This doesn't really deserve to be a blog post and maybe I won't leave it up for long. It's more like a diary entry from a moment of perplexity that is probably transitory, but nobody reads this blog any more anyway, and if they did I couldn't read their comments.
I'm having an emotional reaction to something I heard in the John MacArthur study of Revelation yesterday, in the teaching on Chapter 21. At the end of the Millennium -- not the seven year Tribulation but the thousand year Millennium -- after the rebels gather together against the Lord Jesus and fire comes down from heaven to destroy them all, that's when the "old" heaven and earth "flee away" and are "not found again" and replaced by the NEW heavens and Earth. What upset me was the biblical line that they will no more be remembered. That makes me SO sad.
I'm sure I'm not understanding something rightly because I do believe that the final fulfillment of all these things will be sheer happiness for those of us who are saved. I do believe that but I nevertheless keep thinking how can anyone be happy if we no longer remember our former lives and the planet we knew so well?
Things are going to be drastically different in the new worlds, and that all by itself is depressing but how can I think I would miss this fallen world as I am thinking now that I would? I won't miss its fallenness, I know that, I think the Millennium will be more like what I'd prefer to be the end of the story, where all sin and corruption are gone but the world is the same world we know now. A more productive world, a world that responds to our creative abilities as this one does only more efficiently and productively. Sheer happiness it seems to me. All our natural human feelikngs and abilities coming to fullest happiest expression in the use of the physical world we now know.
Even the Millennium could be hard for those of us who will have been changed into our glorified bodies. We will have capacities we never dreamed of as well as immortality, but we will also have lost a great deal of our humanness as it is expressed in this world now. Some believers will go into the Millennium in these same physical bodies and live the same physical life as always, only to much greater expression. They will marry as usual and have children as usual, but they will live hundreds of years and disease will just about be wiped out. This will truly be Eden regained. For them as well as us in our glorified bodies. Only they will get the highest expression of the normal human joys of this life we are living now while those of us in our glorified bodies will be living something entirely different.
Again I have to assume that it's my inability to imagine it properly that makes me think I'd miss the normal human life or be unhappy in the glorified state. I know it's impossible to be unhappy and yet I can't imagine what it could possibly be like. It will be so different. Won't I miss normal human life, normal human love, normal parenting? Will the ability to move as the angels move, in any direction I want, never to have to fear death again, could that be enough? Surely it won't be all there is though, we will have happiness we can't imagine now. I'm sure that is true but I still feel sad thinking about losing the humanness I know now.
And that is still in this same world, before it is destroyed and no longer remembered and replaced by an entirely new heaven and earth. No sea in the new one. Would I miss the sea? It implies such an enormous difference in things it wouldn't just be the sea I think I'd miss but whatever is implied by a world that doesn't have a sea. Again it's a failure of my imagination and yet all I have is the imagination I have and it makes me sad. I can't imagine happily adapting to a kind of existence so utterly different from the one I know. Again I know there will be immense happiness in the new way of being, but I can't imagine it and the loss of the kinds of happiness possible in this world just makes me very sad.
Life in the Millennium sounds like challenge enough to me since we will be so different already, but the new heaven and earth that will replace it sounds even less like a place or a condition that could make us happy or use any of our created nature. Again I know I am not understanding something rightly but this is how it keeps hitting me. Adapting to an entirely different way of being is going to be hard enough, the glorified body we will have in the Millennium, but then to have to forget the old way absolutely is like saying we won't be the same people at all, and how then can the new world be enjoyed if it's not being enjoyed by the same person I am now?
First the world itself will be different. No more sea, no more sun or moon. It will be lit by the light of God Himself from the New Jerusalem. I am sure we will be happy with that but it is hard to imagine being happy in such a completely different environment. The New Jerusalem is where we will live but it is a large cube, 1500 miles cubed. If it is anchored to the new Earth it would occupy about half the area of the current USA. it is not like any earthly city at all. How does one live in a cube? Well we will not be bound by gravity so we can move at will throughout it. But a cube? A river from the throne of God that is probably not water, lined by trees that are not rooted in soil, separate dwelling places for all of us but what are they? Cubed areas within the large cube? We won't need to sleep, will they have no beds? We will eat but that's going to be sufficiently different that we will probably not need kitchens or tables and chairs for that matter. We will have great powers of mind so that we probably won't need things like phones and the internet to communicate with others. Or TVs to get information. I imagine an empty space, I don't have the imagination to fill it with anything in particular. Why does one need a dwelling place at all?
It feels so alien, so cold, so unhuman. But again it's my inability to imagine it that makes it so. All I imagine is losses, the few additions don't seem to supply anything human nature needs, the sensory experiences, the comforts. New strengths, new powers, justice to perfection, peace to perfection, universal love to all creatures, all desirable in themselves, but lacking something essential, some kind of fulfillment of our human nature, don't know how else to say it. And then the idea that we won't even remember our earthly life leaves me coldest of all.
No of course I couldn't desire the alterative, the lake of fire. Whatever this new life will be I take by faith that it will supply supreme happiness to fulfill all my nature. I just can't imagine it.
