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INFINITE AND ETERNAL KINGDOM OF HEAVEN A NOVEL By James R. Wuthrich
CHAPTERS
Directions for printing on both sides of the page 1. Print only odd pages first 2. Take pages out of the tray and sort them one-by-one so the first page is at the bottom 3. Turn the stack over lengthwise so the first page is now on top but upside down and backwards, and return to tray 4. Print only the even pages. Make sure that both sides read right-side-up (printers vary; you may want to test this)
Chapter
1: Jason’s
Life on earth
Now he who made us for this very thing is God, who
also gave to us the down payment of the Spirit. Therefore we are always
confident and know that while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the
Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are courageous, I say, and are
willing rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.
Therefore also we make it our aim, whether at home or absent, to be well
pleasing to him – 2Cor 5,5-9
Jason was born in 1958 to loving parents and to a brother 3½ years his elder, whom he adored, and a year later he inherited a sister to become his shadow. She and Jason played on the floor every day having tea parties, and then got up and played cowboys and Indians, getting shot and doing the dramatic fall-down-and-die scene. They used chairs and blankets to make forts and had tea parties and chased each other around the house. Jeanie was spindly, not forty pounds, always running, giggling and making jokes. About halfway into her eighth year, she started slowing down, not wanting to play and complained about headaches. She spent most of the time with mom and dad seeking comfort, and it made Jason feel neglected; she cried a lot; mom gave her aspirin, which helped a little, but later the aspirin quit working. She went to the hospital and made friends there and came back a different person; she was no longer a child; she went through all the phases of life in a matter of weeks. She talked about wanting to be married and having children just like mom; she became somber, stoic, never laughed, never wanted to play. She kept going back and forth to the hospital; so when she died, Jason and Fred never had a chance to say goodbye, though the grieving process had already begun in them on some level. Jason missed the time when everything was fun. He came home from school and cried uncontrollably every day for weeks, until he got tired of it and made himself stop, feeling that if he didn’t stop, he would die from sorrow.
They were happy and free. Jason wouldn’t have changed a thing to make their lives better before Jeanie got sick. Whatever he wanted he could have in life, like picking fruit off a tree. As a little boy he saw all the giftedness within him that he would use to steadily guide him into success that he would enjoy; but when Jeanie died, all that went away. She was the only person in the family who had a genuine faith in God. She was alone in her faith even before she got sick, but much more when she was dying. Then she completely devoted herself to her faith in Jesus, until it was the only thing that mattered to her. In her mind her brothers didn’t exist anymore, but she clung to her parents, who knew what was happening, though without faith they offered very little consolation, which made them feel all the more helpless. Their parents made their kids go to Sunday school and learn about God, so they could make their own decision about developing a faith and choosing a denomination, but Jeanie thought that none of this defines faith. Instead, she defined faith as trusting God by suffering alone. Jeanie put on her coat an hour before the red Sunday school bus was scheduled to come, waiting for the toot of the horn, so she could join her friends, many whom shared a faith like hers. The bus soon pulled to the curb and let out the children in front of a tiny, old-smelling Church only a couple blocks away. The children hustled upstairs to the narrow-slatted floor that creaked at every step, each child to his or her grade. The teacher taught her about the love of God, who sent His Son to be the Savior of the world, who promised eternal life to all who would believe in Him. Jeanie wanted so much to live, but she had no choice but to give up all hope of this life and put all her hope on the life to come, knowing that this life wasn’t made for her, that she must sacrifice it in hope of a better life that she would soon enjoy. All the vigor, happiness and hope of this life that others enjoyed she would never know, and it made her feel jealous, even of Jason, who took his health and thoughts of the future for granted; Jeanie made him realize that everything is a gift. She dedicated what was left of her life to her faith in Jesus, and it alienated her from her family. She became as it were a stranger in the house; when she looked at Jason, it was more to judge him. He didn’t understand why she believed in Jesus, because he didn’t know she was actually dying, assuming she would eventually get better and we would all return to a sense of normalcy. How could he think of his sister dying? This was impossible! He refused to go there in his mind, and it made her faith in Jesus that much more of a mystery to him; but once she died, it made a little more sense. The greatest promise of all is in the gospel of John chapter 11, “He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies. Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (Vs25,26). Jeanie dying was soul crushing to Jason and the whole family; he lost his life nearly as much as she lost hers. After that, the well-defined path he had been following suddenly vanished below his feet, along with his childhood happiness and carefree joy. He woke up every morning with a groan; ‘what is the point of this,’ yet he still had his health and would continue living, so he had to make something of himself but didn’t know where to begin. He couldn’t put his life on hold till he got an idea and courage, knowing about death that it steals everything by its finality. Death squelched the meaning of life; it loomed in Jason’s mind above his sister’s grave; he needed to understand these two impossible things: life and death. They posed so many colossal questions, and he wrestled with them as a ten-year-old boy, confronting them like Davy and Goliath, or like Jacob wrestled with the angel (Genesis 32,22-31). Jason started to see a path forming beneath his feet leading to a life-long exploration of these monumental questions, knowing from the beginning that there was no understanding life or death. Jeanie
did more to lead Jason to Christ than anybody, showing him that when everything
is taken from her, diagnosed with terminal cancer, she believed in Jesus all the
more. The onrush of death was undaunting to everyone in the family. All her hopes and dreams
of finding a husband, having children, enjoying many Christmases together,
collecting a million cherished memories over the years, slipped
from her grasp with only six months to live, and that time went fast. She died
in faith, and Jesus received her soul, and she went on living in paradise. God
would give her a new set of dreams and set her on a new path that led to
happiness and fulfillment, far surpassing any earthly hopes. Jeanie taught Jason
all these things when he was just a boy. She taught him how to believe in God
when bad things happen, when everything falls apart and nothing works-out, not
to lose heart or blame God. He is not at fault; he is not at the center of all things wrong.
