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Heaven
Heaven
Heaven
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Heaven

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Have you ever wondered . . . ?
  • What is Heaven really going to be like?
  • What will we look like?
  • What will we do every day?
  • Won’t Heaven get boring after a while?
We all have questions about what Heaven will be like, and after twenty-five years of extensive research, Dr. Randy Alcorn has the answers.

In the most comprehensive and definitive book on Heaven to date, Randy invites you to picture Heaven the way Scripture describes it—a bright, vibrant, and physical New Earth, free from sin, suffering, and death, and brimming with Christ’s presence, wondrous natural beauty, and the richness of human culture as God intended it.

This is a book about real people with real bodies enjoying close relationships with God and each other, eating, drinking, working, playing, traveling, worshiping, and discovering on a New Earth. Earth as God created it. Earth as he intended it to be.

The next time you hear someone say, “We can’t begin to image what Heaven will be like,” you’ll be able to tell them, “I can.”

“Other than the Bible itself, this may well be the single most life-changing book you’ll ever read.”Stu Weber

“This is the best book on Heaven I’ve ever read.”Rick Warren

“Randy Alcorn’s thorough mind and careful pen have produced a treasury about Heaven that will inform my own writing for years to come.”Jerry B. Jenkins

“Randy does an awesome job of answering people’s toughest questions about what lies on the other side of death.”Joni Eareckson Tada

About the Author
Randy Alcorn is an author and the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries, a nonprofit ministry dedicated to teaching principles of God’s Word and assisting the church in ministering to unreached, unfed, unborn, uneducated, unreconciled, and unsupported people around the world. A New York Times bestselling author of over 50 books, including Heaven, The Treasure Principle, If God Is Good, Happiness, and the award-winning novel Safely Home, his books sold exceed eleven million copies and have been translated into over seventy languages.

Editor's Note

Revealing a New Earth...

Rooted in Biblical studies, Alcorn's account of heaven is one of today's most revelatory studies on the oft-discussed subject.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 9, 2011
ISBN9781414345673
Heaven
Author

