What’s heaven like? And why wonder about heaven anyway?
Why? Well: because anything we’ll be doing for the next million years surely deserves our serious attention!
And God makes clear in the New Testament that thinking about heaven is vital for our survival. The big panorama of eternity is the vital backcloth to our lives here; grasping it makes a huge difference to our spiritual growth.
We’re in a continual battle to be radical disciples; radical amid all the brainwashing that pushes us to live the same way as everybody else; battling too against the temptations of the flesh, and all the malice of the devil. How do we resist? When Paul presents the vital spiritual ‘armour’ that protects us, he says our hope of our coming salvation is our ‘helmet’, that which protects our minds (1 Thessalonians 5:8). Our grasp of the glory of what God has got stored up for us is what will protect our thinking! ‘Set your hearts on things above’, he instructs the Colossians (3:1, NIV as usual); we are meant to be ‘hungry for heaven’, ‘longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling’ (2 Corinthians 5:2).
(So be warned, this is an extended post – heaven’s a wonderful topic!)
Peter says the same. In both his epistles we see a clear choice set out: desire for heaven set repeatedly against the ‘evil desires’ of this world. ‘[Setting] your hope fully on the grace to be given you’ is God’s alternative to ‘[conforming] to the evil desires you had’ (look at 1 Peter 1:13-14). The people who ignore the hope of the future are also the ones who ‘follow their own evil desires’ (2 Peter 3:3-4); it’s through God’s ‘very great and precious promises’ that we ‘escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires’ (2 Peter 1:4). Our lives are shaped by what we desire; and it’s one set of desires or the other.
The writer of Hebrews likewise reminds its readers that they were able to cope with having their possessions confiscated precisely because of their firm grasp of the glory of heaven (10:34). And he evocatively describes our hope as an ‘anchor’, reaching in ‘behind the curtain’(6:19); it’s like a ship’s anchor that fastens into the invisible ocean floor, and so stops it being blown around up on the surface. Our firm imaginative grasp of what we cannot see keeps us from being shaken by the waves we can see.
So when Paul tells us that ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Corinthians 2:9), we can take it as a challenge! God wants us to begin to grasp, be thrilled by, even be armed by these things (Ephesians 1:17-18); by such faith we will live (Hebrews 10:34-38). It’s not surprising that the central Christian meal, the Lord’s Supper, is also, in part, future-orientated (‘For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ [emphasis mine], 1 Corinthians 11:26). We need that regular stimulus to our vision. What God has prepared for us is more than we can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). It’s worth our chewing on that, dreaming about it, getting the glory of it into our souls… because this may prove crucial to our spiritual survival!
Grasping this priority is surely the symbolic purpose of Christ’s ascension. Heaven isn’t somewhere up in the sky, after all; as we’ll see in a moment, it’s a supernatural dimension that overlaps in all sorts of ways with our own. Why then did God choose for Jesus’ departure to be expressed by disappearing upwards (rather than by, say, Jesus declaring, ‘I am with you always,’ and then just vanishing)? What important lesson does this embody? Surely it’s to make the point that Jesus’ being ‘here still but unrevealed’ is a glorious fact, but is not the whole story. Rather, there’s an all-important sense in which our Master, ‘the one who comes from above … not of this world’ (John 3:31; 8:23), has ‘gone away’ (see John 14:28) somewhere better, to another dimension ‘above’ (God’s chosen phrasing, Colossians 3:1). And we His people belong there (Colossians 3:2-4); we are ‘aliens and strangers’ in this world (1 Peter 2:11), no more at home here now than Jesus was (John 17:16).
So now, even as we labour as He did to get as much heaven on earth now as possible, our deepest desires and loyalties are elsewhere. That better world with its own values is where we belong, where we’re headed, and what we are to focus on above all. ‘Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things’, says Paul (Colossians 3:2). ‘So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen’, he adds in 2 Corinthians 4:18. ‘Enemies of the cross’ live with their ‘mind on earthly things` [there’s a thought…] `But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there’ (Philippians 3:19-20). ‘The present heavens and earth are reserved for fire … Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?’ (2 Peter 3:7,11). That world, not this, is where we are called primarily to invest our efforts and store up our treasure (Matthew 6:19-20), and our dream is ‘to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far’ (Philippians 1:23).
