You would think that men and women trapped in a fallen world and stuck with a fallen nature would eagerly long for the day when God takes them away from it all to live in a perfect heaven. A few do, but most do not. We find it difficult to muster up a real desire for a heaven we haven’t seen and cannot clearly imagine.
No doubt, our lack of enthusiasm stems in part from simple fear. We naturally fear death. Even with the assurance that God’s hand will lead us safely through the shadow, it isn’t easy to anticipate the passage. The chasm is solidly bridged and the guide trustworthy, but that doesn’t cure our vertigo.
But mainly we don’t long for heaven because what most of us know of it simply doesn’t appeal to us. The images of heaven we have in our minds don’t seem to match up all that well with our deepest longings. It’s like being invited to a chamber music concert when what we really wanted was to go to the ball game.
Are these ideas we have about heaven accurate? The heavenly city described in the book of Revelation is truly magnificent—massive, golden, jeweled, impregnable, and shimmering with the glory of God’s presence.1 But is the apostle John giving us a literal description of heaven or a symbolic picture of its perfection?
And what about the life we will live in that city? Do we imagine it accurately? Most of us share common ideas we have picked up from paintings and cartoons showing figures clad in halos and gowns, reclining dreamily on soft clouds while strumming away on golden harps or singing an endless hymn of praise in a celestial choir. And many assume we will be pure spirits in heaven. They have trouble imagining these mammal-like bodies with all their natural physical functions entering a heaven of spiritual perfection.
Do We Really Desire Heaven?
Most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, must admit that these common ideas of heaven are not very appealing. The heavenly city is undoubtedly magnificent, but it seems more like a showplace to look at than a home to live in. To spend eternity sitting around on cloudy cushions or in perpetual song may seem peaceful, but we can hardly help thinking it might get boring after a while. Floating around in the vaporous form of a pure spirit might be great fun at first, but after the novelty wore off, most of us would want our old, solid bodies back. We would miss touching, tasting, and having an apparatus capable of doing things. (There are strong indications in the New Testament that one of the tortures of demons is that they have no bodies in which to live and function. They seemed always to be looking for bodies to possess. They were so desperate that even pigs’ bodies would do if they could not find a human host.2)
In spite of these uninviting mental pictures of heaven that most Christians share, all insist it is where they want to go when they die. Of course, there is not much else they can say; the choice is pretty limited. They can’t stay on earth forever (which might be the first choice of most of us) because it is going to be destroyed, so it’s either a dull heaven or a hot hell. Naturally, they choose heaven, but perhaps without real enthusiasm. It’s like marrying the wealthy widow to avoid facing bankruptcy.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate what God is offering us; we think it’s right neighborly of him to ask us to come live in his place since ours is messed up and marked for demolition. But it all seems a little much—a little too fancy for ordinary folks like us. It’s too much like visiting in the home of a rich aunt where you always have to dress your Sunday best, sit up straight, keep your feet clean, say “please” and “thank you, ma’am” and be careful about wiping your nose.
What most of us would really like is to have strong, splendid, healthy, flesh-and-blood bodies built like Greek gods or goddesses. We would like to have important things to do and exciting challenges to meet. We would like a place where we could bask in the sun and go for a dunk in an idyllic swimming hole, then dry off by running through the shade of a cool, deep wood without stickers or poison ivy.
Many of us—through we don’t talk about it and like to pretend it is not important—find the idea of heaven unappealing because we think we will lose our sexuality. We enjoy being sexual creatures, and are a little disappointed (maybe more than just a little) by hints that sex may be an aspect of our humanness that we will be without in heaven.
But the Bible doesn’t actually say that in heaven people will be sexless. It does say that they will “neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels.”3 This passage does not specifically say that sex will be absent. What it explicitly says is that the relationship between the sexes as we know it on earth will not be the same in heaven. We assume that this passage consigns us to sexlessness because we assume that the abolition of marriage and being like angels means being sexless.
Why would angels need sex? Do they reproduce? We don’t know. In Genesis we have the incident where the “sons of God” cohabited with the “daughters of men.”4 The Book of Enoch (an ancient manuscript of uncertain origin which is not considered to be inspired, but is quoted in the book of Jude) asserts that these sons of God were indeed angels.
