“…by His knowledge My righteous Servant will justify many, and He will bear their iniquities.” (The Book of Isaiah)
This short story will let us feel a sense of contrast in the space of our physical life, going on in the sphere of today’s temporal existence. While holding on to the handrail of existence in our reality with one hand, with the other hand, we’ll try to slightly open the curtain of our future life, when the human soul goes to another dimension of existence, which is beyond time, matter or death.
In doing this, our thoughts, that can move in space at a speed much higher than the speed of light, will be of invaluable assistance. That’s what the Wise Creator enabled them to do. Thoughts are the amazing beams of the human soul, easily and freely penetrating the universe in any direction. Here you can observe the providence of the Lord, Who bestowed upon us this privilege and unique ability to reach the spiritual spheres of existence through our thoughts, despite being trapped in our bodies. Even though the spirit and soul, confined by the material flesh, are temporarily tied to the material world, just like a butterfly that has not yet emerged is tied to its cocoon, our thoughts are already able to reach the edge of the universe. They easily carry us to the things that are dear to us, which our inner essence leads us to, and which we strive for with our spiritual nature.
I invite you to make a mental journey from the present to the future, from the future to the past, and then back to the present.
Imagine that all your life, hour by hour, is filmed with a special video camera. This camera is very, very unusual. It records picture, sound and color with the highest quality imaginable. Moreover, this magic camera records your thoughts, wishes, impulses and intentions – everything that happens in your soul before you do a particular action, all the things invisible to the eye. And this goes on day after day, year after year…
So when you reach the limit assigned to each person, and your soul, freed by death from material bonds, flies to the unknown and indescribably beautiful heavenly abodes, it stops at the majestic entrance to an incredibly beautiful City, located next to the Pearly Gates, shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow.
Fortified with graceful gold pillars, they are framed on both sides by robust towers stretching high upwards and made of amazingly beautiful light-blue stones, that look similar to marble and amber, iridescent inside and shimmering with countless shades from light-turquoise to dark blue.
It’s impossible to take your eyes off these inimitable patterns inside the stone, that give a wonderful feeling of volume and space, as if drawing your gaze deep inside so that it seems to you that you are looking into the unshakeable depth of the ocean. The look of this stone evokes a delightful sense of beauty and strength.
These majestic towers rise high, adorned with transversal protuberances encircling them and vertical structures made of different types and shades of stone, that magnificently fit into the radiant harmony of color and wonderfully complement the overall splendor of the towers.
On both sides of the towers, as far as the eye can see, there are walls about sixty meters high, divided into rectangular symmetrical parts. At the borders, separated by equal intervals, there are massive triple columns on strong foundations, which going up, slightly rise above the walls and end with capitals of an unprecedented design.
The towers themselves, like two giants, standing tall above the walls on each side of the gate, form a kind of an arch over it, so that the towers in their upper part merge into one. There’s an amazing architectural structure right before your eyes – the majestic entrance to the Royal City.
Indeed, a lot of books should be written to describe in detail all sculptural compositions, decorated with countless pilasters, cornices, wreaths, columns with the most extraordinary capitals, various panels made of separate parts and details of unique shapes, colors and shades, emitting a dim, even light from within.
All the precious stones we know of have been used to create this magnificent structure. Whole cascades of incredible shapes, inlays, moldings and carvings merge into a wonderful palette of color, proportions and architectural harmony. The pinnacle of this miracle of the universe is the pearly gates, glowing with a soft mother-of-pearl light, iridescent over the whole surface of their massive doors.
Over the City, like an unfading glow, shines a golden light emitted by the City itself. This light illuminates the surroundings for many hundreds of miles, painting them in soft golden tones, for such is the color scheme of this light, playing in thousands of shades, ranging from pale blue and light yellow to orange and burgundy red. The huge kaleidoscope, the size of the whole sky, is reflected in the clouds with all the colors of the rainbow, it’s sparkling, playing, shimmering, flaring up and fading, resembling the northern lights.
At times, the most intricate combinations of light and color, rays and shades merge in such a miraculous way that it seems that you are looking at some kind of outlandish kingdom, decorated with unthinkable fairy-tale images, bizarre shapes and patterns and other countless combinations of light that captivate your eyes with their constant novelty.
It looks like some invisible artist got carried away and is painting more and more new images on an enormous canvas, covering the whole sky. It’s impossible to take your eyes off this fascinating panorama of grandeur and peace, beauty and splendor, that makes your heart skip a beat with excitement. You can watch it for hours, mesmerized by this miracle, and forget about everything else in the world.
You can hear the echoes of some wonderful music and singing, coming out of this City, soft and welcoming voices are brought to your ears, and you can even distinguish individual words. Oh, how badly you want to enter this wonderful place! You are approached by a minister from this City. He greets you warmly and invites you to come into one of the numerous buildings, located outside the City walls.
