Remember the story of the Tower of Babel? The people thought to work together to make a name for themselves by reaching up to the Heavens. They decided to build a ladder to the sky, hoping to make a pathway to God. They wanted God to come down and validate their vision of the future. But God saw it and was not pleased, because they were not waiting for Him, nor acting with faith in his plans. In disgust, He split them up into many nations, with separate languages, and turned his back on them. He let them follow their own misguided ideas, and deal with the tough consequences, since they refused to listen to Him.
We cannot build the future according to our own plans, rather we must do all of it for the glory of God. And we must be humble to submit to his plans, insofar as we may be able to discern them, or we risk his being displeased.
We have to remember that the gateway, the ladder to Heaven is not a place where We do things, preempting God's blueprint for the future. For the ladder to fulfill its purpose, it has to be an act of faith and obedience, waiting for God Himself to come down and transform our hearts, to lift us up to be with Him. Jesus is the Ladder to Heaven, where we shall see the angels coming down and going up, just as He told the Sanhedrin when they summoned Him to explain Himself and tell them if He was the Messiah.
We will not preempt God's plans for us by building our own rockets into the Heavens. Rockets will not save us. We can only be saved by remaining humble, and treating all of our neighbors as we want them to treat us. When we do this, then we will have a secure foundation, and we can begin to build the kinds of infrastructure in space that will help us to fulfill our jobs as stewards, ordering and renewing our planet.
What is the way to Heaven? Like Jesus, we must love each other, putting our friends first, and be willing to sacrifice in order to see them saved. Only when our enemies refuse to coexist in peace with us can we be separate from them, and then we still have to pray for those who would persecute us. Maybe one day, they may have a change of heart, and then they can come up to join us among the saints and angels.
The more thoughtful among us sometimes ask, "Why is our world so messed up? Was it always this bad?" And while the Church has focused almost solely on the role of sin, the Jews had a more complex answer. We have to remember, it was evident that Jesus believed in demons, as well as angels, so He would have explained it thus. There are three reasons why the world is so screwed up:
1. Humans disobeyed and rebelled against God. This was the sin of Adam and Eve. God wanted to teach us about obedience, so that we could learn morality and grow our own conscience and self-awareness. After our rebellion, we had to learn those the hard way.
2. The rebellious elohim (alien spirits who follow Satan) taught us corrupting ideas, arts for which we were not yet ready, including the ways of weapons and war. This led to gross perversion and depravity. It is a fine irony that some of the same technologies that can help and serve us, rockets, are also the ones most likely for us to use to destroy ourselves. If that were to happen, it would prove the demons' contention that we are not worthy of salvation.
3. After Babel, God turned away from the nations. Why would He waste his efforts to try and lead us, when we clearly preferred to go our own way? Thus, He assigned them to the keeping of lesser gods (those elohim), who had captured their attention with lies and false promises. This led to our going astray, following strange religions offering peculiar promises, and worshipping idols of the lesser gods, who cared little about our wellbeing but demanded our submission and servitude.
It would be centuries, after the Babel Tower episode, before God would choose another man, Abram, from whom to build a new people. He, and they, agreed to follow Him by faith, and to obey his laws for the sake of righteousness. Those new people would be his forever, and He promised to guide and guard them. God established a covenant relationship with them, repeatedly trying to teach them obedience, punishing them for waywardness, and restoring them to favor. And through them, He would later offer his Son to save everyone from our foolishness and the punishment we have merited.
By the death and resurrection of Jesus, God revoked the authority of those lesser gods, to whom He had once delegated the care of the nations. Now, in order to receive his favor and blessings, He wants us to believe in his Son and follow his teachings and example. By accepting Jesus and following Him, we are choosing to cast aside disobedience and rebellion, to avoid perversion and depravity, and to declare anathema against idolatry and the worship of the lesser gods.
God created human beings to be in his image and likeness. But that isn't all there is to it. We were given a whole suite of gifts so that we could accomplish our tasks. These are the "communicable attributes" of God: Creativity, Intelligence, Rationality, Emotions and Free will. We apply these as we perform our roles to be God's image and likeness. To be "like God" is our purpose in all we do. That's the basic job that we were made for. We were created to be God's representatives on this Earth, and to do the rest of the work to order creation and be its stewards. This was his plan, to give us a purpose and meaning for our lives.
And all of the trouble that results from our not following that purpose, in God's opinion, no matter how terrible, was preferable to the emptiness that would have been if He had never created us at all. He knew ahead of time that this would be likely to happen, but divine foreknowledge does not necessitate predestination. It was likely, but not in any way inevitable. God wanted us to be his children, behaving as He does, and to some day take up our place in Heaven ... and He still does.
So what is our task now as believers, if we want to follow our purpose according to God's plan? Perhaps evangelism, bringing as many people as possible into the faith, may well be our first task as Christians. But our second most important task is to make the Kingdom manifest and visible in the world. How do we do that? We need to help each other to become the best disciples that we can be. What was Jesus' message? "The Kingdom of God is at hand, spread upon the Earth, if you will see it." The early church was bent on demonstrating the Kingdom: taking care of each other, meeting needs, teaching right behavior, and edifying the Church.
We need to spread the Gospel, to call new believers, yes, and then we have to show them how to live for the Kingdom. When the great beacon light of the Kingdom so shines before Humanity, they will be challenged - to believe or refuse. But many more will see and believe, when what they see is community, the Body of Christ, loving one another.
It is not our task to colonize space. That is not what we were told to do in the beginning. It IS our task to be stewards of the Earth, however, and going into space may very well be a part of doing that. We were given the task of making the whole Earth into a replica of Eden, a garden where we would live as companions with God. The best way to do that may involve going into space to do science. There is a variety of reasons for why we might decide to build space colonies: 1) we need to learn about balancing broad arrays of life in closed-cycle ecosystems, 2) to study the interdependence of different habitats, 3) to try to bring back an extinct species so as to restore an optimal variety of living creatures, or 4) to try, in isolation, to figure out why maintaining a particular kind of ecosystem is so hard. If we need space colonies for such good reasons, then we have his permission to do those kinds of things. They would serve our goals, and his plans. And if we will need to live in those space colonies in order to best accomplish those studies and tasks, then we are still doing what He asked us to do.
Climbing up into the Heavens is not forbidden to us, but we have to be doing it as part of being obedient, and for the glory of God. Maybe we should decide that we need to build a way to shield the Earth from errant asteroids. These fly randomly through space and threaten to devastate our planet. Or we might decide that we need to build an "Ark" to preserve the world's life forms, as a backup in case something goes wrong. A colony on the moon would help with either or both of those projects. We could do this to serve the aim of taking care of our Earth.
But still, we need to remember, it is not our place to try to escape our planet, and we certainly must not do it for our own glory or to make a name for ourselves. But if we are doing it as a part of following the divine plan, then of course, why would He object? We have to be honest with ourselves, though, and remember that we were created to be like God, and to give Him all the glory.
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