"On earth, as it is in heaven..."

       Heaven is depicted to us as the most glorious, beautiful, peaceful, harmonious, fabulous, rapturous paradise possible to imagine. Adjectives fail to encompass the picture we see of God's heaven in the Bible. God reigns supreme; He is the absolute Authority, but God is a benevolent, merciful, forgiving Monarch. In heaven, we see order instead of chaos, beauty instead of ugliness, system instead of confusion; the epitome of all that could possibly be desired in the most perfect state.

        God is the supreme RULER in heaven. But His rule is not arbitrary; not selfish, egocentric—It is not rule for the satisfaction of the One doing the ruling, but government for the sake of the governed. God is the greatest possible expression of self-government, for He rules Himself' God is perfect character. There is no higher power which prevents God from making mistakes, sinning, falling short. God is self-ruled to perfection!

        It is this perfect character God wishes us to attain. He is ruled best who is ruled least. This is a principle of God.

        And what is perfect character? It is the ability to discern the difference between good and evil; discern right choices from wrong choices; to clearly perceive the end result of all human actions, and the will power of force oneself to choose the right!

        God is reproducing after His own kind. He is engendering children on this earth who are to mature through overcoming every human challenge, to finally be inducted into the family of God. He seeks to make each of us into one of His children, to give us eternal life. We are but a physical prototype of what shall be, a clay model made in God's image. It is our human destiny that we should become members of the God family.

        In order to produce perfect character in us, God knew it would require the free exercise of personal choice—free moral agency. Character is not created automatically, but developed through a lifetime of imposing self rule on one's own human appetites, overcoming the downward pulls and tugs of the flesh, overcoming Satan and evils in society, through the powerful help of God's Holy Spirit.

        When we pray that God's perfect will, His system of government come to this earth, we need to acknowledge this world's societies and institutions are not, in the main, of God's design. God has given mankind 6,000 years to learn the lesson that man cannot achieve utopia through his own carnal struggles, that he was made to need God in his life, and in his society. When we pray God's will be implemented on this earth as it is in heaven, we need to pray with the fullest comprehension of the sharp contrast between the two; the awareness of just how far man's societies have departed from the will of God.

        Today, this world is in chaos. Enough nuclear explosives exist to destroy the world perhaps twenty times, and the big powers are building more. Proliferation of nuclear weapons continues at an alarming pace; nations such as India, China, Israel, South Africa, have the bomb. Dozens of smaller, third-world countries possess nuclear reactors which produce plutonium; many of them are nearing production of nuclear weapons.

        If we were all the same color, spoke the same language, worshiped the same God; if there were no chauvinism, racism, nationalism, we would still face the greatest problem looming before mankind—that of overpopulation. As the sub-Sahara attests, millions die from malnutrition, starvation and disease each year. The population of the world will double a few years into the next century; double again about thirty-five years later. There is no way to avoid food wars from engulfing much of the impoverished third world.

        America and Western Europe, together with Japan, find themselves in the first-class passenger compartment of our spaceship earth, with about 90 percent of the remaining passengers in the economy compartment, separated only by a flimsy drape. Will the suffering, hungry, squalid, diseased, angry billions of the third world long be content with their plight?

        Overpopulation is the most sinister of all global problems, for it recognizes no racial, political bounds.
Global pollution continues apace; solid waste, air pollution, water pollution. Thor Heyerdhal reported that, during his epic voyage from Egypt to South America aboard a papyrus-reed raft, he was never out of sight of flotsam injected into the oceans by man. Not once, during his thousands of miles of drifting through the Mediterranean and across the central Atlantic, was he out of sight of garbage, cans, bottles, oil slicks, plastic wrappers—some evidence of pollution in our oceans. We are all familiar with the deadly canisters of toxic poisons dumped into the oceans following World War I; the nuclear wastes being dumped into the oceans today, supposedly safely encased in concrete; the daily pollution of our seas by the effluent from thousands of rivers and streams; the huge oil slicks from accidents involving super tankers; pollution from oil production accidents off shore. Globally, man pollutes his environment through nuclear accidents like Chernobyl, or destroys life in the rivers and seas as deadly hydrocarbons are leached into the streams and rivers, and into the seas from farms using oil-based herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and chemical fertilizers to raise crops.

        The diminution of strategic materials is of great concern. World reserves of fossil fuels, germanium, molybdenum, aluminum, chromium, are being used up rapidly. Not only is the list of endangered species long and growing longer, but the rapid depletion of raw materials is also of grave concern.

