Our eternal destiny

Dear friends, following the conclusion of the Lent and Eastertide readings from Sister Emmerich, we return now to the routine business of this blog. After previously discussing purgatory and hell, today’s topic is heaven.

What do we know of heaven? Well, one clue is contained in the Our Father, the prayer that Jesus Himself taught us:

Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

So, the first thing to know about heaven is that it is the place where the Father’s Will reigns supreme. There can be no contradictory points of view, factions, or movements. If it is the goal of every believer to “make it to heaven”, then the first thing we must recognise is that our own personal will must be continually realigned to the Father’s Will. And then we will be fit for heaven!

Christians believe that they will enter heaven in one of two ways, either by dying first (and possibly following a period of purification in purgatory if you are a sinful Catholic, or else directly, if you are a perfect Protestant) and then entering heaven; or else, at the moment of Jesus’s Second Coming, in the words of St Paul, “we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” (1 Th 4:17), and again “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” (1 Co 15:51-52)

It is important to draw a distinction between heaven immediately after Jesus’s Second Coming, and “perpetual heaven”. Here is what the Book of Revelation has to say about this:

And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. … They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.

When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. … But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. … Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire. (Rv 20:4-15)

So we can identify the following sequence of events:

• Jesus’s Second Coming: the First Resurrection.
• The thousand-year reign
• The Second Resurrection and “the great white throne judgement”
• Perpetual heaven

It would be a great tragedy to miss out on the First Resurrection and be denied a thousand years of Satan-free existence with our Lord! As we already discussed, this thousand-year period corresponds to the final Day of Creation, the Day of Rest. What will this thousand-year period be like?

One of our modern prophets has offered us this view, apparently based upon words from God the Father Himself:

The time is drawing closer for My Son to take up His rightful throne when he will come, for the Second time, to reign over the New Perfect Paradise on earth. My heart bursts with joy when I tell you children of the new earth which I have prepared for you. My children will live for 1,000 years in the Paradise I created for Adam and Eve. There will be peace, love, harmony and you will want for nothing.  People will marry, have children and the flowers, rivers, seas, mountains and lakes will take your breath away. Animals will live with My children in harmony and you will be governed with love under the reign of My Son, Jesus Christ. Only then will My Holy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.

Now anyone familiar with the Gospel narratives will spot something immediately: the idea of marriage in the “New Paradise”. Surely not! What about these words of Jesus:

That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching. (Mt 22:23-33)

Interestingly, Jesus says “at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage”. One way to reconcile these accounts would be to accept that the resurrection Jesus spoke of was the Second Resurrection. This would then offer a clear distinction between the Thousand Year Reign and “perpetual heaven”.

Would the begetting of children be the same as it currently is? Apparently not, as we learned during the Advent readings from Sister Emmerich:

Joachim was afterward conducted by the priests to the entrance of the subterranean passage that ran under the Temple and under the Golden Gate. … Joachim had accomplished a third part of the way when Anne met him in the centre of the passage directly under the Golden Gate, where stood a pillar like a palm tree with hanging leaves and fruit. … She was also accompanied by some women, among them the Prophetess Anna.

I saw Joachim and Anne embrace each other in ecstasy. … At the same moment the heavens above them opened, and I saw the joy of the Most Holy Trinity and of the angels over the Conception of Mary. Both Joachim and Anne were in a supernatural state. I learned that, at the moment in which they embraced and the light shone around them, the Immaculate Conception of Mary was accomplished. I was also told that Mary was conceived just as conception would have been effected, were it not for the fall of man.

“The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations” Volume 1, Pages 137-138.

If there is to be no marriage in “perpetual heaven”, why then should there be marriage and the raising of children in the thousand-year reign? To answer this, let’s turn to some other words of Anne Catherine Emmerich:

[After the fall of the angels] It was made known to me that God in His judgment, in His eternal sentence against the rebel angels, decreed the reign of strife until their vacant thrones are filled. But to fill those thrones seemed to me almost impossible, for it would take so long. The strife will, however, be upon the earth. There will be no strife above, for God has so ordained.

“The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations” Volume 1, Page 3.

So it seems that God requires the perfection He originally intended in creating the choirs of angels. Our purpose – the reason for our creation – is to fill the spaces left by the fallen angels. Think upon that. Each person destined for heaven is to fulfil a very particular role that God has intended for him or her from before time began. Wow!

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. (1 Jn 3:2-3)