(This is third of our Heaven mini-series. See post 1 and post 2)
I finished my last post by arguing that Christ has made heaven our home. He has given us confidence to enter the heavenly tabernacle and citizenship in the heavenly Jerusalem.
But is this a permanent thing? Is heaven our future or simply an interim reality until the restoration of the earth?
Previous generations of evangelicals might have been quick to answer that heaven is our eternal home. Their hymns look forward to a “sweet by and by;” to “soaring through worlds unknown.” But many of us today would see heaven as a temporary stage we pass through while we await for our real dwelling – the renewed earth – where we’ll live in resurrected bodies. Our hope, in other words, is earthly rather than heavenly.
Previous generations of evangelicals might have been quick to answer that heaven is our eternal home. Many of us today would see heaven as a temporary stage we pass through while we await for our real dwelling
Now, as I said in my first post, I have no argument with this reaffirmation of physical reality. The New Testament seems pretty clear that when we die we our bodies will sleep while our souls go to be with Jesus; and that when Jesus returns he will both bring us with him, and restore our bodies along with everything else. Our ultimate destiny is to live as embodied people in a renewed world.
But does this mean that heaven isn’t our home? Or that the intermediate state (between our death and the resurrection) is so inferior to our embodied life that it can kind of be skipped-over in our thinking?
I don’t think so. That would be to define us primarily by our substance (our physical natures) rather than by our relationship with God. Rather, as Paul sees it, it is “better by far” to leave the body and be with Christ (Phil 1:22-23). If we have to choose then we should “prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” (2 Cor 5:8).
Heaven vs Earth?
Nor is it clear that earth should be considered our ultimate home rather than heaven. A biblical case can be made that the saints in glory will one day leave heaven and resettle earth after its renewal. But the Bible might support other possibilities as well:
- Sometimes it seems that earthly reality is to be assimilated to heaven as when Paul contrasts the glorious humanity of the “heavenly” man, Christ, with the earthly man, Adam. [1]
- Sometimes it seems that heaven and earth are to merged into a single reality where saints and angels come together in the presence of God. [2]
- Sometimes it seems that both earth and heaven will be removed and replaced by a new reality “which cannot be shaken,” (Heb 1:10-12; 12:26-29)
- Sometimes it sounds like Jesus will come and fetch us and take us away from earth to heaven (John 14:3).
No doubt these perspectives can be reconciled in the mind of God and will be reconciled in reality when Jesus returns. But their diversity should warn us against overly-definite theories about the form of our future cosmos.
Shadows and Reality
Similar cautions apply to the correspondence between present and future reality. Many evangelicals now like to imagine the future as an idealised form of the present. This is fine on one level – the Bible itself does this. It depicts the coming kingdom as a time when people will live past one hundred years of age and bear healthy children (Is 65:20-23). It describes a restructured Jerusalem and a giant temple (Eze 40-48). These Old Testament examples must be non-literal: the New Testament speaks of an end to both death and married life; it says that there will one day be no temple (Mark 12:25; Rev 21:22).
But the New Testament visions must be at least partly symbolic too: when John describes Jerusalem as an immense form of the Most Holy Place built out of gemstones according to sacred geometry; when he speaks of the tree of life growing on both sides of the river that flows from the throne of God and the Lamb.
So here again we need to exercise caution. C. S. Lewis says that those who confuse present joys with heaven are like a little boy who thinks that sex must involve eating chocolate. Since food is the highest pleasure he can imagine, he sees every other pleasure in its light.[3]
Our renewed appreciation for this world and its future risks confusing secondary realities with their source and centre. The main thing we need to be clear about, and most excited about, is that we will live with God and see his face.
This is a danger for us too. Our renewed appreciation for this world and its future risks confusing secondary realities with their source and centre. The main thing we need to be clear about, and most excited about, is that we will live with God and see his face.
Heaven Now
Yet, despite Lewis’ warnings, this is the part of the future is available to us today. Paul writes that “God, who said, ‘let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ,” (2Cor 4:6). This is the start of a new earth and heaven! Those who know Christ have received new creation (2Cor 5:17) and already glimpsed the visio-dei, the centerpiece of the world to come.
Indeed the whole of the Christian life participates in this future. Christian life is lived through the power of Christ’s resurrected life. The Spirit who gave him new life (Rom 1:4; 8:11) now brings Christ’s life to us, baptizing us into Christ so that we can change and be remade (Rom 8:10; Rom 6:3-4 c.f. 1Cor 12:12-13). The Spirit unites us with Christ, making us part of his reality so we become his body, his temple.
Richard Sibbes the “heavenly doctor” of the Anglican Puritans writes that the Christian life participates in heaven. The “Church of God is the house where God frameth new creatures … the beginning of glory.” He says that in the Church we meet the middle paradise between Eden and Glory; the naked reality of which the Old Testament testified.[4]
The River from Heaven
I began this series of posts looking at the idea of heaven as the point at which God meets the cosmos and his blessings flow out into creation. But with the ascension of Christ and the sending of his Spirit that stream of blessing has broken out on earth. It wells up to eternal life in those come to Christ; it flows out from those who belong to Jesus (John 4:13-14; 7:38-39). It summons us – even while remain on earth – to the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb 12:22-24).
Heaven is coming, yet it is already here. It can be glimpsed now; participated in now; experienced now.
Photo: Vinoth Chandar, flickr
[1] This is not to deny suggest a loss of physical reality (as if heaven were insubstantial) but rather its transfiguration and conversion to a heavenly mode. See for example G. D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 792; A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 1288-1289.
[2] See helpful comments on the final unity of heaven and earth here: D. A. Carson, “D. A. Carson on the Book of Revelation”, (Audio hosted by Justin Taylor, Gospel Coalition, 1995) http://media.thegospelcoalition.org/audio/carson/1995_Rev_part22.mp3, 00:18:50-00:20:50; also, N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK, 2007), 115-116, 147 – surprisingly Wright insists that this unified reality should be called “earth” rather than heaven; ibid. 310, n. 9 &12.
[3] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (Glasgow: William Collins & Sons, 1976), 163-164.
[4] “A Breathing After the Holy Spirit” in R. Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, D.D, ed. A. B. Grosart, Nichol’s Series of Standard Divines. Puritan Period, 7 volumes (Edinburgh: J. Nichol, 1863) 2.234-235.
