IMAGINE
entering heaven to find you’re ushered immediately into the biggest room you’ve
ever seen; it’s a room, but a room seemingly without walls or ceiling — absolute
and sheer white… everything, including every indiscernible being in that room,
is pure white; whiter than white.
Everything about the experience is totally other-than you’ve ever
experienced on earth.
It’s
funny, but you’re so caught up in the idea not of “I must be dead,” but, “this
is heaven… this is heaven!” Being
there, you’re in the most pleasant sense of shock you’ve ever known; everything
is new. You haven’t lost your memory so
much as all memory of your life pales into insignificance just now.
Then
your memories flood back, and you’re overwhelmed by the weight of them! Suddenly there are so many memories. There are so many of them that were important
at the time, but you’d forgotten. So
many beautiful memories of love and loss.
So many painful memories, but now with the knowledge of the Presence of
God in those actual events — as he
was there with you. After what seems like a short eternity, you
slip into another shorter eternity —
Judgment
at truth: The Great Judgment Before the Council of Voices.
With
the Almighty Jesus presiding, a brilliant beam of light from a heavenly throne,
the Council of Voices are like the witnesses of your life. So many voices witness to the truth of your
life; their actual perceptions are spoken out without an audible word
said. (You see that understanding is
implicit and perfect in heaven; there are no need of words to communicate
meaning.) Jesus’ Presence is astounding
real, but he is so perfectly still.
Gentle, yet all-powerful and heavenly fearsome! The Voices speak simultaneously, but also in
perfect unison, and you buckle under the weight of what they bring; many things
you had no clue of!
So
many things.
Then
another new thing becomes apparent.
Suddenly you recognise that all the repentance you engaged in toward
reconciliation on earth was mere practice.
Now you’re impelled toward ‘paying’ God in the currency of overwhelming
sorrow — sorrow upon sorrow for the sins you committed and were not duly
repentant for. The purpose of this manic
sorrow is soon understood. It’s the
consummation of your soul into everything of God — his love coming home in its
perfect completion — and all dependent on the thoroughness of this heavenly
remorse, which is indeed perfectly thorough.
***
In eternity I
imagine everything we do is instinctive, for there are now no longer any
barriers to love, there’s no fear, no doubting, no second-guessing. Indeed, so implicit is everything ‘done’ in
eternity nothing is actually done as it would be classified as work. No effort is required; no energy; no
motivation mustered. What is ‘done’ in
heaven just is.
***
We’re
judged (by God and by others) not by how right we are, but by how loving we
are. Somehow love makes us right. It
doesn’t matter how right we are when we love; love makes us righter than a
person who is right.
God
loves it when we’re right, and he’s pleased when we’re righteous. But the weightier things of God are love.
What
will the Council of Voices say about your life and your interactions? When life is done, when it’s too late and go
back and make things right, only then may we know.
Our
choice, today, is to be right (to prove that we are) or to make things right;
love is often devoid in the former, yet love is implied in the latter.
What
if the basis of God’s judgment was dependent on what others thought of us; what
others said about how we made them feel?
It’s worthy of our contemplation.
It
doesn’t matter if we’re right if how we make others feel is all wrong.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.
Note: the ideas
posited here are from my imagination; these ideas can only be fictional.
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