LOVE IS ALL THERE IS: The revelation of heaven on Earth

If there is a heaven, what does it have to do with me here? heralded as, “ Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Revelation –3).
Table of contents

• Hungry and Hungover
• Where Is Heaven on Earth?
• A New Heaven & A New Earth
• What Does Revelation Say Will Happen? - Mar 1, - Love Worth Finding with Adrian Rogers

Wait, wait, wait before we "jump" too far and start concluding what exactly we are reading here, we should take a moment to appreciate the level of symbology and metaphor that Jewish apocalyptic writers used. They would employ to convey massive theological truths in way's that invested their words with the cosmic meaning the prophet believed them to possess. The Revelation is no exception, so there is a lot of symbolism to wade through to get to the meaning.

At this moment, the earth is cut off from the full life of heaven. Crime, inequality, rampant greed, and selfishness—to use a biblical metaphor, creation groans like a woman in childbirth. One day it will be pushed forth into life, like a new baby emerging from the womb. We have to remember that we can easily get lost in some of the details here.

John is using apocalyptic symbols and metaphors to describe this event, just like the Old Testament prophets used poetry. Instead, he was attempting to express an unexplainable conviction that sometimes only metaphors and symbols will suffice. So, what did it look like?

On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve [c]kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" ch It's an all-new Garden of Eden, the paradise of eternal life with God! This is an image of the Old Testament prophetic echoing all the way back to the first pages of Genesis. He saw the tree of life there, accessible to all and eternally yielding fruit. It could do this because its roots had access to the eternal river of life, which can dispense nourishment to all the new creation because it flows from the presence of God himself.

Hungry and Hungover

John describes seeing all the nations there, working to cultivate the garden as Adam and Eve did in Genesis. But it's not just a return back to the garden; it's a step forward into a new Jerusalem, a great city where human cultures and all their diversity work together in peace and harmony before God. John first described the new creation as a marriage of heaven and earth. Jerusalem itself was a powerful symbol for John. It was the first and only city where God resided in a permanent holy house, the first city where kings worshiped the true Creator.

He depicts the reunion of heaven and earth as the descent of a new Jerusalem. This new city would be built by God, not by human hands. John was a master of the Hebrew Scriptures, and his vision of the new creation is a kaleidoscope of images drawn from the biblical poets and prophets. His goal was to create a visual collage of Old Testament metaphors that forces us to reckon with the meaning of these images. He says the heavenly city has four sides, each with three gates, corresponding to the 12 tribes of Israel.

The sociological description of this is secularism. But when it gets down to the gut of things, we are as primitive as that tribe in the Amazon who talks to the stars at night. Heaven matters to us — always has, always will. So heaven is real, and heaven is relevant, but before we know what it has to do with us, we should have a better idea of what it actually is.

Sunday School simplicities may have misled us. No spaceship can take you there. Perhaps heaven is better understood as a dimension of reality. The Hebrew imagery of heaven as the sky is a beautiful illustration of something we hardly have categories to describe, and it is just that: That is how we try to wrap our words around the fact that God is real and involved, but not here visibly.

He is out there, or up there , and by that, we mean that he resides in a dimension of reality outside our own, or something like that. So much of this has to do with how we conceive of space and time. Theoretical physicists say that there are at least ten dimensions in the universe, possibly eleven. We can perceive three. We can see a clue of this in the Transfiguration Matthew Recall how it works.

They just walk up on a mountain, and here on this earth, Moses and Elijah stepped in to talk to Jesus in his glorified form. For that moment, the curtain was pulled back, as it were, and the heavenly dimension that overlaps with our reality was seen. As Tim Chester and Jonny Woodrow contend , some of us may need to flip around the way we have conceived of heaven. Wherever the risen Christ is, that is heaven. He is the one who makes it good and beautiful and desirable. He is the one we want. So then how does heaven relate to this earth?

How does that dimension of reality in which God dwells impact our dimension of reality here?

That is the question. And he will arise at that time of national Israel's tribulation Dan. Amillennialist belief can also interpret this passage as the nation of Israel, however this belief as expressed by amillennialists refers, not to the modern Israel, but to the Ancient religious state of Israel Judea as it existed in the time of Christ.

The Child is Christ, born into the then existing state of Israel, and of Israel's lineage. The remnant or sons of Israel is, in this understanding, the followers of Christ, the followers of the true religion of Israel as it exists after the coming of the messiah.

The " Seventieth Week of Daniel ," and prophecy of the Olivet discourse , in this belief, are ascribed as concerning the first coming of Christ, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A. D During which enforced emperor worship occurred in the temple of Jerusalem, which was later almost totally destroyed, and many Jews were made slaves in distant lands resulting presumably in their remaining families not knowing what happened to them or where they were , and the establishment of Christ's Church, as it currently exists, both on earth and in heaven.

Lutheran scholar Craig Koester, for example, says, "The woman encompasses the story of Israel, from whom the Messiah was born, as well as the story of the church, which was persecuted after Jesus' death and resurrection John's visionary account of the threat against the woman and the woman's preservation uses imagery that encompasses many moments in the story of God's people.

A New Heaven & A New Earth

This allows the story to apply to people in many times and places. Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov — in his interpretation of Revelation notes of the astronomical attributes of the woman in Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Egyptian mythologies. He takes the crown of twelve stars as representing the Zodiac.

In his interpretation, astronomical attributes of a pagan goddess are here "translated into the language of Christian theology and assume the new symbolism [19]. And there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought against Michael; And the dragon prevailed not against Michael, neither the child, nor the woman which was the church of God, who had been delivered of her pains, and brought forth the kingdom of our God and his Christ.

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7. Woman of the Apocalypse?

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures , the foundational text of Christian Science , presents the woman in the Apocalypse as symbolizing "generic man, the spiritual idea of God; she illustrates the coincidence of God and man as the divine Principle and divine idea From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Not to be confused with Whore of Babylon.

A statue of Mary in Strasbourg Cathedral with a crown of twelve stars.

The commentary of the New American Bible the official Roman Catholic Bible for America states that "The woman adorned with the sun, the moon, and the stars images taken from Gn The Israel of old gave birth to the Messiah Rev Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries.

Pius X, Ad diem illum. But the Apostle continues: Surely ours, we who, being yet detained in exile, are still to be brought forth to the perfect love of God and eternal happiness. And furthermore, the Scholastic doctors have considered the Assumption of the Virgin Mother of God as signified not only in the various figures of the Old Testament, but also in that woman clothed with the sun, whom the Apostle John contemplated on the island of Patmos. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, acc.

Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens". Retrieved 2 December Heitz also made a connection to the date of the flag's adoption, 8 December , coinciding with the Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato S.