Gina had only vague ideas about heaven, based on little thought, until her mother passed. Her mother’s passing caused Gina to think about heaven a lot. She understood that Jesus Christ, in whom she believed, spoke about the kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven, and about eternal life. Gina also understood the scriptural claim that when a Christian was absent from the body, in the event of death, the Christian was present with the Lord. But Gina still felt as if she needed a clearer picture of heaven. Every day, Gina spent time wondering where her mother was, exactly, now that her mother, a lifelong Christian, had passed.
Cosmos
Faith gives us more than theological constructs and moral principles. It also gives us a sound way of looking at the world as we experience it, according to God’s design. The world obviously has higher and lower things, not just in the material sense but also in the sense of value, primacy, purity, principle, and power. We orient ourselves to the world vertically, up and down. The sun above lights, warms, and gives life and clarity to the earth. Likewise, the things of God, including first his love and then everything that issues from love, are upward, above, having highest purity, primacy, and power. Those things above suffuse, arrange, order, and give life and pattern to things below. The lowest things have none of that order, authority, or life. The sun does not reach the ocean depths or below the earth’s surface, where life gradually dwindles and then ceases. The dead fall to the earth, their remains scattering into the earth’s lifeless chaos. The living stand up from the earth, looking to heaven for life, meaning, and purpose. Keep your eyes fixed above.
Heaven
Faith characterizes these upper and lower realms, just described above in their cosmic outline, as heaven and hell, between which we dwell on earth. The Bible’s Hebrew and Greek words for heaven reflect that God resides there. God’s heavenly realm is not merely earth’s natural atmosphere or even the starlit night sky beyond but instead higher still. God’s realm is not in the material and astrophysical way we think of it but as the ancients understood it, as a distinct type of realm, as if in another dimension. Do not mock heaven’s biblical and phenomenological description as unscientific. The Bible is not using scientific material constructs. The Bible instead describes things in the way that we would experience them and should therefore think of them. The highest heaven is God’s kingdom, a kingdom because heaven is the place from which God rules all. To say that God’s throne is in heaven is to mark his priority, supremacy, and authority over all.
Character
Some have the wrong impression of heaven as a boring place, lacking in excitement and adventure. Yet heaven is not a monochrome, featureless, singular, vaporous, or ethereal place. Heaven is instead a place of land, water, vegetation, trees, and life. The Bible represents heaven as a large and spacious realm, a country with physical features including mountains, fields, and rivers. God dwelled with the first humans Adam and Eve in his paradise, a mountaintop garden, reflecting heaven. God charged Adam and Eve to work and tend the garden, through which a river flowed, watering the garden. Likewise, the river of the water of life flows through heaven, watering the trees and plants of heaven. God’s tree of life feeds heaven’s residents its fruit, while the tree’s leaves heal the nations. Heaven also has twelve spectacular gates marking boundaries and twelve equally spectacular foundations marking rich structure and permanence. Heaven is these things and much more, beyond what humans can conceive and describe. Set your mind on heaven, not as an underwhelming place but instead as an overwhelming and richly fertile place.
Salvation
Jesus Christ resides with his Father in heaven. The Father drew the Son back to heaven after his resurrection. The disciplines witnessed Christ’s ascension. Heaven is where the Father and Son reside, together with those whom the Son saves. Our eternal resting place is with Jesus in heaven. God’s heavenly realm, though unlike the earthly realm, is a real place where God’s saved and transformed people dwell with the Son in resurrected bodies, the Son having rescued us to reside with the Father and Son forever. We live with God eternally in his heavenly kingdom. Put aside any thought that heaven is only imaginary, about which we only dream on earth. While heaven is of a higher and different character than earth, the Bible consistently represents heaven as a place to which the saved go. Jesus builds a dwelling place for each of us in heaven. Jesus promises that he will return to take each of those whom he saves to the place in heaven that he prepares for us. Heaven holds your own place. The Bible, through the prophet Isaiah, reveals that if you wish, you may build your own house in heaven and plant and harvest from your own vineyards.