Having come inside, you find yourself in the middle of a fairly spacious hall and notice a big screen on the wall across from you.
The minister, accompanying you, turns on the screen and a few moments later a movie, called “My life” begins.
Surprisingly clear and colorful pictures of your past flash before your eyes… You see yourself as a little baby and your mother is leaning over your crib… Then the baby has grown up. You see the first of your childish whims, mischievous deeds, misbehavior and punishment, tears and joy.
Here’s your church, children’s meetings, poems and songs about Christmas and Easter…
School years, classes, inkpots, blots, notebooks, textbooks and school bags…
New friends, first truancies and bad grades…
But what strikes you in particular – in this movie, you can see your own thoughts, all your intentions and impulses that accompanied every action…
Here’s the teacher, asking you why you didn’t do your homework, and you say, looking as miserable as possible, that you had been terribly sick and had barely found the strength to come to school that day…
But, in fact, you had just kicked a ball around till late at night and then chatted with friends till midnight. You told your mom that the teacher was sick and you didn’t need to do any homework…
Then you see an old lady, who you are carefully helping to cross the road with one hand, carrying her bag in the other. Passers-by are praising you for being kind and considerate. But on the screen, you can see that at that moment you hoped the lady would pay you and were rather unhappy when she just thanked you…
Then watch as your youth is drifting by. Here’s your first love, and the second one, and the third, and the fourth… Here’s your wedding, children, work, career…
Day after day, year after year, all your deeds, secret and not, all your thoughts and the intentions of your heart, are now revealed to everyone who is watching this movie. More than once what you saw made you feel like you were burning up and then freezing. More than once your cheeks were flushed, when previously hidden in the dark, your plans and intentions were exposed in front of everyone in this room…
Finally, this torture is over and your guide turns off the screen.
Sad and embarrassed, every moment you are becoming more and more aware of the huge gap that lies between you and this sacred place. The pictures of your life you just saw are swarming in your head. Frustration, with its cold grip, painfully squeezes your heart, and knowing, that you can’t change anything, you have no idea what to do next.
And then the screen flashes again and the minister offers you to watch another movie. Well, you don’t have anywhere to rush to, so you willingly accept his offer.
Pictures of nature from the far east… The birth of a Baby… Instead of the usual comfortable surroundings, you see a simple small barn with cattle, illuminated by a flickering light of a lamp, suspended in the far corner. You can see stalls and hear the heavy breathing of animals, indifferently chewing the cud. You can see the walls made of rough stone, with harness and other peasant tools hanging from them… You can see a young woman, lying on a simple mat, exhausted by labor, and a new-born Baby in a manger, filled with straw…
There is a man, sitting on the ground right next to the woman. Leaning to her, he is wiping her wet face with his belt…
There is no hospital or maternity ward, no ambulance, antibiotics, or IV drips, no diapers or swaddling cloth…
Instead, you see a group of shepherds, who came to the barn straight from the field, dressed in simple and coarse clothes, smelling of wind and herbs, holding wooden staffs in their work-weary hands… Going away, they leave some sheep’s cheese and bread…
Here are His childhood and adolescent years. You can see how the study of Scriptures and Prophecies attracts this child…
Here are His night prayers. While the whole house is asleep, He spends hours praying to God, Whom He called His Heavenly Father …
Here is the joy of His earthly father, when he sees how willingly He assists in the workshop and how good everything that He does turns out…
You see how He spends every minute reading and meditating on Scriptures, how astonished are Jewish leaders and elders by His wisdom and answers… His thoughts and the intentions of His heart are even more amazing!
Here He comes into a synagogue, meets a man with a withered hand and thinks: “Wait just a little bit, and you will be cured. Your disease is to the glory of God…”
Then He meets lepers and they are cleansed…
Here’s a crowded pool of Bethesda, a man long suffering from an illness – sunken darkened cheeks, rags, non-healing ulcers and wounds from bedsores. The unpleasant smell coming from him repels people and everyone shuns him…
But this Man sits down on the paralyzed man’s bed and puts his hand on his head. He looks into his tortured, watery eyes and asks:
– Do you want to be healthy?
– Yes, Lord!
– Take up your bed and go …
Here is Bartimaeus, who for the first time in his life, can see the sky and drifting clouds, and forgetting about everything else in the world, he can’t take his admiring gaze off them…
Here is a funeral procession and a sobbing inconsolable widow mourning the loss of her only son. And suddenly … What a miracle! Her son gets up alive from the stretcher …
Here is Jairus’s daughter, alive and well, coming out of the upper room with Him, and running into the arms of her crying parents…
And then the synagogue again, people’s eyes filled with joy and the frowning faces of leaders and Pharisees…
Here are five thousand people, full with bread and fish, in amazement looking at each other and twelve baskets of the remaining food…
Here is a huge crowd of people with rocks in their hands, holding a fragile, helpless young woman, dressed in torn clothes and shaking with fear, who they roughly throw to the ground in front of Him.
