Daley Ponderings

On these two days, Mr. Alcorn has strayed away from at least what I know as traditional views of Heaven, though granted, I am not a particularly studied scholar on the matter.  I haven't ever heard of an intermediate Heaven, which is different from the future Heaven.  His definition of Heaven, at least for these two chapters is, "The place where God dwells", and he speaks particularly of a "central" dwelling place, given that God is omnipresent.

I think his basis for there has to be a present and future Heaven that are different rely on the statement by Jesus to one of the criminals on the cross, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise", not later, when you are resurrected.

I also thought of the parable of Lazarus and Abraham, where the rich man in hell wants Lazarus to come comfort him, or at least go back to his five brothers and warn them of the dangers of hell.  Abraham says the problem is not that judgement has already taken place, nor that his brothers are already dead, but that they wouldn't listen to Lazarus if they wouldn't listen to Moses and the other prophets.  So, that would mean that there are people currently in Heaven and hell.  I did think later that it is a parable, but I would still expect Jesus to get his facts straight even in a parable.

My question is that, if that is true, when does Revelation 21:13 take place, since it would seem that there would have to be lots of judgement occurrences, one for each individual (maybe he does them in batches? )

He also states that Heaven has a third state, "past", and says that it changed from "past" to "present" at Christ's incarnation, but gives no justification for that.

So - does this really matter? I'll probably write a whole post about, How Important is Doctrine Anyway? but for this particular question, it probably isn't, as I can't think of how it would affect my life today.  But, given that our church is supposed to all be reading this, one might expect people to either be wondering these same sorts of questions, or already have it figured it out.