In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! We are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.1
—J. R. R. TOLKIEN
If you visit the museum at ancient Corinth, or Delphi, or the Acropolis Museum in Athens, you’re likely to find on display a hand mirror from the time of Christ and the early church. Several have survived from that period, though it is likely they were owned only by the affluent. Such mirrors were made from an imperfectly flattened hunk of bronze. In shape, they were similar to a modern hand mirror, but what would have been reflected back from them would have been not much more than a blurred and indistinct outline.
These mirrors are very different from the modern mirror with which we are all familiar, and in which the reflection we see is—while not the real thing—a near-perfect likeness. Modern optics (and vanity lighting) make for extremely accurate reflections.
It is this ancient bronze hand mirror to which Paul alluded in his letter to the Corinthian church to illustrate the difference between our present experience and our future realization of the realities of God, His love for us, and the good He has in store for us: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
If we picture a modern mirror, it robs Paul’s illustration of its force. His point was that the reality of eternity with God—of heaven—is far, far beyond our present ability to comprehend. We can only see (as the King James Version has it) “through a glass, darkly.”
THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
Heaven is a foggy concept that is often mischaracterized or oversimplified. We tend not to think deeply about it even though it is a weighty, ultimate matter.
At the end of his life, the apostle Paul was lying in a prison cell, waiting to be executed. As he pondered his life and wrote good-byes to his loved ones, he penned these famous words to his friend Timothy: “For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:6–8).
Paul was very concerned about heaven and the connection between his walk of faith here and eternity.
But isn’t everyone thinking about heaven when they’re about to die? Why should we think or talk about heaven now? Especially in a book about faith?
We may not be able to perfectly understand the ideas of heaven, the afterlife, and the immortality of human souls, but we do need to consider them for several reasons:
• Heaven and eternal life are central themes of Christianity.
• The existence of the afterlife is the only thing that provides a resolution for the concept of human responsibility regarding justice and injustice.
• Jesus and the apostles used heaven as a primary motivation. Throughout the church age, Christian thinkers and teachers have followed their example in this regard.
• While there may be much we can’t comprehend about these things, there’s also much mistaken belief about them (in our secular culture and in our churches) that we can dispel with a good deal of confidence.
We cannot—as finite people—fully understand the infinite. As creatures confined by space and time, we can’t really grasp realities that involve different dimensions.
C. S. Lewis put it this way: “The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.”2
We’ll see later that heaven might be a much more physical, earthly place than we imagined. But to understand the connection between heaven and our walk of faith, we need to understand the eternal, spiritual part of us: our soul.
UNDERSTANDING WHO WE ARE
People are becoming increasingly familiar with stories of near-death experiences, especially with the recent book Heaven Is for Real, which tells the story of a young boy, Colton Burpo, and his trip to heaven and back during an emergency surgery.
Many people read such stories with skepticism and often find them hard to believe. That’s partly because in our culture it is popular to believe that we are purely physical beings, nothing more than brains and bodies. That even our mental lives—our thoughts, beliefs, memories, desires, and such—are somehow reducible to the firing of neurons in our brains. This view—generally referred to as physicalism—is in stark opposition with the biblical view of humanity.
The existence of near-death experiences,3 common sense and human experience, philosophical scrutiny, and recent developments in neuroscience all seem to indicate that we are more than a product of electrochemical reactions.4 Summarizing his research, Wilder Penfield, the father of neurosurgery, wrote, “To expect the highest brain mechanism or any set of reflexes, however complicated, to carry out what the mind does, and thus perform all the functions of the mind, is quite absurd.”5
When it comes to understanding who we are, there is more than can be measured with a microscope. We commonly refer to this “something more” as our soul, the eternal part of us that cannot be seen, measured, or killed.
But even those of us who believe in the soul can be influenced by the physicalism in our culture. We have a tendency to overemphasize our material aspects to the relative disregard of our immaterial—the soulish and spiritual—aspects of personhood.
This can be seen in our culture’s fixation on youth, athletics, and beauty. We appropriately celebrate birth and babies, but we hide from death, disease, and old age. All of the “big events” on which we focus—sports championships, graduation, prom, marriage, kids—are associated with being young, and we do our best to remain in that life stage.
Instead of viewing our physical being as dominant and our spiritual life as ethereal, we need to find a more balanced biblical view that holds in tension our physical reality and our spiritual reality.
A more biblical (and human) understanding would embrace the entire arc of life. It would see age as of great worth, possessing inner beauty and wisdom as supreme assets, and—like Paul in his letter to Timothy—would see this life as an upward trajectory, always with the goal of experiencing the eternal reality of heaven and intimacy with God.
