Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men,
but chosen by God and precious.
1 Peter 2:4
How do you tell the difference between a living stone and a non-living stone? Ask it a question and if it doesn’t respond, assume it is dead.
Earth is a living sphere with organisms abounding on every square inch of the planet’s surface. Hundreds of millions of bacteria can live in a drop of water, and scores of dust mites can fit on the head of a pin. Yet, if you add the weight of every whale, elephant, insect, and all of the other living things in the world, it would still be less than 1/1000th of 1% of earth’s total mass.
Most everything around us is inert matter. Rock, sand, water, air, minerals, and magma are most of what this place is made of, and none of it is alive. Heaven is a different story. I imagine life to be everywhere, even in things that are quite dead down here. The old laws of physics and biology won’t apply in the New Jerusalem. After all, the Bible talks about living stones and living water.
Probably 99.999% of all preachers will tell you that the verse above is to be interpreted figuratively, meaning it’s an illustration to help us understand spiritual truth. Old Testament worship centered around the temple in Jerusalem, which was built with massive, beautiful, quarried stones. Under the new covenant, the church is not a building or even an organization, but an organism. Its believers are edified together as living stones on the foundation of Christ, who is the principal Living Stone. The idea is to compare and contrast how things were before Christ died on the cross and the change that happened afterwards. It’s really not supposed to be taken literally.
However, if you want to have a little fun with it, think outside the box. John the Baptist preached that “God is able to raise up children of Abraham from […] stones” (Matthew 3:9). If we’re supposed to take this power of God literally, why can’t I, with my wild imagination, do the same with the verse above. I can see Jesus in heaven somehow manifesting Himself as a real, honest to goodness Living Stone, with the beauty of a ruby, the luster of a diamond, and the intricacies of marble. Wow – that’s no ordinary stone!
January 27
