God on Vacation

Sermon for North Hill Adventist Fellowship Sabbath, September 24, 2011

Summer is barely over and I'm already dreaming of my next vacation. I'll drive south on I-5. At Salem, Oregon, I'll head east over the Cascades. On the far side of the Cascade crest, down where the dense forest of fir trees begins to thin into the open woodlands of Ponderosa pines, I'll start to breathe easier. I'll relax. I'll feel like I'm on vacation.
For me, vacation is sunshine, wide open spaces, heat, and the open roads of the eastern Oregon and Nevada. My little car—a four-wheel drive Geo Tracker—and will crawl up jeep trails through juniper and pinion forests. We'll venture across snow-white playas. The sky will be deep blue, spotted here and there with giant cumulus clouds.

Vacation! Perfect!

When I asked. Vacation! Perfect! When I asked folks at church their favorite vacation destinations, they told me places like Italy and Hawaii, Australia and Mexico. Exotic places (for us here in the rainy Northwest). Places where the sun shines and there are few demands and few deadlines. Places to relax with the people you love. Tranquil places. Some people dreamed of Whisler in the winter or Sun Valley, Idaho and the excitement of black diamond ski runs. What united all of these vacation dreams was a picture of a perfect world. For a week or two we imagine living without the hassles and disappointments, the pressure and pain of ordinary life. In short our ideas of vacation are snapshots of the world “as it should be.”

So where does God go on vacation? What are his dreams of the world as it should be? The Bible offers some beautiful clues. Obviously, these images are symbolic, metaphorical. They are put into language and imagery that make sense to us. Which is a good thing.

One of my favorite “heavenly vacation” passages is in Isaiah 11.

The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox,. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child will put his hand into the viper's nest. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isa. 11:7-9).

Herefords and grizzlies happy together in a field, the bears eating blackberries, the cows munching grass, the cubs cavorting with bull calves and heifers. A two year old child laughing at the antics of his friend, the cobra. It doesn't get more idyllic than that. Every thing at peace. Every creature happy. That's God's dream vacation. That's God's dream for the world. It's what the world would be like if God had his way uncomplicated and unhindered. In God's dream world, “they will not hurt or destroy.” They will not be hurt or be destroyed. Then comes the line, “for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” When God is fully, completely, and universally known . . . no one will hurt or destroy. In God's dream world there is no violence, no aggression, no coercion. This vision of a world at peace is echoed by the prophet Micah:

Many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths. For the law will go forth from Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 4:3 He will judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off. They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks. Nation will not lift up a sword against nation, neither will they learn war any more" (Micah 4:2-3).

When God teaches us his ways and we have mastered them, the world will be at peace. God's dream is peace.

A final passage from Isaiah:

God says, Look! I am creating new heavens and a new earth—so wonderful that no one will even think about the old ones any more. . . . It will not be like the past, when invaders took houses and confiscated the vineyards. . . . The wolf and lamb will feed together. The lion will eat straw like the ox. Poisonous snakes will strike no more. In those days, no one will be hurt or destroyed on my holy mountain. I, the Lord, have spoken (Isaiah 65:17-25). 

That's God's dream. That's what vacation would look like for God. God's dream of a perfect world is a world full of people. God likes people. He likes you. Jesus told his disciples that his ultimate goal was, “I will come again and receive you to myself, so that where I am, you will be also.” In the visions of Revelation, Jesus pictures his people seated with him on God's throne (Revelation 3:20). Paul wrote about God's vacation in these words: “and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” If God went on vacation, he would take us all with him. You are indispensable to the joy of God.

The next thing we notice is that God has plans for ending turmoil and conflict. God is going to bring about tranquility and rest. He is going to create a world where the chaos and clamor stop. He is not going to create this sweet peace by getting rid of people but by transforming them, by fixing them.

This is really great news for people suffering from mental illness. If you are tormented by depression, if your life is wrenched this way and that by the effects of bipolar disorder, if schizophrenia has invaded your mind, this is unbelievably good news. A year, a decade, a century of life untormented? Days, weeks and even months of uninterrupted inner peace? That is unimaginable, but that is just what Isaiah and Micah, John and Paul actually do imagine under the inspiration of God. The bears and cows in our own minds will learn to live together in peace. The wolves and lambs that battle inside us will come to a glad and happy peace. If your mind is broken, if your inner torment is driving you crazy, hang on. It gets better.