So back to Revelation then. How does it all conclude? At the end of chapter 20 comes the final judgment, and the catastrophic fate of hell for everyone whose name is not written in the book of life (20:15). And now there’s a massive transition. The ‘first heaven and the first earth’ have ‘passed away’ (21:1). (‘The heavens will disappear with a roar’, writes Peter; ‘the elements will be destroyed by fire … we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness’ [2 Peter 3:10,13].) And now God brings into being that hugely glorious ‘new heaven and new earth’ (Revelation 21:1).
What will this mean for us if we’re followers of Jesus? It means we’ll move into the life God created us for: living in His presence forever. It’s hard to imagine (but worth trying!) how fantastic this will be. To repeat, 1 Corinthians 2:9 tells us that ‘no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him’; and Ephesians 2:7 says God plans to use the coming ages to show us just how colossally He loves us! (We can see why Titus 2:13 says that ‘we wait for the blessed hope – the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ’ that will bring us into all this!) God is a God of infinite love, joy and creativity, and it’s going to be glory beyond imagination to experience that fully. And as we think about Jesus’ invitation to share our Master’s joy (Matthew 25:21,23), we should remember again that God, as Dallas Willard says, is certainly the most joyful being in the universe! In comparison we have only tasted the slightest droplets of joy, even in our best moments here!
But there could be nothing more tragic than to miss out on this (as so many of our friends may do). This post is more about heaven than hell, but we need to grasp the reality of both. On both topics it’s not clever to be too dogmatic, but here are some ideas and possibilities to think about.
Most of us would simply prefer that hell didn’t exist. But Jesus makes clear that it does. There is His unflinching either/or in Matthew 7:13-14: ‘Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.’ There is His warning in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:30, and He repeats it elsewhere) that ‘if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body’ – really? – ‘than for your whole body to go into hell.’ There is a similar either/or in Matthew 25:32-34,41, where our alternative destinations are heaven or else a hellish environment not designed for humans at all. And there’s His famous narrative of the rich man in hell in Luke 16:23-26.
The fact is that, whatever it’s like, hell has to exist if human freedom is to be real. God doesn’t rape people and force them into His presence. But Jesus makes it very clear (John 3:3): it’s if we choose to live under God’s kingship and to invite the life and presence of God within us now that we will have God’s kingship and His life and presence then; if we choose against heaven now, we won’t have heaven then. There comes a point when our life-choice becomes fixed (like Graham Greene’s Bendrix at the tragic close of The End of the Affair), when we have rejected grace for the last time (2 Corinthians 6:1). But that is the most disastrous thing in the world.
This whole topic of hell is difficult, because often our understandings come not from the Bible but from the imaginations of the medieval Church. We can be sure that hell is not like the medieval pictures of devils toasting people with pitchforks like cheese. (In the traditions (hadiths) of our Muslim friends, by the way, hell is like that and far worse.) 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 describes the fate of the lost as being shut out in the darkness, outside God’s presence; so do Matthew 25:30 and Luke 13:24-28. Biblically, being excluded from God’s presence seems basic to what hell is about.
What does that imply? There’s so much we don’t know. It seems reasonable to think that hell will be as merciful as a loving God can make it: God doesn’t want any of us to go there, and that’s why He took the quite astounding step of giving His only Son to bear hell for us on the cross. There is indeed a real case for saying that biblically hell is eternal and conscious; but in Britain, some of our greatest Bible Christian leaders, like John Stott and Michael Green, people totally committed to Scripture’s reliability and authority, have disputed this.(1) But even if Scripture does teach that hell is ‘eternal and conscious’, what would that mean? Perhaps, in God’s mercy, time passes almost infinitely slowly there. Perhaps too, as C S Lewis suggested in The Great Divorce (still arguably the best book to read about hell), in hell our consciousnesses and personalities disintegrate, so that what survives there is not so much a grumbler as a grumble. It’s certainly true that relationship with God is what most enhances our personalities, and perhaps the further and longer we get away from God, the more our personalities disintegrate. We see that with drug addicts: how a personality can dwindle to a craving and almost nothing more.
