We can judge what a place is like by those who live there. A man with a skewer through his nose belongs to the rain forest. The occupant of a Rolls with a liveried driver suggests city opulence. The glory of the angels reflects the glories of heaven.

In IWT13 I wrote about heaven. I shall take up residence there and am naturally curious about it and about its permanent habitants. Are the natives friendly? John in Revelation mentions some of them. Since God's dominion is vaster than all stellar space, those we find there are likely to be different from me. Well I hope so – for their sakes.

Several million different life-forms exist on the earth and in the sea; some are beyond verbal description - animals such as jellyfish, coral and amoebas. But this planet is tiny compared with the vastness of God's domain and it must contain endless spirit forms. John gives us glimpses, but obviously God's creative hand must spill out endless varieties.

Ezekiel saw the Zoa, what our English Bibles call 'living creatures', Ezek.1:5. Some six centuries later the apostle John also saw the Zoa, Rev. 4:6. Often they are regarded as visionary dreams or apocalyptic symbols. There are such visualisations in John and Daniel, the famous prophetical 'beasts,' like cartoons of the world empires. But prophets and others have met living presences, beings of overpowering majesty. Daniel fainted when he saw one, and John wanted to worship another similar awesome Personality. They are 'living creatures'.

To describe new orders of existence, especially spirit beings would be hard. John and Ezekiel could only compare them with what people knew. They described three sets of wings, a man's hand under the wings, four faces reminding him of noble animals, powerful legs gleaming like bronze, and a general appearance fire streaming light as they moved. They went from place to place with instant rapidity. On the ground he saw them like a wonderful complexity, wheels within wheels.

It is curious but nobody can imagine space aliens more attractive than ourselves. Star Wars and TV space fiction invent creatures that look as like freaks, born with genetic malformations needing plastic surgery. Other beings are not like men but worse. God doesn't make horrors. He made the Zoa, who are very different and He delights in new species as evidence of His glory and beauty. On earth His creatures are marvellous, with many species so different from one another, skylarks and whales, tadpoles and giraffes. He made them of dust, but He formed the celestial Zoa from light as centres of burning energy, flowing with beauty. He also made other celestial beings. The nearest creatures to ourselves are the angels, invested with visible splendour outside our experience, and yet they are sent to minister to us, the heirs of salvation.

What glories await us! What endless fascination! John says the Zoa were full of eyes round about, seeing in every direction. Snakes have powers to 'see' in all directions not by eyes but by sensing the electrical stimuli of hidden prey. We do not possess extended awareness yet, but we shall at the resurrection. John tells us about Zoa's many 'eyes', but it is difficult to imagine. But he is certainly talking to a kind of multi-consciousness, awareness in every direction. They are godlike with sight not needing our fleshly senses of eyes, ears and tactility. God of course is infinitely perceiving, direct, Spirit to spirit.

Modern technology 'sees' contours of the sea bed miles below the surface, never seen by mortal eye. God has not less power than science. He knows the shape of our soul, and the contours of our character. We ourselves have some experience of seeing the invisible. "What no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived God has revealed it to us by His Spirit". By the Holy Spirit we see God, and by the gifts of the Spirit we know what is beyond our immediate vision and natural faculties. We already have a higher consciousness. "The Spirit answers to the blood and tells me I am born of God".

These Zoa with many eyes 'see', or know, beyond all normal sight. In Scripture Paul says "We see but a poor reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully". The mirror he knew was only polished copper or bronze, a shadowy image, not like our silvered glass. That is how we see one another now, knowing one another only 'partly'. But when resurrected with a body like Christ we shall have instant powers of recognition, when all things will be transparent to us as to the Zoa and other species of spiritual existence. Such things tell us of the promises of God, glimpses of conditions that will be ours as our life here ends.

Jerusalem the golden! "I know not, I know not what glories wait us there, what joys beyond compare". ____________

As a lad I never knew why the pastor was always preaching about trials and troubles. I didn't seem to need ointments and plasters for wounds. Desperately poor as we were, and always hungry, I accepted it as normal in this world.

Eventually came the responsibility of a congregation. Trouble still did not trouble me. Life's stress and discomfort seemed normal to me. I had learned the right words to say to my congregation, mostly much older than myself, that God was testing us. He stood heavily on our foot and told us to praise Him.

Then, one wintry morning a woman asked me to go with her. We went into the hills which were pockmarked with inky black pools polluted by industrial effluent. By the edge of one such foul place she told me of her desperation and declared her wish to end her life in it.

At that moment my blithe spirit faded like a switched off TV screen. The problem of suffering danced constantly in my brain, taunting and haunting. It became the main subject of my ministry and drove me to seek the answer. First I pored over the sermons of great preachers, culling for words, for balm. I found C. S. Lewis who called suffering 'God's intolerable compliment'. That seemed wise and I could not un-think it. But it brought no cheer to church members in hospital.