        No new fossil fuel is being formed. Perhaps billions of years ago, at the "great die off" of the dinosaurs, billions of tons of animal and vegetable material were buried deep beneath the surface of the earth in cataclysms unimaginable to the human mind. Oil, coal, natural gas—these are the relics of a bygone age, another world—the waste of a period of time on our earth when the continents (no doubt, in completely different configuration) teemed with life of a different kind. Each day, as we burn millions of gallons of this fossil fuel, we edge nearer that time when there will be none left. Our earth is finite, like a space capsule that carries its own fuel, oxygen, water and food. No new fossil fuels are being formed; no mass burials of billions of animals is occurring today. How many years are there before man depletes his energy supplies?

        Of grave concern is nuclear war by accident. Can the big powers continue to play the deadly game of stockpiling ever more destructive nuclear weapons, the while making futile gestures at arms controls, living in that gray area between the peace which can seemingly never be achieved and the war which must never be fought? Many a novel has pictured a nuclear submarine captain going mad or a nuclear bomber hijacked; a conspiracy of generals to launch a nuclear war. Are each of these scenarios so far-fetched? In our war of nerves, there are human beings in those nuclear submarines, armed with enough missiles to wipe out many large population centers. Can human beings always be trusted to remain stable, even when placed under almost unimaginable strain?

        The socioeconomic picture of our globe is not inviting. Hundreds of millions lack the basic necessities of life; food, clothing, shelter. Even among the industrialized nations, vast disparities exist between the privileged and the disenfranchised, the well-to-do and the poor, the majority and the minorities, the overstuffed and the hungry.

        Clearly, the good green earth is not a place of great tranquility Daily reports of the protracted wars raging—Iraq and Iran, the latest car bombing in Beirut, the latest terrorist incident in Europe, the latest airplane bombing or hijacking, the latest blast in Belfast. These and our daily crime reports tell us man has not learned to live alongside those with different color, different language, different religion.

        But it was not always so. Once, this earth was a place of beauty, harmony, perfect peace. It looked like a vast garden from one pole to the other. The Bible proves there was an earlier creation, long before man—a pre-Adamic creation perhaps several billion years in the past. A great archangel was placed over the earth named Lucifer, which means "shining star of the dawn" or "light-bringer." He is one of the three archangels mentioned in the Bible, along with Gabriel and Michael.

        The Bible depicts the whole world like the "Garden of Eden, " with Lucifer and millions of angels given responsibility for the earth. Let's see what happened:

        "In the beginning God [Hebrew: Elohim] created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (Genesis 1: 1-2).

        The Hebrew words for "without form and void," or shapeless, in confusion, are tohu and bohu. Yet, the Bible tells us, "For God is not the Author of confusion... " (I Corinthians 14:33). Also, notice Isaiah 45:18: "For thus saith the Eternal that created the heavens; God Himself that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it not in vain [Hebrew: tohu], He formed it to be inhabited. " God clearly says the picture we see in Genesis the first chapter of this earth completely submerged under the seas; a picture of chaos and confusion, darkness, lifelessness, was not the original condition of earth. God did not create it that way.

        The key is found in the word "was" in the phrase, "The earth was without form." The word should be translated, "The earth became without form. " The Critical and Experimental Commentary says "…Dr. McCaul has shown that the verb 'was' is, in some twenty places in this chapter, used as equivalent to 'became,' and that elsewhere it has the same significance... "

        The Critical and Experimental Commentary article on this chapter contains three possible explanations for the reconciliation of Genesis 1: 1-2 with science. It says, "The third scheme of reconciliation supposes the intercalation of a long and indefinite period between the original creation and the state of things to which the second verse refers. An immense interval, of which no record has been preserved, succeeded, during which the earth passed through the various changes which geology has traced, accumulating the successive strata, with their entombed inhabitants, which its bowels contain; then, at some undescribed period in duration, it became the subject of a superficial catastrophe, by which it was thrown into general dislocation and disorder, overrun by an inundation of waters, and darkened, by an accumulation of thick, vapory mists" (Critical and Experimental Commentary, Jamieson, Vol. 1, p. 3).

        But how, why? Geologists know this earth has been subjected to many ages of chaotic disarray. The majority of all rocks are sedimentary, or water-deposited. Fossilized ripple marks in stone, the evidence of ancient seashores, the aeons-long formation of coral atolls suggest that our earth was subjected to countless inundations; that monster storms ravaged the continents over millions of years. The movement of continental land masses along the tectonic plates of this earth is now fairly well-known. Anciently, our continents were in far different arrangement. How else did seabed fossils come to be easily visible in the tops of the Rocky Mountains; the Alps?

