Spoiler alert, I wish I could do this without giving any info of Season 4 of The Good Place. But let’s be honest, it’s me! So if you really want to continue reading this, go watch The Good Place season 4 first so I don’t ruin it for you!
So the end. The Good Place. Or heaven. What would that be like? Perfect life for eternity. Is that really what we want?
The Good Place Season 4 makes a great case for why an eternity in a perfect world could be… Boring. But there’s a reason they run out of things to do, places to see and all their days seem to be exactly the same. Mondaine and boring.
The writers of The Good Place are limited by what they know. It’s the fact that they are human. They’re limited by what has been and their brains can only imagine a limited amount of what could be.
We can put it this way, did people 100 or 200 years ago know what the Earth would be like today? Even Back to The Future got it wrong. It’s actually a lot cooler than that in fact. There’s a lot we couldn’t even imagine!
We couldn’t imagine it.
Here’s the reality that we don’t account for when we imagine heaven/eternity/the end- we were not responsible for creating this world to begin with. And we are not responsible for creating the after life either.
But there are hints all around us of what eternity will be like. There are moments in our lives that express the essence of a perfect world. You know those moments. The ones where time stands still and you wish it could last forever.
It’s your first kiss. It’s time spent with your best friend and you’re having so much fun, you wish it would never end. It’s when the whole family is together in one room and everyone is getting along. It’s when life has you content and happy and for a short moment you feel like where you are is where you’re meant to be.
I personally believe there are also aspects of hell on Earth. Wasps for one! (I’ve been stung three times in my life! And every time it has felt worst than child birth.
But really, aspects of hell are when those negative situations or circumstances suddenly pop up and turn your world upside down. It literally takes a hold of all the joy and reason to live.
When you find out the one you thought loved you was cheating on you. Abusive relationships. Bullies. Natural disasters. Sicknesses.
Take all of that stuff away. All of those scary surprises that mess up a great day. And suddenly you might just have a perfect world. A world that can possibly look like an eternity in heaven. But again, we don’t know because we are not responsible to create it.
And thank God too! I mean, what if you were responsible to create this entire world. And not just creatures and matter or space and time. But feelings. Social systems. The definition of good and bad. How people are connected. How people feel accomplished. How to give people meaning and purpose.
It’s not something a flawed human being can create. It takes a God! And the same way this God created this phenomenal world, this God is responsible for the world that comes afterwards.
Not to mention human beings and the devil totally messed with this world anyway. So it’s a hot mess that God did not intend it to be. But He wants us to choose to be with Him ourselves. He’s not going to force us. So our time here on Earth is God giving us opportunity after opportunity to choose Him and to trust Him with creating the perfect world for us.
