Previously, I painted a mental picture of Hell for you. Jesus provided the verbal picture, but I merely shared the truth about Hell and you. Now consider the Garden of God.
Jesus explained Hell quite well. If Hell does not exist,
then Jesus is a liar because He not said it did and even described it. (See the
previous chapter.) Just because you disbelieve something does not mean that the
something is not true.
Why would anyone not believe in Hell? Because it is a place
of torments. The easiest way to allay fears of torments is not to believe in
Hell.
Many say, “A good God would not send you to Hell.”
That is true. God is Good and He does not do that.
Who does then?
You, yourselves select Hell. Given two choices: not to go
there or to go there; you decide the rewards of this world would supersede the
Will of God and are willing to pay the price. The ‘price’ of is eternally
dying, never quite consummating it. The flesh is real but never burns. As such,
the ‘lost’ who go to Hell have new flesh as well that burns but is never
consumed.
The grief of it all in Hell, you will know it was not God’s
choice for you and you were your own destroyer!
Would you expect leniency for God if He was that terrible?
No! So, why would God be lenient with you?
Hence, God will judge you but will tell you nothing more
than what you already know.
When God is denied or abandoned, you should understand that
you walked into the ‘incinerator’ by yourself, with not even an angel to lead
you, as is done to those who go to Paradise.
Part of the consequence of sin is isolation, not that you
will not have company, but they all will hate you and you them.
Jesus gave two commandments on which the Law and the
prophets hung… To love God and others. [i] For those who do not like
those commandments, Hell is the place for them. The whole law there is to hate
God and hate others with the same intensity. However, you will be part of the
hated as well.
Consider the love that Jesus commands, “If you love Me, keep
my commandments.” [ii]
Now, let’s examine that condition for a moment.
People think of love as an emotional event. Erotic
love is the most obvious because the response can be both seen and felt.
Familial love is a little harder. It warms the heart, and
since they are of the same gens (family) as you, there is an instinctual
bond there. Pride and a sense of togetherness is emoted in a family situation.
Brotherly love is generally thought of as companionship;
doing things together to lift-up each other. That is expressed in pleasure.
When the love of God is expressed, it is a Divine type of
love (agape in the Greek). It has nothing to do with emotion or
activity. Agape ‘love’ is simply goodwill. The passage on love
can then be rewritten, If you have good will for Me, keep My commandments.
The will of both God and men is to exercise the mind. It is
not work at all, but ergonomics.
Thinking is the easiest of all work because it does
not require much power. Therefore, to go to Paradise in Heaven is basically thinking
good thoughts. Why would God allow anyone in Paradise who thought evil of
anyone? Then it would not be a paradise but a type of Hell… you know, the place
that most do not want to go to!
Commandments seem to be things that you do.
Back to the dog story; “Rover, heel,” and the dog does not
even think about it… the dog heels.
God wants humans to do the same thing but calls it a less provocative
term — ‘bow.’ Bowing in humility is the way that Christians ‘bless’ God. As the
centurions found out, bowing to God cannot be done in mockery but allegiance.
Allegiance is trusting in God for security and is having goodwill.
The Greek word, entole, not only means ‘commands’ but
‘prescriptions’
A place like that without God is Utopian, but the same place
with God there is Paradisical. However, God must be there to make the
difference. God made man for companionship and contrary to Dr. Jeremiah’s
statement, God does want something in return… “Keep My commandments!” — Keep
what I prescribe for you.
Now, rather than looking at the command as an activity that
takes power, recognize goodwill as a prescription, not for well-being
here, but eternal longevity in Paradise. It takes no work to go to Paradise just
as it takes no work to go to Hell. Your destiny is based only on what you think
about God and your fellow human beings.
Therefore, the cunning ‘Serpent’ has an easy task; all it
needs to do is to control your thoughts. That is so simple! The M.O. of the
Serpent is merely to have you see positive things while in the shadows, his
will is done, just as with original sin.
Perhaps the woman saw Lucifer as an angel of light as its
name means, but inwardly the angel was a demon who Karl Jung would call our ‘Old
Man’ or ‘Archetype.’
To go to Hell, you need to do nothing, not even think
because naturally everyone is like the beasts who do as they will. It is instinctual
and the nature of the beast that is in humans.
