Heaven

I encourage everyone to read this book!

I like to read and learn. I read many great books. I recommend many of the books I read. This book exceeds my normal book recommendations!

Here are some of my highlights.

• Most modern Christians carry a culturally created mental map that imagines heaven as a distant celestial realm full of glorious dwellings occupied by the souls of God’s redeemed people who are surrounded by angels in a paradise far removed from this earth. Our map also says the only path to heaven passes through death; it is utterly inaccessible to the living who still occupy the earth. For those shaped by popular forms of Christianity, our map also says that Jesus died on the cross so we might gain access to this heavenly paradise after we die.
• Nearly everything about our faith—Jesus, the gospel, the cross, the church, our mission, even how we raise our children and interact with our non-Christian neighbors—revolves around the view of heaven I’ve just described. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say many of us have a heaven-centric mental map of Christianity. But what if our mental map is wrong? Just as the earth is not the center of the solar system, what if heaven is not the center of our faith?
• When we come to embrace Jesus’s map of heaven, we will discover that it works so much better than the one we’ve inherited from popular Christian culture.
• The heavens are the invisible, intangible realm occupied by the Lord and his hosts.
• Celtic Christians referred to such locations as “thin places.”
• But in John’s Gospel, Jesus announced that a new thin place between heaven and earth had arrived that would be a permanent opening between the two. A new and better temple had come.
• The kingdom isn’t where righteous souls go after death but rather our current reality where we encounter God’s presence and accomplish his will.
• In contrast to the popular view of God as a grumpy, strict gatekeeper, Jesus declares that God opens his kingdom to us joyfully.