Randy Alcorn

Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspectives Ministries and a New York Times bestselling author of over sixty books, including Heaven and Face to Face with Jesus. His books have sold over twelve million copies and been translated into over seventy languages. Randy resides in Gresham, Oregon. Since 2022, his wife and best friend, Nanci, has been living with Jesus in Heaven. He has two married daughters and five grandsons.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you ever wanted to read a book about heaven this is the one book that you must read! This is by far the most definitive book on the subject of heaven.It clears up the speculation and confusion while giving precise and thrilling answers to the most asked questions. An absolute must read that you need to add to your library!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    In Randy Alcorn’s eponymous book on Heaven, the place where good people go when they die, he starts off by setting the record straight: Heaven is not boring. It’s not a place where we float around, singing Hosannahs, playing a harp, and thinking only of God and praising him nonstop. Alcorn says that this way of thinking is not biblical, to which he provides countless passages from the Bible to back up what he’s saying.Alcorn says that Heaven is a real, physical place where we will have real, physical bodies. He speaks against Christoplatonism, which was largely inspired by Neoplatonism, and totes a belief that the physical world is weak and impure, and the the spiritual world is the ideal, quintessential (quite literally), state. While Christoplatonists says matter is evil, Alcorn says: God created matter before the Fall (the fruit incident, not the season) therefore it can’t be evil.It’s this thinking that drives the rest of the book, answering all manner of questions about what Heaven will be like, usually supporting this theory with another Bible verse.While I thought that Alcorn did an excellent job studying what the Bible had to say regarding Heaven, and putting aside people’s fears that it would be intolerably boring (even including quotes by Twain and Asimov indicating as much), I felt that at times, his own rhetoric was laced with nonbiblical suppositions that he warns the reader not to fall prey too. Without delving into extensive theology in a book review, I’ll just leave it at this: I had issues with some of the theories he presented, especially in the absence of supporting text from the Bible. The casual manner at which he tosses out one belief or another which may not be founded on scripture, but is instead a commonly held belief among Christians perpetuated by teachings of the Church, sometimes set me on edge, especially due to his disfavor of such circumstances propagating a boring Heaven, something he refers to as “heresy.”Ultimately, I thought it presented an interesting perspective of Heaven, one closer to the images one sees when they read of Aslan’s Country from Narnia, or Valinor from the Lord of the Rings, but not inherently medieval. This perspective may be useful for those with a little more curiosity in their ultimate destination, especially those who fear going to Heaven more so than going to Hell, or dying. However, like Alistair Begg is known to say in his Scottish accent: “The plain things are the main things, and the main things are the plain things.” So, if something is not made absolutely clear through a reading of the Bible, it’s (a) subject to interpretation, and (b) not all that important for being a good Christian. So, don’t fret too much if you don’t agree with him either. Everybody who gets to Heaven is more of an expert on it than Alcorn could ever be while here on Earth.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very good, but I'm not sure that he is always right! And in some cases, I hope that he is not!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Randy Alcorn brings forth a lot of ideas I'd never thought of before (like an intermediate Heaven where believers go between the time they die and the bodily resurrection to the New Earth - it makes lots of sense and there is Biblical grounds for it, I'd just never heard that theory before) and while there are a few where I think he draws broader conclusions than the Scripture allows, on most of his theories I completely agree. I highly recommend it to any Christian. If you don't really look forward to going to Heaven, because you think it'll be boring or unlike what you're used to here or for whatever other reason it'll shake you up and give you something new to think about. I know that for me, personally, it's made me look more forward to going to Heaven than ever before, and I just wish I could take all my loved ones with me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is by far the most exhaustive study done on the topic of Heaven. I anxiously awaited this book for years and was even more impressed with the finished product than I imagined. It has strengthened me and my resolve to be a better follower of Christ. It is an exciting read and a must read for every Christian and everyone who just wants to know what happens next.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Well, this is certainly an interesting look at our eternal resting place. It is a far cry from any picture of Heaven that I have ever heard about before. However, there are plenty of scriptural references. So you can decide for yourself if this just might be an accurate portrayal.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one for the soul. This book was a eye-opener. I read this on a cruise and I was so impress at Randy Alcorn vivid imagination on how he would interpret the bible and it's meanings of Heaven and beyond. A must read
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is part of my collection that really focuses in on Biblical Commentary more than anything else (including some well known authors in the theological world). All of these books haven't been read cover to cover, but I've spent a lot of time with them and they've been helpful in guiding me through difficult passages (or if I desire to dig deeper).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Heaven is a topic truly unknown by most Christians. This book answered questions from a Bibilical perspective personally, radically changed my life and how I live it. May be read straight through or according to specific questions.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    First 1/4 was amazing. 5 stars. Appendices were good as well. I'm sure the rest was good. It it just didn't interest me as much so I skimmed most of it. Overall fantastic book. I found it incredibly encouraging and resolved many of the issues I've had reconciling the beliefs I was raised with with what I found in scripture.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This has been an important part of a work that God has done in my heart, enflaming a longing for heaven and for God in whole new ways. If Christians lived with this perspective it would transform our daily lives. I feel as if the engine of my Christian life just got supercharged. I don't know that Randy is right in all of his perceptions, but I do know that it won't be less than this! This is what Christ saved us for, so make sure you know what the Bible has to say about heaven.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An eye-opening look at what the Scriptures have to say about heaven. It is a little long-winded, but SO worthwhile.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very inspiring and got me excited for Heaven in a way no other book ever has. Just a bit long and pretty hefty reading for me, but worth it!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This very informative book has certainly opened my eyes and has given me a totally new perspective of heaven. I’ve had questions in my mind for much of my life about heaven, and this book addressed many of those questions. You will feel encouraged to delve deeper into the Scriptures to understand even more. After reading many of the Scriptures, I found myself thinking that I hadn’t thought about a particular verse in that much depth, or in that way – very inspiring, indeed!Two of the most interesting concepts presented in the book were the Intermediate Heaven – not our permanent destination, and the New Earth – our final destination. Just thought provoking! And, of course, Satan hates the New Heaven and the New Earth, and will do everything he can to keep us from redemption and rob us of the joy we will know in heaven. There is so much information about the world to come, and this book deals with it in detail. It is hard to wrap your mind around many parts, but it’s enough to fire up your imagination and give you a driven desire to spend eternity in heaven.It is very clear that there are two possible destinations after death: heaven and hell, and each is just as real and just as eternal as the other. Heaven is not our default destination. We cannot enter heaven as we are. Unless our sin problem is resolved, we will go to our true default destination --- hell. Matthew 7: 13-14 - “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”“The best of life on Earth is a glimpse of heaven; the worst of life is a glimpse of hell. For Christians, this present life is the closest they will come to hell. For unbelievers, it is the closest they will come to heaven.”I have highlighted many parts of this book and I will be keeping it close by to read sections again and again. It is one of the most interesting and profound books I’ve ever read! My rating is 5+ stars.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    When your loved one goes somewhere you want to know more about this place. After my granny died I started studying more about the place she lives at now. Randy Alcorn's description and personal revelation of heaven is both inspiring and biblical. I am longing to be tgere and am looking forward to learn more about the place i get to enjoy with Jesus and my loved ones for eternity
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of the best books about Heaven that I have ever read. It comes straight from scripture. Alcorn describes what we can learn about Heaven and backs his opinions up with various Bible verses. If Heaven is where we ultimately want to go, it's wise to see what to expect. He answers a lot of questions that people have. Two thumbs up for this one!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read this book on the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend, and now I have become one of those people enthusiastically recommending it to my own friends. Between us, the first friend and I make a pretty good tag-team! If you know us, your chances of reading this book have just shot up. It's not too much to say that this book has completely changed the way I view the life to come, and my attitude toward this life as well. Alcorn starts by confronting many of the myths that we've unconsciously swallowed about what Heaven will be like (note that I am capitalizing the word following his example, treating Heaven as a real place). We have a vague idea that Heaven will be so spiritual that we will just float around as disembodied souls in a kind of saline solution of hyper-holiness. It almost sounds like the Matrix — but I think if we really scrutinize our beliefs, we'll find this isn't an inaccurate description. We've been influenced by what Alcorn terms "Christoplatonism," the heretical idea that the material world is inherently sinful and that the spiritual world is the only thing that matters. We have a guilty feeling about Heaven because this picture of it sounds so incredibly boring. We try to comfort ourselves by saying there is no way we can appreciate what Heaven will be like, with our puny minds and sinful flesh in the way. I remember being told as a young believer that though Heaven's nonstop singing and worship sounded boring, it wouldn't be, because all I could understand was the weariness of my currently sinful flesh. This answer satisfied me somewhat, but I still couldn't quite make myself look forward to a Heaven like that. But worship is not just standing and singing in church. Romans 12:1 says that offering our bodies to God as a living sacrifice is our spiritual act of worship. And worship is not just singing, but a lifestyle. I worship God in my treatment of other people, in every detail of everyday life. This verse also underscores one of Alcorn's main points in this book: the physical world, and our physical bodies, are not evil. Our physical bodies can actually be used to worship God! All creation is currently suffering under the Curse, but it will not always be this way. God's big plan is not to harvest our souls from this world and then trash the planet. Oh no — He is going to redeem it. He is going to make all things new, yes, but not alien, not completely different. It's the New Heavens and the New Earth, not a new place altogether. Alcorn gives a Scriptural breakdown of what happens to Christians who die before the Second Coming, the sequence of events at the time of judgment, and the believer's sure destination of the wedding-feast with the Lamb. He also speculates quite a bit on what life in Heaven will be like. Will we forget who we were on Earth? Alcorn says that's silly; why would we? In Revelation chapter 6, the saints pray for vengeance on those who killed them; how could they do that unless they remembered their martyrdom? Alcorn also points out that those saints were told to wait, which implies that there is time in Heaven. John even gives specific amounts of time in Revelation, like when he says there was silence in Heaven for about one half-hour (Revelation 8:1)! How have we missed that all these years? Will we know everything instantly in Heaven? Is that what it means to be perfect? Alcorn argues that no, we will not instantly know everything, and perfection does not mean complete omniscience. There will be learning in Heaven. The saints in Revelation chapter 6 are asking a question ("how long, O Lord?") because they do not know the answer. Learning is not inherently sinful, nor does it imply that the learner is imperfect. We will continue to develop and explore new things throughout eternity. Will Heaven contain human works of art? Alcorn argues yes. There is verse in Revelation that says the glory of the nations will be brought into the New Jerusalem. Human art created under the Curse can still bring honor and praise to the Creator, and Alcorn talks about the works that have moved him to profound worship of the Father. I can identify with that; certain books have taught me beautiful things and enriched my love for God. Sin-glorifying works will perish, certainly, but I don't see why God would destroy the beautiful. I am dreaming of Heaven's libraries with a sort of quiet ecstasy... Will our pets and animals be in Heaven? Alcorn discusses this question from a perspective I haven't really considered before. Most Christians agree that animals do not have souls, but perhaps we ought to be more specific and say they don't have human souls. It is possible that they do have souls. And if the New Heavens and the New Earth are going to be faithful to the original unfallen Eden, animals will have to be there! God delights in giving gifts to His children and enjoying their enjoyment of those gifts. Everything will glorify Him, but that doesn't mean we will simply be singing "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" in His direction nonstop forever. Alcorn believes that our love for our pets glorifies the Creator, because they are His gift, and there's no reason why our pets would not be in Heaven. Because we will be perfect, there will be no fear of idolizing a created being in place of God. All loves and all joys will glorify the Godhead and find perfect fulfillment in Him. The cover of my copy has a quote by Stu Weber, saying "Other than the Bible itself, this may well be the single most life-changing book you'll ever read." He isn't too far-off in that claim. This book has opened my eyes to the Scriptural truth about eternity, and I have learned to long for Heaven. When I see something beautiful, I realize that I am experiencing just a shadow of Heaven's beauty. When life's bitternesses and regrets pain me, when I look at people I love suffering chronic pain, when I live in imperfect and misunderstood relationships — I rejoice in my hope of Heaven. And the hope of the future helps sustain me in the now. I cannot recommend Heaven highly enough, and I'm very thankful for the Scriptural perspective it is restoring to believers around the world. If I could give it ten stars, I would! I urge you to read it... I can't promise that it will radically change your perspective, but it certainly did mine. Great book, great truths, and a fantastic addition to the literature on Heaven.

