"Your kingdom come, your will be done, on
earth as it is in heaven".
Many
teach after the Catholic idea that the final goal of our natural state is to eventually
leave this earth and go dwell in a place far away called ‘Heaven’. Part of this
teaching concludes that ‘Heaven’ is where we all go after we die or shortly
after, unless of course we go to the 'other place'. Many also report having had
dreams about being in this ‘Heaven’ or even encountered loved ones living in
it. Apostolic Scriptures though tell us that no-one goes to ‘Heaven’, but
rather that ‘Heaven’ comes to us (Revelations 21-22).
When Moses
entered the cloud on the mountain, Hashem instructed him to tell the Children
of Israe to build Him a sanctuary (Exodus 25:8-9). Jewish sages teach that at that moment Moses actually entered the heavenly realm; that there
he saw the ‘pattern’ after which he was to build the Tabernacle and all its
elements. God had brought His realm down on earth to show Moses .
The idea of the Tabernacle was to establish the
necessary protocol so that the Holy One may be able to dwell among us on the
earth (Exodus 25:8). We often speak of the 'restoration' of all things. 'Restoration'
implies the return of something that was, of the original model of God’s
creation, of God’s ‘Heaven', when He fellowshipped with us on the earth
(Genesis 3:8). The Garden of Eden is the ideal we all desire to return to:
living in complete unobstructed fellowship with God within the realm of His
marvelous unadulterated creation. That is ‘Heaven’.
You may ask “But what about these people who claim
to have had dreams of a wonderful place, or to even have sojourned there?”
Well, maybe they are just reacting to their experience with the only
information that they have (we often do). Maybe they have simply gone to the
place where the soul sleeps or rests, awaiting the final resurrection (1 Samuel 28:15; Daniel
12:2; Revelations 6:9-11). Yeshua spoke of resurrection as a time following
biological death, and as He did, He spoke of that place where people awaits the
resurrection, a place corresponding to our works on the earth (Luke 16:19-24). Remember, He told the thief at His
side that he would be in paradise with Him that very night but three days later
Yeshua hadn’t yet gone to the Father (Luke 23:43; John 20:17). Paul also speaks
of several levels of heavenly dimensions.
From the beginning, Hashem’s work has been to
restore the original conditions of the Garden of Eden. The way Josephus
describes the first 1,000 years on earth under Seth
sounds very heavenly (Ant. 2.3.68-69). Later,
when the world is already gone astray, God chooses a people through whom He
makes a covenant to be able to dwell among them. The Tabernacle and the Temple
housed the Shekinah, the very Presence of God. Yeshua came to earth to
show how godliness is experienced and lived. He prayed, Your kingdom come, … on earth as
it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10),
and the whole thing ends with Yeshua spending 1,000 years restoring all things
on earth to prepare it for the arrival of New Jerusalem, again, on the earth
(Revelation 20-22).
May it be soon Abba, even in our days!
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