Thoughts on Psalm 67

Today’s reading: Psalms 66-67; Revelation 20

I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was talking about the biblical expectation of eternity, which fits with Psalm 67, and it's highlighting to me just how different the popular Christian expectation today is...

After I got to the end of Dr. Michael Heiser's The Naked Bible Podcast (which I highly highly suggest listening to), I have been looking for something else and started listening to The Bible Project podcast. I'm only a few episodes in, but I'm enjoying the setup and style of the podcast so far.

But in those first few episodes they were discussing heaven, and how, in the bible, "heaven" just refers to "sky" and is never a place of expectation for where we will go. The biblical authors are always looking for God's reign on earth, rather than looking to abandon earth for an ethereal/spiritual existence "out there" somewhere. They pointed out that there are only four references to a believer's state after death and before the resurrection, and the only thing said in those four references is that we will be with Jesus. Everything else is about the expectation of the resurrection and life in the resurrection.

Psalm 67 took my thinking there this morning because the psalmist is looking for the day in which God is praised and followed by all peoples and nations across the earth. That hope just seems so distant today, with so many people so far from God, but what we've been reading lately in Revelation kind of speaks to that as well. We aren't moving forward on a trajectory of faithfulness, where all peoples will soon turn to the Lord, but we are on a trajectory toward destruction, where God will intervene in history, judge the rebellious, and reestablish a good and righteous creation with Himself at the helm, fully realizing the picture of Psalm 67 in that day.

I know this is a bit of a stream-of-consciousness type post, but it's what's on my mind from the reading today and I wanted to share. My brain also still feels pretty fuzzy still from some medicine I've been having to take the last couple weeks, and is a big part of why I haven't been posting much lately. Hopefully I'll be done with this medicine soon and will be back to being able to think and write properly again...