Book preview

Heaven - Randy Alcorn

PREFACE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Bookstores overflow with accounts of near-death and after-death experiences, complete with angels giving guided tours of Heaven. A few of these books may have authentic components, but many are unbiblical and misleading.

We Christians who believe God’s Word are partly to blame for this. Why? We have failed to explore and explain the Bible’s magnificent teachings about Heaven. No wonder a flood of unbiblical thinking has rushed in to fill the vacuum. Because the human heart cries out for answers about the afterlife, our silence on Heaven is particularly striking.

The truth is, in our seminaries, churches, and families, we have given amazingly little attention to the place where we will live forever with Christ and his people—the New Earth, in the new universe. This eternal Heaven is the central subject of this book. It’s a subject I’ve found to be fascinating, thrilling, and life-changing.

TEST THIS BOOK BY SCRIPTURE

From the beginning, I want to make it clear that it’s vitally important that this book be true to Scripture. I believe that most of my conclusions, even those that significantly depart from current evangelical thinking, will stand up to biblical scrutiny. Inevitably, however, some may not. In the context of prophetic statements, the apostle Paul says, Test everything. Hold on to the good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). It’s up to you to test by God’s Word what I say, hold on to the good, and reject the bad.

Through biblical study and extensive reading, dialogue, and critique, I’ve tried to detect any conclusions that don’t pass Scripture’s test, to eliminate them before this book was published. But despite my best efforts, some errors undoubtedly have slipped through. I call on readers to be like the Bereans, who examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true (Acts 17:11). Don’t throw out the baby of truth with the bathwater of what you regard as my mistakes—but, by all means, do throw out the bathwater!

I invite you to contact me if you believe you have biblical grounds for disagreeing with anything in this book. I am open to correction—in fact, I seek it, and I will make any warranted changes in future editions. This revised version of the book contains a number of changes I made based on input from readers of the first edition. I am grateful for their questions and criticisms. (Keep in mind, though, when you write to me, that I’ve never heard this before . . . and I’ve always thought that . . . and Our denomination teaches . . . are not biblical grounds for disagreement.)

Many things in this book will be new even to readers who are veteran students of Scripture. New ideas are rightly suspect because they are often heretical. However, when biblical truths have been long neglected or ignored, attempts to present them may sound far-fetched. They may appear to be adding to or misinterpreting Scripture, when in fact they are simply portraying what Scripture has said all along but we’ve failed to grasp. In these pages I will introduce some biblical truths that I believe have been long ignored or spiritualized and thereby stripped of their richness and significance.

STRUCTURE AND CONTENT

Examining the table of contents will give you a good feel for this book. In part 1, A Theology of Heaven, I will explain the difference between the present Heaven (where Christians go when they die) and the ultimate, eternal Heaven (where God will dwell with his people on the New Earth). Don’t be afraid of the word theology—it simply means a study of God’s relation to the world—and don’t underestimate your ability to understand what God has revealed to you in his Word. We’ll discuss whether the current Heaven is a physical place; whether people there remember life on Earth; whether they pray for loved ones on Earth and can actually see what’s going on here; and we’ll answer the question, If people in Heaven are aware of events on Earth, including suffering, how could it be Heaven?

