My son is 19 years old with many ideas, hopes and dreams for his future. I remember how I felt at his age. He wants to experience life as he knows it and serve the Lord here. I told him that the Lord has wonderful work for us to do when we are raptured. What do you think we will be doing after the rapture? What does the Bible say about this? Obviously things on earth will be heating up. Will we be dispatched to serve Him in any way?
Part of the problem with thinking ahead is that we only have our Earthly perspectives with which to frame our thoughts. When Paul described the resurrection in terms of a tiny brown seed becoming a beautiful plant or flower in 1 Cor. 15, he was verbalizing that difficulty. We know from the picture on the packet what the seed will grow into, but we would never be able to predict it by merely looking at the seed.
It’s the same with us. We only see ourselves as the seed, it’s all we know. To many, especially the young, our Earthly future can look pretty good, full of adventure and promise, and we don’t want to miss it. But God has seen the flower and already perceives us this way. And He took Paul on a little tour of the future one day to give him a taste of what it will be like. While Paul said he was not allowed to describe it (2 Cor. 12:4) he did say that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him. (1 Cor 2:9)
But think about this. We’ve been created with incredible powers of intellect and creativity, and at the rapture the constraints on those powers, imposed both by our sin nature and our Earth bound existence, will be removed as we become the perfect version of our currently imperfect selves. It’ll be like receiving the most incredible upgrade imaginable.
We’ll be able to travel at the speed of thought to any place and time in Creation, exploring the vast reaches of the universe from the instant of its inception to the very edge of its territory, satisfying every whim of our curiosity, and answering every question of our intellect. We’ll know and understand things that currently leave us hopelessly confused and will easily learn and master skills and abilities we can’t even dream about now.
Of course God will have amazing things for us to do. Otherwise why give us such ability? And as we’re doing them, we’ll recall our Earthly perspective and wonder how we could ever have dreamed so small and settled for so little.