God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
We conclude that in His use of the Old Testament Jesus stood alone among His Jewish contemporaries, and that not because He took unusual liberties with the text (He was in general usually faithful to its intended meaning), but because He believed that in Him it found its fulfillment.
Because the church doesn’t really have heaven on its mind, it tends to be self-indulgent, self-centered, weak, and materialistic. Our present comforts consume too much of our thoughts, and if we’re not careful, we inevitably end up inventing wrong fantasies about heaven – or thinking very little of heaven at all.
