Shadowlands

There is much talk in the world of education about the "learning curve," which my dictionary defines as "...the rate of a person's progress in gaining experience or new skills." Without going into too much detail, I would characterize myself as one with a very 'steep' learning curve. In college, I took Beginning Tennis at least three times (and I still couldn't hit a ball); and during Seminary a dear friend tried for two years to teach me how to sew (she ended up finishing all my projects).

So it was with reading and understanding the Bible. It wasn't until I was in my fourth church that I began to see Christ everywhere in the Old Testament. I had a very good pastor/ teacher at that stage in my life, and he challenged me to go searching for Jesus on the pages of Scripture before His birth. This was a radical concept for me. I had always assumed that the Old Testament was everything that happened before the birth of Christ, and that the New Testament was the story of His life, death, and resurrection. What I didn't know was that Jesus can be discovered in every chapter of the Bible, all 1,189 of them!

So it was a similar situation with Heaven. I certainly knew that Jesus spoke a great deal about Heaven, that much of the New Testament testifies to the existence of Heaven, and that the book of Revelation gave the most clues about what Heaven was like ("...neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore"). But the Old Testament? Outside of Genesis 1:1 ("In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth"), I was oblivious to the massive amount of references to Heaven, until a new teacher came along to challenge me once again. The teacher this time? Grief.

Grief has a way of making one feel desperate - desperate to feel hope and joy again. Early in my journey I began to keep a Scripture journal. Basically I wrote out - long hand - any verse that touched my soul. I read the Bible much more slowly and carefully than ever before - because I certainly did not want to miss out on any reference to Heaven that I might skip over in my hurry to be healed. And the result? I was absolutely shocked at how much information there is in the Old Testament about Heaven.

Every chapter of the Bible, if considered rightly, has something to do with the eternal purpose of God. Heaven is a big part of that, for Ephesians 1 says that God will "...unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth." Is it reasonable to assume, then, that 78% of the Bible would be silent on the topic of Heaven?

Unfortunately, I did think that - until I saw the Old Testament for what it was: a shadowland of beautiful Heavenly realities.