Quotes from J. Richard Middleton

The important point here is that the idea of "heaven" as the eternal hope of the righteous has no structural place in the story. It is simply irrelevant and extraneous to the plot. Heaven was never part of God's purposes for humanity in the beginning of the story and has no intrinsic role as the final destiny of human salvation.

It is all too common in many churches around the world for believers to have absorbed the view that they must accept all calamities as the will of God, and many think that they must suffer in silence or even affirm God's role in the calamities. But this stance of absolute submission to the divine, exemplified by Abraham in Genesis 22, is not typical of biblical faith.

Ethics is lived eschatology. It is, as New Testament scholar George Eldon Ladd put it, "the presence of the future."4

The Old Testament does not spiritualize salvation, but rather understands it as God's deliverance of people and land from all that destroys life and the consequent restoration of people and land to flourishing.

The inner logic of this vision of holistic salvation is that the creator has not given up on creation and is working to salvage and restore the world (human and nonhuman) to the fullness of shalom and flourishing intended from the beginning. And redeemed human beings, renewed in God's image, are to work toward and embody this vision in their daily lives.

You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth. (Rev. 5:9–10)