Where's heaven?

I've been thinking lately...

Heaven, at least as it's been brought down to us, is a place up in the sky or somehow in another dimension with clouds and harps and angels. It's a place where we go to live with God after we die. But I wonder if that's actually the Biblical view of heaven.

To the Jews it seems like the Temple was like this fusion of heaven and earth. It's like by walking into the Temple, you were actually walking into heaven, the place where God lives and reigns. And then this rabbi comes along and starts saying things like 'the kingdom of God is at hand'-it's right here in front of us, it's available to anyone.

In the Gospels the phrases 'kingdom of God' and 'kingdom of heaven' seem to be synonymous and so I wonder if we misread a lot of Matthew when he says 'kingdom of heaven' and think that means this otherworldly place we go after we die, when he's actually talking about something that's here, right now, at hand.

If a kingdom is a place where the king rules, then maybe Jesus was calling us to make earth this place where God reigns. Maybe Jesus wasn't kidding when he said we should pray that God's will be done "on earth as it is in heaven."

And then there's Revelation. I can make neither heads nor tails of most of the book but there's this quarky part at the end. In all the cartoons and movies and sermons and such, we're always going UP to heaven to live with God, but that isn't the picture Revelation gives. In Rev. 21 it talks about the New Jerusalem "coming DOWN" out of heaven. And then God says, "now the dwelling of GOD is with MEN." Coming at that through modern eyes I'd almost think it were misquoted or that the Bible had it all wrong. Doesn't God realize that at the end of time He isn't suppose to dwell with US, we're supposed to go dwell with HIM!

Like a lot of other stuff I've been thinking about, I'm not really sure what this all means yet, but some scriptures certainly make much more sense to me in this light.

Maybe when God created the world it really was "good"...And maybe God still sees it that way.

Perhaps God really did, "so love the world..."

And maybe God really does want for his "kingdom [to] come" down here and for his will to be done, "on earth as it is in heaven"

Maybe this life isn't just about getting our butts saved and then twiddling our thumbs until we die and get to heaven.

And for me it also raises some new questions. For example, if heaven really will crash into earth at the end of time, what does that mean for us now? If God's planning on living down here, should that affect the way I treat this place? If the "kingdom of heaven" is down here and not up there, is there something I should be doing for His kingdom here and now in preparation?

I think, for me, in some ways, I've been living for a long time as though this world were somehow inherently evil, bad, something to run from. And my job was to stay as far away from this world as possible until God finally takes me completely away from this world and I never have to think about it again. But there was this one rabbi who tried something different. He came eating and drinking with sinners, mixing it up with the world, and he had this nasty habit of associating with the "not-good-enoughs." Maybe I should try something like that...