By Neil Earle
The April 16 Time magazine had a cover story by the Pulitzer Prize winning Jon Meacham – a devoted Episcopalian – on a perennial subject in American culture, Heaven. His intro played off a book that has taken many Christians by storm, “Heaven is for Real” – the memoir of a four year old boy named Colton Burpo, a Methodist’s pastor’s little son, who claimed to have visited heaven for three minutes while being operated upon for a major appendectomy.
Colton matter-of-factly related to his dad over time that he had learned that God is three persons, that Jesus loves kids and that he had a sister in heaven. That last part shocked and eventually healed his mother who had indeed had a miscarriage which Colton had known nothing about!
This success followed on the heels of Mitch Albon’s 95 week bestseller “Five People You Meet in Heaven” where a carnival maintenance man has his life and its ups and downs explained to him by people he reconnects with “up there.”
I, like Meacham, will not pass too many value judgments on these pop culture phenomena. Meacham himself quickly moves on to someone from the academic Christian world, our old friend Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright whose book “Surprised by Hope” argued that heaven is not some future pie-in-the-sky but “the other hidden dimension of our ordinary life – God’s dimension if you like.” Says Bishop Wright: “God made heaven and earth, at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.” He concludes: “The Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock.”
Let’s gather a few Biblical data on heaven as summarized in a brief article in the Oxford Bible Dictionary. These are based on such texts as Psalm 115:3, Psalm 68:4, and 1 Kings 8:27 and Isaiah 44:24.
“In the Bible as in the English language, heaven can refer to the regions of the atmosphere or also to a supernatural world. Birds fly in the heaven (Jeremiah 4:25) and the clouds are there (Proverbs 8:27-28). Heaven also refers to the firmament or celestial vault (Genesis 1:6) which divides the waters above form those beneath and is supported on pillars…
“The supernatural heaven is the dwelling place of God…The Hebrews spoke of the existence of several heavens, and Paul had a mystical experience of being taken up to the third heaven (2 Corinthians s 12:1). Christ ascended above all the heavens (Ephesians 4:10)…God’s throne is in heaven (Isaiah 66:1) and angels surround it (1 Kings 22:19) and this vision is developed in Revelation 4. In the highest heaven there is a tabernacle or true tent (Hebrews 8:2) exalted above the heavens (Hebrews 7:26), where Christ the true High Priest offer spiritual sacrifices and intercedes for faithful Christians…
“The names of the redeemed are recorded in heaven (Hebrews 12:23) which is a realm of joy (Luke 15:7) and ‘peace” (Luke 19:38). The description of heaven in Revelation 4, 14 and 21 representing the ultimnate triumph of God, have often provided the ground of hope for life after death and have been a fertile source of imagery in Christian hymns” (OBD, page 143).
Okay. That gives us our bearings.
Heaven is usually seen in Christian thought as the abode of the righteous dead and such thinkers as N.T. Wright accepts that definition. He adds that heaven is not the final rest of the saved but more a place of rest. A great text in Revelation 6 shows the martyred saints freshly arriving in heaven and given white robes (symbol of righteousness) and told to “rest.” This is reaffirmed in Revelation14:13, a favorite text for us at our funeral services:
“Then I heard a voice from heaven, “Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Yes,” says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”
Bishop Wright has been arguing that heaven is the rest and not the final reward of the saved. He refers to “life after life after death” because in God’s Plan there will be a New Heaven and a New Earth inaugurated at the end of the age. This also includes the resurrection of the faithful dead when their bodies are united again with their spirits are at rest in heaven. This is hinted at in 1 Thessalonians 4:14 where Jesus “brings with him” those who have died in the faith. Anglican Bishop Wright is only echoing what the Presbyterian Westminster Confession stated firmly in 1647:
“The bodies of men after death return to dust and see corruption; but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, immediately return to God who gave them; the souls of the righteous, being made perfect in holiness, are received into highest heavens, where they behold the face of God waiting for the full redemption of their bodies.”
This is also supported by Hebrews 12:22-23 where the “church of the first born” is mentioned in heaven. It has always been a controversial but widespread teaching of the Christian Church that the “spirits of just men made perfect” refers to the righteous patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament who were led to Paradise by Jesus at the time of his death and resurrection when Jesus “led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:7-8). Peter Toon accepts this idea in his noted seminary text Heaven and Hell: A Biblical and Theological Overview (page 78). Various Scriptures are cited in reference to this release of the faithful dead from their condition of non-physical existence. These include Ephesians 4:7-10 and Hebrews 10:10 which says we, too, went beyond the Veil with Jesus at the time when he offered his sacrifice to the Father in heaven.