But still Jesus makes clear that the danger of hell is enormously, unbelievably serious. Think what it means to experience absolute separation, forever, from God’s presence. God is the source of all love, all joy, all peace, all hope. So to be separated, absolutely and forever, from the presence of God is presumably to be in a state (if we can imagine it) where there is no love, no joy, no peace, no hope, and there never will be. The mind staggers before such a thought. Jesus speaks understandably of ‘darkness, where there will be weeping’ (Matthew 22:13). No one could imagine anything more catastrophic. God’s love should motivate us each to do all we can to ensure that nobody, anywhere in the world at all, fails to realise the huge consequences of joining their lives now to Jesus, or not. If we’re separated from Jesus when we die, that means permanent, disastrous separation from Him thereafter; if we’re joined to Jesus when we die, we’ll be with Him forever in heaven, sharing glory beyond our wildest dreams.
The fact is that Jesus makes it clear, whether we like it or not, that there is a hell, that it’s most definitely not a good fate to end up with; and that people like us go there. If we have any love in our hearts we must surely warn our friends – implore them, says Paul (2 Corinthians 5:20) – to repent, receive the Lord’s forgiveness and be reconciled to God. Indeed if we see the world the way God the Father does (John 3:16), we’ll know that any price is worth paying to ensure that people throughout the world can act upon God’s rescuing gospel.
Let’s pray that, somehow, God helps us grasp what Jesus says about the seriousness and horror of hell, and witness accordingly to the way, the only way, that our friends and colleagues can be sure to avoid going there!
But the other place, the glorious one…
So then, heaven. So many things that happen – death, unhealed disease, unrepaired relationships – are inexplicable on earth, and make sense only when we take our training for heaven into account. In heaven we will have millions upon millions of years to harvest the benefit of what has happened here, and to use the steel that is in our souls because of tough things that happened here that could never have happened in heaven. Only in the light of this training can some of the things that occur here make any sense. It’s one of the ways in which our hope of heaven is our ‘anchor’.
So a few things about heaven. When we ‘die and go to heaven’, just where do we go?
Maybe nowhere that we haven’t gone already! Above all, heaven means being with Jesus. So biblically, heaven is not where we go when we die; heaven is where we go now when we first become Christians and are born again! Paul describes our situation as believers now like this: ‘God … seated us with [Christ] in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus’ (Ephesians 2:6).(2) In other words, we are already, now, ‘seated with Christ’ in heaven! When we were born again, we were completely united with Christ – brought definitively into His Body (1 Corinthians 12:13). Or to put it another way, God’s Spirit who came to live inside us then is the ‘deposit’ or foretaste (or down-payment!) of heaven, as Paul keeps on saying (eg Ephesians 1:14; 2 Corinthians 5:5). From then on, heaven has a foothold or bridgehead inside us, from which its transforming powers break now into our decaying world; and one day – at death or the second coming – they will sweep through our personalities completely. But the foothold’s there already. Graham Kendrick’s song ‘Heaven Is In My Heart’ had it right! When we were born again, we entered into heaven, and heaven entered into us. We are with God, He is with us; we are ‘seated’ in heaven now!
Of course, we don’t actually feel it; most of the time, anyway. Right now our five senses are firmly attuned to this world; and so – most of the time, apart from odd moments, hints, occasional glimpses in the best minutes of our lives that we sense momentarily and then they’re gone – we don’t actually experience heaven, our being ‘seated’ in total union with Christ. But that’s why death will be the supreme adventure. We’re like people walking through the woods wearing headphones. Outside, the birds are singing, but there’s too much noise pumping into our ears, and we can’t hear them at all. Then suddenly the batteries go totally dead … and for the first time we hear what’s really there! So when we close our eyes for the last time to this world, and open them to the more real, eternal universe, we shall suddenly see where we’ve been living – see the forces that really matter, the overwhelming universe of angels and demons, God and Satan, heaven and hell, that we’ve been stumbling around all this time. It will undoubtedly come as a shock. No doubt we’ll ask, ‘Why did I worry so much? Why was I so afraid? Why did I invest my energies the way I did?’ In addition, we’ll see the rest of the Body of Christ, including all our fellow-believers who have ‘crossed over’ earlier.
So what’s it going to be like?
It’s unimaginable: that much we know! There will certainly be some real continuity with the best of our present world (otherwise why does Scripture speak of a new ‘earth’ [Revelation 21:1; 2 Peter 3:13]?) There will also clearly be a dramatic break, not just with the earth we know, but the heavens too. ‘Heaven and earth will pass away’, says Jesus clearly (Matthew 24:35). Peter says:
`The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.
Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? … That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.` (2 Peter 3:10-13. And see also Psalm 102:26, Isaiah 51:6, and Hebrews 1:11-12.)
We cannot imagine the ways in which our glorious new home may be radically different. For instance, Jesus’ laconic statement that in the world to come there is no marriage as we know it (Matthew 22:30) clearly implies, as Don Carson says, ‘an existence quite unlike this present one’.(3) This does seem to undermine the currently popular idea that the eternal world is pretty much like the present one, only purged of evil. A ‘new heaven’ as well as a ‘new earth’ does sound like a radically transformed cosmos, and this new cosmos of heaven and earth may be very different to ours in all kinds of glorious, thrilling and unimaginable ways!
Paul describes what he saw in this new cosmos that will so triumphantly replace our own as ‘inexpressible things’ (2 Corinthians 12:4; see also 1 Corinthians 2:9 and 1 John 3:2). And in Revelation 4 and 5 we sense John, inspired by God the Spirit, stretching language to its limits in his struggle to catch something of the wonder he’s seen.
But of this much we can be sure: to be totally in the presence of God, face to face with Him at last, must be to experience the fullness of His infinite love, infinite joy, infinite peace, infinite gentleness. Heaven exists because the Lord loves us and wants our company; His longing is that we should be with Him (John 17:24; Ephesians 2:7). We’ve only ever caught the briefest and most limited glimpses, here on earth, of what undiluted love and joy are like. There, we’re going to taste them fully. Thank You, Lord!
We shall experience all Christ’s glory there (John 17:24): the glory Moses longed to see but was told he simply could not see and survive (Exodus 33:20); and we shall worship! We read about a fantastic worship symphony in Revelation 4, and especially 5:9-14. One day we shall see this with our own eyes! Thank You, Lord!
And even more amazingly, that glory will overflow into us and be in us (Romans 8:18)! When Christ comes back, says Paul, He will ‘be glorified in’ – not merely by, but in – ‘his holy people’ (2 Thessalonians 1:10,12). We shall look at each other and see a unique embodiment of the glory of God that He has brought to expression in us, as throughout our lives He has helped us become like Jesus. At the end of history the community of God, the collective Bride of Christ, will actually shine ‘with the glory of God’ (Revelation 21:11). We won’t just see the glory; it will be flooding out through us. So we can look forward to knowing each other as we never have before, and thereby learning more and more of God’s glory. Just as the New Testament sees ‘worship’ as something that includes our ‘service’ to others, as well as the more direct offering of thanks and adoration to God, so it seems reasonable to think that our worship will include seeing His glory through learning what He has done in and for each of us – how He’s saved us, rescued us, transformed us throughout our lives. I love having dinner with friends where throughout the meal we swap good stories; millions of years won’t be enough to hear each believer’s unique story of how the Lord worked – secretly and openly – His symphony of transfiguration in their life. And that will send us back to the throne of God in adoration. The eternal heavenly community is going to be a great place to be!
(An even wilder speculation: maybe that’s why Jesus made that odd comment that there’s no marriage in heaven, in Matthew 22:30? He can’t have meant that we lose the deep closeness we had on earth – it’s hard to imagine Him saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t allow that here!’ Maybe the alternative is that all relationships we have there are lifted to the maximum, like the best possible marriage… God’s infinite love flowing continually through, and so from and to, each member of His Body, world without end?)
And, according to Paul, we shall have bodies: ‘redeemed’ bodies (Romans 8:23), bodies transformed ‘so that they will be like [Christ’s] glorious body’ (Philippians 3:21); yet still glorious bodies. Jesus made a deliberate point of demonstrating in His glorified body that He still enjoyed eating (Luke 24:41)! This bizarre fact can preserve us from any ideas of heaven as something tediously bloodless and passionless. Jesus came to bring us ‘life … to the full’ (John 10:10). In heaven we shan’t be drifting around as insubstantial ghosts; rather we shall experience the life we were created for (see 2 Corinthians 5:5), for the very first time.
