He Shall Reign Forever

One of my fantasies is being granted the power to identify who’s involved in evil activity, such as terrorism, drug dealing etc. and teleport them to hell immediately rather than wait until they die. Another option might be to send them to an alternative universe to live with people like themselves, but to have the option available to repent and come back here 😀.

People do repent. I’ve met terrorists on both sides of the Irish conflict who repented and trusted in Jesus. The Apostle Paul once persecuted the early Christian church. When he was first converted, they were nervous of even meeting them. To them, he must have seemed like a member of ISIS or the Taliban. But as it happened, he became the most influential Christian in history. So it’s a good thing that no-one teleported him to hell, or to another universe.

However, my teleporting skills mightn’t make much of a difference to my life because we don’t currently have a huge number of terrorists or criminals in Ireland in comparison to other countries that I read about. And if someone else was granted the same power, who’s to say that they wouldn’t teleport me to some nasty universe? 😀 And God is so holy that he sees all of us as evil. Jesus once said something like that in passing to his very own disciples, when he was encouraging them to pray:

Matt 7:11
If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

There are different degrees of evil, but all of us fall short of God’s standards, and all of us need to repent and trust in him. So, instead of dreaming about teleporting people to hell, perhaps it’s best to leave everything to God and in our current world, to do all that I can to make it a better place and to support those who subdue terrorism, criminal behaviour and all kinds of evil. And nasty people generally do get their just desserts, even in this world. However, it bothers me that innocent people living in these regions suffer so much.

1 Cor 2:9
“What no eye has seen,
    what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”
    the things God has prepared for those who love him—

When I was a child, I thought that heaven was just a nice place that you go to when you die and that it would be nothing like earth. However, there is a lot of Scriptural content that seems to suggest a restored physical universe. It will be different, but seemingly, it won’t be entirely different.

2 Peter 3:10-14
¹⁰ But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. ¹¹ Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives ¹² as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. ¹³ But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. ¹⁴ So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.

It’s sometimes hard to get excited about that because our experience of this world makes it difficult to imagine everything in the physical world being perfect. Will the new universe have spiders? 😀 If so, maybe we’ll look on them as we look on ladybirds now.

But on the outside, everything will be perfect. And within, psychologically and spiritually, we’ll be very different. The happiest times in this world are occasions such as holidays when you’re free of the stresses of everyday life. But if everything were perfect all the time, would you get bored? Or maybe we’ll look back and consider how awful things were in our wicked world and constantly delight in the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ now reigns and that the world is no longer in the control of the evil one.

Luke 1:31-33 
You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, ³³ and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

Rev 1:15
¹⁵ The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said:
“The kingdom of the world has become
    the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah,
    and he will reign for ever and ever.”