But when Jesus said we would be like the angels he may not have been referring to their sexuality or lack of it at all. He may have been referring merely to the fact that angels do not marry and do not die.
If paradise is to be restored, we can be sure that either sex will be present or there will be something that offers even more sensational delight than sex. Sex or something better. The core longing behind the sexual impulse will be satisfied, and the joy of satisfying that longing will not leave us wishing for our days on earth.
Looking for
We know what most people would like to have in heaven because we can see what they like to have on earth. Most of our pursuits in life are actually misguided searches for para-dise. Our trips to the beach or the mountains; our swimming pools, speedboats, health spas, and country clubs; our clamor for fame, wealth, or success in our careers; our craving for pleasure; our efforts to make little palaces of our homes are all attempts to satisfy longings we can’t quite identify. We are trying to find peace, rest, belonging, satisfaction, significance, and fulfillment.
These deep, restless yearnings are what make us so vulnerable to Satan. What we are actually searching for is the real paradise we were meant to have, but we have never seen a real paradise and don’t know how to satisfy these persistent longings. So Satan shoves before our eyes cheap but glittering imitations of the realities we are seeking. He urges us toward immediate delight for our senses, shortcuts to making our selves seem important, and temporary means of making our lives comfortable or seemingly secure. His message is that we can have it all here and now—no need to sit around longing for an iffy and maybe slice of pie in the sky by and by. Why resist all the world’s delicious temptations on the promise of an insipid heaven where you will be without most of what you really enjoy? What Satan offers is shortlived and shallow, but it obscures our vision of the real object of our longings. He knows that if we think enough about houses, security, and gold, we will forget about heaven, eternity, and God.
Satan distracts us for a moment, but the glamour of his substitutes quickly fades and the old longing remains, as strong as ever. That childhood toy you wanted so badly you could taste it from Thanksgiving to Christmas was in a corner gathering dust before the new year. The dream house you had pictured and planned for years seemed boxy and commonplace before you had lived in it six months.
Nothing the world can offer satisfies the longing because we
are looking for something that was lost before we were born. We are looking for
We should not be too quick to write off
Restoring
The Original Plan
Why does God tell us that he is going to remake the earth? Of what possible use will it be after we are taken to heaven?
He will remake it for the same reason that a man remakes his home after a tornado hits it, or that a ruler rebuilds his bombed-out country after a war. Obviously, God still has a use for the earth, and it will have been too severely damaged for a mere patchwork job. He is going to burn away all the blight and ruin and refurbish it from scratch or take the original plans and rebuild on another lot. Like a gardener who burns the dead grass from his lawn before replanting in the spring, God will utterly destroy the earth and make it over as he meant it to be in the beginning. The earth was originally created to be perfect, and to be the home of man. It seems that God’s original intent is not to be thwarted. A good and omnipotent God cannot allow a creature like Satan to ruin permanently a creation that has been pronounced good. Apparently he intends to see that the universe rights itself and stays on its original course.6
We can no more understand what it will be like in heaven
than a caterpillar can understand what it will be like to be a butterfly. But
like the caterpillar we were created to be something more glorious and
spectacular than we can possibly imagine in our earthbound existence. So you can
erase from your mind any unappealing images of heaven that linger there. You
will not be sentenced to an eternity of aimless lounging and perpetual choir
practice. Heaven will be an amplification of your fondest dreams, the ultimate
fulfillment of your deepest longings. It seems that the golden city of
When you arrive in heaven, you can expect to feel perfectly at home. It won’t be like eating Sunday dinner at the boss’s house, or like living under continual surveillance of an all-seeing eye. It will seem that everything has been custom designed specifically to your individual tastes, as if someone read your mind, designed and built the mansion you’d always dreamed of, then gave it to you for your birthday.
