Book 3 of Musings A Better Person

The Lord Jesus Christ did not come to bring us to Heaven to live forever, but to reconcile us to God and make us a better person.

Many, perhaps all religions, have as their goal to bring people when they die to some kind of paradise. We know this is true of the Muslim religion, for example, where people are willing to suffer great pain or death in order to go to the Muslim paradise when they die.

Christianity was one of several religions found in the Romans Empire, at the time it came into being. Perhaps the concept that we are saved to go to Heaven entered the Christian religion at that time, borrowed from Gnosticism or some other school of thought.

We have gone a step further today. We teach that you don't have to do anything to insure your entrance into Heaven when you die. You don't even have to live righteously or serve God. You just profess faith in Jesus Christ and that is all there is to it.

Well, a careful reading of the Bible from Genesis through Revelation will demonstrate that the Christian religion is not directed toward going to Heaven to live forever, much less that Christ came to bring us to Heaven in our lukewarmness, sin, and rebellion.

We are on earth now. When the Lord returns we will return with Him and be on the present earth once more. After the final judgment we will be on the new earth. So why do we present Heaven as our eternal home? I don't think we have thought much about it. We are just assuming this is what the Bible teaches.

Of course, there is the famous John, Fourteen, where Jesus takes us to live in a mansion.

Two problems here: first, the word translated "mansion" means an abiding place, not a fancy house; second, when Jesus invited us to be with Him where He is He was not speaking of Heaven but of the bosom of the Father.

You can notice right after the "mansion" verse it says, "No man comes to the Father except through Me." Jesus is the Way to the Father, not the way to Heaven.

In John, Chapters Fourteen through Seventeen, the passages where the Lord spoke of returning to where He came from, He never once mentioned He was returning to Heaven. It always was to the Father.

"What's the difference?" you might ask."

The difference is enormous. If our goal is Heaven we have to wait until we die to go there; and if we are "saved by grace" we don't even have to change the way we behave.

But if our goal is the Father, then every day we are being transformed as we press into the Father.

We are supposed to abide in Christ as He abides in the Father. Christ Himself is the House of God (in My Father's House). Christ has prepared a place for us in Himself, that we might find rest in Christ in God. This is the subject of the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John-not going to Heaven but going to the Father through Christ. Read John 14:2 through 14:23 and see if all those verses are talking about our going to Heaven or our dwelling in the Father through Christ.

The Lord came to earth that we might be reconciled to God and that we might become better people.

Look how these two thoughts come together in the following verses:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:17-21)

Notice the accent on the new creation, and then on reconciliation. Notice how many times the term reconciliation or reconciling or reconciled is used.

We don't stress reconciliation to God today as much as we do going to Heaven. I don't think we care too much about coming to know God, just about escaping Hell and going to a place where we will be happy. Am I correct in this?

What does it mean by saying the old has gone and the new has come? It means our personality has been transformed. All the old adamic garbage, the worldliness, the lust, the self-will, has been removed from us. In its place is the righteousness, holiness, and obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Because of our accent on going to Heaven by grace, we don't emphasize the new creation. Yet it is the new creation that itself is salvation. It is the new creation, the salvation, that reconciles us to God.

Heaven is not the issue. Nothing is gained in the Kingdom of God, no solution to the problem of the rebellion of the angels is provided, by our going to Heaven. The gain, the solution, comes when we are changed from rebellious sinners into obedient servants of the Lord. Does this make sense to you?

So we see we are due for a reformation of Christian thinking. We are to be being transformed in personality every day. If we are not, we are not being saved; for salvation is transformation.

As we are transformed in personality we are reconciled to God.

Reconciliation occurs initially as we are forgiven through the atonement made by the blood of the cross.

Then reconciliation proceeds as the evil is removed from us and Christ is formed in us.

The end result of the program is redemption is a personality transformed completely into the image of the Lord Jesus Christ, and a personality so reconciled to God that it is dwelling eternally in the center of God's very Person and will.

How does this sound to you?

"Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you." "I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters," says the Lord Almighty. (2 Corinthians 6:17,18)