“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
And since there are degrees of reward, the more favored among us can continue the hike with their elder Brother further up into the mountains, passing even more beautiful waterfalls while the rest of us wait patiently, conversing with each other and being glad for them. None of this sitting on a cloud grumbling “Wish I’d brought a magazine” nonsense.
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It will be the most beautiful, exquisite, thrilling, delightful, warm embracing, healing, wholesome incredible, freeing place. It will be vivid, inviting, endless, fun, the absolute greatest place of all.
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I think all of us have formed a more or less vague mental image of what heaven is. The image has been built on what we have been reading or hearing. The reality is likely to be a bit or much different than our mental image.
Some things have been told in the Bible. Assuming that these descriptions are true (I do believe) and describe life in heaven, the heaven is something very positive. Living in the presence of God, no suffering, everlasting joy. Something worth waiting.
The whole point of that “further up” and “further in” is one of an infinite vista of new and better experiences. I see it as the fundamental logic of why we can only find eternal life in a relationship with an infinite God, where there would be no end to what He has to offer us. This means we would always have opportunities for growth and learning which it seems to me would be substance anything worthy of being called “eternal life.”
A mere eternal existence without some assurance that it has what is needed to make an eternal existence worthwhile, sounds more like a promise of hell.
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