In heaven we will not be ghosts. We will have new, spiritual bodies.7 Some make the mistake of thinking that spiritual bodies means incorporeal bodies. But that is not at all the case. Spiritual means under the control or direction of the Spirit. Nothing spiritual can be done without a physical apparatus. Loving your neighbor is “spiritual” but meaningless unless you see your neighbor’s needs and meet them, whether it is taking him food and medicine while he is sick or inviting him to church, which means employing your body to act on his behalf. We must not fall into the trap of thinking the body unimportant. We sometimes do injustice to the body, blaming it for all our sins (Is it your body’s fault that you lose your temper, snub an associate, or swell with pride?) and placing it at the bottom of the hierarchy when we speak of the three components—spirit, soul, and body—that make up our being. God designed the human creature to be an integrated unit, not a composite of three disconnectable parts. The body is essential to our humanity. It is the visible expression of our invisible self. The spirit without the body is impotent— incapable of action, communication, or making itself known. One of the worst hells we could imagine is being eternally bodiless and aware of nothing but our own existence—no light, no sense of presence, no sense of the existence of other beings, no way to know anything at all other than the dark, isolated, existence of a blind, unfeeling, unhearing, inactive, inexpressible self. Make no mistake; the body is important. It is to be redeemed.8 God has gone to incredible lengths to see that we will have eternal bodies because, more incredibly, the body is designed not only to display the invisible inner self; it is given the exalted honor of displaying the nature of the invisible God.
In our future existence we will have the same familiar bodies we have now, but with all their flaws and weaknesses corrected. Our bodies will be solid, flesh-and-bone organisms with all five senses intact and working, but they will be immune to pain, disease, age, and death. They will be like the bodies of the unfallen Adam and Eve, and like the body of Jesus after his resurrection.9
Some religions teach that the ultimate achievement of human existence is to reach a state where we are completely free of all desire. On the surface, this seems to be a commendable goal, since our desires lead us into most of our troubles. But Christianity teaches that the purpose of all desire is to lead us to God. Therefore, the ultimate achievement for the Christian is fulfillment, not repudiation of desire. We will not lay aside our desires when we enter heaven; that would be like leaving the hooks off our fishing lines. It is through the satisfaction of desire that we experience the ecstasy heaven offers.
Such dynamic new bodies recharged with properly aimed desires are not meant just to loll around heaven all day. Heaven will not be an elaborate retirement center; it will be a place of meaning and activity.
What will we do there? The Bible is not specific, but it does drop a few tantalizing hints. It tells us that we will be in highly responsible positions. We will judge angels. We will be rulers—of what, the Bible does not say. We could flesh out the skeletons of these hints with our own guesses, but such an exercise would be futile. It is likely that God does not reveal more because our imaginations are not capable of handling the scope of the reality. Or maybe he just wants to surprise us. For now we must be content to know that whatever task God has in store will be the very thing we always wanted to do. It will eternally satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts.10
What Is In the Future?
Each of us must face death, and after death, God’s judgment. Where will we be in the time between death and judgment?
The Bible does not say. Some think that Jesus’ answer to the
thief on the cross means we will spend the time in an interim state—the place
Jesus called
The Bible may be vague on some things, but it does clearly teach that Jesus is coming again, and that all God’s people will be taken into heaven to live with him forever.12 Christians, however, differ widely over just how and when these last events will occur. There are several “isms,” each with its own timetable and sequence of events, that seem to mark the end times and the second coming of Jesus. It is not the purpose of this work to attack or defend any of these positions. We will leave that task to others and try to stick to a simple explanation of what the Bible reveals without indulging in interpretation about sequences and specific times.
Jesus will appear suddenly at a moment when no one expects him. His arrival will be announced by the voice of an archangel and a trumpet blast that will be heard around the world. Everyone alive will see Jesus when he comes.13
Rumors crop up now and then that Jesus is already here, living in some remote country and waiting for the right moment to reveal himself. But Chris-tians need not worry about being fooled by rumors or by impostors. The Bible tells us that he will come suddenly and spectacularly, and everyone will see him.
The graves of the earth will open and give up the Christian dead in them. Then the Christians who are still alive when Jesus comes will rise up into the clouds with the risen dead to meet Jesus in the air.14 From there they will go to their new homes in heaven, where they will live forever.
These events are often called the end times, as if they signaled the end of the human story. But the story as God originally outlined it has not yet been written. Adam and Eve began the first chapter but spilled the ink over the remaining pages. Jesus has blotted the ink and cleaned the pages, and when he comes, he will present them to us to complete the story as it should have been written. Our story is not ending; it is about to begin.
Why aren’t more people enthusiastic about heaven?
What kind of body can we expect to have in heaven?
Are our desires meant to be suppressed?
Why does the Bible say that God will remake the earth?
What do you think heaven will be like? Why?
Will we know when Jesus comes again?