The backbone of part 1 is a discussion of the book’s central subject, the New Earth. I’ll present foundational biblical truths concerning God’s larger plan in redemption, especially in the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and what that means for the New Earth. I will answer questions such as, What will it mean to see God? What will our relationships with people be like? What will it mean to rule the earth with Christ?

Part 2, Questions and Answers about Heaven, addresses specific questions about life on the New Earth that arise out of the foundational teachings in part 1—questions such as, Will the New Earth be like Eden? Will there be animals on the New Earth? What kind of city is the New Jerusalem? What will our bodies be like? Will we eat and drink? Will we work? use machinery? play? study and learn? create art and music and culture?

You may find that the material in the first part of the book is paradigm shifting. If you don’t understand the foundational principles, however, you will come to the second half with a different set of assumptions, and what I’m saying may not make sense. The soundness of my conclusions in the question and answer section depends on the biblical basis I present in part 1.

I sometimes skip around when reading a book, going straight to the chapters that deal with what interests me most. If you do this, I hope you’ll then go back to the foundational chapters to see what the book’s logic is built upon. If you are patient enough to read this book consecutively, I think you’ll be rewarded. Part 3, Living in Light of Heaven, encourages us to let the doctrine of Heaven transform us and fill us with joyful anticipation.

If I were dealing with the subject of Heaven in order of importance, I would begin with a discussion of God’s presence in Heaven and our relationship with him, because being with God and seeing his face is the central joy of Heaven and the source of all other joys. But there’s a major obstacle: Because of our wrong assumptions about the eternal state, we bring misguided perspectives to what it will mean to see God or be with him. We succumb to the vague, ethereal notions of eastern religions rather than build our understanding on the concrete, physical depictions of biblical and historical Christianity. We fail to envision God as forever incarnate in the risen Christ, and we fail to recognize the New Earth as a physical environment, civilization, and culture in which God will dwell with us. Consequently, I must lay the biblical groundwork before I discuss what it will mean to live with God forever and answer other key questions about Heaven.

I’VE NEVER THOUGHT THIS WAY BEFORE

A friend asked me the central premise of this book. When I explained it briefly, he looked at me wide-eyed, incredulous. I rephrased it, using different Scriptures and illustrations. Suddenly, the light went on for him. He said, "The more you restate it in different ways, the more Scripture you use, the more it makes sense. But I’ve never thought this way before. I don’t think many people have. You’ll need to make your case carefully, or people just won’t believe it."

I will try to make the case carefully and biblically. There is plenty in this book for everyone to disagree with. But I hope you’ll find that most of it rings true to Scripture and opens up exciting doors to imagining and anticipating everything that awaits God’s children in the magnificent world to come.

INTRODUCTION

THE SUBJECT OF HEAVEN

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. 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. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.

JOHN 14:1-3

The sense that we will live forever somewhere has shaped every civilization in human history. Australian aborigines pictured Heaven as a distant island beyond the western horizon. The early Finns thought it was an island in the faraway east. Mexicans, Peruvians, and Polynesians believed that they went to the sun or the moon after death.[1] Native Americans believed that in the afterlife their spirits would hunt the spirits of buffalo.[2] The Gilgamesh epic, an ancient Babylonian legend, refers to a resting place of heroes and hints at a tree of life. In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies had maps placed beside them as guides to the future world.[3] The Romans believed that the righteous would picnic in the Elysian fields while their horses grazed nearby. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said, The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity. Although these depictions of the afterlife differ, the unifying testimony of the human heart throughout history is belief in life after death. Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal—that this world is not all there is.[4]

EARLY CHRISTIANS’ PREOCCUPATION WITH HEAVEN

The Roman catacombs, where the bodies of many martyred Christians were buried, contain tombs with inscriptions such as these:

In Christ, Alexander is not dead, but lives.

One who lives with God.

He was taken up into his eternal home.[5]

One historian writes, Pictures on the catacomb walls portray Heaven with beautiful landscapes, children playing, and people feasting at banquets.[6]

In

AD

125, a Greek named Aristides wrote to a friend about Christianity, explaining why this new religion was so successful: If any righteous man among the Christians passes from this world, they rejoice and offer thanks to God, and they escort his body with songs and thanksgiving as if he were setting out from one place to another nearby.[7]

In the third century, the church father Cyprian said, Let us greet the day which assigns each of us to his own home, which snatches us from this place and sets us free from the snares of the world, and restores us to paradise and the kingdom. Anyone who has been in foreign lands longs to return to his own native land. . . . We regard paradise as our native land.[8]

These early Christian perspectives sound almost foreign today, don’t they? But their beliefs were rooted in the Scriptures, where the apostle Paul writes, To me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. . . . I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far (Philippians 1:21). He also wrote, As long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. . . . We . . . would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:6, 8).

When Jesus told his disciples, In my Father’s house are many rooms. . . . I am going there to prepare a place for you (John 14:2), he deliberately chose common, physical terms (house, rooms, place) to describe where he was going and what he was preparing for us. He wanted to give his disciples (and us) something tangible to look forward to—an actual place where they (and we) would go to be with him.

This place is not an ethereal realm of disembodied spirits, because human beings are not suited for such a realm. A place is by nature physical, just as human beings are by nature physical. (We are also spiritual.) What we are suited for—what we’ve been specifically designed for—is a place like the one God made for us: Earth.

In this book, we’ll see from Scripture an exciting yet strangely neglected truth—that God never gave up on his original plan for human beings to dwell on Earth. In fact, the climax of history will be the creation of new heavens and a New Earth, a resurrected universe inhabited by resurrected people living with the resurrected Jesus (Revelation 21:1-4).

