For Deep Theological Question number seven, I ask this: are there caterpillars in Heaven?
We’ve previously established that it’s in conformity with Judeo-Christian thinking to believe there are animals in Heaven. We see horses in Revelation, and Ivy told us that Proverbs 12:10 indicates that animals have souls (animal souls, but nevertheless.) It’s within the abilities of an omnipotent God to have whatever He wants in Heaven, and therefore we can assume there’s no impediment to animals being there too.
If you’ve ever visited my Seven Archangels website, you know it’s narrated by the Archangel Remiel, and she has her own email address. Someone wrote to her and asked if there were butterflies in Heaven, and she wrote back that yes, there were.
But that got me thinking: are there caterpillars in Heaven?
We posit that in Heaven there will be no more death. I assume that means animals and insects won’t die either, and therefore there’s no need for them to reproduce.
Caterpillars die, but even if they went to Heaven, or to a New Earth, caterpillars are an intermediate state. And in Heaven, won’t everything be brought to completion?
Someone asked me if I picture Emily in Heaven as a child, and I replied no, right from the day she died, I viewed her as an adult.
But the Biblical view of God (as Gary Rendsburg tells us) is a God of History, and history implies time, and time implies change. So do butterflies just get recycled and start over again?
I’m not sure. But I don’t see that anything would be trapped forever in an intermediate state. All things will be brought to completion, and that may mean no caterpillars in Heaven.
I would miss caterpillars, so they have to be there. (God doesn’t want us to miss things, does he?)
In school, they’re used to teach life cycles. Things go around and change and start again. Change is good. They would be proof — on a small understandable scale — that growth and change is part of life.
I don’t like where this is going. Does “brought to completion” mean unchanging? Does it mean that I will never learn to sing Child ballads or play piano? That you won’t get better at violin? Will we be students stuck on the same lesson? Will we suddenly master it and lose the joy of learning and slow mastery?
What about reading a new book? Will we have read it already? How will we enjoy a mystery or feel suspense?
Nope, the idea of a finished and unchanging Heaven doesn’t appeal to me.
Heaven needs caterpillars. We need things that grow and change and grow again in new ways.
My POV on the ‘glorified body’ in heaven is that it would be the completion of the being’s life, but unbound from time, being simultaneously all that it has ever had the potential to be. In eternity we will no longer be limited to experiencing time moment by singular moment; like God, we will know all moments and (I think) in heaven exist in all moments. So…we’ll be brought to completion – you may then be a proficient violinist, the caterpillar would be a butterfly – but you would also be learning the violin and enjoying all the intermediate stages in the same eternal moment, and the butterfly would exist as egg, caterpillar, pupae, and butterfly, all in that eternal moment. Which is why I think the glorified body is always so unrecognizable, because we limited humans simply cannot comprehend or make sense of that glimpse of Eternity and so we ‘see’ it instead as something recognizably human but strange.
I don’t know if any of that makes sense outside of my head (where it barely makes sense even to me) but that is what I meditate on sometimes. Eternity as all of the moments, no longer divided.