        Somehow, from the early picture of absolute beauty, splendor and peace of which we read in the Bible, the earth was destroyed. But how?

        Jesus said, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10: 18). This was said in response to the joy His disciples evinced upon returning from their first evangelistic journeys. They were exulting because they discovered the name of Jesus Christ caused demons to obey them, that they had power over evil spirits through His name. When Christ said He saw the fall of Satan like a brilliant streak of light plummeting down to earth, comet-like, He was once again attesting to His pre-human existence with God the Father. He was showing He was present when a titanic struggle took place, and Satan, defeated, was cast down to earth. He was showing His disciples they had power over Satan's cohorts through the use of Jesus' name.

        John wrote, "And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew a third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born" (Revelation 12:3-4). Later, John said, "And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him" (Revelation 12:7-9).

        Study those words carefully. If they are to be understood literally, we may be looking at the answers to age-old questions about the chaotic condition of our solar system; the bleak, lifeless, pock-marked surfaces of Mars, Jupiter, and the other planets; the ravaged surfaces of their moons and our own.

        We also see that heaven was not always the place of supreme tranquillity it is today. There was a time when a battle took place so unimaginable, so gargantuan in scope that it defies the mind of the most inventive science-fiction writer.

        We may be looking at evidence of the original "Star Wars"!

        Now, let's see what the Bible says about this event. Isaiah 14 is a chapter dealing with type and anti-type: Satan, and the king of Babylon. All the Bible commentaries and Bible handbooks acknowledge that the language of the middle verses of this chapter means Satan. Notice, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [shining star of the dawn] How art thou cut down to the ground which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, 'I will ascend unto heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars [symbol for angels] of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the MOST HIGH' " (Isaiah 14:12-14). This verse reveals much about Satan's origins. It tells us he was an archangel with a name which meant "shining star of the dawn," and that he was on this earth, below the heights of the clouds. Notice further information in another chapter of the Bible dealing with type and anti-type, this time between Satan and the prince of Tyre: "Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou was created.

        "Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou was upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.

        "Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee" (Ezekiel 28:12-15).

        The Ark of the Covenant, carried by the Levites in the wilderness and later placed in the Holy of Holies in Solomon's temple, was constructed with two angelic beings called "cherubim" whose outstretched wings almost touched over the "Mercy Seat. " This was a picture of God's throne. As we have seen, there are "cherubim and seraphim" about God's throne. The reference to Lucifer apparently shows an earlier position of great station, next to the throne of God. Then, we see he was assigned to this earth when the whole world was of beauty. Finally, we see the metamorphosis from wise and beautiful to jealous and scheming, the struggle of Lucifer to unseat God; his defeat, together with one third of the angels of heaven, and his violent expulsion from heaven. Lucifer was cast back down to this earth at the climax of a battle so titanic, so vast in its proportions, that the human mind cannot begin to imagine it.

        Now, see what we have learned: The earth was originally not in chaotic disarray. The picture of the creation of Genesis 1 is not the original creation, but the re-creation of the physical surface of this earth and the creation of man, together with most known types of animals and fish of the present world.

        Both the Bible and geology tell us there was an earlier creations time when this world teemed with life, when the frigid, northern areas of permafrost and frozen tundra were in fact semi-tropical (mastodons have been unearthed in Siberia; they were warm weather mammals), when weather patterns were completely different. Our present-day fossil fuels are derived from this ancient world of teeming life.

        Space does not permit a thorough discussion of the deposition of coal beds, oil reserves; the graphic story of fossils in the rocks; how the dinosaurs, and vast numbers of other species suddenly disappeared, as if from some gargantuan catastrophe. One very possible theory has to do with a comet, or gigantic meteor smashing into the earth with the force of hundreds of multi-megaton H-bombs, spewing into earth's atmosphere billions of cubic yards of pulverized rock and dust, bringing about an immediate ice age. The initial shock would have destroyed all life on earth, caused earthquakes of unimaginable intensity, brought about tidal waves thousands of feet high, literally rocked the earth in its orbit.

        Is that how it happened? We cannot know for sure, but we do know that our solar system shows mute evidence of massive destruction in the past. No new craters hundreds of miles across are being formed on our moon. Was the earth impervious to these showers of asteroids and comets? Probably not.

