Revelation 7:9-17 - by Don Neuendorf
After this I looked adn there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb...
I don't like crowds. Orderly crowds, like in a stadium, where everyone is sitting in rows, are bad enough. I find it depressing to think about so many lives, so many issues, so many emotions, many of them lost or sad or heading down a wrong path. Disorderly crowds, random mobs of people at an amusement park or something, are even worse. Even if they are well behaved a large crowd is a place where your own identity begins to become submerged. Even your intention, the direction you want to walk, begins to be changed by the flow of the crowd.
This is why people often look at heaven in a negative way. They see only a mass of unidentifiable people. People speaking strange languages. People who are all facing the same way, worshiping the same Lord. Some people see that as dehumanizing....
They think it's dehumanizing because it reduces the individuality and makes people all part of the large organism, the crowd.
That's how I look at crowds, until... Until I know someone in that sea of faces.
It was intimidating to arrive at the airport in Port Au Prince, Haiti and be greeted by crowds of begging people, all speaking in a foreign language (except for the one ubiquitous phrase, "You gimme dolla?"). We were a few white faces in a sea of black faces, every one of them turned toward us. I could not see them as people - but only as a sea of needs pressing on me. But then we met our interpreters and our bus driver. We met a local pastor. We began to meet members of the congregation. Once we knew who these people were, and our hearts were connected, then the strange accents of all the other Haitians were no longer so strange or threatening. Then their faces became familiar, whether we had met them yet or not.
It is impossible to comprehend heaven - but I don't mean the extent of it, or the prosperity of it, or even the eternal duration of it. It is impossible to comprehend the one dominant feature of heaven - the intimacy of it. For this vast multitude in heaven, speaking a Babel of languages, wearing innumerable faces, will not be a mass of strangers. But because of our perfect oneness in Christ, these many people will be our intimates... all of them.
When I was young I often longed for friendships. As I grew older I discovered how hard it is to maintain relationships - even good ones. They require so much energy of the heart. But when I am surrounded by people I love, and who love me, it is sometimes almost overwhelming, the sense of fulness. THAT is what we look forward to in heaven. Not just seeing grandma or grandpa or mom and dad again - but seeing siblings we never knew before - people that we will love more deeply than we love our closest family today.
I cannot imagine it - but I pray for a tiny taste of it in the Body of Christ in this place.