Whether we admit it or not, most of us want to believe in heaven as the place we go when we die. Its notion that there we will live “happily ever after” echoes our primal fairy tale mentality.
Because of this, some people doubt the Easter story of Jesus’s resurrection as simply “too good to be true.” They wonder if perhaps we should read it as a metaphor for the inspiration that allowed Jesus’s followers to spread His teaching after His death.
On the other hand, plenty of people have latched on to Christianity’s Easter promise of resurrection as a guarantee of the ticket to heaven you “only” get as a believer in Christ.
Both of these stances miss the real point of the resurrection.
The Garden of Eden story of Genesis 3 makes it clear that death wasn’t part of God’s intended game plan for humanity. Instead, death was the consequence of sin – our replacing God’s good directions for wholeness with our own ideas of how to live.
Jesus dying on the cross is the divine remedy for the havoc that our human rebellion from God’s Lordship has caused. Christ’s sacrifice not only forgives us our sins; it simultaneously restores us to God’s intended destiny for us – eternal life with the Lord.
In other words, it’s a package deal. We don’t get into heaven by signing up for Christianity. The door to paradise opens when we sign up for the divine makeover.
After all, how can heaven be heaven unless something is done about our tendency to love ourselves more than God and our neighbor?
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