        Both astronomy and geology tell us of mind-boggling catastrophes in the past history of our solar system; of the explosion of stars, and the forming of new ones; of the coming into being of planets, and the destruction of planets. Radiocarbon dating of fossils generally concedes the earth to be about four and a half billion years old. Did God place Lucifer here, with about a third of the angels, in that distant age? Did their rebellion and the ensuing war in the spirit world result in the destruction we see? There is strong indication it did.

        God's Word shows Satan was expelled from heaven, that he was cast down" to this earth. Here, he is called the "god of this world" (11 Corinthians 4:4), and the "prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2). He is called the "adversary," the "accuser of the brethren," and the "tempter."

        All of us are aware of stories about the devil. We eat "devil's food" cakes, and take pictures of "the devil's punch bowl" at the seashore. Most believe he appears as an evil-looking man with spade beard, pencil-thin mustache, smallish, wicked-looking horns, a red body stocking and a pointed tail. Not so. The Bible says he appears "as an angel of light" (II Corinthians 11: 13-15) and warns Christians about his subtle religious deceptions.

        God's Word reveals Satan is largely responsible for the chaos on this earth, that He influences nations of people, heads of state. Can anyone truly understand the mind of a totalitarian leader like Adolf Hitler apart from Satanic influence? Those close to him told of a mysterious power that seemed to emanate from him; of his towering, demonic rages. Somehow, he exercised a magnetic, evil influence over millions. His pogroms against the Jews, his incredibly inhuman "final solution" for millions in his death camps, his demoniacal military genius—these and other traits strongly suggest that Satan himself possessed Hitler's mind.

        Clearly, God's will is not being accomplished on this earth today. The societal structures of man are not of God's making; not pleasing to God. Man's civilizations are based upon the human emotions of vanity, jealousy, lust and greed. They are wholly carnal, filled with competition, strife, avarice, cunning, vengeance, hatred. That is why God wants us to pray "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven! " When we utter these words, we need to see the desperate plight of this war-weary, sin-sick world; to see it from God's perspective!

        God is able to hear the piteous wails of the starving; the crying of deserted, lonely and abused children; the screams of the wounded and dying in the bloody conflicts of man. God sees the inhumanity, the callused disregard for human rights and simple human decency by despotic human leaders. God sees and hears it all—those terrible things we see but glimpses of in our daily news.

        God is working out a great purpose here on earth, a purpose in which your life figures prominently. He wants us to know that we'll never escape this human experience alive, that we have a personal destiny to fulfill, that we were put on this earth to become something so wonderful, so beautiful, so powerful, that our minds cannot encompass it. We were made in God's image as a physical prototype—to ultimately be born of God, to become His children, members of His own family! He wants us to see that there is the alternative of eternal life over eternal death, that we have only to repent of our sins, call out to a loving Father in heaven for His divine grace, and He will hear; He will induct us into His family if we surrender our wills to Him, and begin to apply His laws in our lives.

        I doubt there has ever been a morning so beautiful a husband has turned to his wife and said, "Dear, isn't this a lovely day to go out and shop for a casket and a burial plot?"

        No, we tend not to think of such things , choosing to pretend, as it were, that we are rather permanent, impervious to the madness of human folly, accident and happenstance that demand the lives of others all around us. But any day—any day at all—is a good day to seek our God, to pray to Him. He says, "Is not this the fast [spiritual service] that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free? and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that you bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that you cover him; and hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

        "Then shall thy light break forth as the morning and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Eternal shall be thy reward. Then shalt thou call, and the Eternal shall answer; thou shalt cry, and He shall say 'Here am I'!" (Isaiah 58:6-9).

        Some day, in the not too distant future, God's way of life will be imposed on this earth. What a great day it will be to read in the headlines how factories are progressing in converting guns to hoes and rakes, tanks to tractors, bullets and bombs to useful tools. God says, "And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, 'Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God.' And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away" (Revelation 21:3-4).

        Christ's outline for successful prayer, the "Lord's Prayer," as we call it, instructs us to pray for that glorious day!

        Pray for God's perfect will to be accomplished in your own life first; then pray it will be accomplished in others! But you must really want what you pray for. You must learn to pray, as did Jesus Christ your Savior, "Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done, right here on earth, here and now, just as your perfect will is always loyally and faithfully done in heaven above!" God loves prayers like that. Study David's prayers, and you will quickly find why he was called "a man after God's own heart." What a description! How would you like it to be said of you? It's possible.