We spend our lives longing for a golden shore. We sing about it. Muse about the world that lies in the beyond, eagerly awaiting an egress that will take believers to a final resting place past all of the violence, all of the hate, all of the sickness, all of the suffering. One look at the evening news and it isn’t hard to long for an escape—it is human to wish for one. This longing takes many different forms, depending on the worldview of the individual. The Buddhist longs for Nirvana, the Muslim for Paradise, while others who do not claim a religious disposition may retreat into their minds to imagine a world that is at peace and where there is no more hurt. We have a natural longing in our souls for the restoration of all things.
Christians also have this longing. We long for a place called Heaven. Many of the songs we sing dream of shores bordering a glassy sea, streets of gold, mansions and crowns that shimmer as we throw them down at the feet of Christ. In our mind, it is a place that is somewhere in the sky that is far from here. Far away from all of the problems that ravage the earth. In a world that is spinning in chaos, we long for the city that will never diminish.
While we act on our God-given desire for restoration, it often comes at an expense of those who are hurting around us. In his controversial book "Love Wins," Rob Bell says something that echoes these sentiments. “If you believe that you’re going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else [Heaven], then why do anything about this world?” While I don’t agree with Bell’s theology on most things, he raises a valid point.
In the midst of our longing, we miss the hurt that is going on around us. It can be easy to see the atrocities that happen in our world — the shootings in Orlando, the chord of terror that ISIS has struck across the globe, the sicknesses, the starvation — and want to flinch away. Our response often cries, “Come, Lord Jesus!” And rightly so. It is a very biblical concept to long for the restoration of all things. In the midst of the first couple centuries of Christianity, early Christians clung to this hope as they faced lions in the Colosseum or hid in the catacombs from the Roman authorities. Christianity is built on the hope that Christ will one day return, restore the earth, and “make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
To our shame, however, in the midst of our longing we often leave the world we are in behind. Our dreams of Heaven become a form of escapism that causes us to forget the brokenness of this world rather than aid in the Great Commission as God’s chosen instruments. We forget that the Kingdom of Heaven we will dwell in with Christ, is not a place far away in the sky; it is a new, redeemed Earth.
One look at the difficult things in this world and it is easy to run, hide and long for Heaven. However, this longing shouldn’t isolate us like islands from our hurting world; it should propel us toward it. God wishes that “that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9), even though He knows that not everyone will. As we progress in our progressive sanctification, we should adopt the mind of Christ also wishing that all would come to repentance and take place in the redemption that is coming. The promise of Heaven should motivate us to swing wide our doors and embrace a hurting world beckoning them to enter to the rest that is found in Christ.
We haven’t been sent to this world to hide until Christ returns, rather, we are ambassadors sent on a sacred mission to be his agents of reconciliation to a lost and hurting world.
