Where and what have you learned on the meaning of Heaven and Hell?
Have you always just assumed that everything you heard from a pulpit,a story or just an explaination given to you from someone that you took it for granted?
Just as anything that you have for your faith, your desire is to see it thru to believe in what you say. Otherwise, it is just an fruitless faith in a belief.
God’s desire for us, is to know him, His design, His purpose, and himself. We cannot do this by a weekly 20 min soundbite that explains God and his purpose, if anything it gets very distorted. Our tradition has been that we have plucked our understanding of Heaven and Hell from a few verses and run with it as if it was gold. It goes deeper than this, and with a better understanding of both things.
Our belief is based on a truth that is hidden in God’s word(not just the written word, put of the spiritual understanding of it.) This “God’s story” is set in a certain time, certain place, with certain people, that was meant for it to be all weavon together to show God’s desire for “a people” that was to be his of His Image.
The story is of a history, it tells us the way back when story, the future woven into the past, the now, the future as it was told in the past. But it is a story that is unique is that we are in the middle of it, and we need to see that we are to be those “people’ that God was wanting way back then,but it is to our destiny that we ‘be’ God’s people in acts of his life.
This understanding will be forthcoming of the what is told in Revelation 21 and 22.
A New Heaven and a New Earth. Think about this, this is what is in Revelation 22. Does your belief in Heaven and Hell withstand this paradigm?
The Eternal Purpose 