OUR TERMINAL DISEASE

As human beings, we have a terminal disease called mortality. The current death rate is 100 percent. Unless Christ returns soon, we’re all going to die. We don’t like to think about death; yet, worldwide, 3 people die every second, 180 every minute, and nearly 11,000 every hour. If the Bible is right about what happens to us after death, it means that more than 250,000 people every day go either to Heaven or Hell.[9]

David said, Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life. You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Each man’s life is but a breath (Psalm 39:4-5). Picture a single breath escaping your mouth on a cold day and dissipating into the air. Such is the brevity of life here. The wise will consider what awaits us on the other side of this life that so quickly ends.

God uses suffering and impending death to unfasten us from this earth and to set our minds on what lies beyond. I’ve lost people close to me. (Actually, I haven’t lost them, because I know where they are—rather, I’ve lost contact with them.) I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people who’ve been diagnosed with terminal diseases. These people, and their loved ones, have a sudden and insatiable interest in the afterlife. Most people live unprepared for death. But those who are wise will go to a reliable source to investigate what’s on the other side. And if they discover that the choices they make during their brief stay in this world will matter in the world to come, they’ll want to adjust those choices accordingly.

Ancient merchants often wrote the words memento morithink of death —in large letters on the first page of their accounting books.[10] Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, commissioned a servant to stand in his presence each day and say, Philip, you will die. In contrast, France’s Louis XIV decreed that the word death not be uttered in his presence. Most of us are more like Louis than Philip, denying death and avoiding the thought of it except when it’s forced upon us. We live under the fear of death.

Jesus came to deliver us from the fear of death, so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death (Hebrews 2:14-15).

In light of the coming resurrection of the dead, the apostle Paul asks, Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? (1 Corinthians 15:55).

What delivers us from the fear of death? What takes away death’s sting? Only a relationship with the person who died on our behalf, the one who has gone ahead to make a place for us to live with him. If we don’t know Jesus, we will fear death and its sting—and we should.

SEEING THE SHORE

Perhaps you’ve come to this book burdened, discouraged, depressed, or even traumatized. Perhaps your dreams—your marriage, career, or ambitions—have crumbled. Perhaps you’ve become cynical or have lost hope. A biblical understanding of the truth about Heaven can change all that.

In 1952, young Florence Chadwick stepped into the waters of the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island, determined to swim to the shore of mainland California. She’d already been the first woman to swim the English Channel both ways. The weather was foggy and chilly; she could hardly see the boats accompanying her. Still, she swam for fifteen hours. When she begged to be taken out of the water along the way, her mother, in a boat alongside, told her she was close and that she could make it. Finally, physically and emotionally exhausted, she stopped swimming and was pulled out. It wasn’t until she was on the boat that she discovered the shore was less than half a mile away. At a news conference the next day she said, All I could see was the fog. . . . I think if I could have seen the shore, I would have made it.[11]

Consider her words: I think if I could have seen the shore, I would have made it. For believers, that shore is Jesus and being with him in the place that he promised to prepare for us, where we will live with him forever. The shore we should look for is that of the New Earth. If we can see through the fog and picture our eternal home in our mind’s eye, it will comfort and energize us.

If you’re weary and don’t know how you can keep going, I pray this book will give you vision, encouragement, and hope. No matter how tough life gets, if you can see the shore and draw your strength from Christ, you’ll make it.

I pray this book will help you see the shore.

[1] J. Sidlow Baxter, The Other Side of Death: What the Bible Teaches about Heaven and Hell (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1987), 237.

[2] Harvey Minkoff, The Book of Heaven (Owings Mills, Md.: Ottenheimer, 2001), 87.

[3] Edward Donnelly, Biblical Teaching on the Doctrines of Heaven and Hell (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2001), 64.

[4] Don Richardson, Eternity in Their Hearts, rev. ed. (Ventura, Calif.: Regal, 1984).

[5] Spiros Zodhiates, Life after Death (Chattanooga: AMG, 1977), 100–101.

[6] Ulrich Simon, Heaven in the Christian Tradition (London: Wyman and Sons, 1958), 218.

[7] Aristides, Apology, 15.

[8] Cyprian, Mortality, chap. 26.

[9] To underscore the fact that Heaven and Hell are real places, I am deliberately capitalizing them throughout the book, as I would other proper nouns, such as Chicago, Nigeria, Europe, or Saturn. I also capitalize the New Earth, just as I would New England. Not to do so would imply that Heaven and Hell and the New Earth aren’t real places. But they are—they’re as real as the places we were born and the places we now live.

[10] Basilea Schlink, What Comes after Death? (Carol Stream, Ill.: Creation House, 1976), 20.

[11] C. J. Mahaney, Loving the Church (taped message, Covenant Life Church, Gaithersburg, Md., n.d.); read the story of Florence Chadwick at http://www.vanguard.edu/vision2010.

PART I

A THEOLOGY OF HEAVEN

SECTION ONE

REALIZING OUR DESTINY

CHAPTER 1

ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO HEAVEN?

The man who is about to sail for Australia or New Zealand as a settler, is naturally anxious to know something about his future home, its climate, its employments, its inhabitants, its ways, its customs. All these are subjects of deep interest to him. You are leaving the land of your nativity, you are going to spend the rest of your life in a new hemisphere. It would be strange indeed if you did not desire information about your new abode. Now surely, if we hope to dwell for ever in that better country, even a heavenly one, we ought to seek all the knowledge we can get about it. Before we go to our eternal home we should try to become acquainted with it.

J. C. RYLE

Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan preacher, often spoke of Heaven. He said, It becomes us to spend this life only as a journey toward heaven . . . to which we should subordinate all other concerns of life. Why should we labor for or set our hearts on anything else, but that which is our proper end and true happiness?[1]

In his early twenties, Edwards composed a set of life resolutions. One read, Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness, in the other world, as I possibly can.[2]

Some may think it odd and inappropriate that Edwards was so committed to pursuing happiness for himself in Heaven. But Pascal was right when he said, All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end.[3] And if we all seek happiness, why not do as Edwards did and seek it where it can actually be found—in the person of Jesus and the place called Heaven?

