Hey again! Time for more Hard Bible Questions.
Question number two:
"If God knew the beginning from the end, and therefore knew He would destroy earth and create a new heaven and earth in the end, why did He create this one? What is His purpose here?
Also, when Satan is bound by a great chain and thrown into
the abyss in Revelation 20, and it is known that he must be set free after a
thousand years one last time, what is God's purpose there?"
My answer:
I was speaking about this with one of my friends recently at my Small Group, and she put it very eloquently. There are essentially two answers to the first question, but the first comment is why God would make such a world if He knew we would fail at keeping His commands, and that is simply: Love. It might be ironic to say so, but the second part of that question about making THIS world specifically is again: Love.
God is Love. That not He is just LovING, but He is Love itself. Love Incarnate. And from the Biblical understanding, God is three Persons in One. He is simultaneously alone and has never been alone and the only reason we can really see why He’d create us is because He wanted us. He wanted to share Himself and His love with others, and He chose to create us.
But here’s the thing: If God is Love itself, it is NOT Loving to give someone free will but then NOT give them another option. In order for us to experience Love in its fullness, we have to choose it. Love is emotional, yes, but it isn’t only an emotion. It is a choice, an action, a commitment, a submission to another in the fullest since of the world which enhances not only their existence, but yours. But this love is ONLY possible if there is the option to not choose it.
In order for us to know love, God had to create a world in which there was the opportunity for us to choose Love, which means we also need to have an option to choose not to love. Likewise, in order for us to know Goodness, there unfortunately has to be a way for us to know what a lack of Goodness is and means and feels like. It isn’t that God created Evil. God could not create evil. He is Goodness itself. But because He is Goodness itself, that stands to reason that anything not of God is… well, not Good.
This all goes back to the Love. In order for us to know God and know Love and know Goodness, in order for us to experience true love, there has to be a choice. And as it stands, there are only two choices: God (and ergo Love, and ergo Goodness) or not God (and ergo Hate, ergo Evil/Wrongness). Kind of like Darkness; darkness doesn’t exist outside of Light. If there was no light, there would be no darkness, because it is only by having the Light do you even know what darkness is in the first place.
And if someone’s going to choose to love you, and choose to spend time with you, and love you for who you are, you cannot force them to love you, you cannot force their hand and then call it love. That is manipulation, that is puppetry, that is evil. That is not good and it is not God. It is good to choose God. But it is also good to be able to choose. Because it is only by Choosing that we can even have true love at all.
As for the question regarding Revelation: Lort hap merceh, lol, who can ever truly understand Revelation?! It is quite an awesome book. I have studied it only once, and I desperately wish to study it again. But I’ll give this my best shot. Keep in mind, when it comes to Eschatology (study of end-times), there are a myriad of different opinions and views and interpretations of this book. But I think it behooves us to remember that Revelation is an apocalyptic, which by ancient Near East definition, is a literary style full of allegory and metaphor, and there are disagreements between certain metaphors and how to interpret and apply them. All this to say… I personally find the topic fun and interesting and the discussion as a whole isn’t really foundational for my belief in Christ (I say this ironically, as 2020 plus joining a Biblical church covering Revelation at the same time was one of the strongest solidifying factors of my faith lol).
Okay, but to the question:
The devil being bound for 1000 years and then released. To be honest, I am not sure. It says in the NIV that after the thousand years of the saints reigning with Christ is over, the devil will be released to deceive the nations in all four corners of the world (Gog and Magog are culturally representative of oppressive rulers). To be honest, I am not sure why this would be the case. God is God; Satan acts not by His will but by His permission, and once the end of times comes… there really isn’t a battle. Satan isn’t a match for God. He is not equal to God and nor can he stand against God. So when God says, “yeah, we’re done here,” it’s going to be done. Over. Poof. If there is any sort of stand off, it’ll be more for us, to remember Who God is and Glorify Him in His power over evil, but not because there is actually going to be any legit battle going on. (In my opinion. I do not think it’ll be this epic battle of good and evil for the reasons I already expressed: Satan cannot light a torch to God and he is not God and it is only by God’s “permission” that he’s even still around at all]).
I do think this goes back to Eschatology and whether or not you or I believe we are already in the thousand years or not, or if you are pre-post- or a-millennial. I personally… *deep breath* I don’t know how to say this without sounding dismissive, but I don’t really care where we are. I know who “wins”: God. The ending and victory is already written because there is no actual battle to be had. If we are already in the millennium and Satan is already bound (which I personally kind of think he is, in a way, because he doesn’t and hasn’t and isn’t permitted to act in the way he used to prior to Christ’s coming as we see in the OT, and there’s argument to be had that Christ and His followers are spiritually reigning today), then… well, he’ll probably be released because the end hasn’t come yet, and God’ll let him round up the last of the non-believers for Him before He brings on judgement day. If Satan is not yet bound and we aren’t in the millennium, then as for why Jesus would let him go before just throwing him in the lake of fire… well. I don’t know. And I honestly don’t care either. It’s not that I don’t care. I do care. I love conversations like this and books and podcasts and documentaries and discussions, etc, but I don’t know enough. Given the literary genre of the Book and the fact that folks can spend a lifetime studying such things, I think ultimately: it’s a fun conversation to try to guess and be like, “Oh, snap, I was right!” or whatever about how God is going to ultimately, finally eradicate all evil and bring on the New Jerusalem, I do not think the reality of it matters, and so I don’t really give much more thought to it than that.
So. I apologize I don’t have a more fully-fleshed answer, but I don’t think the point here in this book is to be able to fully figure it all out. It is a word to keep the Body focused on what matters, to remind us there is hope at the end of the trials, and to remind us the cost of freedom, and God’s unrelenting willingness to offer chance after chance. Given the craziness that is Revelation: I still think I got pretty succinct lol.
