Category Archives: Heaven

Heaven for Eternity?

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heavenIn an article entitled “Where God’s People Go When They Die,” Randy Alcorn writes:

Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. — 1 Thessalonians 4:13

When Marco Polo returned to Italy from the court of Kublai Khan, he described a world his audience had never seen—one that could be understood only through the eyes of imagination. Not that China was an imaginary realm, but it was very different from Italy. Yet, as two locations on planet Earth inhabited by human beings, they had much in common. The reference points of Italy allowed a basis for understanding China, and the differences could be spelled out from there.

The writers of Scripture present Heaven in many ways; for instance, as a garden, a city, a country, and a kingdom. We’re familiar with gardens, cities, countries, and kingdoms; they serve as mental bridges to help us understand Heaven.

Usually when we refer to Heaven, we mean the place where Christians go when they die. When we tell our children, “Grandma’s now in Heaven,” we’re referring to the intermediate, or present, Heaven. The term intermediate doesn’t mean it is halfway between Heaven and Hell, in some kind of purgatory or second-rate place. The intermediate Heaven is fully Heaven, fully in God’s presence, but it is intermediate in the sense that it’s temporary, not our final destination. Though it is a wonderful place, and we’ll love it there, it is not the place we are ultimately made for, and it is not the place where we will live forever. God has destined his children to live as resurrected beings on a resurrected Earth.

So, as wonderful as the intermediate Heaven is, we must not lose sight of our true destination, the New Earth, which will also be in God’s presence (because that’s what Heaven is, the central place of God’s dwelling).

Will Christians live in Heaven forever? The answer depends on what we mean by Heaven. Will we be with the Lord forever? Absolutely. Will we always be with him in exactly the same place that Heaven is now? No.

In the present Heaven, everyone is in Christ’s presence, and everyone is joyful. But everyone is also looking forward to Christ’s return to Earth, when they will experience their resurrection and walk on the earth again.

It may seem strange to say that the Heaven we go to at death isn’t eternal, but it’s true. Let me suggest an analogy to illustrate the difference between the intermediate Heaven and the eternal Heaven. 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. It will be great to see friends and family in the present Heaven whom we haven’t seen for a while. But like us, they will be looking forward to the resurrection, after which we will actually live on the estate that God is preparing for us.

Another analogy is more precise but also more difficult to envision, because for most of us it’s outside our experience. Imagine leaving the homeless shelter in Miami and flying to the intermediate location, Denver, and then turning around and going back to your city of origin, which has been completely renovated—a New Miami. In this New Miami, you would no longer live in a homeless shelter but in a beautiful house in a glorious pollution-free, crime-free, sin-free city. So you would end up living not in a new home but in a radically improved version of your old home.

This is what the Bible promises us—we will live with Christ and one another forever, not in the present Heaven, but on the New Earth, which God will make into Heaven by virtue of the location of his throne and his presence, and where he will forever be at home with his people.

Calvin’s Maladies and the Longing for Heaven

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the wife of one of the more important leaders of the Protestant Reformation in France. She had recently recovered from a struggle with numerous physical afflictions. In direct reference to her diseases, and all of ours as well, Calvin said:

“They [that is, our physical afflictions and diseases] should, moreover, serve us for medicines to purge us from worldly affections, and retrench [i.e., remove] what is superfluous in us, and since they are to us the messengers of death, we ought to learn to have one foot raised to take our departure when it shall please God” (John Calvin, Selected Works, Vol. 7; 1551; ed. H. Beveridge and J. Bonnet [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983], 331ff.; emphasis mine).

We ought to learn from our physical afflictions, said Calvin, to live every day with “one foot raised” to take our departure into heaven when it shall please God. Do we live every day with one foot lifted ever so deftly off the ground in constant alert and anxious expectation of the moment when we will depart this world and enter into the splendor of heaven and the presence of God himself? I strongly suspect that Calvin did, and that there is much about living now in expectation of that day that we can learn from him.

Calvin is a remarkably helpful guide, a man of great wisdom, insight, and personal energy when it comes to thinking about the resurrection of the body and our anticipation of eternal life in the New Heavens and New Earth. We see this in no fewer than four ways.

First, Calvin was in the truest sense of the term a pilgrim on this earth. Calvin knew from personal experience what it meant to be a sojourner and an exile in this life. In his commentary on 1 Peter 2:11, Calvin describes the children of God, “wherever they may be, as “only guests in this world” (Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, translated and edited by the Rev. John Owen [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2005], Vol. 22, p. 78). As he reflected on Paul’s exhortation in Colossians 3:1 that we “seek the things that are above,” he argued that only in doing so shall we embrace our identity as “sojourners in this world,” that is to say, people who “are not bound to it” (Commentaries on The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to The Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, translated by the Rev. John Pringle [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2005], Vol. 21, p. 205).

Nowhere does this emphasis in Calvin come out with greater clarity than in his comments on Hebrews 11 and 13. Calvin concludes from 11:16, where the author mentions the patriarchs’ “desire” for “a better country, that is, a heavenly one,” “that there is no place for us among God’s children, except we renounce the world, and that there will be for us no inheritance in heaven, except we become pilgrims on earth” (Commentary on The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, translated by the Rev. John Owen [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2005], vol. 22, p. 285 [yes, Calvin believed Paul wrote Hebrews]). His observations on 13:14 are especially instructive. There the author of Hebrews describes the perspective of all believers in saying: “For here [i.e., on this earth] we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.” In light of this, says Calvin, we should consider that

“we have no fixed residence but in heaven. Whenever, therefore, we are driven from place to place, or whenever any change happens to us, let us think of what the Apostle teaches us here, that we have no certain abode on earth, for heaven is our inheritance; and when more and more tried, let us ever prepare ourselves for our last end; for they who enjoy a very quiet life commonly imagine that they have a rest in this world: it is hence profitable for us, who are prone to this kind of sloth, to be often tossed here and there, that we who are too much inclined to look on things below, may learn to turn our eyes up to heaven” (ibid., 349).

This keen sense of being a pilgrim and sojourner on earth was reinforced in Calvin’s heart by the harsh realities of his life. Forced to flee Paris because of his inflammatory remarks about the Roman Catholic Church and the need for reform, Calvin is reported to have descended from a window by means of bed-sheets and escaped from the city disguised as a vine-dresser with a hoe upon his shoulder. The next two years were spent as a wandering student and evangelist. He settled in Basel, hoping to spend his life in quiet study. Calvin returned to Paris in 1536 to settle some old financial matters. He decided to go from there to Strasbourg to be a scholar, but as a result of his famous encounter with William Farel ended up in Geneva. Trouble erupted when he and Farel sought to administer church discipline and to restrict access to the Lord’s Table to those who were spiritually qualified. The two were literally kicked out of town in April of 1538. Continue reading →

Why Heaven?

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So why John would you think you are fit to enter heaven after death?

In and of myself, I have no hope WHATSOEVER of entrance into God’s heaven. My only hope is found in the word SUBSTITUTION – that there was One who stood in my place, that my very own sins were transferred to Him as He hung on the tree, that He bore the punishment that was mine, that He died in my place, that He drank the bitter cup of Divine wrath for me; and that grace upon grace, the righteous life of that One was credited to my account when I trusted in Him, and that I stand in His righteousness alone. I have no other plea but this: that based on the sure foundation of SCRIPTURE ALONE, that CHRIST ALONE the Perfect Savior is my Subsitute, and that He is mine by GRACE ALONE, through FAITH ALONE, to the GLORY OF GOD ALONE.