This is a stimulating concept and it helps flesh out verses that say Jesus has destroyed death (2 Timothy 1:10), that believers already have eternal life through the life-giving Spirit (John 6:54) and Paul’s recorded desire to depart and be with the Lord. In our funeral services here in our congregation we have recently been outlining a three-fold process for our lives with God. It comes under the rubric “Good, Better, Best.”
Good: “life in Christ” here and now (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Better: “life with Christ” in the heavenly rest (Philippians 1:23).
Best: Like Christ: when spirit and body are united at the resurrection and clothed with immortality (1 John 3:2).
The great expositor John Calvin referred to our life in heaven during this intermediary stage as the beginning of our rest, a token of the ultimate hope of our new glorified bodies at the resurrection of the Just. All aiming towards New Life in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
My own studies on this subject for almost 45 years embolden me to propose an alternative to the standard “heaven as up there.” This is an understandable concept in light of the Bible’s “language of appearance” i.e. the way events are seen from the human observer’s standpoint (Psalm 19:1-7; Genesis 1:16). The Book of Hebrews can encourage us to think of heaven as horizontal, echoing the thought of Bishop Wright. Paul said God is not far from every one of us (Acts 17:26) and if we look at all the references in Hebrews to Jesus going “through the veil” as our Forerunner (Hebrews 6:19-20) we may find it easier to grasp that fact. Not only has Jesus gone through the symbolic veil that once separated men from God in the Jerusalem Temple but he has taken us with him through the ultimate curtain in heaven: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living Way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body…let us draw near to God” (Hebrews 10:19-22).
Heaven as the resting place of the saved! This is the conclusion that seems warranted by the scriptural and theological evidence. But what does that mean? What will it be like and what will we be doing? Can we know anything at all about this most intriguing of subjects?
Peter Toon did a commentary on the great St. Augustine’s biblically-based thoughts on Heaven. Here are four of the conclusions offered, with a few of my own thoughts interjected.
We shall rest. This rest is not stagnation or inertia but a holy contentment such as we have not known but have always longed for. This encourages us to go from strength to strength as we learn to love God more fully and learn of God’s purposes for our lives. Paul writes tantalizingly that in the final state we shall “know as we are known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). One of the attractive points about “Five People You Meet in Heaven” was how the lead character, Eddie, had his own life slowly explained to him, how even the horrible setbacks fitted into a grand design for his life. Deep down, we would all like that kind of experience and it is one which the Bible hints at more than once (Psalm 139).
We shall see God. Even Christians only see through a darkened glass right now but there we shall know him face to face. We will experience him without hindrance, without encumbrance, without distortion, without distraction, without intermediaries. “All our knowledge of God is mediated knowledge here below,” Fuller Seminary’s Colin Brown once stated. But now we turn form the copy to the Original. C.S. Lewis wrote that when we see God we shall know we always knew him. Why? Because he was in all our experiences of love here below – mother love, friendship, a teacher’s love, counselor’s concern. “All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His” (The Four Loves, page 139).
We shall love. Right. As we just said, it is God who first loved us and infused us with his zest and excitement for the things of the Spirit. God is the End-point of human love just as he is its Starting-point-the Alpha and Omega. For all love is of God, John tells us (1 John 4:7). God’s love is an overflowing superabundance of concern for the Other. In heaven we come finally to the Source after a lifetime drinking further downstream. We take it in and learn to express it as fuel for whatever tasks God has for us in His New Creation.
We shall Praise. Living in the absence of evil, stress, agitation and distraction even the tongue of the tuneless will learn to sing and the hesitant will join in the New Song. It is Praise that takes us out of ourselves. Our capacity for praise does God no good—he lacks nothing. Praise will bubble forth from thanksgiving and for one reason: it is the only reaction a finite intelligence can have in close relationship with the Infinite. The prophecy of Psalm 84:4 (and so many more) will be fulfilled: “Blessed are those who dwell in your house, they will praise you forever and ever.”
So what have we learned? Let’s try to sum up:
First, Heaven is a term whose meaning in Scripture very much depends on the context.
Second, God’s heaven is not far from us and not only futuristic but near to us though in another dimension.
Third, the tradition was right: Heaven is a place of peace and rest (Luke 19:18) though a busy civilization of spirit beings (Hebrews 12:22).
Fourth, heaven is temporary. It will be shaken in the cosmic upheaval at the End and swallowed up in God’s main event, “life after life after death,” the New Heavens and the New Earth.
At least, this is enough to think about for one day.