Giant Sunglasses

Have you ever put on a pair of sunglasses, and fifteen minutes later forgot that you were even wearing them? When you put them on, your perspective changed. Everything got darker. And even though the way you were seeing the world around you wasn't how it looked in reality, you had adjusted and forgotten that things were actually different. The lights were brighter and the colors were likely more vibrant. If you were to take the sunglasses off, you would see things the way they truly were.

A long time ago, in 185 A.D., a man named Origen was born into the city of Alexandria. Origen put a giant pair of sunglasses on Western Christianity, really on us, and we have forgotten that we are wearing them.

Alexandria was a city conquered by the renowned "Alexander the Great", who was a student of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle was a student at the school started by the well-known Greek philosopher, who studied under Socrates, Plato. In a secular world, Plato managed through his philosophical writings to draw a thick line between what is visible and what is invisible. He came to the conclusion that what is seen is real; what is unseen is ethereal and mysterious.

Origen, having been born into a city that Alexander the Great had established upon Platonic thought, took on the goal of assimilating the secular worldview of Platonism and the Christian worldview. Sadly, he was extremely successful. He managed to convince us that when the Bible talks about heaven, it is a realm that is mysterious, ethereal, and unknowable. Since we can't see it, it must not have tangible form. According to Origen, even Jesus, when He ascended into heaven, disposed of his physical body and now has no real form. The famous leader in the reformation, Augustine, was deeply influenced by Origen. And even Martin Luther, the "father" of the reformation supported Origen's writings.

And now, almost two thousand years later, we are still looking at our sphere, seen and unseen, through a lens that has led us into a tragic deception. To us words like "supernatural" and "mystical" are normal in discussions about heaven. I have just learned that there isn't even a word in Hebrew or Greek, found in the Bible, that can be translated "supernatural". We have strayed from the way the authors of the Bible and early believers viewed heaven, our eternal home, and have distanced ourselves from it's reality. Now, we just skip over verses in the Bible, like Hebrews 12:22-24 or 1 Kings 8:30 or Jesus' multiple references to His home (and ours!) because we have been conditioned to think we can't understand them. I have recently realized how much of the Bible I have missed because I don't try to understand it in the way the early church did.

But guess what...

There is a real place called Heaven that God created to dwell in with man. It's not just a gas or cloud of smoke. It is tangible, even though we cannot see it from our earthly and sin-tainted perspective. We have pictures of it in the Bible that we almost never take into consideration. Jesus is a man, with hands and feet and a face. And he is in Heaven, making it beautiful and glorious. It's not just an idea; it's a real place, and He's a real man.

I have been awakened to a desire to know more about this place where the Bible says I will spend eternity. If it is just as real as the computer I am typing on, and I am really going to live there one day, and most of all if it is where God dwells right now (not swirly light ethereal god, but real, tangible, touchable God), it is of utmost importance that I familiarize myself with it, and that I fall in love with the man enthroned in the center of it.

It's time to take off the sunglasses we didn't know we were wearing.

Reference:

I pretty much learned all of this from Stephen Venable's notes on "Biblical Foundations of Night and Day Worship and Prayer". You can listen to his teachings and get the notes at http://www.ehc.org/series.jsp?sectionid=3&id=9. I would encourage you to listen to the teachings and read the notes! You will be ruined (in a good way;)!