The Gospel of the HereafterSmyth, J. Paterson (John Paterson)
Religion
The Gospel of the Hereafter
Smyth, J. Paterson (John Paterson)
Eschatology
The only clear thought we have about external things in Heaven is that
"I" who lived here in an earthly body and in the Near Hereafter lived a
spirit life "absent from the body"--shall in that Far Hereafter have a
spiritual body analogous we suppose to the body "I" had on earth. Not
the poor body, certainly, which rotted in the grave, "ashes to ashes,
dust to dust" but a "glorified body," and yet it would seem having some
strange mysterious connection with the earthly body. As the oak is the
resurrection body of the acorn, and the lily of the ugly little bulb
that decayed in the ground, "so also is the resurrection of the dead.
It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in
weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is
raised a spiritual body." That gives very little information but it
gives some tangible idea to grasp. Beyond this there is no hold for
imagination.
But as we saw in the earlier chapters on the Intermediate Life I am
still "I," the same conscious self through the whole life of Earth.
and Hades and Heaven, and therefore the _real life, the inner life_ can
still be understood. So when we enquire what can be known about the
meaning of Heaven--at the very start I strike the key-note of the
thoughts that follow, in the words of Christ Himself, "The Kingdom of
God is within you." Heaven is a something within you rather than
without you. Heaven means character rather than possessions. The
Kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but Righteousness and Peace and
Joy in the Holy Ghost.
That is the thought which I am trying to keep prominent all through
this book. Hades life is dependent on character. Judgment is a
sorting according to character. Heaven and Hell are tempers or
conditions of character within us. They are not merely places to which
God sends us arbitrarily. They are conditions which we make for
ourselves. If God could send all men to Heaven, all men would be
there. If God could keep all men from Hell, no one would be there. It
is character that makes Heaven. It is character that makes Hell. They
are states of mind that begin here, and are continued and developed
there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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