To go to Paradise in Heaven requires change. Since instincts
are genetic, you have no power to change your genome (the DNA carbon chains
that identify exactly who you are.) That can only be done by God providing you with
new genetics. Jesus called that ‘born again.” [iii] He explained to Nicodemus
that, that is not something you can do, nor your mother can do, but that He
alone will do. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one can come
to the Father except by Him. [iv]
The key there is coming to the Father.
Where is the ‘Father’? In Paradise in the realm of Heaven.
The Father, the ‘LORD GOD’ reigns in another domain. To enter the door, or
portal, to that realm requires a new nature. Hence, if your nature remains to
sin with impunity, as if there are no consequences, then Paradise is no place
for you.
How would someone know that they he is a Christian? It is
how one looks at God’s prescriptions — as mandates or grace. After all, God has
no obligation for your comfort, so why would he make Paradise available to
anyone to whom He is not responsible?
God does care for His heirs. Their reward is God’s Estate in
Paradise. Jesus is the heir to the Estate of His Father. Paradise in Heaven
belongs to Him as well as the world. Those who are fellow heirs with Jesus, not
only will inherit Paradise in Heaven, but the world when Jesus comes again. Lucifer
does not own the world; he is merely a ‘squatter’ in what belongs to God. God
will take it back when it is time!
Many consider the ‘Ten Commandments’ as punitive — things
they do not want to do but must do.
Jesus never said, “You must do all that I command,” but “You
must be born again.” Rebirth is doing the Will of God, not out of fear of
retribution, but because you have goodwill for Him. They are metrics about how
to please God, but so many think of them as hard works.
The Ten Commandments are nothing more that characteristics which
measure your love for God, and the honoring your father and mother even gives
the promise; “That your days may be long upon the ‘land’ which the Lord thy God
gives you.” [v]
Ironically, ‘land’ in that passage is 'adama’ in the
Hebrew. Where was the ground (adama) where Adam was created? In the Garden
of Eden in Paradise!
Was God saying that honoring the parents would lead to a
long life on Earth or eternity in Paradise in Heaven? Perhaps God was referring
to the latter because the world is a place of punishment for sin, as scripture
reveals, “So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the
garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep
the Way of the Tree of Life.” [vi]
Where did the man and woman go? Into the world. Chapter
three of Genesis describes nothing more than the world.
Eden is a ‘place of delights” (ibid). It is not the world. Eden was most likely in another realm that was later called, ‘Paradise.’ Hence, the Garden of Eden was not here on Earth, and no wonder it no longer exists. I am suggesting that Paradise was never here but only in heaven, and that in the end, Paradise will be on Earth, to wit:
And
I (John) saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first
earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy
city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride
adorned for her husband. And I
heard a great voice out of heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is
with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself
shall be with them, and be their God.” [vii]
Most people want some idea where they are going for such a
long time! So, you want to know about Paradise? Get a preview of it by reading
about it! Do you want to know the milieu of all the heavens? Read the Book
of the Secrets of Enoch.
John saw one important thing! It was not just a Utopian
society on Earth but a place on Earth adorned by God, and the greatest Light
therein will be “God Himself,” according to the vision of John.
There will indeed be a great climate change… for the better,
when the cosmos and the Earth are regenerated to make it an ideal place to
exist, but only for those who are in Paradise.
I once thought of Paradise as eastward in Eden,
thinking that was some ‘direction’ in the world. I once believed that Eden was
even in the world. However, the Hebrew word, translated ‘eastward’ means
nothing more than “before time” (ibid) since the sun comes up in the
East.
When did time begin? It could have been on ‘day four’ when
the Sun and the Moon were created, so using that reference before time would be
before day four.
The ‘firmament’ was made on the second day. Many think of
the firmament as a dome, but it is the cosmos, when material things were made (matter).
Paradise, although it cannot be seen, is made of firm things that cannot
be seen by the naked eye.
In the Books of Adam and Eve, it was written that the
two, before sin, could see things that can no longer be seen because they had a
bright nature with bright eyes. Heaven is for real, but it cannot be seen with
human eyes because sin disallowed human beings from seeing things that did not
belong to them.