He set us in a failing world and allowed the chips to fall where they may and
asked us to believe in Him no matter what happens. The worst thing that could
happen was death, and that just leads to heaven. Every
day in the seventh and eighth grade he walked to school alone in the quietness
of his heart and listened to his inner voice for nine tenths of a mile, and then
heard another voice take over his own, bringing a sense of clarity to the
conversation. How could death overtake life when it is so full of excitement, so
many surprises, experiences, phases and hopes? Death seemed completely out of
place, or was life out of place, and was death and inertness the rule? If so, it
only widened the mystery! He struggled with these enormous questions
as a boy; he never stopped throughout his life musing on some of the most
puzzling quandaries ever posited. Life became a distraction to his pursuit of
the meaning of life. He remembered looking into Jeanie’s eyes and seeing a
ponderous stare of a stranger, but in time he inherited her countenance; and
though he would never understand what she knew until he confronted his own
death, he sought the understanding of these things, that he might finally
comprehend what she was thinking. More than anything he wanted to know about the
hope that she embraced and the love that she felt from God, the person who was
getting her through her ordeal, leading her through death, to the shores of His
heavenly kingdom. The angels escorted her to the lover of her soul.
Jason pursued the answers to the greatest riddles that God placed in front of him. He cemented his faith in Jesus at the age of twenty, ten years after Jeanie’s death, and from that point his dedication to answering all the questions that death had raised became of full-time job while holding down flunky jobs and going to college, which was like a nightmare, because it took him from his first love, the Bible and his relationship with Jesus, who together would teach him all he needed to know about God. The Lord spoke to him one day clear as a bell and told him that he would create what would be a topical concordance of the New Testament, and ten years later he started his project in 1990. Twenty years later, in 2010, he started writing commentary for his concordance, and he put it online, and there he answered all the questions about life and death and everything in-between, things that began to puzzle him at the formative age of ten. He called it jeansbiblestudy.com, and it became a popular website for those throughout the world seeking truth.
After his dedication to Christ at the age of twenty, he spent the next four years reading the Bible, going to church and listening to countless sermons. He listened to the radio and other sources that spoke about the gospel and put his knowledge together to make a seamless tapestry of truth, and it radically changed his life on the inside. He sought to enlighten as many people as he could regarding the things he was learning, but manifesting the light was not as easy as collecting it, since people rightly saw the light of Christ as a direct assault on their worldview. Jason began to notice that there was one subject glaringly missing in all the sermons he heard; no pastor was willing to preach about heaven, yet heaven is the future home of everyone who believes; it is our great hope. Jesus called it paradise (Lk 23-42,43), yet no one seemed interested in talking about it, which made Jason fell that people's faith never got off the ground, that maybe they weren't hoping for heaven. Maybe their so-called faith was meant only for this life (1Cor 15-19). This gave Jason the creeps, and it made him rightly sense that something was wrong with the Church in general as an institution that was supposed to represent Jesus Christ on the earth, being unwilling to talk about its great hope. There
is a saying, “You can’t take it with you,” but you can come back and get
it. Jason created a time capsule and put his favorite rock in it and some other
things and buried it. He also planted an oak tree at the age of sixty-three, so
if it survived the tribulation, he and Jeanie would return at the Millennium and
build a tree fort in it, and let it become one of their favorite haunts. Jason’s
website is one of many on the Internet that directly opposes the god of this
world, whose name is Satan and opposes those who serve him, that fill them with
hate that such websites exist in their world. One day Jason got a knock on the
door; he answered it and the man asked, “Are you Jason Witicker.” “Yes, I
am,” he replied. The man pulled out a gun and shot him dead. He lay there at
the threshold of his front door in a pool of his own blood, while the man ran
away leaving Jason to die.
Jason felt his spirit come loose from his body, as one would peel off a sticker, as though an adhesion between his spirit and his body were giving way, the restraints of his flesh unshackled as he lay on the floor, allowing him to stand over his dead body lying at his feet. Instead of feeling that he had no place to go or feeling homeless, he felt free; he could go anywhere and do anything. He looked down and saw his own body lying there and felt sorry for it, but it was no longer him (actually it never was), and he had no desire to return to it. He stood over it as though trying to protect it from any would-be scavengers and wondered what would happen to him from here. He realized that if God didn’t come for him pretty soon, his circumstances would grow dark in a hurry; but just as he was thinking about this, an angel dressed in white suddenly appeared in front of him and took Jason by the hand and escorted him into God’s heavenly kingdom, directly into the presence of Jesus Christ, the one who loved him and gave himself for him, a place that Jason would not have found by himself, a hidden realm that was off limits to mortal men. Those released from the flesh and trusted in Jesus’ blood sacrifice to cleanse them from all sin discovered this place as their new home. | |||||||||||||||||||||
