Throughout this book, we have been exploring how following the voice of our Caller shapes our creating today. In part 1, we learned that God was the First Entrepreneur, and that when we create we are doing so much more than developing products; we are reflecting the character of our Father. We dispelled the pervasive myth that work is inherently bad and meaningless with the biblical view of work as an inherently good act of worship, thus removing any sort of secular/spiritual hierarchy of callings. And we bucked the world’s self-centric questions for evaluating career opportunities, asking a different set of others-oriented questions to discern our call to create.
In part 2, we explored how our calling shapes the why, what, and how of our creating. We examined our motivations for creating, choosing not to create to make a name for ourselves but to reveal God’s character and love others. We looked at how those priorities shape the products we choose to make. And we examined what it looks like to holistically integrate the gospel into our ventures, beginning with striving for excellence in everything we do and prioritizing people over profit.
In part 3, we walked through a series of challenges that are unique or especially acute for those who are called to create. We wrestled with the tension between trusting and hustling and how we as driven entrepreneurs can find true rest. We thought deeply about how we might respond differently to failure to show the hope we have in Christ. And we learned about the challenge of continually renewing our minds through regular communion with God, our partners, and other believers.
In this fourth and final part of the book, we have been exploring “the bottom line” for our ventures, beginning with a look at how our entrepreneurial endeavors can be powerful vehicles for fulfilling our command to create disciples, and then moving into an analysis of the purpose of profit. Each of these topics significantly impacts our creating today, challenging us to reimagine our work as service to the One who has called us to create. But the question we’ve been building to is this: While our creating clearly matters for this life, does it really matter for eternity?
An Entrepreneur and a Theologian
Hordes of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs rushed to find open seats in the auditorium, eager to hear from one of their greatest heroes, Peter Thiel. In 1998, Thiel cofounded PayPal, serving as the company’s CEO through their IPO in 2002. Following this entrepreneurial success, Thiel began making investments in early-stage companies that paid off big, including making the first outside investment in Facebook in 2004. Over the past decade, Thiel’s stature as a leading thinker and doer in Silicon Valley has risen dramatically, culminating most recently with his #1 New York Times bestselling book, Zero to One.
The fact that a group of young, hipster techies were clamoring to grab a seat for a Thiel talk is not surprising. But what made this event so remarkable was that Thiel was there to discuss the Christian faith. While Thiel is well-known for his success as an entrepreneur and investor, few people know that he is a professing Christian, hence at least some of the allure that had driven these entrepreneurs to hear him discuss his faith in Northern California where, as HBO’s Silicon Valley says, “Christianity is borderline illegal.”
To make the event even more intriguing, Thiel was joined onstage by N. T. Wright. If you recognize the names of both Thiel and Wright, congratulations, you are in what has to be an infinitesimally small cross-section of people who are familiar with both the work of one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors (Thiel), and one of the world’s leading Christian theologians (Wright).1
Their ninety-minute discussion ranged from topics such as whether or not humans can end death to how entrepreneurs can help solve poverty. But what I found most interesting was a discussion on whether or not science and technological progress are at odds with faith, as is so often portrayed in culture with Christians (often rightfully) earning the reputation as being “critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture.”2
Thiel weighed in, saying, “I grew up as an evangelical Christian. There certainly is a sense in which scientific technological utopia seems quite at odds with a Christian worldview, but I think there are some commonalities that are worth stressing. One very important commonality is that both have this view that the future will look very different from the present or the past. This is certainly the view that is presented in science fiction, it’s presented in the New Jerusalem.”3 In a separate forum, Thiel put it this way: “Insofar as Christians don’t just hope for a better world but also hear a call to be active partners in the fulfillment of that hope, I think building new and better tools is one way to do that.”4
What in the world is Thiel talking about? He is articulating a biblically sound view of heaven that has tragically been lost in much of the modern church: that earth is not “heaven’s waiting room” but rather the place that God has created us to dwell in forever.
If this all sounds very foreign to you, stay with me for a minute. I was in your shoes for the first two decades of my life as a Christian. Growing up, I believed that when I died or when Christ returned, I would be taken up into the clouds to live forever in some hybrid church service/retirement home where there would be no work, no creating, and certainly no looking back to earth. Unfortunately, this is often the only heaven portrayed in the church today. I love how pastor John Mark Comer describes this theology in his excellent book Garden City: “This is essentially a theology of evacuation. The sentiment is, Let’s get out of here [earth] and go somewhere else.”5 To be honest, the thought of this used to really depress me. Something in my soul feels a deep connection to earth. Something in my soul feels like I was called to create forever. Something in my soul tells me that the American caricature of heaven simply can’t be all there is to eternity. That something in my soul was really Someone: the Holy Spirit, pointing me to the Bible, where God has graciously revealed a much more awe-inspiring and invigorating picture of what he has planned for our eternal existence.
