Last Sunday, the sermon at my church was based in Revelation Chapter 20 in the Bible. Revelation is a book full of vivid imagery of the return of Christ, war, judgement, salvation, and the end of the world. That vivid imagery is what made Revelation one of my favorite books of the Bible to read when I was a kid. This Sunday, while trying to construct and explore these images and their underlying meaning, particularly for my own personal end times, it suddenly struck me that maybe it can be compared to an instanced dungeon. After church, I began bouncing this idea off of my fellow congregants, but alas, no one else there knew what an instanced dungeon was. Not too many WoW players at my church, *sigh*. So I write of it here.
In a massively online mulitiplayer game, MMO, there may be thousands or even millions of players spread out over dozens or hundreds of servers. Even with a large number of servers, it isn’t feasible for a lot of player to play the same special content, i.e. a dungeon, at the same time. To solve this problem, each player or group of players gets their own copy, or instance, of that dungeon. That way everyone gets a chance to play special quests or challenges.
I believe that at death, when we go to be with God, we are pulled out of time. I think of this as a change of perspective really to one where time no longer passes as we experience on this side of reality. So in Heaven, there is no waiting for those who died after you to arrive. When you die, you’re at the end of the story, boom, everyone who ever lived is there just like the vision John describes in the book of Revelation. Our individual deaths are like getting an instanced dungeon of the book of Revelation. But since God has more than enough servers and CPU cycles (LOL), I guess only the dying part is truly instanced for each person. Everyone gets to share the experience of John’s vision together.