Experience
Expect to find heaven to be so desirable and enjoyable as to experience everything for which you could wish. Under God’s unchallenged authority, heaven has no conflict or harm, only peace. Predators like wolves and lions rest with, rather than attack and kill, what would have been their prey on earth. Nations, of which heaven will hold many, will not fight one another in endless wars any more. All in heaven will love as God loves. Deserts will bloom for heaven’s residents, and wildernesses will welcome them. Jesus will drink wine with his saved in heaven. Heaven won’t be a place where you lose your identity and self-consciousness. In heaven, you will recognize yourself. You will also recognize others, including loved ones whom you know here on earth. You will know others, though, not superficially but for who they truly are. In heaven, we see one another authentically face to face. Heaven will also leave you no regrets, tears, sorrow, or pain. No wonder, then, that the faithful look forward with the greatest anticipation to experiencing heaven.
Body
The faithful do not float through heaven as merely a consciousness, without a body. The faithful instead receive their own resurrected body in heaven, a body that reflects and continues their earthly identity but in healed and perfected form. The saved whom Jesus rescues enjoy their resurrected heavenly body free from pain or disease, and glorified with good health, strength, and agility. Your heavenly body will reflect your earthly capacity to eat, drink, and move about in your own physical form but give you greater capability, possibly even to move through physical barriers. Your heavenly body will also not weaken, decline, or decay. No wonder, then, that the faithful look forward to the healing and transformation they will experience in their resurrected body in heaven.
Return
The Bible also represents a later heaven, a new or second heaven after Jesus returns to earth. Jesus came once to give his life, stand again in resurrection, and ascend again to heaven. Jesus will come again, this time not to give his life but to reclaim his earthly kingdom. The new heaven that the return of Jesus will usher in will descend to earth as a holy city, a New Jerusalem. The new heaven and earth will form a new and incorruptible realm in which the saved will live eternally. The main feature of the vast descending city, the new heaven and earth, will be God’s glory shining there, illuminating the realm and leaving no need for sunlight or moonlight. The new heaven and earth is so fabulous, even filled with precious stones and jewels, as to overwhelm those whom God grants even the slightest vision of it.
Anticipation
Some resist thinking about heaven. Yet faith encourages us to consider these things above and in our future. The faithful are to contemplate and seek heaven, where Christ sits with his Father. Indeed, we are to set our minds on those things above, more so than on matters here on earth. We fix our eyes not on the temporary things of earth but on the unseen and permanent things of heaven. We look forward especially to the new heaven and earth that God will fill with his glorious righteousness. In all that the faithful do, we first seek God’s kingdom, letting God grant us earthly things as he wills. We set our hearts on things above, not earthly things. God blesses us with every spiritual blessing in heaven. The greatest attribute of heaven will always be that heaven draws us to him, into his glorious presence. Heaven is real and attainable. Know and love Jesus because the faithful’s citizenship is not here but instead in heaven.
Absence
The apostle Paul assures believers that to be absent from the body, interpreted as referring to physical death, is to be present with the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus himself gave the same impression. When the thief dying on the cross beside Jesus acknowledged the divinity of Jesus, he also asked Jesus to remember him when Jesus returned to his heavenly kingdom. Jesus replied to the thief that the thief would that day join Jesus in paradise. When we die while embracing our salvation in Jesus, we immediately join Jesus in heaven. We live with the assurance of heaven. We regard our earthly troubles, no matter how severe, as light and momentary, in the perspective of an eternity with the Lord in heaven. Rest assured that your beloved Christian friend or relative who has departed earth is in God’s presence in heaven. Look forward to the day you, too, will be in heaven.
Reflection
Do you have a robust vision of God’s heavenly kingdom, in your cosmological perspective? Can you distinguish the modern scientific materialist view of the universe from the earthly and heavenly realms God gives us? Do you look forward to experiencing heaven? Are you relying on Jesus for your salvation and eternal life, as he invites you? Are you looking forward to having your healed, strengthened, and incorruptible heavenly body? Would looking heavenward in anticipation, more often and richly, help your earthly outlook? Can you rest more assured that your departed Christian family members and friends are with the Lord? Do you have other friends and family members for whom you need to care and pray, and with whom you need to share the good news of Jesus Christ, so that they, too, can look heavenward with joyful anticipation?
Key Points
Faith describes an experiential cosmos of heaven above and hell below.
Heaven is God’s divine and distinct realm beyond the atmosphere.
Heaven has a rich, varied, and consequential character to enjoy.
Christ’s salvation ushers the departed believer into heaven.
The departed believer immediately joins Christ in heavenly paradise.
The saved experience heaven in their own resurrected body.
Heaven will, after Jesus returns, descend to earth as a celestial city.
The faithful should keep their minds fixed above in anticipation.