Thus, heaven confronts us with another paradox in the life of faith: that we are both physical and spiritual. We can’t emphasize one of our dimensions at the expense of the other.
George MacDonald, the famous Scottish pastor and author (1824–1905), addressed this. In his fictional Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, he has the elderly and failing Mrs. Tomkins lamenting, “But, you know, sir, everybody dies. I must die, and be laid in the churchyard, sir. And that’s what I don’t like.” To this, the young vicar (the writer of the annals) replies, “But I say that is all a mistake. You won’t die. Your body will die, and be laid away out of sight; but you will be awake, alive, more alive than you are now, a great deal.” The vicar then adds parenthetically:
And here let me interrupt the conversation to remark upon the great mistake of teaching children that they have souls. The consequence is, that they think of their souls as of something which is not themselves. For what a man has cannot be himself. Hence, when they are told that their souls go to heaven, they think of their selves as lying in the grave. They ought to be taught that they have bodies; and that their bodies die; while they themselves live on. Then they will not think, as old Mrs. Tomkins did, that they will be laid in the grave. It is making altogether too much of the body, and is indicative of an evil tendency to materialism, that we talk as if we possessed souls, instead of being souls. We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when it is cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them.6
Far from being merely bodies and brains, we are souls who presently have bodies. We are souls who will continue our temporal walk of faith into eternity. Our souls survive the death of our bodies, and someday we will each be given a new, resurrected body.
Even Jesus seemed to point out that reality is more than this physical universe. In Luke 23:43, Jesus comforted the thief on the cross next to Him with the promise of something greater: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Dwight L. Moody, the famous twentieth-century Christian evangelist, said it well. He stated, “Someday you will read in the papers that Moody is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I was born of the flesh in 1837; I was born of the spirit in 1855. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit shall live forever.”7
TEN THOUSAND YEARS ON STREETS OF GOLD?
When cultural stereotypes catch on, they have the power to obscure truth.
For years, my picture of heaven was a bunch of people sitting around on a cloud, playing harps. And I wasn’t too excited about it. My picture was based on hundreds of stereotypical paintings, cartoons, and commercials about heaven I’d seen throughout my life.
But what if art has failed us? What if it has been a bad teacher when it comes to the subject of heaven? What if heaven defies artistic representation?
And what if we have misunderstood the scriptural references to heaven?
God often puts marvelous realities into word pictures far beyond our imaginations that enable us to catch a glimmer of the truth. If we take these word pictures concretely (“literally,” in modern usage), we will be in error, and we’re likely to miss the greater glories to which they point.
One of these word pictures is a passage from Revelation 21:21, a reference to the New Jerusalem: “The great street of the city was of pure gold.” I think the imagery here is creative hyperbole. I don’t think God wants us to expect literal streets of the element known to chemists as Au. Rather, He is trying to enable us to grasp visions of glory unimaginable.
The streets of New Testament times were simply dust or perhaps rock in some places in the Roman world—the most abundant and worthless of materials. In the greater world awaiting us, everything will be so glorious that it will be as though gold (the most precious commodity in our present experience) is relatively worthless in that royal economy.
Another example of a creative word picture is the Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 11:6–7: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.”
This Hebrew poetry is declaring that the future reign of the Messiah (the “Branch of Jesse”) will be characterized by a level of peace and harmony that is currently inconceivable to us. The wolf-and-lamb word picture is the Holy Spirit’s way of putting the reality of infinite peace in practical terms that are understandable to finite minds.
We also experience a good deal of confusion with regard to time and eternity. In this creation, we experience time in a very specific way, and we find it difficult (if not impossible) to imagine things otherwise. We naturally think of eternity in heaven as being composed of days or years like those we experience now, only with the difference that those days go on and on forever. For example, the lyrics “When we’ve been there ten thousand years . . .” come from “Amazing Grace,” a song that’s became one of the most treasured hymns of Christendom.
But time itself is merely a dimension of the created universe of which we are a part. We measure days and years by the behavior of our solar system. A day is a complete revolution of the earth on its axis, and a year is the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun.
The motion of the earth may not apply to eternity.
While here, we won’t ever know how time is going to work in eternity. Our current predicament of being confined to the time of this universe will continue to make it hard for us to imagine existing outside of it.
But you don’t need to be worried about sitting on a cloud, bored out of your mind for all eternity, caught in a loop day after day after day of playing a harp or singing. What Isaiah and John were getting at is that heaven will be completely different from life here—a surprise, not a disappointment.
