As quoted in “Heaven” by Joni Eareckson Tada is a short poem by C. S. Lewis from “his latest book” back then:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sun rise.
My take is this: this is meant for those who can’t get past the negatives of heaven (no passionate love, no delicious food). It certainly helps me.
In “The Existence and Attributes of God” Stephen Charnock said:
For, 1. God in regard of his existence is not only the discovery of faith, but of reason. God hath revealed not only his being, but some sparks of his eternal power and godhead in his works, as well as in his word. (Rom. i. 19, 20), “God hath showed it unto them,” — how? in his works; by the things that are made, it is a discovery to our reason, as shining in the creatures; and an object of our faith as breaking out upon us in the Scriptures: it is an article of our faith, and an article of our reason. Faith supposeth natural knowledge, as grace supposeth nature. Faith indeed is properly of things above reason, purely depending upon revelation. What can be demonstrated by natural light, is not so properly the object of faith; though in regard of the addition of a certainty by revelation it is so.
My take is this: I find it very hard to have faith enough to be an Atheist and this succinctly shows why. There is a book by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek with that title.
Once again from “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) implicitly confirmed the validity of the Teleological Argument when he marveled at the design of our solar system. He wrote, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”1 Yet it was William Paley (1743–1805) who made the argument famous by his commonsense assertion that every watch requires a watchmaker. Imagine you’re walking along in the woods and you find a diamond-studded Rolex on the ground. What do you conclude is the cause of that watch: The wind and the rain? Erosion? Some combination of natural forces? Of course not! There’s absolutely no question in your mind that some intelligent being made that watch, and that some unfortunate unfortunate individual must have accidentally dropped it there.
My favorite part of this is from Isaac Newton. Especially in his younger years Isaac was very passionate about the Bible. Most people are not aware of this.
In “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist” Norman Geisler and Frank Turek say:
The extent of the universe’s fine-tuning makes the Anthropic Principle perhaps the most powerful argument for the existence of God. It’s not that there are just a few broadly defined constants that may have resulted by chance. No, there are more than 100 very narrowly defined constants that strongly point to an intelligent Designer. We’ve already identified five of them. Here are ten more:
1. If the centrifugal force of planetary movements did not precisely balance the gravitational forces, nothing could be held in orbit around the sun.
2. If the universe had expanded at a rate one millionth more slowly than it did, expansion would have stopped, and the universe would have collapsed on itself before any stars had formed. If it had expanded faster, then no galaxies would have formed.
3. Any of the laws of physics can be described as a function of the velocity of light (now defined to be 299,792,458 meters per second). Even a slight variation in the speed of light would alter the other constants and preclude the possibility of life on earth.
4. If water vapor levels in the atmosphere were greater than they are now, a runaway greenhouse effect would cause temperatures to rise too high for human life; if they were less, an insufficient greenhouse effect would make the earth too cold to support human life.
5. If Jupiter were not in its current orbit, the earth would be bombarded with space material. Jupiter’s gravitational field acts as a cosmic vacuum cleaner, attracting asteroids and comets that might otherwise strike earth.
6. If the thickness of the earth’s crust were greater, too much oxygen would be transferred to the crust to support life. If it were thinner, volcanic and tectonic activity would make life impossible.
7. If the rotation of the earth took longer than twenty-four hours, temperature differences would be too great between night and day. If the rotation period were shorter, atmospheric wind velocities would be too great.
8. The 23-degree axial tilt of the earth is just right. If the tilt were altered slightly, surface temperatures would be too extreme on earth.
9. If the atmospheric discharge (lightning) rate were greater, there would be too much fire destruction; if it were less, there would be too little nitrogen fixing in the soil.
10. If there were more seismic activity, much more life would be lost; if there was less, nutrients on the ocean floors and in river runoff would not be cycled back to the continents through tectonic uplift. (Yes, even earthquakes are necessary to sustain life as we know it!)
My take is this. If you find a Rolex in the woods and it is an amazing feat of technology you assume it had an intelligent designer. You don’t assume it was created via rain, wind and erosion. This is also in the book. It is a GREAT book.
In “Heaven” Pastor Randy Alcorn said:
Spiritually speaking, we live in the Country of the Blind. The disease of sin has blinded us to God and Heaven, which are real yet unseen. Fortunately, Jesus has come to our valley from Heaven to tell us about his father, the world beyond, and the world to come. If we listen to him—which will require a concerted effort not to listen to the lies of the devil—we will never be the same. Nor will we ever want to be.
This is not a testimony against the United States. It is an analogy.
I do like the analogy of living in the Country of the Blind in our unregenerate state. That is why I include this quote.
