Will God take away part of our memory when we enter paradise?

[layhoma]

Revelation 21:4
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."


When we enter paradise in this condition, I can't imagine how there will not be pain or tears from the memories we endured from this world. Examples:

A victim of rape carries the trauma in her mind.
The worries if loved ones will be saved during the last 7 years of tribulations.
If we fail to find our loved ones in paradise, there will be tears.

Just to name a few............

The only argument that counters my question would be - Isaiah 55:9

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

So lets just take an educated guess from our finite wisdom at this moment, the only way when we enter paradise when there is no pain and tears would be for God to erase part of the unpleasant memories we bring along and even erase that part where we met or associated with friends and loved ones in the past.

Anyone would like to comment?

 

[Resha Caner]

I'm just speculating, but I don't know why God would wipe out our memories. The Revelations verse indicates healing more than annihilation. There are verses about forgetting, but they're in a somewhat poetic context so it's dubious to take them too literally.

All I can say is that I believe it's possible to heal without forgetting.

IMO what Christ has done for us - the reason for rejoicing in heaven - would be empty if we couldn't remember why he sacrificed for us.

 

[jpcedotal]

This is kind of where the argument for the meaning of "Second Death" comes from and the question, "Is Hell eternal?"

I was raised Baptist, but within the last few years I have really devoted myself to studying God's Word in context...

and you bring up a good point

My dad is not saved and when we are both physically dead, how can I possibly be happy knowing my dad is burning forever in Hell...unless for some reason, I no longer know my dad?

Second Death...death of the soul....death of the very essence of who a person is that includes memories others have of this person...the soul gets totally erased from ever being...whatever a soul is....not turned to something else or some dead thing, but becomes nonexistent, becomes nothing that ever was. Those who die lost will suffer a second death and when this happens, those who are saved will no longer have any emotional and/or spiritual connection with them...because they never existed...that includes memories.

OR

maybe there is no such thing as "memory" for the saved...only for the lost and this in itself is hell as they relive every mistake they have made and every time they turned down the pulling of the Holy Spirit.

OR

there is no time, no past (memories), no future (expectation), only the now always in Christ, always focused and turned toward God, always filled with the Holy Spirit....all three together at once with me always and forever...there is nothing else.

That is just my opinion(s).

 

[Resha Caner]

My dad is not saved and when we are both physically dead, how can I possibly be happy knowing my dad is burning forever in Hell...unless for some reason, I no longer know my dad?

The idea that the unsaved would just cease to exist is a comforting alternative to eternal torment, but I don't see Scripture teaching that. I would be happy to be wrong about it, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

One flaw I see in what you said is an implication that joy has to be all or nothing. I'm not sure that's quite right. I mean, are we to say God has no joy? He's living with we sinful beings right now, and He isn't going to change when the earth disappears. So does he have joy or doesn't he? I'm pretty sure God has joy. But He also is saddened by sin.

The difference is His perfect understanding. I believe there can be joy in God's justice just as much as in his mercy. So, to human ears, it's sounds horrible to say we would rejoice in the justice given to unbelievers, but that may well be the case.

If that's not the case, it leads to all kinds of weird contradictions. One I already mentioned. Another is this: God supposedly "forgets" our sin - and that is not some future thing. We are forgiven now.

Since God has unfettered access to all that exists, for Him to "forget" something in a complete sense would mean it ceases to exist. Well, but I can remember past sins. If I can remember them, they still exist in that sense, and God is aware of it. So does that mean God actually hasn't forgotten - hasn't forgiven me? No. Rather I think it means the phrase has been burdened with unintended meaning.

 

[jpcedotal]

The idea that the unsaved would just cease to exist is a comforting alternative to eternal torment, but I don't see Scripture teaching that. I would be happy to be wrong about it, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

One flaw I see in what you said is an implication that joy has to be all or nothing. I'm not sure that's quite right. I mean, are we to say God has no joy? He's living with we sinful beings right now, and He isn't going to change when the earth disappears. So does he have joy or doesn't he? I'm pretty sure God has joy. But He also is saddened by sin.

The difference is His perfect understanding. I believe there can be joy in God's justice just as much as in his mercy. So, to human ears, it's sounds horrible to say we would rejoice in the justice given to unbelievers, but that may well be the case.

If that's not the case, it leads to all kinds of weird contradictions. One I already mentioned. Another is this: God supposedly "forgets" our sin - and that is not some future thing. We are forgiven now.

Since God has unfettered access to all that exists, for Him to "forget" something in a complete sense would mean it ceases to exist. Well, but I can remember past sins. If I can remember them, they still exist in that sense, and God is aware of it. So does that mean God actually hasn't forgotten - hasn't forgiven me? No. Rather I think it means the phrase has been burdened with unintended meaning.

Like a said, it is just an opinion and not one that changes my relationship with God or weakens my faith if everything i stated is wrong. As far as I remember without looking it up, there is only one passage that tells of a conversation between someone in Hell and someone in Heaven and the thing that strikes me as odd and does "fit" into "the saved having no knowledge of the damned" is the fact that the beggar Lazarus never says anything. In fact, there is not anything to suggest Lazarus even knew the conversation is going on....

 

[Resha Caner]

Like a said, it is just an opinion and not one that changes my relationship with God or weakens my faith if everything i stated is wrong.

Thanks for saying that, and it's the same for me. These are basically just my opinions.

 

[juvenissun]

Revelation 21:4
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."


When we enter paradise in this condition, I can't imagine how there will not be pain or tears from the memories we endured from this world. Examples:

A victim of rape carries the trauma in her mind.
The worries if loved ones will be saved during the last 7 years of tribulations.
If we fail to find our loved ones in paradise, there will be tears.

Just to name a few............

The only argument that counters my question would be - Isaiah 55:9

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

So lets just take an educated guess from our finite wisdom at this moment, the only way when we enter paradise when there is no pain and tears would be for God to erase part of the unpleasant memories we bring along and even erase that part where we met or associated with friends and loved ones in the past.

Anyone would like to comment?

One thing we MUST know: The way that God put us on the earth to live a few tenth of years of earth life is very meaningful to everyone of us whom God is going to use in His Kingdom. We are different on the earth. So will we be different in the Heaven. Our learning and our experience obtained in our earthly life make us different from each other. There is no sense to wipe out ANY of our memory. Otherwise, the one up there won't be you or me anymore.

Provided, if some memories are useless, God will wipe it out when we are still alive on the earth. We DO NOT remember everything we did. In fact, we remembered very little of our experience.

 

[ViaCrucis]

A descent doctor severs a diseased limb, a great doctor heals it and restores it entirely.

We will, most assuredly, be made whole in the Age to Come. It's not that we will forget the things that injured us, or the sufferings we experienced, or even the awful things we had committed; it is that in Christ, in the perfect of Christ, there will be wholeness, such that our mourning will turn to joy, our sorrows into laughter.

C.S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce has this great passage,

"“Son,'he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why...the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly.” "

Not that Lewis is an authority on the hereafter, but I do think it is a remarkable way of understanding the sort of newness, wholeness, the glory of the Age to Come when God makes all things new and all is restored and made right.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[x141]

Within every thought, there is a seed of Life.