so in the Bible the ideas of heaven and earth are ways of talking about God’s space and our space so I understand our space really well we live here there’s trees rivers mountains but my understanding of God’s space gets a little fuzzy and what we do get in the Bible are images trying to help us grasp God’s space which is basically inconceivable to us so these are two very different types of spaces yes they’re they’re different in their nature but here’s what’s really interesting is that in the Bible these are not always separate spaces so think of heaven and earth is like different dimensions that can overlap in the same exact space so we talk a lot about going to heaven after we die but this idea of heaven and earth overlapping we don’t talk a lot about that which is kind of crazy because the union of heaven and earth is what the story of the Bible is all about how they were once fully United and then driven apart and about how God is bringing them back together once again so let’s go back to the beginning where heaven and earth they’re completely overlapping yeah this is what the Bible’s description of the Garden of Eden is all about it’s a place where God and humanity dwell together perfectly no separation and humans then partner with God in building a flourishing beautiful world and so on but as humans we wanted to do things a different way we wanted God out and we wanted to create a world apart from him yeah so we have these two spaces now and the Bible actually uses lots of different kinds of words and phrases to refer to these two spaces to make a clear distinction so you’ve said that these spaces can overlap though so explain how that works yeah this is where we have to start talking about temples because in the biblical world you experience God’s presence by going to a temple that’s where heaven and earth overlap now there are two types of temples described in the Bible one is a tabernacle basically a tent that that was built by Moses and the other was this massive building made by Solomon and these temples were decorated with fruit trees and flowers and images of angels and all kinds of gold and jewels and so on and these are designed to make you feel like you’re going back to the garden and at the center of the temple was a place called the Holy of Holies which was like the hot spot of God’s presence now we can go and be with God again but not so fast because the temple also creates a problem so God’s space is full of his presence and goodness and justice and beauty the human space is full of sin and injustice and ugliness the result so how do these spaces overlap if they’re so different than they’re in conflict with each other this was resolved through animal sacrifice yeah that’s kind of weird what do animal sacrifices have to do with this yeah the idea is this animal sacrifices somehow they absorb the sin when the animal dies in your place and it creates a clean space so to speak where you are now free to enter into the temple and be in God’s presence okay so if I’m an Israelite and I live in Jerusalem I might be able to be in God’s presence but you said the story of the Bible is all of heaven and earth reuniting right so we have to keep going in the story where we come to Jesus in the New Testament and in the Gospel of John we hear this claim that God became human in Jesus and made his dwelling among us now this weird Wehling is really curious it literally it means he set up a tabernacle among us and so what John is claiming right here is that Jesus is a temple he is now the place where heaven and earth overlap what’s interesting about Jesus is that he isn’t staying in this safe clean space he’s running around hanging out with sinners he’s healing people of their sicknesses and forgiving people of their sins he’s basically creating little pockets of heaven where people can be in God’s presence but he’s doing it out there in the middle of the world of sin and death and he keeps telling everyone that the kingdom of heaven is at hand and he even told his followers to pray regularly that God’s kingdom come and that his will be done here on earth just as it is in heaven but a lot of people are threatened by Jesus and they kill him which seems to spoil this whole plan to reunite heaven in earth but we we have to go back to a scene earlier on and giasses story where John the Baptist saw Jesus and said behold this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world so Jesus isn’t just talked about as being a temple he’s also talked about as being the temple sacrifice yeah so so the cross is now the place where Jesus absorbs sin to create a clean space that is not limited like animal sacrifices Jesus’s sacrifice has the power to keep spreading and spreading and reuniting more and more of heaven on earth and this is all really great but it leaves one big question in my mind which is what happens when I die don’t I just fly over to God’s space to be with Jesus yeah so a few times in the New Testament we learned that Christians will be with Jesus in heaven after they die but that is not the focus of the Bible story the focus is on how heaven and earth are being reunited through Jesus and will be completely brought together one day when he returns so in the book of Revelation we get this beautiful image of the Garden of Eden now in the form of a city coming to end the age of sin and death by redeeming all of human history in a renewed creation and God space and human space completely overlap once again we believe the best way to understand the Bible is to look at its overall narrative so we’re gonna do this by taking individual themes and tracing them throughout the storyline of the whole Bible we also do this by making videos that focus on one book of the Bible looking at the literary themes the structure and the design of that book we are a non-profit and so we need your help in making more of these videos help us reach our next goal so we could keep making them John has 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