To be clear, the “theology of evacuation” isn’t all wrong. The Bible promises believers of Jesus Christ that we “will be with [Him] in paradise” (Luke 23:43) the moment we breathe our last breath in this life. That paradise obviously isn’t on this earth. In his exceptional book Heaven, Randy Alcorn refers to this destination as “Intermediate (or Present) Heaven.”6 This is the heaven we grew up learning about in Sunday school. But intermediate heaven is only half the story. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples often refer to death as “sleep,” a temporary state until Jesus comes back to resurrect our physical bodies and renew the earth. John gives us a prophetic glimpse of this in Revelation:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:1–4 NASB)
In other words, earth is not “our temporary home”7 but where we will dwell with God forever—not the cursed earth we inhabit today but a new earth totally redeemed by its Creator. Alcorn illustrates this eloquently:
Suppose you live in a homeless shelter in Miami. One day you inherit a beautiful house in Santa Barbara, California, fully furnished, on a gorgeous hillside overlooking the ocean. With the home comes a wonderful job doing something you’ve always wanted to do. Not only that, but you’ll also be near close family members who moved from Miami many years ago.
On your flight to Santa Barbara, you’ll change planes in Denver, where you’ll spend an afternoon. Some other family members, whom you haven’t seen in years, will meet you at the Denver airport and board the plane with you to Santa Barbara, where they have inherited their own beautiful houses on another part of the same vast estate. Naturally, you look forward to seeing them. Now, when the Miami ticket agent asks you, “Where are you headed?” would you say, “Denver”? No. You would say, “Santa Barbara,” because that’s your final destination. If you mentioned Denver at all, you would say, “I’m going to Santa Barbara by way of Denver.”
When you talk to your friends in Miami about where you’re going to live, would you focus on Denver? No. You might not even mention Denver, even though you will be a Denver-dweller for several hours. Even if you left the airport and spent a day or a week in Denver, it still wouldn’t be your focus. Denver is just a stop along the way. Your true destination—your new long-term home—is in Santa Barbara.
Similarly, the Heaven we will go to when we die, the intermediate Heaven, is a temporary dwelling place. It’s a wonderfully nice place (much better than the Denver airport!), but it’s still a stop along the way to our final destination: the New Earth.8
Great, so hopefully we have cleared up one of the greatest misunderstandings of Scripture in our time, but we still haven’t answered the question I posed earlier in this chapter: While our creating clearly matters for this life, does it really matter for eternity? In one of the richest passages of Scripture on the topic of eternity, the apostle Paul spends fifty-eight verses in 1 Corinthians 15 expounding upon heaven and our coming bodily resurrection. You may expect him to end this exposition by saying something to the effect of, “Since it’s all going to ‘burn up’ anyway, what you do in this life doesn’t really matter.” But that’s not at all what Paul says. Instead, Paul uses his last words in the chapter to encourage us to “be steadfast . . . in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58 NASB). Now, “the work of the Lord” almost certainly refers to overtly evangelical work: sharing the gospel, serving the poor, working to strengthen the local church, and so forth. But Paul doesn’t exclude other types of work, including our work as entrepreneurs and creators, and I bet that’s on purpose. Commenting on this passage, N. T. Wright, the theologian who joined Thiel onstage in Silicon Valley, says this:
What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.9
One of the most prophetic passages on the new earth is found in Isaiah 60. The prophet writes:
Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.
See, darkness covers the earth
and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the LORD rises upon you
and his glory appears over you.
Nations will come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
Lift up your eyes and look about you:
All assemble and come to you;
your sons come from afar,
and your daughters are carried on the hip.
Then you will look and be radiant,
your heart will throb and swell with joy;
the wealth on the seas will be brought to you,
to you the riches of the nations will come.
Herds of camels will cover your land,
young camels of Midian and Ephah.
And all from Sheba will come,
bearing gold and incense
and proclaiming the praise of the LORD.
All Kedar’s flocks will be gathered to you,
the rams of Nebaioth will serve you;
they will be accepted as offerings on my altar,
and I will adorn my glorious temple.
Who are these that fly along like clouds,
like doves to their nests?
Surely the islands look to me;
in the lead are the ships of Tarshish,
bringing your children from afar,
with their silver and gold,
to the honor of the LORD your God,
the Holy One of Israel,
for he has endowed you with splendor.
Foreigners will rebuild your walls,
and their kings will serve you.
Though in anger I struck you,
in favor I will show you compassion.
Your gates will always stand open,
they will never be shut, day or night,
so that people may bring you the wealth of the nations—
their kings led in triumphal procession.
For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish;
it will be utterly ruined.
The glory of Lebanon will come to you,
the juniper, the fir and the cypress together,
to adorn my sanctuary;
and I will glorify the place for my feet.
The children of your oppressors will come bowing before you;
all who despise you will bow down at your feet
and will call you the City of the LORD,
Zion of the Holy One of Israel. (Isa. 60:1–14)
What is happening in this scene? This is a reversal of the events that surrounded the Tower of Babel. As you recall from chapter 4, the Babylonians had discovered the technical innovation of brickmaking. But with this invention came the temptation to use the new technology to glorify themselves rather than God. “They said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth’” (Gen. 11:4). But the Babylonians’ attempt to rob God of the glory due him alone earned them the thing they dreaded most: God “scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city” (v. 8).
