Driving through Utah

Travel Update: We left Azusa, California at 8am on Tuesday and arrived in Buena Vista Colorado at 11:40pm.

Topics of conversation in the car:
#1. Death before the fall - our universe operates tremendously on principles of decay... radiation, light, burning (stars), growing. For animals to survive there has to be death because all living creatures feed on other living things - carnivores and herbivores. And so did man. Why would a God create a universe with laws for operation and then randomly have a component of creation violate them. Man grows, lives, operates on all accounts on this principle as well... and thus would have had to reached a point of "earthly" mortal death... though hundreds of years beyond what we know life to be now.

#2. Going to prepare a place - the universe we live in was prepared for us so intentionally and so fine tuned. It has dimensions and universal laws that govern our existence... such as space and time. If Jesus was "going to prepare a place" for us that means an alternate existence with new dimensions and new universal laws would have to be created for us to exist in. Essentially, a feature of our existence as a unique creation of God requires that we exist in a defined state. Our new "universe" (for lack of a better term) won't necessarily be the same as the one, but it also won't put us on the same playing field as God himself. He is beyond the requisite of dimensions. After our death on earth, we may understand more, we may be going to a better place... but we won't be elevated to a status of a mini-God ourselves. I think American evangelicalism subtly, maybe unknowingly, promotes the idea that our supernatural capabilities in "Heaven" will be more than what I read the Bible to imply about our nature as created beings.

Yes... we really talked for quite a while about this yesterday driving through Utah. :)