Do All Dogs Go to Heaven?

There was a song I learned while attending Christian life meetings in college back in the 1970's during my days as a college student on the campus of McMurry College in Abilene, Texas.  We used to sing it all the time and it went something like this ...

 

Heaven is a wonderful place

Filled with Glory and Grace

I want to see my Savior's Face

Heaven is a Wonderful Place - I want to go there.

 

Repeat Song

 

The song always made me think of heaven as pie in the sky, a place where we go after we die.  While Heaven is all that - I've learned over the years that Heaven is more than all that.  Heaven is also the ham where I am.  Jesus once said that the kingdom of God (heaven) does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you." Luke 17:21


What this means for me is that we don't enter heaven getting our ticket punched on the gospel train, knowing that God will tell us when the train is ready to leave, but heaven is a place whose journey begins within us.  It's a journey of the heart where God creates heaven in our heart, giving us a new way to live and serve, thus creating places of heaven on earth, a foreshadowing of s world we'll enjoy when we go to heaven!


But, do all dogs go to heaven?  Now there's a question I will address this Sunday in worship at the 11 a.m. sanctuary service.  Why not come and bring a friend as we explore the topic together.  See you Sunday!


Dennis 

Predestination

Predestination in the Christian world means a divine foreknowledge of all things that happen.  Some use predestination to shape their definition of elect, a people chosen by God, to include only an elect few.  Some believe in double-election saying God elected some to be saved, while others are elected to be damned.  I don’t any Christians in my community who advocate such a view, but it seems implied in our society at large. I belong to one of the two major political parties in this country.  I won’t say which one, but I do receive letters from the national organization around election time, and if I took seriously everything written in those letters, I would believe my party to be elected by God to save this nation from economic and moral disaster, while the other party is been damned by a faulty political philosophy that will lead to economic and moral ruin.  Whether we say it or not, we practice in our two party system a “double election” in national politics!  Personally speaking, whether in religion or in politics, such a view divides us from one another, which is the root problem of our sin.  

One reaction to this idea of double election is single election, meaning God elects all, or predestines all to be saved, an idea that originated in the ancient teachings of church fathers like Clement of Alexandria in the Catechetical school in Alexandria and continued by Origen who followed as Clements’ successor. Today, post-modern Christian authors continue to explore single election with books like If Grace is True 2003 and The Evangelical Universalist 2006, writings in the past ten years that lift up the idea of a God who elects to save every person.   I think it sounds great, but there is that haunting, evocative question read in Hebrews 2:3, “How shall we escape if we ignore so great a salvation?”  This suggests a choice to be made, and it appears to be a choice that we choose to either accept or ignore?

There is another way to look at predestination:  all of us are predestined to be loved.  John 3:16 says that “God so loved the world...”  Paul writes in Romans 8:38 – 39 that nothing he knows of can ever make God stop loving us.  If we are predestined to be loved, then God has made a choice.  God chose you, but what choice will you make?

We will explore this topic more as we continue our sermon series in the sanctuary on basic beliefs.  Join us as we dig deeper into basic Christian beliefs like salvation, sanctification.  We’ll explore all these beliefs from our United Methodist tradition.