They all are waiting for a quick merciless trial, but He bends to the ground, not looking at the crowd. He looks into her eyes, full of tears and mortal terror: “Save me, Lord!” Her heart is trembling in silent prayer…
And suddenly an incredible thing happens. Just one question – and people around disappear, it’s just Him and her. Haphazardly thrown rocks and quietly descending dust… “And I do not judge you. Go and sin no more…”
Here are sleepless nights, that He, going to the mountains, far away from human bustle, spends in deep prayer. Here are the sleeping disciples, tired of the day’s walk…
Here are the possessed and demons, coming out of them with shouts…
That is going on day after day and year after year. Every new deed is better than the previous one. Everywhere He stepped, people were helped, cured, they found peace and joy, forgiveness of their sins and acquired a new meaning in life…
You can see how His heart was burning with love for people, how His pure and holy thoughts sought to do everything, even the impossible. How grieved His heart, when due to their lack of faith He couldn’t use His miraculous power to help them…
And listen to His words! How wonderful was that harmony of thoughts and words! There wasn’t as much as a shadow of guile, or dubious intention, favoritism, hidden agenda, or manipulation. It was purity and truth itself.
Here are the wicked scribes and Pharisees, whose hearts are boiling with anger and envy. They just saw the resurrected Lazarus and it overflowed their cup of patience…
Here are their insidious questions about divorce, the tribute to Caesar, and even greater anger and hatred, provoked by His impeccably right answers, that brought to light all their slyness, revealing their evil intentions, making them look stupid even in their own eyes, as well as in the eyes of all people.
Here are His pure sincere tears, that He could no longer hold back, approaching Jerusalem, a magnificent city, that He loved beyond all measure, loved its inhabitants, knowing in advance what terrible fate He was about to accept from them…
Here is His last prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the sleeping disciples …
Here is a crowd, excited by high priests’ appeals and wine, holding stakes, swords and torches…
And then His arrest, beatings, trials, more beatings and flogging… A whole detachment of Roman soldiers made entertainment out of torturing Him with an animalistic pleasure for people accustomed to killing.
He felt dizzy, His legs could hardly carry Him… Wounds, hunger and thirst… The last time He had some food was at the Easter supper with His disciples… Then the sleepless night in Gethsemane, arrest, trial in the Sanhedrin, Pilate’s court, Herod’s court, another Pilate’s court, more mockery and torture… Roman soldiers’ iron fists left a lot of bloody marks on His face.
“Prophecy to us. Who hit You?” – and another punch in the face followed…
“Hail, King of the Jews!” – and another trickle of blood is running down His cheek…
And so the soldiers went to their barracks, tired, gloomy and disappointed by not hearing a plea for mercy from Him, by not seeing any resistance, or horror in His eyes, there was just silence and disarming obedience, expressed in a wordless question: “Why are you doing this to Me?”
His body was so weakened and disfigured by beatings that there wasn’t an unaffected spot on it… There was a reason why the notorious Roman whips terrified the whole world. His back, arms and thighs turned into one big bleeding wound…
Here is a cross and the crucifixion… His body hung powerlessly from the cross… He was so disfigured, that even those who knew Him, wouldn’t have recognized Him, if they hadn’t known it was His body there on the cross…
One can remember the words from the Book of Isaiah: “His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness.”
The contrast in comparison with the other two, crucified alongside of Him, involuntarily struck the eye… Just one look at Him caused a shudder: a human body, hanging by nails, with veins stretched to the limit, with ribs so visible, they could be counted, with knees bent and feet folded together and pierced by one nail… The nail wounds on His feet caused terrible suffering and any movement brought about a new wave of unbearable pain…
His arms were stretched along the crossbar with a nail in each hand, His chest was strained under the weight of His hanging body…
Crucifixion was indeed a hellish invention, the most terrible and painful in all of the history of mankind. It was conceived in such a way, that the man hanging on the cross was forced to torture himself.
To take another breath, he had to brace himself, lean on the nail, piercing his feet and take the strain off his chest. The executed was gradually suffocating, unable to breathe freely and for every breath he had to pay with a new wave of horrible pain. And so on until the end, until his heart stopped beating…
The high priests and elders, the scribes and Pharisees were enjoying the spectacle they had long been dreaming about… Deep in their hearts, they hoped He was about to crack and start begging them for forgiveness and mercy. They had seen so many brave and stubborn people, who would grovel and crawl at their feet, begging them to save their lives, when the hour of death was near…
“This One is not any different.” – they thought. “Very soon we’ll hear His screams, we’ll see how He’ll take back all His words and be glad to kiss the dust at our feet, begging us to spare His life…”
But He is silent. No groans, or screams, no complaints, even though His suffering is at its peak. And suddenly… Like a bolt from the blue, He utters: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing!”