God cares about our bodies. We’re made for something richer, something fuller, than what we have now; but what is ‘mortal’ in us won’t be ‘unclothed’, says Paul, it will ‘be swallowed up by life’ (2 Corinthians 5:4). The wonderful verses of 1 Corinthians 15:37-44 (please pause to read them!) show us more: our new bodies (‘raised in glory … raised in power’) may be as unimaginably different from what we have now (‘sown in dishonour … sown in weakness’) as is the butterfly from the chrysalis it has cast off, or the full-grown wheat from the shrivelled seed we plant. Yet, like the wheat’s relation to the seed, they will still be us. Perhaps our first steps will be like the first moments after a long illness or injury – that strange feeling of flexing our limbs, gingerly, then more easily, remembering with surprise what it used to feel like to be healthy, without weakness or pain. So probably after death, or Christ’s return (Philippians 3:20-21): we shall stretch out in surprise and know, for the first time, what it means to be fully human, fully, gloriously whole.
And Hebrews 10:34 tells us there will be rewards for us, ‘better and lasting possessions’. (‘Treasures in heaven’ as Matthew 6:20 puts it; the ‘true riches’ Jesus mentions in Luke 16:11.) Even the gift of a cup of cold water back in our past will not go forgotten or unrewarded (Matthew 10:42); our loving God is very good at this! To quote the astonishing words of 1 Corinthians 4:5, ‘Each will receive his praise from God’! (Hadn’t we assumed it would always be the other way round?!)
But surely heaven will be forward-looking even more than backward-looking. There will be immensely worthwhile things for us to do. Work on earth only became drudgery after the Fall (Genesis 3:17), because of our wilful independence from God. Paul’s reference to supervising angels (1 Corinthians 6:3) – and probably Jesus’ parable about looking after ten cities (Luke 19:17), and His remark about the Master putting His faithful servant ‘in charge of all his possessions’ (Matthew 24:47) – hint at creative activity in the new heaven and new earth where we’ll have many opportunities to build something outrageously, joyfully wonderful to the eternal glory of God.
And all that is just part of the big picture. Heaven is not only about our individual salvation and transformation, though it certainly is about that. No: heaven is also about the fulfilment of God’s master-plan for a whole transfigured cosmos. Romans makes this clear. The first five chapters of Romans set out how we can be forgiven and right with God, warning us against the age-old ‘religious’ temptation that creates slavery rather than relationship, of trying to please God by our good deeds, our law-keeping or our religious rituals. They climax in the famous verse of Romans 5:1: ‘Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (emphasis mine).
But many Christians act as if Paul, and Romans, stops there. In fact this is just the vital foundation, the removal of the barrier separating us from the great things that follow. Romans 6 announces our transformation, declaring, amazingly: ‘Sin shall not be your master’ (v14). In other words, there is absolutely no wrongful or destructive behaviour that we cannot break free from, as people whose old innermost self is dead, who are ‘born again’ and hence ‘controlled’ now in their deepest being by the Holy Spirit Himself! Chapters 6, 7 and the first half of 8 lead us through how, over time, that works. But there are still greater things to come. What these chapters lead up to (4) is, first, Romans 8:19-21:
The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. (Emphasis mine)
The point here is massive cosmic transformation. Here on earth we live in a world where everything decays. But heaven is different. Imagine instead a universe where ‘grace reigns’ (Romans 5:21): grace, the principle of heaven, God’s endless loving creativity forever bringing something out of nothing, from glory to glory. Imagine a universe where all this world’s decay and futility have been reversed forever by the glory that has its bridgehead now, invisibly, in God’s people; where this world and our entire cosmos ‘will be liberated from its bondage to decay’. (‘I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us!’, declares Paul three verses earlier [8:18].) It will be a ‘new heaven and new earth’ where the deterministic, entropic laws of this fallen world – everything gradually disintegrating, falling apart (see 1 Peter 1:23-25 and Ecclesiastes 1); where there’s no beauty that doesn’t fade, no achievement that doesn’t eventually crumble, no glory that can ultimately endure – are replaced entirely by the loving purposefulness and creativity of God. And there will be ‘no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’ (Revelation 21:4).
