The Goal of Salvation

 

     One of the things which keeps coming up in conversations about salvation is heaven. In these discussions, heaven is imagined as another realm where God and His angels dwell as either a paradise, or some parody of an angel standing at pearly gates checking IDs like a bouncer. Most folks think that entry into heaven is the goal and purpose of salvation through Christ, and this is what we're taught by nearly every church and denomination.

      Except it isn't. Entry into heaven is not the goal of the salvation found in Jesus Christ.

      As I have written before, if heaven is where God dwells, then heaven is all around us infinitely in every direction, because God is omnipresent and there is no time or place in which He does not dwell. We simply don't experience it because of the distractions of this life and our physical senses, and because of our own peculiar human malfunction. In other words, we are all already there, we just can't see the forest for the trees, and are so wrapped up in our own stuff that experiencing the eternal and ever present presence of God at all is considered unusual and beyond extraordinary (and, if I were to be honest, would be overwhelming if it took place all the time in this physical world). Far from a realm of the blessed dead, the dwelling place of God is here and now, and the traditional images and parodies of heaven stem from medieval artwork and theologies, themselves influenced by previous pagan worldviews about the afterlife.

      The primary goal of the salvation found in Jesus Christ is to provide a solution for our common malfunction, that is, to make it so that we don't have to be enslaved to that malfunction in everything we say, do, or think so that we can act and speak free from it. Our salvation is first and foremost deliverance from this primary problem. This is accomplished through union with Jesus Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, intertwining each one of us with His Spirit so that we are parts of Him and He of each one of us as the parts of a body with Himself as the head which controls and guides the rest of it. But as we are united with Jesus Christ so that He may guide and take control of our words and actions, we are also united with the Father through Him. We become one thing with God Himself through Jesus Christ, so that wherever He is, we are, and wherever each one of us is, He is present.

      And so of course to be absent from the body is to be present with Jesus Christ, because we are one thing with Him. Of course when the physical body is stripped away we are exposed to the unfiltered presence of the Eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient Being who is love because we are already one with Him. God's solution to our malfunctioning neurology as human beings is to graft us to Himself, with our cooperation and permission, so that His Spirit and His Eternal life can be the new source of our behaviors and words. And the consequence of this grafting is that we are always wherever He is, and He with us, regardless of whether we are in the body or out of it.

      This is why the common misconception that salvation is all about who goes to some imagined celestial paradise, gets a big mansion in the sky, and lives out eternity in a kind of paradaisical retirement plan really, really bugs me. It's a distortion of the worst kind, and leads to all kinds of misunderstandings, spiritual abuse, and some pretty harmful theology. Everyone is just concerned about who gets through the gates and who doesn't, when that whole scenario is as much a product of medieval mythology as the Elysian Fields are a product of Greek mythology.

      God isn't going to ask anyone, "Why should I let you into My heaven?" like some Zeus like figure deciding who's been good and who's been bad, or deciding whose theology is correct enough. This is a popular image and the one most people think of when they think of it. But this isn't the reality of what our salvation found through Jesus Christ entails.