Notice that in these visions of the perfect world, there is no mention of hell and punishment. God is not dreaming about retribution. He's dreaming about redemption. There has been a deep undercurrent of fascination with destruction and hurt in Christian theology. Some Christian preachers, even famous ones, honored by the church as brilliant theologians and godly preachers, have gotten sucked into visions of hurt and destruction. They have developed horrific pictures of hell, then preached these visions as the mind and dream of God. But when they do this, they've missed the boat.

And when we get sucked into their fascination with hurt and destruction, we are missing the boat, too. I've known people whose minds are permeated with fear. They worry about whether they can ever escape the destruction at the end. They worry they may have committed the unpardonable sin. They read the passages in the Bible that warn of rejecting the Holy Spirit and wonder, “Is that me? Have I gone too far?” Those questions have two sources: first a highly sensitive conscience. These people see vividly their own complicated motives. They are aware of times when they chose the wrong path or when they chose the right path for the wrong reasons. Their awareness is so vivid, so keen, they can't imagine how they could ever fully recover.

The second source of this relentless self-condemnation is dark preaching, preaching that imagines people will be helped toward heaven if they could just see clearly the awfulness of sin. Unfortunately, for many people, a clear vision of the awfulness of sin is just depressing and discouraging. It does not serve as an effective instrument for getting people to dream of heaven.

A third source of this relentless self-condemnation is preaching that is too bright. Some preachers tell us that what God demands is flawless, unwavering, total, conscious devotion. We are to be aware of the presence and direction of Jesus every waking second. This is not possible unless you withdraw from life. I don't want my brain surgeon thinking about Jesus while he's operating on me. I want him to give one hundred percent attention to my brain. If you're on a date, you don't want the man or woman you're with to be thinking about Jesus. You want them to be paying attention to you.

A high level of holiness can be cultivated. We can learn to be always open to heavenly impulses. We can go through our days frequently in conversation with God. But the notion that we are failing in holiness when we give full, undivided rapt attention to a lover or to a physics problem or to glitch in the software you are charged with maintaining is simply false. God does not scold us for giving intense attention to the interesting and challenging and endearing things of this life. In Isaiah 65, part of God's dream of the future was that people would be building houses. They were not going to spend all their time on their faces in front of the throne!

How do we counter intrenched self-condemnation? Begin dreaming with God. Deliberately imagine the eternal vacation that God is dreaming of, a vacation that includes you. When we fill our minds with the pictures of the future God is dreaming of, it will begin to shape how we live here and now. We will find ourselves figuring out ways to divert energy from preparing for war to providing for people. Instead of praying for the destruction of our enemies, we will pray for their transformation. Instead of dreaming of hurting our enemies, we will dream of healing them. This will affect our lives at home, at work, at school. It will affect our politics. It will play into the way we view education. It might influence our habits of TV consumption and news consumption. We will limit our exposure to people who encourage us to hate, to fear, to fret. Instead we will fuel our own dreams of the heavenly vacation. We will read encouraging things. We will fix our eyes on beautiful things. We will find ways to remind ourselves frequently of the sweetness of the future God imagines with us.

We will encourage ourselves and others in doing things here and now that align us with God's dreams. We will dream of giving God a bit of vacation now, that is, we will arrange our lives so they look something like the world God imagines: a world where the cow and grizzly happily share a pasture, a world where people beat their swords into plowshares. A world where no one hurts or destroys. Hurting and destroying are not in God's dream – which strongly suggests the Christian fascination with hell is misplaced. The classic horror of eternal torment is erroneous. The Adventist idea of a momentary hell is a step in the right direction. Perhaps eventually we will learn that the whole notion of ultimate retribution was merely a stop-gap measure to help us understand God's abhorrence of hurting and destroying. Maybe Isaiah's picture of a world in which no one hurts or destroys is not just the final picture, maybe it is the truest picture, the ultimate picture of the way the universe works under God. This I know for sure: The more deeply we imbibe that vision, the sweeter will be our influence here in this world. The more ready we will be to participate fully in the grand vacation God is planning for himself and his children.