By Jim Denison
Traveling abroad this week with limited Internet access and writing nine hours after Harold Camping’s failed prediction that the Rapture would begin May 21, I find myself oddly grateful.
Camping was wrong again — no massive earthquakes or disappearance of his followers. It’s easy to castigate the millions spent in advertising and the global ridicule cast not just on Camping but on the “evangelical Christianity” he was presumed to represent, but I’m taking a different view.
When it occurred to me this afternoon that the Rapture had not occurred as he predicted, my first thought stopped me short. Even though I don’t believe the “rapture” to be a biblical doctrine and certainly don’t think Camping’s convoluted hermeneutics are to be taken seriously, the passing of his predicted event did evoke a momentary sensation of relief. And that’s my point.
Why was I glad not to be taken to heaven today? The simple answer is that I have more I want to do on earth. I want to go to heaven someday, after I’ve finished everything I aspire to accomplish in this life.
I doubt that I’m unusual. I don’t remember the last sermon I heard (or preached) on heaven. How often did you think about your eternal destiny this week? Did its existence change anything you did? Should it?
Here are three reasons why we should wish Camping had been right:
First, if we don’t live for heaven we will live for this world. That’s a mistake. Paul claimed that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). John warned, “Do not love the world or anything in the world” (1 John 2:15).
Why not? Because it is never enough. When someone asked one of the Rockefellers how much money was sufficient, he smiled and replied, “Just a little more.” Your new home seems ideal until someone builds a bigger one down the street. Your new car is what you wanted until next year’s model improves it. Straight As in school are outstanding, but there’s always another semester. This world is never enough.
Second, if we don’t live for heaven we must rely on ourselves, for God will not help us love this world. We will succumb to the great American myth of self-sufficiency: We can do anything if we get up earlier, stay up later, try harder, work longer. But the transcendent, the spiritual, the eternal is beyond the reach of our self-dependent drivenness. And we find ourselves empty and frustrated without knowing why.
Third, if we don’t live for heaven we lose our true sense of purpose. P. T. Forsythe made a prophetic statement in 1907: “If within us we find nothing over us we succumb to what is around us.”
Remember the time in Alice in Wonderland where Alice meets the Cheshire Cat and anxiously asks, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” says the Cat. “I don’t much care where,” says Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” says the Cat.
C. S. Lewis was right: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”
I’m oddly grateful for Harold Camping’s misguided prediction, for it has forced me to think about my real priorities. Paul testified: “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 5:18). That’s where my eyes should be fixed as well.