Honor (SA)

People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.

 - From Revelation 21

Glory and honor.

In New Jerusalem, there will be some sense of the passage of time . . . there are still twelve months. There are fruits that grow in season. As there are the twelve days of Christmas, so there are twelve months in a year. Our basic, fundamental unit of time measurement, a year, is divided into twelve, or roughly, into months which correspond to the moon's phases.

It will glorious, as if we all were children experiencing the magic of Christmas every day. Except, the magic will be real.

This is glory. Pure joy tied to greatness, excellence, justice, and abundance.

But there's the part about "honor" in eternity. We have to realize that eternal beings do not have the same goals, desires, needs, and drives as we do. We have these various forms of hunger, in our lives today. Some hungers must be assuaged, if we are to live. Others are just primitive-type drives that, as highly-developed and willful creatures, we are capable of controlling. Some of these drives may be denied, and it will not kill us. This is the self-control that Nature, or God, expects us to exercise. We are not like the lower forms of creatures, that operate on instinct and can't help themselves.

We can help ourselves.

We aspire to the Kingdom of God and a residence in New Jerusalem. Where honor prevails, the people are permanently joyful. And they have mastered themselves. They are no longer controlled by their drives.

This is essence of honor. This is why "purity" goes hand-in-hand with honor. You cannot be selfish and pure at the same time. You cannot be impure, or unclean, and have honor. An honorable person is a clean-living person. An honorable person is the person that we once thought was commendable; the kind of person you would want your son or daughter to marry. They checked their impulses. They withheld pleasures for themselves. They delayed gratification. And this was considered a worthy aspiration.

But we now mock that kind of attitude. Rather than urging our culture and society onward and upward to lofty goals and principles, we have brought the lofty principles down to our own level, or lower . . . so that no one has to reach for anything. Leave people alone so they can scratch their itch. Elevate the lowest common denominator.

If Eternity is in a realm where people are unselfish, not driven by selfish desires, not prone to satisfying themselves first and maybe others later . . . then shouldn't that inform our vision of society and culture, in this age?