And then another blow! One of the robbers, who had previously mocked Him, shocked by His words, suddenly realized: He’s not a person. These are not human words. A person couldn’t say so after what had been done to him… “Remember me, Lord!” – he begged, turning to Him, his face filled with tears…
The high priests were beside themselves with anger and frustration. Why isn’t He asking them to have mercy? The crucified don’t notice the high priests, or soldiers, or the roaring crowd and continue their dialogue about unearthly matters. Every phrase in this conversation destroyed all the foundations of the cruel world they lived in… “Today you will be with me in Paradise” – these words are uttered and then silence again. Only the brutal robber’s face lit up with an unearthly peace and tears of gratitude rolled down his sunken bearded cheeks…
Here are His last words. Here is His spirit, going up from this earth and slowly descending right in the middle of this incredible City in great jubilation, joy and triumph. You can hear loud, victorious exclamations: “It’s finished! Victory! Hosanna to the Winner! Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
Legions of Angels, radiant Archangels, brilliant Leaders of the heavenly host, a multitude of celestial beings with palm branches of peace in their hands greet the Winner! The familiar robber’s face flashes among them. Everything is flooded with a wonderful golden light emanating from a large mountain, where the Throne of the Most High is located.
That’s where He, the admirable Son of Man, dressed in dazzling white clothes, headed for, and bowing down before the Heavenly Father, He laid His victory, obtained in such a difficult way, at His feet.
You don’t want to take your eyes off this amazing sight of happiness, peace, love, triumph and jubilation and you feel tears of admiration coming out of them.
Yes, the life you just saw was truly beautiful. It is especially strongly felt in front of the Gates to the amazing City, the very air of which seems to be filled with holiness and love. Here your soul, freed from the confines of your body, with particular acuteness sees the difference between your life and the life of the Son of Man.
With a painful feeling of yearning and jealousy, you imagine how proud you would be standing at the Gate of this City, if your life was even remotely similar to the life of the Son of Man. Oh, then you too would be able to tell the Creator with joy in your heart: “Behold, as Your servant, I did everything I could to glorify Your name, Father!”
But now… It’s absolutely clear, that having such a biography, you don’t have any right to be in this City. And this is fair.
Deeper and deeper immersed in these thoughts, feeling more and more hopeless, you don’t notice that your guide is standing in front of you. His face and eyes are shining with some inexplicable light from within, while his look fills your soul with anticipation of something extraordinary and important.
– My brother! – he says. – You just saw a huge gap between your life and the life of the Son of Man. I see that your soul is grieving. It’s true, your life is incompatible.
What he says next sounds like a bolt from the blue:
– But the Son of Man did not live His Life for Himself. Today He offers you His wonderful life instead of yours. Everything you saw in His life: labor, ministry, suffering, mockery, humiliation and painful death – all of this He endured for you. Now you have a chance to replace your life with a wonderful life of the Son of Man, if you accept Him as your Substitute. This way, you’ll be able to enter the Holy City. If you agree to accept Him, He is ready to exchange with you right now. The choice is yours.
Saying these words, the minister reaches out his hands to you, and, amazed, you can see scars from terrible wounds on them.
At this moment you wake up… You can see a thin streak of dawn, a fresh morning breeze blows into the room and moves the curtain. Outside the window you can hear the noise of the city, waking up from the night’s rest, the birds are singing, there’s a sound of a plane, flying by behind the clouds.
“Oh, my God! How thankful I am to You for the Son of Man, for Your wonderful plan of salvation and for this lesson that You taught me, as great mercy, last night! From now on and forever, my life will belong only to You, and with my deepest gratitude I’m giving it to the Son of Man forever and ever!”
My dear friend, who is now reading these lines! Today, Jesus Christ offers you His wonderful life instead of yours, burdened with many sins and crimes. You will never achieve the Divine standards of righteousness, so that you could enter this marvelous City. The Son of Man already did it for you. You don’t need to worry, or be trialed at Pilate’s or Herod’s court, you don’t need to go to the high priests at the Sanhedrin, you don’t need to endure the torture at the hands of the Roman soldiers or go to the cross. The Son of Man has gone through all this for you.
And for your share, the Lord will grant this memorable joy and happiness of living an eternal life with God and the Son of Man in His wonderful City with all the saved. Take this priceless gift of God’s love! You must do it today!
Bow to God and tell Him about your decision from now on and forever to belong only to Him. Renounce all your sins, for the sake of the Son of Man, and ask Him for forgiveness.
Invite the Son of Man into your life, so that His life would henceforth become your life, so that He would keep you in His right hand, and at the end of your earthly days, take you to His abodes of Heaven.
