ARE WE IN HEAVEN?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 9, 1879

ARE WE IN HEAVEN?

Yes; if the following piece of theological teaching, sent forth to the world by a journal calling itself “The Christian Reformer,” is correct:—

Heaven is a moral state, not a place. You cannot go in a straight line through space to Heaven—but you can reach Heaven by constantly approaching toward God’s righteousness in a line of moral rectitude. This is self-evident. God is here as truly as anywhere else in space. Heaven and hell are also. The pure in spirit see God, and are in Heaven. The impure in spirit are in darkness and hell. The boundaries of moral character are the boundaries of the spiritual universe.—Quoted in the Christian Reformer of Aug., 1879.

How could the idea of God be more effectually dispelled than by such language as this? Alas! if this is all the Heaven we are to have. And the wicked would utter a war-whoop of joy if they thought they were in all the hell they were going to have. The drunkard, gambler, and debauchee want nothing better than to revel in their low dens of vice. It is their heaven, and they would shout hallelujah over the idea that that was all the hell they were ever to have. This is what the devil would like to have men believe. And of what use is the Bible with all its teachings about God and Heaven and hell, if the view above stated is correct? None at all; it is a cheat and a fraud, and had better be sunk in the depths of the sea. Don’t ask us to be astonished that people are losing their respect for the Bible, and that infidelity is increasing, when men who profess to be Christian instructors and expounders of the word of God, gravely put forth such a rarefied bosh, as the teaching, or rather in spite of the teaching, of that word.