Tragically, however, most people do not find their joy in Christ and Heaven. In fact, many people find no joy at all when they think about Heaven.

A pastor once confessed to me, Whenever I think about Heaven, it makes me depressed. I’d rather just cease to exist when I die.

Why? I asked.

I can’t stand the thought of that endless tedium. To float around in the clouds with nothing to do but strum a harp . . . it’s all so terribly boring. Heaven doesn’t sound much better than Hell. I’d rather be annihilated than spend eternity in a place like that.

Where did this Bible-believing, seminary-educated pastor get such a view of Heaven? Certainly not from Scripture, where Paul said to depart and be with Christ was far better than staying on a sin-cursed Earth (Philippians 1:23). My friend was more honest about it than most, yet I’ve found that many Christians share the same misconceptions about Heaven.

After reading my novel Deadline, which portrays Heaven as a real and exciting place, a woman wrote me, I’ve been a Christian since I was five. I’m married to a youth pastor. When I was seven, a teacher at my Christian school told me that when I got to Heaven, I wouldn’t know anyone or anything from earth. I was terrified of dying. I was never told any different by anyone. . . . It’s been really hard for me to advance in my Christian walk because of this fear of Heaven and eternal life.

Let those words sink in: "This fear of Heaven and eternal life. Referring to her recently transformed perspective, she said, You don’t know the weight that’s been lifted off of me. . . . Now I can’t wait to get to Heaven."

OUR UNBIBLICAL VIEW OF HEAVEN

When an English vicar was asked by a colleague what he expected after death, he replied, Well, if it comes to that, I suppose I shall enter into eternal bliss, but I really wish you wouldn’t bring up such depressing subjects.[4]

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve received thousands of letters and have had hundreds of conversations concerning Heaven. I’ve spoken about Heaven at churches and conferences. I’ve written about Heaven and taught a seminary course titled A Theology of Heaven. There’s a great deal I don’t know, but one thing I do know is what people think about Heaven. And frankly, I’m alarmed.

I agree with this statement by John Eldredge in The Journey of Desire: "Nearly every Christian I have spoken with has some idea that eternity is an unending church service. . . . We have settled on an image of the never-ending sing-along in the sky, one great hymn after another, forever and ever, amen. And our heart sinks. Forever and ever? That’s it? That’s the good news? And then we sigh and feel guilty that we are not more ‘spiritual.’ We lose heart, and we turn once more to the present to find what life we can."[5]

Gary Larson captured a common misperception of Heaven in one of his Far Side cartoons. In it a man with angel wings and a halo sits on a cloud, doing nothing, with no one nearby. He has the expression of someone marooned on a desert island with absolutely nothing to do. A caption shows his inner thoughts: Wish I’d brought a magazine.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain portrays a similar view of Heaven. The Christian spinster Miss Watson takes a dim view of Huck’s fun-loving spirit. According to Huck, She went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. . . . I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said, not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.[6]

The pious Miss Watson had nothing to say about Heaven that appealed to Huck. (And nothing, if we’re honest, that appeals to us.) What would have attracted him was a place where he could do meaningful and pleasurable things with enjoyable people. In fact, that’s a far more accurate depiction of what Heaven will actually be like. If Miss Watson had told Huck what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures—now that would have gotten his attention!

When it came to Heaven and Hell, Mark Twain never quite got it. Under the weight of age, he said in his autobiography, The burden of pain, care, misery grows heavier year by year. At length ambition is dead, pride is dead, vanity is dead, longing for release is in their place. It comes at last—the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them—and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness.[7]

What a contrast to the perspective that Charles Spurgeon, his contemporary, had on death: To come to Thee is to come home from exile, to come to land out of the raging storm, to come to rest after long labour, to come to the goal of my desires and the summit of my wishes.[8]

We do not desire to eat gravel. Why? Because God did not design us to eat gravel. Trying to develop an appetite for a disembodied existence in a non-physical Heaven is like trying to develop an appetite for gravel. No matter how sincere we are, and no matter how hard we try, it’s not going to work. Nor should it.

What God made us to desire, and therefore what we do desire if we admit it, is exactly what he promises to those who follow Jesus Christ: a resurrected life in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ on a resurrected Earth. Our desires correspond precisely to God’s plans. It’s not that we want something, so we engage in wishful thinking that what we want exists. It’s the opposite—the reason we want it is precisely because God has planned for it to exist. As we’ll see, resurrected people living in a resurrected universe isn’t our idea—it’s God’s.

Nineteenth-century British theologian J. C. Ryle said, I pity the man who never thinks about heaven.[9] We could also say, "I pity the man who never thinks accurately about Heaven." It’s our inaccurate thinking, I believe, that causes us to choose to think so little about Heaven.

THEOLOGICAL NEGLECT OF HEAVEN

John Calvin, the great expositor, never wrote a commentary on Revelation and never dealt with the eternal state at any length. Though he encourages meditation on Heaven in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, his theology of Heaven seems strikingly weak compared to his theology of God, Christ, salvation, Scripture, and the church. This is understandable in light of the pressing theological issues of his day, but surprisingly few theologians in the centuries since Calvin have attempted to fill in the gaps. A great deal has been written about eschatology—the study of the end times—but comparatively little about Heaven. (Only a small number of the books on Heaven I’ve collected are still in print.)

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote an in-depth two-volume set titled The Nature and Destiny of Man. Remarkably, he had nothing to say about Heaven.[10]



While Christians still accept heaven as an article of faith, their vigor in defining the nature of eternal life has much diminished. In spite of the current revival of religious interest in America and Europe, the desire to discuss the details of heavenly existence remains a low priority.

Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang



William Shedd’s three-volume Dogmatic Theology contains eighty-seven pages on eternal punishment, but only two on Heaven.[11]

In his nine-hundred-page theology, Great Doctrines of the Bible, Martyn Lloyd-Jones devotes less than two pages to the eternal state and the New Earth.[12]

Louis Berkhof’s classic Systematic Theology devotes thirty-eight pages to creation, forty pages to baptism and communion, and fifteen pages to what theologians call the intermediate state (where people abide between death and resurrection). Yet it contains only two pages on Hell and one page on the eternal state.

When all that’s said about the eternal Heaven is limited to page 737 of a 737-page systematic theology like Berkhof’s, it raises a question: Does Scripture really have so little to say? Are there so few theological implications to this subject? The biblical answer, I believe, is an emphatic no!

In The Eclipse of Heaven, theology professor A. J. Conyers writes, Even to one without religious commitment and theological convictions, it should be an unsettling thought that this world is attempting to chart its way through some of the most perilous waters in history, having now decided to ignore what was for nearly two millennia its fixed point of reference—its North Star. The certainty of judgment, the longing for heaven, the dread of hell: these are not prominent considerations in our modern discourse about the important matters of life. But they once were.[13]

Conyers argues that until recently the doctrine of Heaven was enormously important to the church.[14] Belief in Heaven was not just a nice auxiliary sentiment. It was a central, life-sustaining conviction.

Sadly, even for countless Christians, that is no longer true.

OFF OUR RADAR SCREENS

An overwhelming majority of Americans continue to believe that there is life after death and that heaven and hell exist, according to a Barna Research Group poll.[15] But what people actually believe about Heaven and Hell varies widely. A Barna spokesman said, They’re cutting and pasting religious views from a variety of different sources—television, movies, conversations with their friends.[16] The result is a highly subjective theology of the afterlife, disconnected from the biblical doctrine of Heaven.

I attended a fine Bible college and seminary, but I learned very little about Heaven. I don’t recall a single classroom discussion about the New Earth. In my Hebrews-to-Revelation class, we never made it to Revelation 21–22, the Bible’s most definitive passage on the eternal Heaven. In my eschatology class, we studied various views of the Rapture and the Millennium, but almost no attention at all was given to the New Earth. In fact, I learned more about the strengths and weaknesses of belief in a mid-Tribulation Rapture than about Heaven and the New Earth combined.

Heaven suffers as a subject precisely because it comes last, not only in theological works but in seminary and Bible college classrooms. Teachers often get behind in their eschatology classes, enmeshed in the different views of Hell, Israel and the church, the Tribulation, and the Millennium. No time is left for discussing the new heavens and New Earth.

Imagine you’re part of a NASA team preparing for a five-year mission to Mars. After a period of extensive training, the launch date finally arrives. As the rocket lifts off, one of your fellow astronauts says to you, What do you know about Mars?

Imagine shrugging your shoulders and saying, Nothing. We never talked about it. I guess we’ll find out when we get there. It’s unthinkable, isn’t it? It’s inconceivable that your training would not have included extensive study of and preparation for your ultimate destination. Yet in seminaries, Bible schools, and churches across the United States and around the world, there is very little teaching about our ultimate destination: the new heavens and New Earth.

Many Christians who’ve gone to church all their adult lives (especially those under fifty) can’t recall having heard a single sermon on Heaven. It’s occasionally mentioned, but rarely emphasized, and almost never is it developed as a topic. We’re told how to get to Heaven, and that it’s a better destination than Hell, but we’re taught remarkably little about Heaven itself.

Pastors may not think it’s important to address the subject of Heaven because their seminary didn’t have a required course on it—or even an elective. Similarly, when pastors don’t preach on Heaven, their congregations assume that the Bible doesn’t say much about it.

In 1937, Scottish theologian John Baillie wrote, I will not ask how often during the last twenty-five years you and I have listened to an old-style warning against the flames of hell. I will not even ask how many sermons have been preached in our hearing about a future day of reckoning when men shall reap according as they have sown. It will be enough to ask how many preachers, during these years, have dwelt on the joys of heavenly rest with anything like the old ardent love and impatient longing.[17]

If this was the case then, how much truer is it now? Heaven has fallen off our radar screens. How can we set our hearts on Heaven when we have an impoverished theology of Heaven? How can we expect our children to be excited about Heaven—or to stay excited about it when they grow up? Why do we talk so little about Heaven? And why is the little we have to say so vague and lifeless?

WHERE DO WE GET OUR MISCONCEPTIONS?

I believe there’s one central explanation for why so many of God’s children have such a vague, negative, and uninspired view of Heaven: the work of Satan.

Jesus said of the devil, When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). Some of Satan’s favorite lies are about Heaven. Revelation 13:6 tells us the satanic beast opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. Our enemy slanders three things: God’s person, God’s people, and God’s place—namely, Heaven.[18]

After being forcibly evicted from Heaven (Isaiah 14:12-15), the devil became bitter not only toward God, but toward mankind and toward Heaven itself, the place that was no longer his. It must be maddening for him that we’re now entitled to the home he was kicked out of. What better way for the devil and his demons to attack us than to whisper lies about the very place on which God tells us to set our hearts and minds?

Satan need not convince us that Heaven doesn’t exist. He need only convince us that Heaven is a place of boring, unearthly existence. If we believe that lie, we’ll be robbed of our joy and anticipation, we’ll set our minds on this life and not the next, and we won’t be motivated to share our faith. Why should we share the good news that people can spend eternity in a boring, ghostly place that even we’re not looking forward to?

In The Country of the Blind, H. G. Wells writes of a tribe in a remote valley deep in a towering mountain range. During a terrible epidemic, all the villagers lose their sight. Eventually, entire generations grow up having no awareness of sight or the world they’re unable to see. Because of their handicap, they do not know their true condition, nor can they understand what their world looks like. They cannot imagine what realms might lie beyond their valley.

