What Everybody Missed About The Thief On The Cross | Tim Mackie
- Andy McIlvain
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Video from John 14:6
What Everybody Missed About The Thief On The Cross | Tim Mackie
"Tim Mackie’s message is that prayer is not merely a religious task but a way of entering the deeper reality the Bible calls “Paradise,” which he shows is not just a future heaven but a present, living dimension of God’s presence woven through Scripture. He builds that case by tracing the word and image of Paradise from Genesis 2, where the Garden of Eden is the original sacred space, to Luke 23, where Jesus tells the thief, “today you will be with me in Paradise,” which Mackie argues means Jesus is pointing back to Eden language rather than merely to “heaven,” and then to Revelation 21–22, where the end of the Bible reveals a garden-city with the river of life and tree of life, showing that the biblical story begins and ends with renewed Eden. He then connects this to Paul’s experience in 2 Corinthians 12, where “the third heaven” and “Paradise” are presented as the same reality, and to Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28, Ezekiel’s visionary call, and the Transfiguration in Luke 9, all of which he reads as moments when heaven and earth overlap and people encounter the living God in altered states of consciousness. His central claim is that Paradise is ultimately not a location but a person—Jesus, the “Eternal now” and “Perpetual present”—so prayer is the practice of surrendering our whole selves, not only our minds, to that presence and learning to see reality as it truly is. In that frame, the biblical story is not about escaping earth, but about recognizing that God is already near, that heaven is breaking into ordinary life, and that worship, liturgy, and prayer are invitations to taste Eden now, even while we still live east of it.' from the video introduction
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