BitterSweetLife

A couple days ago it occurred to me that Heaven is a logical, mathematical, unavoidable necessity in light of who Christ is.

When a God who is infinitely good chooses, as a means to his glory, that his goodness should be explored and enjoyed by humans, eternal life naturally follows.

Infinite paradise is the natural consequence of an unfathomably perfect God. He cannot be known in a year, or in a hundred billion years. Eternal life is the only theater for seeing and savoring Christ.

Moreover, on this framework I feel absolutely comfortable in asserting something else: Heaven will be the scene of progressively sharper joys, of increasingly better pleasures. Our experience of happiness in God’s presence will not be static, but dynamic—ecstatic happiness, and more and more so.

This is because, as we grow (millennium by millennium) to know Christ better, the joys we experience in Heaven cannot help but grow as well.

Jonathan Edwards said, in so many words, that someone who embraces all the beauty of creation with goodwill, but does not embrace Christ, is infinitely parochial.

Infinitely parochial. I love Edwards, not only for his Christological brilliance, but for the heart-stopping precision of his terms.

Imagine the person who lovingly gazes at fireflies through his back screen door, but cannot find it in his heart to look upward to the stars.