It was not only the sickness and tragedy puzzled me, but what Scripture said about it, particularly statements in the New Testament. What I read there was unparalleled anywhere else. But they were hard sayings. I believed them, preached them, but couldn't see them. Jesus Himself said "Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted". But why I wondered should it be like that? Why did God make a world in which comfort was needed? I remember being alone in my single lodgings with raging toothache for a week. I found true what Shakespeare said. "There was never yet a philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently". It needs a cure not a caress. I couldn't forget that desolate soul by the ugly marl hole. She needed a stronger arm than mine round her shoulders. No words, no amount of money, no music could do anything for her, and she represented the whole inconsolable world.

For me then came the joy of marriage to a wonderful girl, and no better way to start a family! But her family tree included Bishop Hooper. Queen Mary had him burned alive for his faith. He died in unspeakable agony. Dead - how could he be comforted?

I puzzled over 2 Corinthians 4:17: "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." If there as an answer it had to be there, in the hereafter.

It was clear enough from the Word that this was no world of bliss. Eliphaz tried to comfort Job saying "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards." Jesus also said "In the world you will have tribulation" and after a good few decades on earth I've proved how right He was. Nothing different seemed ever to be intended. God does not send affliction but leaves us here exposed to it. Our lot is not to be snatched away to be like the angels.

The mists began to clear and I saw that the Word of God said nothing about a world without trouble being better. We must pass through this 'vale of tears' to get and be where and what God wanted us to be. He knew what it would be when He permitted our birth. Jesus pushed His disciples off in a boat knowing full well that Galilee would soon be a boiling cauldron, but He always did what He saw the Father do. He could have stilled that storm, but instead He saw them through it. Paul went to three cities "confirming the souls of the disciples exhorting them that we MUST through much tribulation enter the kingdom of God." This Greek indicative is 'dei', it is right and proper, it behoves us, it is the thing to do. It is the word of Jesus saying He MUST do His Father's will.

I began to see it as if from a lookout across an eternal landscape. I am still scanning it. I observe that the road is left rough with full justification, not mere compensation. It had to stay that way underfoot because something great was afoot. Jesus said "O slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken, ought not Christ to have suffered these things?" Christ OUGHT to have suffered! Peter says the same thing about us. "Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering as though something strange were happening to you, but rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed."

If we would read the facts we might understand better. God has revealed to us nothing merely to gratify our own curiosity. He gives us secrets only for the fulfilment of His purposes. Jesus told His disciples "All things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you … that you should go and bring forth fruit." So putting together what we know we shall learn more. Begin with the angels, so important in the Divine economy. Some angels sinned and were reduced to planetary level. It was a minor rebellion leaving the masses of heaven unaffected, they could be foolish for "God charges his angels with folly" but they are innocent like children, with no experience of temptation or trial.

Outside the human race nobody knows suffering or stress – except God. Angels and cherubim don't have worries or nights when the darkness seems endless, the future peopled with stalking evils. No devil is there to push the Zoa or angels to the brink. The Divine glories they enjoy beyond our thought leaves them without allure for the tawdry tinsel of our material world.

So why aren't we favoured like angels? What is God up to, pushing us off to struggle across life's raging seas? We are like mariners the Psalm talks about going down into the depths and then tossed high on hills of heaving water, like a mouse in the paws of a cat.

God has plans and purposes that angels cannot fulfil. They require humans, a special species, that God put here to be shaped by the wild weather, and be identified by a patina of triumph over adversity. He wanted people who had proved His grace and had overcome, victorious people, feeble flesh but more than conquerors over the greatest evil forces and triumphant in stressful conditions. Nobody is exempt from such moulding and making. Elijah wanted to die, John the Baptist was jailed, apostles were hunted like vermin and "it was fitting for him, for whom all things exist, to make the author of our salvation himself perfect through sufferings", Heb.2:10. It needs us, people who have gone to hell and back, to be God's vanguard marching into the eternal future, pillars of the new heaven and new earth in which righteousness dwells. Chiselled and battered into shape, the only creatures overcoming the world, the flesh and the devil, and now to the praise of God and His great salvation becoming the foundation stones of the eternal city.

When Christ shall gather us in the fair land where God is, nobody there will be like us. Only one order will have come through great tribulation redeemed and washed in Christ's blood. No angel, no Zoa, can glorify God like those once dead in iniquity but who overcame the world, the flesh and the devil. The matchless redeemed will take over heaven. Angels will abandon the streets of the city of God to give place to the pilgrims of the night, their new song of the Lamb vibrating against the crystal walls. There will be praise and glory to God in the Church for ever.

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