*** I had a follow-up question on the post. This was the question and this was my long-winded answer.
"I have a question for your answer. I agree with you that without a choice, you would be manipulating someone to love you. Does that mean you believe there is still a choice in heaven? Could someone change their mind once they get there if they wanted?"
This is my knee-jerk reply (though I did spend some minutes thinking about this beforehand and did read it over before submitting, though it’s long and I touch on some things that I was hesitant to post. Of course, this is a reply I did just now, without having days to think on if I forgot something etc. Feel free to ask anything else, and if I can’t knee-jerk reply, I’ll tag you in the reply when I post it. And thanks so much for a follow-up question. I love having to think about such things to truly have a grasp of what we know and believe and think and why etc.
The short answer to your question is: I don’t know and I don’t think anyone here this side of heaven could, but even if you couldn’t, I don’t know why you would want to, given that God is literal Goodness.
Now for the long answer: Given the nature of your question, my answer might be mostly my opinion. But! What I do know is that God is Love, Goodness, Justice, Mercy, Righteousness, etc. He is everything that is good. If you can imagine something as Good, it is of God, given who He is and His nature. As my response above says: He IS Good, not that He just has good attributes. So, my reply to you is that: what would you be going to?
In order to reach heaven (which, in simple terms, is God’s kingdom and eternity with God, which is everything good), we are made righteous by accepting Jesus’s gift of salvation and following His ways. And because our sin/wrongdoing is covered in Him, we won’t combust (lol; for lack of a better word) in His presence. (There’s a reason angels and messengers of God and Yahweh Himself in the OT always start with “Fear not!” If we actually came face to face with God, the reality of our imminent destruction is obvious. Not, as my reply said, because God is going to smite us for the sake of smiting us, but because in His holy and completely Good nature, NOTHING anti-Good can exist, even in the slightest.)
In general though, I would say firstly: If you are in heaven and with God in what is wholeness and completion and goodness, my follow-up question to your follow-up question would be: WHY would you want to go? I, as a limited, finite human, cannot tell you if you will be able to change your mind later. Maybe? But where would you go? You’d be living everything you can imagine as Good. It’s not like heaven is some white-washed place where all we do is stand around and sing praises lol. That is an extremely faulty image of heaven and what it’s like to be in God’s presence. If you harken back to Eden, it is essentially what we all crave: lush, beautiful harmony between Man and Nature, nothing has to die for other things to live, there is no hate or fear or bitterness or death or sickness, there’d be PEACE, mentally and logistically, etc. So everything we crave right now in this world, that we yearn for, we had before the Fall. And after we die, being with God through Jesus is a restoration of that. So, if you get there, why would you want to leave? What would you be leaving the ultimate goodness and wholeness FOR?
But. That also makes me wonder if the answer is yes. Because you cannot force love, you must choose it, and Adam & Even sinned and chose to turn away before turning back (and that’s the beauty of God, because He let them [how much less have others sinned against us, and we struggle to forgive them, and all they might’ve done is lie to us?]). But then the damage was done, so God could no longer be in their direct presence…but it was for their sake, not His.
But let’s say you do want to leave, or let’s say you don’t want God in the first place: God WILL NOT make you stay with Him if you don’t want to be with Him. Many folks know Him and reject Him, and then ask why would he said what WE call good people to Hell? (Oh man, I’m getting into a tangent. I might have to make another post…). But therein lies another misunderstood principle. Hell is the absence of God. It isn’t that He is necessarily SENDING folks to Hell, at least in so far as I can understand it (though yes, there is talk in the Bible about the unrighteous being judged, because [this could be another post], God is also JUST, and the ONLY want to be Just is to have evil be atoned for; God would not be Just if He didn’t punish evil; He would not be Good if He did not punish evil; we would say it is evil to NOT punish evil, to always let bad actions go unpunished and for people to get away with every bad thing they’ve done). But by being unrighteous, we are already on the way there. (This is why we say Jesus “saves” us.)
Now, on this, some say it’s “unfair” that God would set a standard of goodness we couldn’t meet, but it is more nuanced than that (and that isn’t even touching on the definitions of our morals or what they are or how we got them). In our striving to be good, we keep failing *even to uphold our OWN standard of Goodness*, let alone God’s.
Even if you took God’s perfect Goodness away, we’d still fall flat. Most folks would say good people don’t steal, lie, cheat, demean, belittle, say bad things, wish bad things on others, cheat on their loved ones, harm their loved ones, but if we are all honest, we’ve all done that to some extent at some point, sometimes knee-jerk, many times intentionally and sometimes we don’t even care that, in our pain, our desire for revenge (which revenge is not justice), we don’t even care if it sounds mean or evil, because the other person “deserves it” or we “deserve” something else. The irony here is that we do not meet even our own standards of Good let alone God’s. But that’s why Jesus comes to save us, and that’s why we even say he “saves” us. Because if God is all good, then anything outside of Him is the opposite of Good, and we just can’t get there on our own (else this world wouldn’t be broken like it is. This isn’t pessimism; this is just looking and acknowledging things for what they are. If we could all do what we all know we “should” do, there’d be no crime or hurting hearts or fear or wars, etc).
So. I basically touched on something else which is serious and sensitive and even offensive to many, because we do not like to be told what to do or how to do it. But I’ll wrap up with this: as for if you could change your mind in heaven after this life, the answer is I do not know, but I know God will not force you to stay there if you don’t want to be there. Which ultimately leads me to believe that, while that might be an option given who God is and how Love works, I do not believe anyone who ends up in heaven with God would have desire to leave. Why would they?
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