Cultural re-education
While I was preparing this lesson a phrase came to my mind. It was paraphrase really of a cosmonaut, a Russian astronaut, arriving in orbit, looking around and saying, “Hmm, I don’t see any God up here.”
Something else came quickly to mind: “I wonder if he really said that.” That is what my Christian culture ingrained in me, but sometimes reality runs along a different tangent than culture. So I launched off into the or-bits and or-bytes of the internet to look around. I found Yuri Gagarin up there and relearned that he was the first human into orbit and the one I connected with that phrase.
In the verbatim transcripts of his earth-space communications no such phrase can be found. “Uh, oh, here it goes again,” went my thoughts. “Another point I have had poured into me falling all to pieces. Great!” As I kept reading I found that it was not a phrase concocted by proponents of Christianity (whew!) but a phrase from a Soviet premiere concocted against religion in general. It seems that this phrase originated from Nikita Khrushchev*. Between 1958 and 1964 the U.S.S.R. was in the midst of an anti-religion campaign. During that campaign Khrushchev said something about Gagarin not seeing God when he was in space.
Gagarin was a national hero on par with Lindbergh. Khrushchev cunningly tied Khrushchev’s anti-religion perspective to that national hero. Only later on did it begin being attributed to Gagarin**. So it seems plausible to me that Gagarin’s prowess was hijacked for Khrushchev’s initiatives.
The real heaven is different than Khrushchev was indoctrinating. Heaven as a place is inaccessible to molecules as we know them. While there is a connection between God in heaven and man on earth no initiative of ourselves will find a trail to it. For Khrushchev to announce that God was not seen from a spaceship is preposterous. It is merely the deceitfulness of propaganda.
The trail of any person to God is only found when God shows himself to that person. That is a trail of faith, but a dependable trail, a trail of maturity.
In Revelation 21 we will see that God’s dwelling place will eventually be with humanity, but that is for later. In that later that John wrote of something which was different, evident, perceivable, seeable. When heaven was opened as we see here in verse 11 we see a start of something new.
References:
* Leaders of the USSR (Copied from WorldAtlas.com-accessed 12/29/2017)
Historical Leaders Of The Soviet Union | Era In Power |
---|---|
Vladimir Lenin | Formation-1924 |
Josef Stalin | 1924-1953 |
Georgy Malenkov | 1953-1955 |
Nikita Krushchev | 1955-1964 |
Leonid Brezhnev | 1964-1982 |
Yuri Andropov | 1982-1984 |
Konstantin Chernenko | 1984-1985 |
Mikhail Gorbachev | 1985-1991 |
Gennady Yanayev | 1991 |
** Two useful links on the Gagarin/Khrushchev matter are here (half way through the Vostok 1 section (accessed 12/27/2017)) and here from an interview with a friend of Gagarin. The most relevant section being under the second heading of that interview (accessed 12/27/2017).
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