Heaven Is Our Home.

Every people-group to ever exist has its images of the Afterlife.  Though they differ from culture to culture and epochs in Time, the single unifying testimony of the human heart is a belief in Life after death.  There is abundant evidence in anthropology to support cultures and peoples possessing a God-given sense of the Eternal {Eccl. 3:11b}, an innate instinct that this world is not all there is.

What did the earliest Followers of Jesus believe about a Life beyond the walls of this present world?  The Christianous, the ‘Followers of Christ’ in 1^st and 2^nd century Rome, buried the bodies of their martyred brethren in the catacombs beneath the city.  There lie many tombs with inscriptions like the following.

In Christ, Alexander is not dead, but lives.

One who lives with God.

He was taken up into his eternal Home.

One historian said, “Pictures on the catacomb walls portray Heaven with beautiful landscapes, children playing, and people feasting at banquets.”  As odd as this may sound to Western ears in a post-Christian world, these beliefs are deeply rooted in the Scriptures.  Paul, e.g., in Philippians 1:21 say’s, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain [Literally, ‘living-Christ, dying-profit’].  …I am torn between the two,” for “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far,” v. 23.  To die in Jesus, as the early Church believed, is to cash in both the principal of faith and the interest of action, and have in your hands an abundance of God, more than we could ever imagine in Time.

He also wrote in 2 Corinthians 5, which is a perfect parallel to the glory of Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 {both Jesus’ and ours}, “We know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed [He compares the body we currently have to an ‘earthly tent’ …and if it ‘is destroyed:’], we have a building from God, an Eternal House in the Heavens [the place where God dwells and from which He rules], not built by human hands.  Meanwhile [even in this moment] we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling [The body that will be is a ‘building from God,’ an ‘Eternal House,’ a ‘heavenly dwelling’— ‘heavenly’ signifying where it comes from, Who designed it, and Who empowers it.]… so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by Life,” vv. 1-2, and 4c.  Which is another way of saying {and the reverse of} what he said in 1 Corinthians 15:54, that “when this perishable body we now inhabit has been clothed with the imperishable [notice not naked but ‘clothed’], and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’”

For “as long as we are at home in the body,” bound to the present Earth in a body stained by sin, “we are away from the Lord.”  We “prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” {vv. 6b and 8b}.  In what?  Our “Eternal House” ...crafted and constructed by the hands of the Master.  Even the very body we’ll be given, the Armor that equips us for Eternity, will be custom fit by the Master Carpenter.  Is that cool or what?  Notice he doesn’t say, “We prefer to be without a body;” he says, “we prefer to be away from our weaknesses, away from our weariness, away from the death, decay and corruption of our present bodies, and with Jesus until that Time when He clothes us with power in a body just like His!”  Aaaaaaamen.

HJC	Ric Webb  |  Shepherd Heart’s Journey Community 9621 Tall Timber Blvd. |  Little Rock, AR 72204 t +1.501.455.0296
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