047 Coming Home

There's a beautiful scene in the movie "Antwone Fisher," which describes death for a believer, or coming Home to Heaven better than anything else I've ever seen, and is all the more touching when you realize that the film is a true story. Antwone Fisher is one of those beautiful people still walking on this earth who never had a true home on this earth during his early years, having been raised in orphanages & foster homes accompanied by traumatic childhood experiences.

His Navy Psychiatrist (one of Denzel Washington's best characters ever) encourages him to go and find his real family in order to get at the root of his problems with aggression & feelings of worthlessness. And so, when he finally does find the family of his deceased father, there comes the most beautiful scene in the whole movie, where he enters his aunt's house and meets all the relatives he never even knew he had, everybody eagerly welcoming him, introducing themselves briefly to him with excitement, until finally his aunt gives the signal to open a double door to the dining room, where the old members of Antwone's family sit awaiting him at a richly decked table, very similar to a dream he had at the start of the movie.

An old lady (presumably Antwone's grandmother), obiously too weak to even speak, knocks on the table in an effort to demand attention and beckons Antwone to come to her with outstretched hands. Gazing into his eyes, hands in his, and recognizing her long lost son in this, newly found grandson, she finally utters one heartfelt "Welcome," and in this moment you feel like, if you'll ever make it to Heaven, this will be the only word you'll want to here.

So many of us are wandering through life like Antwone Fisher, like Orphans, oblivious to the large family that awaits us when we'll finally come Home from this life's search and journey. We sometimes feel abandoned, too, worthless, often not even due to any wrong we've done, but simply because we figure that there is nobody who loves us enough to have stuck it out with us.

And yet, I am convinced that every person has a huge family awaiting them in eager anticipation, like Antwone Fisher, consisting of ancestors we may never even have heard about. We may not know them, but they know us alright.

Some folks may not be all too keen on being confronted by no high and mighty angels when they get to Heaven, perhaps confronting them with all the wrong they possible might have done. But everybody, I'm sure, can be looking forward to coming Home to their true family, the ones of whom you'll know, "that's where I belong. These are my people," and I bet that's one event making Heaven a worthwhile Place to look forward to and hope we'll eventually wind up there.

Maybe it will take some of us a longer detour to get there than others, but I have a notion that sooner or later we all will. We all will (John 1:9).

046 A New Covenant

I'm coming to the conclusion - not without the usual, probably considered highly heretical input from above - that another monumental change is happening in our era, similar to when Christ walked on earth 2000 years ago in order to establish a new covenant between God and men.
The old covenant (testament) had been between Him and the physical descendants of one man, Abraham, more specifically, the branch of the descendants of his son Isaac, also called the Jews. That covenant also roughly lasted 2000 years, until that race proved to be unworthy of the right to the title "the people of God," or His exclusive representatives.
After Christ died - simultaneously with the passover lambs that were being prepared by every pious Jew around the world, and embodying the very symbolism of each one of them, yet without most of them recognizing this fact, and the temple veil was supernatural rent in two to reveal to the world that the arc of the covenant wasn't there anymore (by the way, you can stop looking for it; the Bible tells us where it is in Rev.), the old covenant was dead. In order to become a child of God from henceforth, all one had to do was not just have the luck to be born of a special, chosen race, but to accept the sacrifice God made in offering up Jesus, His "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev.13:8).
So, for 2000 years, the people of God had a new name. They called themselves Christians. I'm coming to the point, though, where I see that the new people of God, the Christians, are erring just as much from the true basis of their faith, and are straying just as much from God, no matter how vehemently they claim to be God's people nominally, as their ancient predecessors did, and God must be looking around for anybody, from any faith or religion, to do the job the Christians refuse to do, and be living samples of the truth the Christians refuse - to either accept, or to live and obey. One of those men of God, for instance was the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi, who probably lived a better and truer sample of what a Christian was supposed to be like than each and every other Christian on earth during his life-time, put together.
That doesn't mean I'm promoting Hinduism. It just means that God can use anyone, even a Hindu, to promote the true meaning and essence of Christianity, if He can't get any of the Christians to do it. I'm coming to the conclusion that Christ is exclusively for the Christians no more than He was exclusively for the Jews.
Of course, most Christians will probably want to stone me now, just as the Jews stoned Stephen, one of the early Christians - from the time when a Christian was still a follower of Christ, not Mammon - who proved that the rug of God's anointing had been pulled out from under Jewish feet and given to true believers in Christ.
Back then, it cost something to be a believer in Christ: you had to pay the price of persecution for it, of being an outcast. A Christian was a member of a minority group, a small, perecuted and highly controversial sect. Those Christians have long since moved from the arenas of the Roman colosseums into the grandstands. They're no longer martyrs, but they make martyrs of others: fellow Christians, Muslims, Hindus, whoever stands in their way.
No wonder most honest people in the world are disgusted by the term "Christian." It has become a term that stands for anything but what Christ stood for: exploitation and supression of the poor, domination of anybody too weak to defend themselves by the "Christian," Western "civilization."
Those dear Christian brethren simply haven't realized that they've been infiltrated and taken over by the other side, and the spiritual stench of their house has become so bad that God had to move out, run and hide elsewhere, anywhere He would find shelter among humans, in the hearts of the humble, whether Christan or not, the true People of God.
The People of God are the People of Love (see John 13:35). If they don't happen to call themselves Christians, I won't blame them. Can you?

God's mind on the matter:

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