Metaphor 14 - Pets

Maybe that doesn’t bother you. Maybe you are thinking, "So what? I’ll be dead and buried and gone, one day, and the wrath of God won’t matter to me then." But you would be forgetting about the metaphor of Chicagoland. Remember that one of the things Pierre the pseudo-robot would have been wrong about was his existence ending when his robot body was destroyed by a Mack Truck.

Just so is it with us. The body may be destroyed, but the spirit that inhabits it goes on. And there is another aspect of the Chicagoland metaphor I should like expand upon with another metaphor, one suggested from something C.S. Lewis once wrote.

Imagine wild dogs. In the wild, dogs have their own drives and instincts and a particular mental makeup that drives their behavior.

Now consider domesticated dogs that we have as pets. Their long association with us humans, while not changing their basic drives and instincts, has changed their mental make up to a remarkable degree. Pet owners will tell you that their dogs, overtime, eventually develop personalities that have human qualities to them. In a sense, human association with a dog has raised the dog’s mental makeup up into a higher degree of being then it would have had as a wild dog.

Now remember that human beings were created for the express purpose of contemplating God, and that one of the characteristics of God is eternity. So a consequence of the creation of our Chicagolands, our spirits, is that they have some of God’s quality of eternity "rubbing off" on them. We have eternity in our hearts. Our bodies and our spirits inhabit time, but once the body dies in time, eternity is the home of the spirit, the Chicagoland.

This is another reason why God must "do something" when such being as ourselves becomes unlike Him. And why we should be very concerned indeed about what the "something" will be.

So we’ve now come around to the idea of the eternal wrath of God. And you may be asking me, Robert DeNiro style, "Are you talk’in to me?" For which I answer, "Yes, I am." And I have another metaphor.