Hard Word

Oftentimes we seek God to hear what we want to hear.

We may be in pain and we seek His word to soothe.

We may be in a dilemma and we seek signs to decide one way or another.

We may be anxious about tomorrow and we seek His will.

But sometimes God is silent in all these. Instead He wants you to hear Him, hear what He actually wants to say.

And that is hard.

For you have to turn away from those things that are pressing, urgent and anxious, in your life, in your mind and in your heart, and to abandon them to Him, that somehow they will be taken care of.

And instead you are to put your mind on things strange, unfamiliar and apparently irrelevant.

But then that is God's word.

Faith and Hope, in Heaven

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

[1 Cor 13:12-13]

I had thought that if we had perfect knowledge, when we know fully, even as we are fully known, there is no more need for faith and hope. And it seems that at least one other echoes such a perception.

But apparently, faith and hope still "remain" in heaven.

I can somewhat understand faith remaining even when we are in heaven. For faith is acting on what we know. So perfect knowledge dont count for any more or less faith. If we do not act there is no faith. And in heaven we still act in a manner consistent to what we know, and thus faith remains.

Hope is more difficult to understand. For hope implies something of the future, something that is yet to be, and that there is change, and hope is a dependance on these things that are not yet.

But heaven is imagined as timeless and unchanging. It is timeless in that there is no time, or that all things past and future are always present, and without change we have no notion or perception of time. Or at the least we may be like God, and able to see all times past, and all times future, from eternity to eternity. Why then hope?

Unless in heaven there is also something yet to be, upon which we depend? It is hard to imagine what that might be, but what we know from the above is that hope "remains".