Home has different meanings. When someone asks me, “Where is your home?” I’m not always sure if they mean where I grew up or where I currently live. I grew up in Pennsylvania, but I currently live in Indiana. I also spent two years in California, three years in Oklahoma, four years in Texas, and five years in Illinois. So what you mean by home is variable.
Heaven, too, has different meanings. The Bible uses the word heaven to mean the sky, the stars, and the planets. It also uses heaven to mean where God and Jesus are, and by implication where believing Christians go immediately after we die. Paul tells us that for believers “to be away from the body” (i.e., to die) is to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). But many people, including Christians, also use the word heaven to mean where people will spend eternity. This is not wrong. But in actuality, those who have believed in Jesus will spend eternity on a new earth. We won’t be floating on clouds.
Peter wrote, “God has promised us a . . . new earth, where justice will rule. We are really looking forward to that!” (2 Peter 3:13 CEV). The old earth will be radically reformed to become a perfect, sinless earth. This takes place in the future when “the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up” (v. 10 NASB). (For more about the new earth, see question #10.)
So when Christians speak of going to heaven, we are speaking of going to a temporary location until the new earth is created. Bible interpreters often call this temporary place for believers “the intermediate heaven.” Our final place of happiness is not actually called heaven in the Bible because God’s dwelling place (heaven) will come down to be united with a newly created earth. The apostle John speaks of how an angel showed him this event, “And he carried me away in the Spirit . . . and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:10). This re-created “Jerusalem” will be placed on the new earth. Heaven and earth will become one.
The intermediate heaven is like a temporary place of transition until the end of the world and eternity begins. The final “heaven”—the new earth—will be brought about after our body is resurrected, the final judgment takes place, and the old heaven and earth are destroyed. At the resurrection, true followers of Christ will receive a resurrected body to join with their disembodied spirit (or soul). God will then re-create the old earth into a new “resurrected” earth. Eternity is really heaven on earth.
Believers will personally be with Jesus in both the temporary heaven and the eternal “heaven,” the new earth. The Bible makes this promise, “And so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thess. 4:17). There are no differences in the fellowship and companionship believers will have with the Lord in these two “heavens,” or of the happiness they will experience.
What then are the differences? In the intermediate heaven, we will not have a resurrected body. Some think we will have a temporary body until we get our final, resurrected body. They suggest that in the Bible, the souls described in heaven wear clothes (white robes), can be seen by others, have voices that cry out, etc. John wrote in Revelation that he saw “the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God. . . . They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’ Then each of them was given a white robe. . . .” (Rev. 6:9–11).
Others suggest that Paul views death as a time when believers are “unclothed,” i.e., without a body. Here on earth, while we wait for our final home (our resurrection body), “we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling [our resurrected body], because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked . . .” (2 Cor. 5:2–3). Paul’s comment about being temporarily “naked” might imply that we will be without a body in the temporary heaven.
In the temporary heaven, believers will rest from their earthly labors. There will be no need to share the gospel with others, or to help the poor and needy, or to be diligent to earn a living, or to do other responsibilities Jesus commands of us in earthly life. In the eternal heaven, with a resurrected body, we will carry on some responsibilities again for the Lord. (See question #12.)
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Matthew 27:52–53; John 14:23; Acts 7:59; Romans 8:21; 1 Corinthians 15:42–44; Revelation 21:1–3