50 Days of Heaven - Days 6 and 7

On these two days, Mr. Alcorn has strayed away from at least what I know as traditional views of Heaven, though granted, I am not a particularly studied scholar on the matter.  I haven't ever heard of an intermediate Heaven, which is different from the future Heaven.  His definition of Heaven, at least for these two chapters is, "The place where God dwells", and he speaks particularly of a "central" dwelling place, given that God is omnipresent.

I think his basis for there has to be a present and future Heaven that are different rely on the statement by Jesus to one of the criminals on the cross, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise", not later, when you are resurrected.

I also thought of the parable of Lazarus and Abraham, where the rich man in hell wants Lazarus to come comfort him, or at least go back to his five brothers and warn them of the dangers of hell.  Abraham says the problem is not that judgement has already taken place, nor that his brothers are already dead, but that they wouldn't listen to Lazarus if they wouldn't listen to Moses and the other prophets.  So, that would mean that there are people currently in Heaven and hell.  I did think later that it is a parable, but I would still expect Jesus to get his facts straight even in a parable.

My question is that, if that is true, when does Revelation 21:13 take place, since it would seem that there would have to be lots of judgement occurrences, one for each individual (maybe he does them in batches? Tongue out)

He also states that Heaven has a third state, "past", and says that it changed from "past" to "present" at Christ's incarnation, but gives no justification for that.

So - does this really matter? I'll probably write a whole post about, How Important is Doctrine Anyway? but for this particular question, it probably isn't, as I can't think of how it would affect my life today.  But, given that our church is supposed to all be reading this, one might expect people to either be wondering these same sorts of questions, or already have it figured it out.

Posted by Jon Daley on November 14, 2006, 6:01 am | Read 4159 times
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I'm certainly no studied scholar on the matter either, but plain logic tells me that "current" and similar words have no meaning at all when you're talking about a situation outside of time.
Posted by SursumCorda on November 14, 2006, 8:19 am
Ah, I didn't say that he speaks of God being outside time, but not Heaven, that it is "obvious" that Heaven changes, is in time, etc. urgh. Now I see the post was updated, and broke all the quotes again. For some reason, the quotes and other characters have been breaking recently. I don't think any code was changed that should have affected that sort of thing.
Posted by Jon Daley on November 14, 2006, 8:21 am
Thinking about it more, and reading more explanations from him on the 8th day, I think his problem of having to have a past, present and future heaven are reconciled if you "move" Heaven outside of time.

I guess the trouble is that for something outside of time, what does it mean to change? Perhaps it is something like it only seems like it changes, from our perspective, or something like that.
Posted by jondaley on November 15, 2006, 8:37 am
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