book review, part 1--the slumber of christianity--hey, Heaven is a good thing!!

It seems like, lately, all I've read has been about life here. By that, I mean that the hope of life after death has been at best minimized and replaced with responsibilities of life now. Jesus didn't really deal with life after death, so may, but about how to live life now. The concept of Heaven is treated in various ways--perhaps as an example of some kind of platonic dualism that needs to be discarded, or as the state to which we should be pushing the present world, or as a kind of embarrassing thing that we should pay scant attention to, not emphasizing it too much, as we go about the business of trying to improve things here.

For me, then, it was refreshing to read some things like this, in Dekker's book "The Slumber of Heaven".

The pleasures of this life and the happiness they bring have been dealt a death
blow by a systematic lack of passion for the next life.

And.

The fact is, nothing in this life can satisfy unless it is fully bathed in an
obsession for eternity. Nothing.

I've needed this reminder. I need to remember what the prize really is, the inheritance. Eternal life.

It isn't that what happens here is unimportant, it is. How I treat people is important, but not so I can make earth into heaven. How I live in this life in important.

It is a matter of perspective. As Paul said, if it is only for this life that we have hope, we may as well hang it up and quit. Sorry, but the meaningless hope of some kind of futuristic earthly heaven brought about by the political shenanigans and restrictions of any religious view, whether I large agree with it or not, offers me nothing. I want nothing to do with either the militant forceful takeover of the Reconstructionists, or the play-nice subversive takeover of the Deconstructionists.

I want a Lord who will come with ten thousands of His saints, to put an end to all the works of the ungodly. I want the hope of Heaven after this life, and I want the hope of Christ's real return to set this world right.