For God’s Sake: Object of our desire will be Christ

Recently, my wife and I were driving along Hwy. 98 craning our necks to see the Blue Angels zipping over the shoreline in tight formation. In my neighborhood, I appear to be the only one who runs outside to catch a glimpse of an aircraft roaring overhead. Somedays it is hard to get any work done.

I got my interest from my father, who often took his large brood of children to airshows near our home in Canada. He had served in the Royal Canadian Airforce in WWII but not as a pilot.

He wanted to be a pilot, but a wayward snowball in the eye in a childhood snowball fight left him with impaired vision. Instead, he served as an aircraft mechanic stationed in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island.

For his eightieth birthday, one of my older brothers, an amateur aviator himself, purchased some flight time for my dad in a WWII era Harvard (the T6 Texan) flown by a pilot who did aerobatics. The grin on my father’s face getting in the cockpit was undiminished when he got out after a very dynamic flight, though his face had a slight greenish cast.

I sometimes dream that I can fly, and it is all as matter of fact to me as walking from one place to another. Psychologists, psychics and spiritualists attach a host of conflicting meanings to such dreams, none of which means anything to me.

In a seminary class that addressed the subject of the new heaven and the new earth, the professor encouraged us to consider what the Bible says about the next life and ponder what will be our experience. We are told that God will create a new heaven and a new earth.

Unlike our experience now, this new creation will not have any of the corruption of sin, nor will those who dwell in it. “For the former things are all passed away,” says the One sitting on the throne of God, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Whatever earthly experience we try to translate into that new existence will fall miserably short of that new reality. No matter, it only means that it will be far better than we could ever imagine.

Will the citizens of heaven be able to fly? We’re not told. What we do know is that when the Lord Jesus Christ returns to gather his own to himself, they will be caught up to meet him in the air. I’d like to think that such experiences will be the norm from that day on.

Even if it isn’t, I know that there will not be a shred of regret, for in that day, the object of our desire will be Christ, not the mode of transportation by which we meet Christ.