What a buzz!

After reading last week's blog about the wonders of gravity, a reader sent a link to a video that illustrates just what can happen when the laws of gravity and aerodynamics get together. I was gobsmacked. May I suggest that before reading any further you take a look at the video.

Don't know about you, but I for one cannot imagine any experience that could possibly match free flight in a wing suit for buzz power. What an adrenalin rush! Imagine streaking through the air at 100 mph (160 kph) and running your fingernails against cliff faces or swooping under bridges. (Of course, I'm a male. Our female readers may not see it quite the same way. I don't know.) If only I had the money and the courage I'd be into it with knobs on.

Yet the kicks provided by free "flight" (in reality a modified fall) are a wet firecracker compared with the thrills and spills of life in the hereafter. Furthermore, the longest wing suit dash would lasts only some tens of seconds. Kingdom thrills endure and endure. Not for seconds, or minutes, but for. well. forever. My sister-in-law recently paid over $200 for the opportunity of attending an Andre Rieux production complete with ice dancers, jugglers, gorgeously-clad singers and, of course, Andre himself moving his fingers up and down and his bow across the violin strings, all at lightning speed. She lapped it up. It was over in a couple of hours. One-in-a-lifetime experiences will be multiplied endlessly in the kingdom of God:

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him (1 Cor. 2:9).

Mull those words over. Toss them around in your mind like you savor a quality wine for some time before swallowing. Thrills and spills will be the order of the day. Perhaps more mature believers will look down their noses at my childish dreams about everyday life in the kingdom of God. But I don't care. If Augustine can suggest that, ". philosophers might well examine again the question of earthly gravity in the light either of the body of Christ with which He ascended into heaven or of the bodies of the saints as they will be in their resurrection" (The City of God) why should I be embarrassed to wonder what it might "feel" like (whatever that may mean then) to experience, say, spaghettification when one takes on a "corporeal" nature and wanders into a black hole's gravitational field? The Psalmist really meant it when he said that, ". no good

thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly" (Ps. 84:11). Jesus really meant it when He said that unless we get childishly wide-eyed and bushy-tailed at the merest thought of kingdom life we will not enter the kingdom (Mark 10:15). Let's get serious about being childish. Believers should be as irrepressibly excited at the prospect of entering the kingdom of heaven as a little child is over her first visit to Disneyland.

The greatest, highest, most exhilarating thrill of all in kingdom life comes from simply being in the presence of God, of "seeing His face" (Rev. 22:4):

You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore (Ps. 16:11).

Commentators may dicker over whether this verse is talking about this life or the "afterlife". Why not take the position that it refers to both, the intensity of bliss of the latter outshining the former as the sun does the moon? People get madly excited about travelling the world and seeing its natural wonders; the Grand Canyon, Guilin Hills, the Great Barrier Reef, to name but a few. How much, much more excited should we be at the prospect of seeing the glory of the One who made them all?! But before we see God's face in all its glory in the New Jerusalem, we have another massive treat in store:

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also (John 14:3).

Jesus understood what the kingdom of God would be like. After all, He had previously experienced it (John 17:5) - He was God in the flesh. It was contemplating "the joy set before Him" that helped Him endure the cross (Heb. 12:2). He promised His followers that they could revel in kingdom ecstasy in His company. Jesus provided a handful of keyhole glimpses into the joys to be found in the kingdom. Jesus will appear to His glorified saints with a face that would shine as the sun (Matt. 17:2). The saints themselves would shine as the sun (Matt. 13:43). They will sit and eat with Jesus; indeed, He will even serve them (Luke 12:37)! When one contemplates Who Jesus is, and what sort of company He would be, what more could one ask for than to "dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Ps. 23:6) with Him? Truly, truly, what more could one ask for? Don't dream about free flight in a wing suit, dream about being received into Jesus' presence forever.