In “The Existence and Attributes of God” Stephen Charnock said:
A secret atheism, or a partial atheism, is the spring of all the wicked practices in the world: the disorders of the life spring from the ill dispositions of the heart. For the first, every atheist is a grand fool. If he were not a fool, he would not imagine a thing so contrary to the stream of the universal reason of the world, contrary to the rational dictates of his own soul, and contrary to the testimony of every creature, and link in the chain of creation: if he were not a fool, he would not strip himself of humanity, and degrade himself lower than the most despicable brute. It is a folly; for though God be so inaccessible that we cannot know him perfectly, yet he is so much in the light, that we cannot be totally ignorant of him; as he cannot be comprehended in his essence, he cannot be unknown in his existence; it is as easy by reason to understand that he is, as it is difficult to know what he is. The demonstrations reason furnisheth us with for the existence of God, will be evidences of the atheist’s folly. One would think there were little need of spending time in evidencing this truth, since in the principle of it, it seems to be so universally owned, and at the first proposal and demand, gains the assent of most men.
I contrast this true wisdom with this from Google AI Overview: According to Carl Sagan’s perspective on the oscillating universe theory, if the universe is indeed cyclical, experiencing repeated cycles of expansion and contraction (“Big Crunch” followed by a new “Big Bang”), then life could potentially exist in each cycle, with new life arising from the remnants of the previous universe; however, he also acknowledged the significant challenges this idea presents, particularly regarding the preservation of information and the potential for drastic changes in physical laws between cycles.
In his book “Renovation of the Heart” Dallas Willard said:
But what is this “self-denial” or “death to self,” which goes hand in hand with restoration of the soul and eventually the whole person? At first it sounds like some dreadfully negative thing that aims to annihilate us. And frankly, from the point of view of the ruined soul, self-denial is and will always be every bit as brutal as it seems to most people on first approach. The ruined life is not to be enhanced but replaced. We must simply lose our lives—that ruined life about which most people complain so much anyway. “Those who have found their life (soul) shall lose it,” Jesus said, “while those who have lost their life (soul) for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39, PAR). And again, “Whoever aims to save their life shall lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake shall findit. For what have you gained by possessing the entire world if in the process you forfeit your life (soul)—lose yourself. What would you trade your very soul for?” (Matthew 16:25-26, PAR; also Mark 8:35-36; Luke 9:24-25).
In “Heaven: Your Real Home” Joni Eareckson Tada says:
The Bible provides the symbols. But it is faith that makes the hieroglyphics of heaven come alive. And heaven has to come alive! After all, you’re a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, and according to Philippians 3:20, you’re supposed to be eagerly awaiting it. Heaven is your journey’s end, your life’s goal, your purpose for going on. If heaven is the home of your spirit, the rest for your soul, the repository of every spiritual investment on earth, then it must grip your heart. And your heart must grip heaven by faith.
There is a Far Side cartoon that shows an angel on an isolated cloud strumming a harp (as if he had been doing it all day) that says about this view of heaven “Should have brought a magazine” Joni and Randy Alcorn (who I will quote soon in my blog) show that heaven in the Bible is more like our current experiences with delicious food and the beauty of nature and the like NOT missing from it. I believe that was the idea, but feel free to correct me if needed.
In “Heaven” by Randy Alcorn is this from a C. S. Lewis book:
C. S. Lewis depicts another source of our misconceptions about Heaven: naturalism, the belief that the world can be understood in scientific terms, without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations. In The Silver Chair, Puddleglum, Jill, and Eustace are captured in a sunless underground world by an evil witch who calls herself the queen of the underworld. The witch claims that her prisoners’ memories of the overworld, Narnia, are but figments of their imagination. She laughs condescendingly at their child’s game of “pretending” that there’s a world above and a great ruler of that world.
When they speak of the sun that’s visible in the world above, she asks them what a sun is. Groping for words, they compare it to a giant lamp. She replies, “When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp.” When they speak of Aslan the lion, king of Narnia, she says they have seen cats and have merely projected those images into the make-believe notion of a giant cat. They begin to waver. The queen, who hates Aslan and wishes to conquer Narnia, tries to deceive them into thinking that whatever they cannot perceive with their senses must be imaginary—which is the essence of naturalism. The longer they are unable to see the world they remember, the more they lose sight of it. She says to them, hypnotically, “There never was any world but mine,” and they repeat after her, abandoning reason, parroting her deceptions. Then she coos softly, “There is no Narnia, no Overworld, Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan.” This illustrates Satan’s power to mold our weak minds as we are trapped in a dark, fallen world. We’re prone to deny the great realities of God and Heaven, which we can no longer see because of the Curse. Finally, when it appears they’ve succumbed to the queen’s lies, Puddleglum breaks the spell and says to the enraged queen, “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that . . . the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”
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In “The New Matthew Henry Commentary” for Jeremiah 12:1 it says:
This shows us that when we are most in the dark about the meaning of God’s ways with us, we must still decide to keep right thoughts about God, and we must be confident that he never did and never will do the slightest wrong to any of his creatures. Even when his judgments are as unsearchable as a great deep and altogether inexplicable, his righteousness is still as strong and immovable as the great mountains (Ps 36:6). Jeremiah 12:1