This is what heaven’s about! It is with this cosmic transfiguration that God’s long-term purposes begin. (And once again, we can’t imagine all the radical change and glory it implies [look at 1 Corinthians 2:9].) Our individual heavenly destinies find their wonderful place within that. Heaven is not some mere epilogue to our life here; rather, our lives here are just the brief preface to the millions of years of joyful wonder to come. And yes, God is doing something crucial with us here, because there are vital lessons we can only learn, vital training we can only experience, in a fallen world where there’s suffering and where God sometimes seems absent. And during all that time we are the bridgehead through which the heavenly dimension, the kingdom of God, has been breaking in (Romans 8:21), because in us there is always the seed of the Word, the seed of the alternative universe (1 Peter 1:23; James 1:18). But with the millions of years of eternity, the alternative takes over altogether, and stretches away into distances of glory beyond which our limited imaginations cannot hope to follow. All this is what heaven is about. Now the real game begins!
And even more thrilling and mind-stretching, we shall be just like Jesus! Not merely ‘nice’; not even merely holy; but actually ‘conformed to the likeness of his Son’, with absolutely everything that implies (Romans 8:29). This is the other crucial verse that all the previous parts of Romans lead up to: the goal of all God’s loving purposes and planning, the consummation of our entire existence. Or as Galatians wonderfully puts it: Christ will finally have been ‘formed in us’ (4:19)! Not that we will be clones; God is infinitely creative, and undoubtedly we will each be like Jesus in uniquely diverse and individual ways, true to the glorious personality He has been moulding in each of us. The long, predestined process whereby God has sculptured us, in all we learn and all we suffer, in each act of service, each relationship, each deliberate choice for holiness, each Bible passage or sermon or group study absorbed… God will have woven all this together with unimaginable skill, so that in the end, as we see Jesus completely, we are finally made just like Him (look at 1 John 3:2). All the love, joy, gentleness and power for good of Christ will now be flooding out through us, just as they do through Him. We’ll be ready to share Christ’s throne (Revelation 3:21; Romans 8:17,32), to share everything that our heavenly Bridegroom is and owns, because heaven will finally have spread right through our personalities. Thank You, Lord!
Now we see the point of that odd preposition in Romans 8:18, where Paul speaks of the ‘glory that will be revealed in us’ (emphasis mine), not to us; ‘that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (2 Thessalonians 2:14); so that, bizarrely, Jesus might be the ‘firstborn among many brothers’ (Romans 8:29). (Is that one of those verses where we feel, ‘Had I written the Bible I would never have said that’?) But what deeper glory – by definition – could the Father possibly grant us than to be ‘conformed’, totally, ‘to the likeness of his Son’? ‘Attaining to the whole measure of the fulness of Christ’ (Ephesians 4:13, emphasis mine) – being ‘filled to the measure of all the fulness of God’ (Ephesians 3:19, emphasis mine): these promises, once we really reflect on their meaning, become astonishing. And yet God has predestined nothing less for our futures. ‘He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all – how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?’ (Romans 8:32). ‘Those He justified, He also glorified’ (Romans 8:30): God is a God who delights to share all His glory with us, from top to bottom. Millions of years will never be enough to exhaust it. As Ephesians 3:20 says, what God has planned for us is simply far more than we can ask or imagine.
I love this passage from C S Lewis’ Screwtape Proposes a Toast:
`There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours … It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.`
‘Strongly tempted to worship’, because we will be so like Jesus! It’s happening already, Paul tells us: ‘We … are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3:18).(5) There, at last, it will be complete.
And most joyful of all: we will not only be `like` Jesus, we will see Jesus face to face and be with Him forever; the Bride with the Bridegroom at last. ‘One thing I ask of the LORD,’ David wrote, ‘this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in His temple’ (Psalm 27:4). That longing will be totally fulfilled! No: millions of future years will surely not be enough to exhaust all this wonder, glory and joy of heaven! Thank You, Lord!
(I say ‘millions of years…’ here – but in heaven will there be such a thing as time? Well, who knows? Like we’ve said, the eternal world is probably different from this one in ways we can’t begin to conceive, and this may be one last example.(6) But anyway, what can this question mean? We can’t imagine heaven as like a block of ice, frozen in motionless perfection forever. We haven’t a clue what the possibilities may be, nor how our radically transformed eternal consciousnesses may experience time. Maybe the end of ‘time as we know it’ means its replacement by some other, heavenly kind of process? Passages like Jesus’ parable of the talents hint that we’ll have joyful, creative work to do in the new heaven and earth, as we’ve seen. And the glory of God is infinite, so there’s no way we as finite beings can apprehend it all at once – we can’t have the capacity for everything God in His love will want to reveal to us, and share with us. So does that suggest we’ll be involved in an eternal process, continually learning, feeding on, drinking in, more of God – more and more and more? And maybe, where now time is our master and we are its slaves, maybe its heavenly equivalent will be a more flexible medium that we can master and sail through in whatever way best enables our growing discovery of God (a day as 1,000 years when it’s useful, or 1,000 years as a day)? Who knows! But whatever it is, C S Lewis surely has it right in The Last Battle: always ‘farther up and farther in’ to the glory of God…!)