Now, Isaiah is sharing a prophetic vision of the reversal of Babel, of all the nations coming back together into “the city of the Lord.” Isaiah is seeing a vision similar to John’s in Revelation of the New Jerusalem, where God will reign forever on the new earth. But unlike in Babel, the people are not using their creations to glorify themselves; they are laying their creations down as an offering at the feet of the First Entrepreneur. The people of Tarshish bring their ships, Midian and Ephah bring their livestock, Sheba brings gold and frankincense. “The wealth of the nations,” the best creations of the nations, are being brought into the eternal city to glorify the One who called the people to create.
I’m afraid many who are called to create view heaven as a place without culture, void of anything we might create in this life. That is simply not what the Bible teaches. Scripture tells us that, at a minimum, there will be cities, gates, rivers, houses, food, vineyards, fruit, roads, and music on the new earth. In short, there will be culture, the product of our creations. The Bible makes it clear that we will work without the curse forever on the new earth; I think it’s safe to assume that those of us who are called to create will use our entrepreneurial skills to create as an act of worship. But Isaiah shows us that it’s not just the things we create in heaven that will last for eternity; what we create today has the potential to live on forever on the new earth. While God clearly points to people as the crown jewel of creation, giving extra weight to the way we love and serve people as we build our ventures, he also deems the products of our creations worthy of eternal consideration. Just as God called us to be co-creators with him in the Garden of Eden, he is graciously calling us to co-create with him on the new earth. In the words of Andy Crouch:
The city [New Jerusalem] is already a cultural artifact, the work of a master Architect and Artist. The citizens themselves are the redeemed people of the Lamb, drawn from “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). But God’s handiwork, artifacts and people alike, are not all that is found in the city. Also in the city are “the glory and the honor of the nations”—brought into the city by none other than “the kings of the earth.” So it’s a fascinating exercise to ask about any cultural artifact: can we imagine this making it into the new Jerusalem?10
And that is the question I want to leave you with as we wrap up this book. Can you imagine your creations, the products of your entrepreneurial endeavors, passing through into eternity? Are you creating in such a way that our Lord will view your work as an offering of worship? Can you see the First Entrepreneur taking your creations and working them into his eternal masterpiece? If we reimagine our creating as a means not of glorifying ourselves but of glorifying God and loving others as we have been exploring in this book, I think we have a shot.
On the new earth, our homes may be decorated with paintings from Kristin Joy Taylor, or we may find Bible verses hand-lettered by Krystal Whitten adorning our walls. Maybe we will join the employees of Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out for a feast of exceptional chicken sandwiches and burgers. Who knows, God may even choose to allow a Guinness or two to pass through heaven’s gates. There won’t be a need to tell time, but maybe Casper ten Boom’s watches will meet us on the other side so that we may wonder at the marvelous creation of the timepiece and remember how they were used to protect God’s people. It’s hard to imagine eternity without Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, played Soli Deo Gloria. With perfect, redeemed bodies, there may not be a need for Joel Ohman’s Exercise.com apps, but if God deems exercise an act of worship, maybe even Ohman’s product will be a part of our eternal existence. We don’t know what the dress code will be on the new earth, but after our workout we might need some clean clothes, and the team at Grace Harbor Group may be there to serve us much like they serve the poor through their business today. Maybe the New Jerusalem’s library will be filled with books authored by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Hannah Brencher. I pray even this book will be considered among “the glory and the honor of the nations.” Instead of teaching children how to capture their perspective of poverty, maybe Angela Popplewell’s curriculum at 100cameras will be used to teach us all how to capture a glimpse of God’s glory using HTC smartphones developed by Cher Wang. Our children may be wrapped up in EllieFunDay blankets, their feet covered in TOMS Shoes. And we’ll almost certainly sing “It is well with my soul,” because, in fact, it will be—forever.
If the prospect of your products being included on the new earth doesn’t motivate you to create for your Caller, I don’t know what will. I love Wright’s idea of “building for God’s kingdom.” We human beings do not build the kingdom. Only God does that. But all of us have the opportunity to create for the kingdom, laying our work products down at the feet of the First Entrepreneur, who just might choose to take our raw materials and work them into his final creation.
So, as we close this book, I pray that you and I will create for the kingdom. If our creations are to be considered “the glory and the honor of the nations,” they must be excellent for sure. But I think creating for the kingdom means more than creating excellent end-products. It means deeply integrating the gospel into how we create, prioritizing people over profit, using our organizations to make disciples, and creating in line with the other challenging truths we have already explored in this book. It’s about choosing the path of the entrepreneur and creator not primarily so that we can “work for ourselves,” set our own hours, control our own destiny, or make a name for ourselves. We choose this path because Someone has called us to create. We choose this path because God gave us the passion, giftings, and opportunities to use our entrepreneurial talents to glorify him, love others, and create something that has a shot at being considered the glory of the nations. So my final charge to you and to myself is this: create in a way that our work can never be confused as a mere “job.” Create in a way that clearly conveys to ourselves and the world that we work sacrificially for someone else. We work for the One who has called us to create.