GOOGLE MAPS WON’T GET YOU TO HEAVEN
As physical beings located in space, we very naturally default to thinking of heaven as a place or location. We are encouraged in this vision, since Scripture’s portrayals necessarily involve spatial imagery that comports with our experience of this world.
What if heaven is not so much a different place as a different way of existing?
Take one of Jesus’ illustrations (recorded in John 14:2): “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” In America, many of us live in one or more houses with only our immediate family (or maybe some roommates). Our parents and grandparents have their own houses, and we expect our children to have their own space someday. We may have rooms for cooking, for dining, for sleeping, for watching television . . .
When we read Jesus’ words, we tend to think He is promising us a fifteen-by-twelve-foot room in which we get to hang our own pictures and stay up as late as we want reading a book.
But for Jesus’ Jewish listeners, the house was a multigenerational dwelling where extended family were commonly in residence and honored guests were accommodated and made to feel like family.
In its proper context, Jesus’ illustration was simply a way of reaffirming the Father’s intention of reconciling to Himself as sons and daughters all those who enter into relationship with His eternal Son.
Rather than promising us a room in a big house, Jesus is saying that we’ll be part of the family. Toward the end of His prayer for His followers, Jesus said, “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:23–24).
Near the beginning of this same prayer, He said, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (v. 3).
Heaven is a relational reality, not just a place in the sky. Eternal life is a relational reality, not a period of time. How would that change the way we live our lives if we lived as though eternity started now? How would we change our current relationships if we viewed them as eternal? How would it affect the decisions we make?
Paul saw “keeping the faith” as directly tied to heaven, a continuation of the relationship he had spent his whole life cultivating. He understood the connection between what we do with our bodies and decision making during this life and our eternal relationship with our Father.
If heaven is more accurately understood as a relational reality, in the same way hell should be recognized not as a place but as a cessation of relationship. Existence in hell entails being cut off from friends and loved ones and, more importantly, it means being cut off from the love of the One who created us to find our joy in intimate relationship with Him. As George MacDonald put it, “The one principle in hell is—‘I am on my own.’ ”8
The banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden and the loss of intimacy with God they had enjoyed there is a picture of the eternal banishment from God’s presence that awaits those humans who choose to reject His offer of love and forgiveness.
Where heaven entails a restoration of relationship with our Creator, hell is existence apart from God.
As with the word pictures for heaven, the Bible’s word pictures describing hell (darkness, fire, gnashing of teeth) probably are not meant to be taken literally. Nonetheless, the reality of hell is worse than we can presently imagine, just as the reality of heaven is far better than our finite minds can comprehend.
Mark Twain had a funny take on our confusion about the afterlife: “Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.”9 But if we accurately understand heaven as fundamentally relational, and hell as absence of relationship, then we can also recognize that eternity starts now. For those of us who will spend eternity with God, eternal life doesn’t begin at death; instead, it begins when we enter into relationship with the Son of God, at salvation, when we are adopted into the family of God.
According to C. S. Lewis, “Heaven enters wherever Christ enters, even in this life.”10 He fleshed out his thinking, saying, “Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.”11
A truly biblical understanding acknowledges both our material and immaterial components, but sees them holistically. Just as we can fall into the cultural temptation to overemphasize physical reality, we can sometimes fall into the religious trap of overemphasizing spiritual reality.
God designed us to inhabit both.
In the creation account of Genesis 1, God was most pleased with the creation in its entirety: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (v. 31).
In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, we read that “all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven” are being reconciled to the Father through Jesus (1:20). While we may be tempted to spiritualize this passage, to claim that “all things” really just means human souls, the passage does not allow this. The “all things” that Christ came to redeem are the same “all things” that—earlier in the same paragraph—Christ created (v. 16), and preceded and sustains (v. 17).
Heaven and hell provide an ultimate justice not always realized in this life,12 but it is equally true that it is in this life that we choose—and are held responsible for our choices—to act justly or not.
At the heart of Christian belief is resurrection, surviving the death of earthly bodies. But it is crucial to note that this is a bodily resurrection, and that it does not apply only to immaterial souls.
Read what Paul said in Romans 8:9–11:
You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.
And later in verse 23:
We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.
I can’t really picture what resurrected bodies will be like, but the early disciples knew exactly what to expect. After all, they saw the first one: Jesus.
Jesus’ own resurrected body was physical, but not quite the same as the bodies we have now. In John 20:26, the implication is that Jesus passed through walls or a locked door. In Acts 1:9, “he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.”
