I agree. And frankly, I have rarely met another person that understands that. You just elevated my estimation of you greatly. - lol (for what it's worth)
When did you realize this? When I read C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, I then understood this concept.
Lol, back atcha!
I'm not sure when. CS Lewis was no doubt instrumental in it. When I want someone to understand it, I steer them to his Space Trilogy, where mention is made of how the 'Oyarsas' of the three planets seem a little off-vertical, yet not them, but the horizontal of earth was what was off. (More of his light reading with heavy implications.)
And, of course, there is plenty of Scripture concerning the impermanence of this temporal reality.
A lot of it came from when I was taught hermeneutics in Seminary, and what to me seemed common sense became a weird science, with the rules still subjectively applied. For example, the human worldview that attributes undeserved substance to this life is obvious when they say that this or that passage is poetic, but prophetic, too, and they show how to tell when that passage begins to be so, and when it is no longer so; and worse, when they say this or that passage is allegorical or symbolic, as if the things of this life were the substantive to which the eternal or spiritual is compared.
To me that is like the story of the blind men in the Kalahari trying to describe the elephant. To one it is a snake (trunk), to another a rope (tail), to another a tree (leg), to another a great hippo. We don't know jack-squat.
Why can't our pearls be representative of the great single pearl that is a gate? Why can't our gold be a poor representation of the streets of gold in the New Jerusalem? Why can't we fathers be a silly picture of the REAL Father in Heaven? Why the spiritual indigestion at the thought of God being a male? —he is not male, but males are masculine, however poorly it be so. I have no problem at all with God being more masculine than I am. He is GOD, after all; He is the very definition of masculine.
There is reason even to speculate, since God is efficient in all things, and absolutely nothing he has done is done for no reason, that EVERYTHING we see is done in its fullness there, here only seen in part. Already we know that the internals of what is visible here are beyond our sight, but
there we will know the workings of what is now only temporal to the smallest particle / force. How much greater then, to know the 'internals' of the REAL thing we see
in eternity!
It is in the following, that you and I diverge, because I see in this question of substance of the vapor vs the eternal, the 'default' that God is (i.e., were there nothing else, there would be God). Then, whatever he decides to make for himself, is altogether holy, perfect and beautiful, requiring no substituted or replaceable parts, and all other creation is structure and means for building that thing for himself. All the rest of creation is unimportant by comparison, to that one project. Though we, whom he has redeemed, are not worth more than the worst of those that continue to reject him, and no more virtuous in and of ourselves, we are shown mercy because he wants us to learn of his gracious love, in making us members of the Bride of Christ. Compared to God, humanity is nothing, and he owes them nothing. Compared to God, humans don't even register as sentient, within this vapor of existence we now inhabit. Yet he gives us will, and knowledge, to where we are without excuse.
