Seeking Heaven on Earth

Seeking Heaven on Earth
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

A friend of mine had an interesting hobby. He enjoyed taking photographs of old churches in his area. As a sort of adjunct to this hobby he also did etchings of grave markers from the 18th and 19th Centuries in the cemeteries that so often are adjacent to these churches. My friend found that the epitaphs on those stones many times spoke of how the deceased havd finally left this “veil of tears” to go on to a much better place. Whether explicitly or implicitly these stones usually acknowledged that existence in this fallen world is full of burden and grief.

The Puritans of the 17th century were well aware of this truth and, contrary to the popular image of cold, judgmental religious fanatics; they authored many books on how to help those who suffered from “melancholia”, as depression was then known. To the Puritans such suffering was an inevitable part of coming to grips with the fact that those who have tasted Heaven, but continue to live on Earth cannot help but sometimes struggle with pain and sorrow. Such struggle, to them, was an unavoidable part of living with the results of humanity’s disobedience. Would that we had such a sensible perspective today.

It sometimes seems as if some contemporary evangelicals have completely forgotten that Heaven cannot be attained here. In fact it cannot be “attained” at all, only entered, and that is contingent on death. We do not want to come to grips with the fact that trials and tribulations are part and parcel of the present human condition. The New Testament teaches us to “bear each others burdens” and to “mourn with those who mourn”. It never tells us to inform a suffering child of God that he or she is somehow automatically at fault for feeling sorrow. Nowhere in Scripture are we dismissively told to “just get over it”.

Yet the struggling believer sometimes hears just that from the very brethren who they go to for help in sharing the burdens of life. Instead they are scolded for their lack of faith. This is usually justified by a supposedly biblical, but badly exegeted, conceit that joy should and must always be the state of any true believer.

This is not to say that unrepented sin is never the cause of a Christian’s troubles or even that it usually isn’t. We have to some degree embraced the “victim mentality” of our culture with its emphasis on blame and the shirking of personal responsibility. What is at issue here is not the proper rebuke of someone who indulges in that mentality but rather the laying on of an additional burden of guilt to a believer experiencing the human reaction to the results of evil in the world.

It might be instructive to look at the life of Christ, described in the word of God as a “Man of sorrows”. He weeps over Jerusalem, in love, for those in the city who are literally hell-bent on their own destruction. For His friend Lazarus He grieves in the presence of the terrible reality of physical death and in the Garden of Gethsemane experiences the emotional agony that comes from the prospect of His own. Never once, however, does Jesus tell a human being that they should be ashamed for knowing pain and being deeply affected by it. Why would He when He’d been through the experience Himself?

Christians have been rightly accused of sometimes shooting their own wounded. , However those who have known their own dark night of the soul are rarely the ones doing the shooting. Such Christians know just how hard our earthly pilgrimage can be and their reaction to seeing a person in such pain is compassion and a willingness to help them understand and bear it until the trial is over. They know that the “power of positive thinking”, even that which uses Scripture verses as a mantra, may work for a time but it cannot ultimately keep a believer free from experiencing the pain of living in this “veil of tears”. Yes, our Lord tells us that we should not ultimately lose heart and give in to total despair, but at the same time He also does not expect us to be unaffected by the reality of living in what author Frank Peretti so aptly called “This Present Darkness”.