I've sometimes wondered about this myself. I mean, where was Satan before he was in the garden tempting Eve? He was Lucifer, one of the highest-ranking angels in Heaven, and was tempted to try to take God's place. A third of all the other angels agreed with him. It didn't work out so well for any of them, and are now destined to end up in the eternal flames in the end--all after originally being in Heaven.
It makes me wonder if any of us after millions of years in Heaven would get to a point where we decide that we want "more", and are tempted to stray off course, and then wind up banished to a lesser creation where a newly created set of living beings would be subject to us trying to lead them away from God.
Well, eschatologically speaking, it might be helpful differentiate between Heaven, as it now is, and the life of the world to come, after the General Resurrection, the New Jerusalem described in Revelation.
The Patristic view, also that of the Orthodox, is that the souls of what one might call the Righteous, the Elect, the Church Triumphant, the victorious Saints, such as the Holy Apostles, Martyrs and Confessors of the Early Church, and indeed all of those definitively saved through divine grace flowing from faith in Christ as promised in John 3:16 will abide in Heaven, in Abraham’s Bosom, until the Resurrection, experiencing a foretaste of what is to come. In this context, it seems like the anticipation of the joys of eternal life would preclude boredom, which also, one might argue, exists due to demonic attacks upon humans; perhaps we become bored when demons try to distract us, or perhaps boredom is an attribute of our fallen condition; when we rise again in glory, we might no longer be plagued by such considerations.
Now regarding eternal life itself, the New Jerusalem, the mystical eighth day of creation that awaits those who chose to love Christ rather than hate him, being consigned to the outer darkness* - if this is eternal life, and if we accept the Patristic belief in Theosis, as St. Athanasius (who defended the Christian faith at Nicaea and also is responsible for the universal adoption of the 27-book New Testament canon, having prescribed it to his brother bishops in the Church of Alexandria in his 39th Paschal Encyclical in 367 AD (this being a letter he wrote annually to the bishops under the Alexandrian Patriarchate, basically those in Egypt, Numidia and Ethiopia, that contained the date of Pascha for that year calculated according to the formula adopted churchwide at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD), put it, “God became man so that man could become god” which is to say that we will be, as John Wesley put it, entirely sanctified in the parousia, becoming by grace what Christ is by nature, sons of God by adoption, we will benefit from gaining eternal life properly defined, that is to say, freedom from the oppression of linear time.
In my youth I used to be terrified at the prospect of enduring the passage of millions of years, until I realized that time was a creature, created according to the plan of the Father by the Logos, the Only Begotten Son and Word of God, along with everything else, according to John ch. 1, by whom all things were made, and thus God does not experience the passage of it accept with regards to His humanity - but having risen from the dead in a glorified form, able to enter rooms with closed doors, clearly no longer subject to the same limits we face, based on the dialogue in the Resurrection Gospels, it seems reasonable to say we will not be forced to endure the passage of time but will either exist outside of it or control it, so the prospect of an infinite number of years need not terrify us (whereas the idea of enduring not millions, not billions, not trillions, but infinite years is as disturbing as the idea of unending torture and worse than annhilation; perhaps for this reason the aspiration of the misguided Indian religions in their original, pure form, which survives to some extent in Therevada Buddhism, is an end to existence, to be “blown out,” an idea which coupled with their delusions of pantheism and of reincarnation without end must seem appealing.
But I don’t believe God, who loves us infinitely, would allow us to experience the infinite in a finite manner and be so tormented.
By the way, the Enterprise A has been, since my youth, my favorite version of that ship; I always thought NCC-1701-A was the most beautiful; perhaps its the blue, green and white Okudagrams, especially the appearance of the bridge at the end of Star Trek IV. I also greatly love the appearance of the refit Enterprise.
* Interestingly, Orthodox fathers regard this as a final act of mercy, for the love of God is a consuming fire, which would be torment for those who hate Him, who would experience that same consuming fire as divine wrath.** Thus, God spares them that, by placing them in the outer darkness; as St. John Chrysostom pointed out, the worst possible torment, worse than any contrived torture that might be inflicted upon them, would be the realization of what they had, through their own choices, excluded themselves from. Yet, many argued, even given the choice, those in Hell would not change; CS Lewis rather elegantly illustrated this point in “The Great Divorce” and with his argument “the gates of Hell are locked from the inside.”
** Since God does not change, according to Scripture, we must reject the error of anthropomorphology, an “Old man with a beard” who allows humans to provoke Him from going from a state of loving calm to unquenchable anger; rather, in His divine essence, God is unchanging, eternal and inscrutable, a eternal union of three coequal coeternal and uncreated persons, the Son, begotten before all-ages, and the eternally proceeding Spirit sharing in the essence of the unoriginate Father, ever one God, but the Son, by putting on our humanity and uniting it with His divinity without change, confusion, separation or division, glorified our nature, meaning that in the resurrection, we will be more than Adam was before the Fall.
churchleaders.com
