Universe 2.0

It's hard to talk about the life to come without putting it in the context of the Gospel for the simple reason that it is the gospel narrative in which we find ourselves in. Fascinatingly enough, even the gospel isn't the whole of the story. Simply put, the story ultimately is God. The reason for pointing that out is because when we think about the Gospel it inadvertently makes man the main character. So, what is the Metanarrative of Scripture? It's God. And any discussion of Creation and its creatures (you and me) is to think about the Will of God and our role in his unfolding Divine Decree.

So, let's think about the context in which we find ourselves in. We live in a world given to us by God and we were tasked to rule over it as freewill agents with creative power and ability. We get to, in a sense, "play God" on this planet. But of course we have wrecked this world and ourselves in a way that we cannot fully appreciate. So, God is in the process of redeeming his creation. It's a salvage operation. What we have to look forward to, for those of us who have accepted our fate in Christ, is the New Creation.

This "heavens and the earth" referred to in Genesis 1 is referring to the Universe. The heavens and the earth refer to the entirety of God's Creation. All of this creation has been corrupted though and something radical needs to be done in order to save it. It's not that God will destroy it and create a new one but that he will rehab this one and make a "Universe 2.0" out of it.

To be direct about it, all I'd like to do here in these couple of paragraphs is to shift our thinking of the life to come from "Heaven" to "Universe". I take issue with the term heaven because the heaven we go to after we die is temporary and that will be no more as it now is as Revelation 21:1-7 begins to describe. There will be an Eternal City (as it is also suggested in Hebrews 11:10) and I think that the City is just the beginning of what there will be to discover.

This universe that we find ourselves in today is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. Is there a boundary somewhere out there, an edge of space? There certainly is. I do not think of it as literally infinite. But it is, for us, infinite in that we cannot get to the end of it (even if we were to one day create rocket ships that could travel faster than the speed of light!). Even this planet contains mysteries that we have yet to unlock. And of course we look within our own hearts and minds and find a universe of intelligence and creativity within ourselves.

So, let's conceptualize the life to come a bit more concretely, for lack of a better word. In the beginning, God made a good world. Grasp the nature of this world first (the first creation). And then put those conceptualizations onto the universe that is to come following this one (the New Creation). And think about it as "Universe 2.0".