Part 3! Today has been crazy, so I’m just now remembering to put the strip up, which was ready about two weeks ahead of time.
This verse is pulling mostly from the start of Revelation 21 – and it’s largely to say one thing: Heaven is only truly heaven because God is there. In Exodus, after Israel’s repeated failure to follow God faithfully, God offers to send them on into the promised land – all that they had dreamed of after hundreds of years in slavery – save for one caveat: he wasn’t going with them.
Would it be enough for you to have eternal life, health, provision, friends and family around you? It seems to me like eternal life on those terms might be great to start with – but 2 or 3 hundred years in it would be getting pretty boring. What God wanted to show the Israelites – what he wants to show us through these verses – is that what makes heaven so heavenly, is the presence of God. Only when eternity is spent in the company of this God could it ever be, not just bearable, but ever-increasingly wonderful. Always new depths to his love to discover, always new reaches to his mercy, always new heights to his joy. For the Christian, heaven isn’t angel wings, clouds and harps – it’s eternity spent in a new creation filled with the presence of God.