More on the City…
Feb 19th, 2009 by ljkim
God’s idea of “heaven” in the Bible is not a flowery meadow, or a garden, but a city. A city with people of every nation, tribe, and language, where “the kings of the earth” (the best of the best) come to bring their treasures. You’ve heard me say this before… In Revelation (a few weeks back) the City of God is the biggest, wealthiest, city-est city imaginable…of outrageous size and wealth and diversity.
Now most cultures are anti-urban: the founding fathers like Washington and Adams hated the bustle of the city and longed to be at their farms. And so generations of churches have read their anti-urban bias into the Bible, but scholars across the board agree that the Bible is an urban document. Even the rural dwellers of the Bible (e.g., Abraham) did so in the hope of one day founding a city with inhabitants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore.
So what does this mean that heaven is a city? Our cities certainly aren’t heavenly. What I think this means is that when Gospel takes hold in a city it becomes more and more like heaven. So in other words: take New York with all its energy, creativity, excitement, the best restaurants, the best of culture, and take away all the sin and greed and selfishness and elitism and classism; what you’re left with is an image of heaven. By the same token if you take a small suburb and add the Gospel, you’d get a city… Imagine a small town: what if the residents were so committed to doing good and loving people that the poor were taken care of, jobs and companies sought to develop great lives for their employees, the town council sought to give its citizens the best it could and the wealthy saw their wealth (not just for themselves, but) as a means to make the world better starting with their neighborhood? The population of this small suburb would skyrocket. Who wouldn’t want to move there? So there it is: Suburb + Gospel = City AND the City + Gospel = Heaven.
Related posts: