Christians
describe a God who wants to share His “heavenly home” with others. He wants to share the joy that He experiences; and apparently He wants to share this with human beings for all eternity. In this entry, I want to describe how, if
there is such a God[2],
He faces a huge dilemma. This dilemma
ties in directly with the issue of free will that I am so fond of talking
about.
God has free
will. Regardless of what you think about
human free will or human determinism, if there is a God worth calling a God, He
has to have complete freedom of the will.
He can decide to do anything He wants – there are no restrictions to
what He can decide to do. Further, He
can carry out those decisions due to a little feature called omnipotence. As a result, we struggle to describe some
aspects of God’s character. Words like “want”
or “desires” have a different meaning when nothing can stand in your way.
At some
“point in time” however, God was enjoying His ultimate freedom and His ultimate
power and thought “I would like to share this with others.” So, He made man with the plan of sharing
fully in God’s joy – sharing fully in heaven.
Here’s the
big dilemma: God’s joy is entirely
intertwined with His “omni-“ characteristics and His complete freedom. In order for man to share in God’s joy, man
has to be made like God. John says “…when
he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” [I Jn
3:2b] This does not mean that man becomes God. In fact, the Christian doctrine on this is
very clear – man is always distinct from God.
Man is still man, but in heaven he is transformed so that he can
experience the joy that God experiences.
But in heaven, what will be man’s characteristics? I contend that heaven cannot be heaven – it
cannot be the full sharing in God’s joy – unless we have the character of
God. And that means that man – faulty
man – gets to have the big keys to the kingdom.
Man gets to have complete freedom and he gets to have complete
power. Do you see the problem here?
The problem
with any human being having complete freedom and complete power is that, with one mistake, that human can end
everything, including God. One tiny
moment of indiscretion and everything ends with no chance of recovery. Just consider the danger that God puts Himself in by bringing mere human beings
into full fellowship with Him in heaven.
It is true
that, on earth, man can really mess things up.
But there is a significant limit to what man can do, by design. Maybe, eventually, man will have developed a
weapon big enough to blow up the whole earth.
And that will be the end of man. But not for eternity. Man can only destroy the physical; and even
the ability to destroy the physical is fairly limited. We cannot kill souls – we can only kill
bodies. And once we destroy ourselves,
that is the end of our destroying. As
human beings, we can get frustrated or angry or depressed and we do stupid
things. One person might put their fist
through wall. But imagine if everyone
carried with them a little button that released all of the nuclear warheads all
at once. In a fit of frustration or anger
or depression, someone would hit that button and…boom.
But heaven
presents that problem in spades. We’re
not just given a button that controls nuclear warheads. Full freedom and full power means that we
could hurt not only ourselves and our fellow man, but hurt God as well. We could end it all for all of eternity, and
there would be no fixing of it. In the
material, finite world, there is a limit.
Death, despite all of the awful things it means, is also the ultimate in
“safety limits.” We, as human beings,
can go no further than death. Our
influence extends no further than the finite universe. But in heaven, our influence extends
forever. A single mistake. A single
mistake…means the end of it all for everyone, with no recourse of
recovery. It’s over. Love, joy, peace…they end.
I thought
about this from a personal perspective.
Would I want to have the full freedom and full power that God has? Would I want to have the possibility hanging
over my head that in a brief moment of something less than perfection, I would
be the one to bring it all to an end? Is
heaven worth that risk?
What this
means from God’s perspective is that He
cannot afford to make one little mistake in who He lets in to heaven. I mean, if He allows in one person who isn’t
completely, wholly, and permanently transformed to a perfect state, He runs the
risk of this danger – the danger of complete annihilation. He cannot take that risk. So, here is the dilemma God faces: He wants the companionship of human beings –
He wants to be able to interact with humans in a manner that they experience
the same joy that He experiences; but to do so He must risk it all, including
Himself. If He makes a mistake and lets
in even one wrong person…it’s over.
That’s God’s
dilemma.
This is why
we can’t be involved in figuring out who gets into heaven or how they get into
heaven. We would mess it all up. We’d let in the really good people that we
know. We’d grade on a curve and take the
top 10% or 20%, and then let our good friend in even though they were only at
21%. We look at heaven as a nice honor
for a life well-lived. A nice gift from
God for trying to please Him in some way.
But it is not that. Heaven is a gift, for sure, but it is first
and foremost a gift for God. It is a
final act of creation – creation that started “long ago.” And it is the most dangerous place in the
universe for human beings and human nature.
Without a transformation of our nature – a transformation that only God
can ensure is complete – we should not hope for heaven. Heaven, populated by human beings – even
really really really good human beings – would be hell in no time. And then what will be left?
In the first
creation, there were apparently angels who rebelled. Satan is described as a “fallen angel.” But human beings, the Bible teaches, will be
made higher than the angels. The fall of
angels was the most disastrous event in the universe. It led to evil. It led to the fall of man. It led to the death of every human being. It led to Jesus dying on a cross. But the fall of angels would pale in
comparison to a second fall of man.
It just can’t happen.
That’s God’s
dilemma. Be careful what you wish for, o
man. Don’t think a minute that you would
want to be the one with the keys to heaven.
[1]
Is it theologically correct to say that God has a dilemma? No, not really – not without carefully
defining your terms. But I’ve written
this whole thing from a very human perspective, using human terms to describe
God, in order to more simply convey the idea here. If I had to carefully define every term with
respect to God and chase every rabbit trail of theology, I’d never be able to
get my point across. You’ll have to take
this entry as something closer to an allegory.
[2]
If you are certain that there is no such God, then the rest of this entry will
not be of much use to you – you might as well skip it.
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