Luke, who was a physician, recorded several details about Jesus’ appearances after His resurrection. There was something about Him that made the disciples think they had seen a ghost, and He did not always obey the physics of this universe. Here’s one example:
While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” (Luke 24:36–39)
As we saw in the passage from Romans, Paul was convinced that we would be resurrected like Jesus, with renewed, more powerful, more alive bodies. That is the hope Paul was trying to point us toward.13
N. T. Wright, the renowned Scottish scholar, Anglican minister, and theologian, wrote his entire book Surprised by Hope to reframe the way we think about heaven, hell, and the resurrection. I think the following quote is the best summation of the significance of resurrection:
The point of the resurrection . . . is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die. . . . What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it. . . . 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 (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it . . . ). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.14
MacDonald and Moody looked ahead to a paradise outside of this universe. N. T. Wright rests in the promise that heaven and earth will finally be made new through the power of Christ’s resurrection.
But both perspectives on eternity require us to take a lot on faith.
NOT WORTH COMPARING
Of course, our earthly experience of the blessedness and joy of eternity in relationship with God is imperfect, and we are distracted by trials and sorrows that won’t be part of our future heavenly experience.
A critical part of Christianity’s answer to the problem of suffering is the recognition of the biblical truth that our current physical lives are not the final picture. Eternal life and heaven—which are devoid of sorrow and suffering—are the greater realities for which we were created.
Paul reassured the believers in first-century Rome with these words: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”15 To the Corinthians, he put it this way: “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”16 Peter expressed this same idea to the persecuted Christians to which he wrote.17
Really? Can we honestly dismiss as “light and momentary” all of the suffering with which we’re familiar? Does that include that of the loved one whose entire life has been characterized by the pain of a debilitating disease, the friend whose life was defined by the car crash that took the lives of his wife and children, the village in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which the people have never known a time free from gunfire, murder, rape, and the worst kinds of atrocities?
Paul himself had a pretty close relationship with pain and suffering. A catalog of his experiences (summarized in 2 Corinthians 11:23–29) includes multiple imprisonments, beatings, whippings, and shipwrecks—he faced danger wherever he went. Moreover, the Master for whom he endured all this was—despite living a perfect life and bringing healing and restoration everywhere he traveled—unjustly imprisoned, whipped, spat upon, lied about, and crucified; He was, as foretold about Him in Isaiah 53:3, “a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.”
The New Testament perspective does not involve a denial of the intense pain and suffering of this life. Rather, it establishes the insignificance of the (presently realized) suffering relative to the (presently unimagined) glory that awaits us. Of course, accepting this as true involves a step of trust.
Faith requires us to hold to the paradox that even in death, there is hope; that in our pain and suffering, there is blessing in store; that though we live in a world held captive by fear and death, in its present state it is not our final home. In faith we step forward while we wait for a new heaven and a new earth.
Getting this right was a primary reason for the spread of Christianity in the first centuries after the resurrection. Along with their great love and compassion, the other defining characteristic of Christians in the Roman world—where they were tortured and killed for their faith—was that they didn’t fear death.
This is perhaps best attested by a hostile source, the second-century Greek satirist Lucian, who mockingly described Christians as starting with “the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains the contempt of death and voluntary self-devotion which are so common among them.”18
Without the resurrection, it’s hard to gamble with your life.
The issue of heaven is all about where we draw the finish line. It is about the time and the space that we give for the story to resolve. Heaven is where we look to for our rewards, and for the scales to balance.
Heaven is real.
And though eternity starts now, for the moment we stand outside of heaven, trying to get a glimpse of the realities that will be ours for eternity. Our picture of heaven is not the artistic pictures we’ve seen, but the fullness of relationship we find in being united with God. Heaven provides us with the promise of future rewards and motivates us through the difficult times that, paradoxically, come as we obey God in faith.
Heaven is the promise of being with God, free from pain and sorrow, that serves as the incentive for Christian action and sacrifice.
This life does not afford the reality of complete experienced happiness throughout. Only heaven can afford secure, eternal, and complete happiness. This is why happiness is understood as an attitude and a goal. Perhaps the simplest way to think of heaven is as a kingdom where happiness and joy are kept on the inside, and strife, envy, evil, suffering, and anti-joy are kept out. A kingdom where we are in perfect harmony with each other and our Creator.
Heaven is permanent happiness that cannot be taken away.
In heaven, happiness is the air that is breathed.
You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
—PSALM 16:11