Possibilities, interpretations, speculations. Some of them probably completely wrong. Heaven is ‘more than we can ask or think’! But we can at least try to imagine what something ‘more than we can ask or think’ might be like – to think and dream about what it is that no eye has seen, no ear heard – that God has got stored up for those who love Him… That’s a huge reason for not letting anyone we care about miss out on all this, because it’s only if we’ve invited heaven in now that we’ll have heaven then. But for our own sakes too, as Jesus tells us, we should surely rejoice over what we know about heaven (Luke 10:20)!
So let’s reflect thankfully on heaven, dream about how it can be. It has been enormously refreshing preparing this post! God wants us to start to grasp, be thrilled, even be awed by, the future He has stored up for us (Ephesians 1:18; Colossians 3:1-2). Let that glory sink deep into your soul, because as we feed on it, we will begin to live it, and it will keep us anchored, helmeted, unbrainwashed, radically and actively devoted, while we’re waiting…
We are called to walk the way of Christ’s cross in this world, because the cross leads to the resurrection, and beyond that to glory beyond our wildest dreams…
NOTES
(1) The Evangelical Alliance has produced a very helpful study of this issue titled The Nature of Hell (2000).
(2) In fact ‘heavenly realms’ is better translated here and elsewhere (see Ephesians 6:12) as ‘the supernatural realms’. In this post, however, we’re using the word ‘heaven’ in its conventional sense for the realm ‘in Christ’ in which we shall live out our glorious future eternal life.
(3) D A Carson, Expositor’s Bible Commentary on Matthew (Zondervan, 1995), p461. Watchman Nee comments on the words of Revelation 20:11 ‘Earth and sky fled … and there was no place for them’: ‘Some consider this fleeing of the earth and heaven as only a divine act of re-making, but the succeeding clause, “and there was found no place for them” [AV], clearly shows that the old heaven and earth are completely destroyed’. Come, Lord Jesus (Christian Fellowship Publishers, 1976), p221.
(4) For a more in–depth treatment of these exceptionally glorious chapters see Pete Lowman, Gateways to God: Seeking Spiritual Depth in a Post-Modern World (Christian Focus, 2001), chapter 6.
(5) Interestingly, and practically, this key passage about the means of our transformation is actually talking about reading God’s Word the Bible (see the context from v14). Peter likewise focuses on the Word of God as the imperishable seed of our new life in 1 Peter 1:23-25.
(6) This whole aspect, incidentally, is something that (thinking about the question of the rapture’s timing, that we discuss in another post in `Other Useful Stuff`) LaHaye for example forgets when he mocks the ‘post-trib’ view that Christ’s people will meet Him in the air as He descends from heaven and then return to earth with Him: ‘We zip up to the Father’s house, take a quick peek in there, and zip right back down moments later with Christ … The post-Trib theory allows no time for the Judgment Seat of Christ [cf 2 Corinthians 5:10] and the Marriage Supper of the Lamb [Revelation 19] … Only the pre-Trib position allows sufficient time (at least seven years) for these events to be fulfilled with dignity and grace’ (The Rapture, pp123-24). It’s strange that LaHaye can’t see how an extended period of ‘heaven-time’ fully sufficient for these might yet appear only momentary in earth’s time. And as for the marriage supper, again LaHaye doesn’t allow for the possibility that our transformed consciousnesses might function simultaneously in both the earthly dimension and the heavenly dimension of the marriage supper too. After all, Ephesians 2:6 makes clear that we live in the heavenly dimension as well as the earthly one even now; we just aren’t conscious of it. And in the eternal state we may well be transformed in all kinds of other, unimaginable ways!
(This is a slightly edited version of a chapter from my A Guide to the End of the World, available on Kindle or in book form from https://instantapostle.com/books/a-guide-to-the-end-of-the-world/ .)