To see Paradise requires a new nature… a new creature made
again in the Image of God. So, you want to see where you are going as a
Christian? Look at things with the eyes of creature with a newfound nature.
Once I saw Paradise as a place of toil. After all, young me
thought, Someone must plant and cultivate the Garden! Indeed, Someone
will. God is the ‘Husbandman’ who will take care of the Garden just as He
always has; Jesus said, “I am the True Vine, and My Father is the Husbandman.” [ix]
What Jesus meant that the Father supplied the Seed and planted
it. God planted a Garden and His ‘crop’ was man and of two genders, male and
female.
“Man was planted in the Garden of God?” you question! Yes, it is so:
There went up a mist
from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God
formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath
of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden
eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. [x]
If my hunch is true, that adama (ground) was in heavenly Paradise, then Adam (Ground)
was not formed from the dust of planet Earth but a paradisal substance; hence
Adam was gloriously made! (The fact that carbon in human DNA is not of this
world but from distant and ancient hot stars makes sense.)
The point that I am making is that Paradise is ‘paradise”
and perhaps it was never of this world, but in another realm that science cannot
see into.
Science looks at things with blind eyes. The word ‘science’
means “to know’ but that is grandiose thinking — it is delusional. They do not
know but think they do!
Science, by definition, is the discovery of things that can
be seen or measured. It applies only to the cosmos and admits that it does not pertain
to the unseen realm which John described as having dimensions and could have
mass as well.
Jesus said to His disciples, the following:
In My Father's house
are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a
place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and
receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. [xi]
Worse of the worst is that Lazarus was spared seeing the
rich man in Hell, but the rich man could see Lazarus in Paradise. Think of the
agony of that… and for eternity!
Jesus described, not a Garden for two, but a great city —
New Jerusalem. Within the City of God is not just a Garden but a House of God
that would put Herod’s Palace to shame, and within it is a mansion of sorts ready
for any or all that will come unto the Father by Jesus.
The reward is for just seeing Jesus as God in the flesh, and
that He can save, and that requires both a place to be saved from and another
place to be saved from?
Hell is the place saved from and Paradise the
place to be saved to. So, when is it that you are saved? When your soul, before
destined for Hell, ends up in Paradise. That occurs, not in this world, but the
next. No wonder that Paul, who was in Christ, saw death as gain!
“Love,” Paul wrote, is for the “hope of salvation.” [xii] Hope points
toward salvation as a future event. The “Big Lie,” as I wrote before, is that
you are already saved and whatever you do is inconsequential.
If Adam was already in Paradise, He lost Paradise because of
sin. God always does things the same Way and we should always expect Him to do
so again.
‘Born again’ is a replanting of the ‘Garden of Living Souls’
just as in the beginning. Jesus used parables to reveal which seeds of the Garden
will grow and it is conditional.
Jesus, in parables, laid out the conditions:
Hearken; Behold, there
went out a sower to sow: And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way
side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony
ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it
had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it
had no root, it withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew
up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground, and
did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty,
and some sixty, and some an hundred. [xiii]
As the ‘Last Adam,’ Jesus is the
Hope that the Garden of Living Souls will produce a glorified crop of people, all
who have been remade in the Image of God.
New Jerusalem and the New Heaven
and Earth is a repeat of Genesis chapters one and two wherein God was
preparing a place for His people. That place was the Estate of God that He
would leave to His heirs.
Made for the First Adam, the Last
Adam will inherit the Estate, sit at the right hand of the Father, and share
the Estate of God with His ‘fellow heirs’… “That the Gentiles should be fellow heirs,
and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ.” [xiv]
By now, you should have a rough
understanding why you should not want to go to Hell but go to Paradise. It is
for a long time, so choose wisely.
What is that you need to do?
Toil? No… you only need to see Jesus as the only Way to the Father and you have
the hope of salvation.
Hopefully, since I have provided for
you verbal pictures of Hell and Paradise that when you escape the gravity of
the world, you would not want the grave (Hades) but eternal life just on the
other side of the door.
The door opens only one way and only
Jesus opens it. Death is the gateway to either eternal life or eternally dying,
and there is no waiting period in Purgatory nor turning back from your
destination.
(picture credit; Deviant Art; "Portal to Another Dimension')
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