Longing for heaven

 

Australian aborigines pictured heaven as a distant island beyond the western horizon. The early Finns thought heaven was a distant island in the faraway East. Mexicans, Peruvians, and Polynesians believed they went to the sun or the moon after death. Native Americans believed that in the afterlife their spirits would hunt the spirits of buffalo.

The Gilgamesh Epic, an ancient Babylonian legend, refers to a resting place of heroes and hints at a tree of life. In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies had maps placed beside them as guides to the future world. The Romans believed that the righteous would picnic in the Elysian fields while their horses grazed nearby. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said, “The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity.” Although these depictions of the afterlife differ, the unifying testimony of the human heart throughout history is belief in life after death. Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal—that this world is not all there is.

 

—Randy Alcorn, Heaven (Tyndale, 2004)

 

 

Larson, C. B., & Ten Elshof, P. (2008). 1001 illustrations that connect (164). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House.