Spiritually speaking, we live in the Country of the Blind. The disease of sin has blinded us to God and Heaven, which are real yet unseen. Fortunately, Jesus has come to our valley from Heaven to tell us about his father, the world beyond, and the world to come. If we listen to him—which will require a concerted effort not to listen to the lies of the devil—we will never be the same. Nor will we ever want to be.

Satan hates the New Heaven and the New Earth as much as a deposed dictator hates the new nation and new government that replaces his. Satan cannot stop Christ’s redemptive work, but he can keep us from seeing the breadth and depth of redemption that extends to the earth and beyond. He cannot keep Christ from defeating him, but he can persuade us that Christ’s victory is only partial, that God will abandon his original plan for mankind and the earth.

Because Satan hates us, he’s determined to rob us of the joy we’d have if we believed what God tells us about the magnificent world to come.

RESISTING NATURALISM’S SPELL

C. S. Lewis depicts another source of our misconceptions about Heaven: naturalism, the belief that the world can be understood in scientific terms, without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations.

In The Silver Chair, Puddleglum, Jill, and Eustace are captured in a sunless underground world by an evil witch who calls herself the queen of the underworld. The witch claims that her prisoners’ memories of the overworld, Narnia, are but figments of their imagination. She laughs condescendingly at their child’s game of pretending that there’s a world above and a great ruler of that world.

When they speak of the sun that’s visible in the world above, she asks them what a sun is. Groping for words, they compare it to a giant lamp. She replies, "When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp."

When they speak of Aslan the lion, king of Narnia, she says they have seen cats and have merely projected those images into the make-believe notion of a giant cat. They begin to waver.

The queen, who hates Aslan and wishes to conquer Narnia, tries to deceive them into thinking that whatever they cannot perceive with their senses must be imaginary—which is the essence of naturalism. The longer they are unable to see the world they remember, the more they lose sight of it.

She says to them, hypnotically, There never was any world but mine, and they repeat after her, abandoning reason, parroting her deceptions. Then she coos softly, There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. This illustrates Satan’s power to mold our weak minds as we are trapped in a dark, fallen world. We’re prone to deny the great realities of God and Heaven, which we can no longer see because of the Curse.

Finally, when it appears they’ve succumbed to the queen’s lies, Puddleglum breaks the spell and says to the enraged queen, "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that . . . the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow."[19]

The truth is exactly the opposite of naturalism’s premise—in fact, the dark world’s lamps are copies of the sun, and its cats are copies of Aslan. Heaven isn’t an extrapolation of earthly thinking; Earth is an extension of Heaven, made by the Creator King. The realm Puddleglum and the children believe in, Narnia and its sun and its universe, is real, and the witch’s world—which she tempts them to believe is the only real world—is in fact a lesser realm, corrupted and in bondage.

When the queen’s lies are exposed, she metamorphoses into the serpent she really is, whereupon Rilian, the human king and Aslan’s appointed ruler of Narnia, slays her. The despondent slaves who’d lived in darkness are delivered. Light floods in, and their home below becomes a joyous place again because they realize there is indeed a bright world above and Aslan truly rules the universe. They laugh and celebrate, turning cartwheels and popping firecrackers.

Sometimes we’re like Lewis’s characters. We succumb to naturalistic assumptions that what we see is real and what we don’t see isn’t. God can’t be real, we conclude, because we can’t see him. And Heaven can’t be real because we can’t see it. But we must recognize our blindness. The blind must take by faith that there are stars in the sky. If they depend on their ability to see, they will conclude there are no stars.

We must work to resist the bewitching spell of naturalism. Sitting here in a dark world, we must remind ourselves what Scripture tells us about Heaven. We will one day be delivered from the blindness that separates us from the real world. We’ll realize then the stupefying bewitchment we’ve lived under. By God’s grace, may we stomp out the bewitching fires of naturalism so that we may clearly see the liberating truth about Christ the King and Heaven, his Kingdom.

[1] Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings (New York: New American Library, 1966), 142.

[2] Jonathan Edwards, The Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards (1722–23), JonathanEdwards.com, http://www.jonathanedwards.com/text/Personal/resolut.htm; see also Stephen Nichols, ed., Jonathan Edwards’ Resolutions and Advice to Young Converts (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2001).

[3] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/p/pascal/pensees/cache/pensees.pdf, section VII, article 425.

[4] Barry Morrow, Heaven Observed (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001), 89.

[5] John Eldredge, The Journey of Desire: Searching for the Life We’ve Only Dreamed Of (Nashville: Nelson, 2000), 111.

[6] Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1996), 6.

[7] Mark Twain, quoted in Charles Ferguson Ball, Heaven (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor, 1980), 19.

[8] Charles H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, April 25, morning reading.

[9] J. C. Ryle, Heaven (Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2000), 19.

[10] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1942).

[11] W. G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, n.d.).

[12] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Great Doctrines of the Bible, vol. 3, The Church and the Last Things (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2003), 246–48.

[13] A. J. Conyers, The Eclipse of Heaven (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1992), 21.

[14] Ibid., 58.

[15] K. Connie Kang, Next Stop, the Pearly Gates . . . or Hell? Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2003.

[16] Ibid.

[17] John Baillie, And the Life Everlasting (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 15.

[18] The NASB supplies words not in the original (here, in italics), which make the three things that Satan slanders appear to be only two: "And he opened his mouth in blasphemies against God, to blaspheme His name and His tabernacle, that is, those who dwell in heaven." It equates God’s dwelling place, his Tabernacle, with the people who live in Heaven. Hence it retains the two familiar ideas of the objects of Satan’s slander—God and his people—while not  recognizing the less familiar one, God’s dwelling place, Heaven. The NASB reading offers an alternative understanding of the passage.

[19] C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 151–61.

CHAPTER 2

IS HEAVEN BEYOND OUR IMAGINATION?

To speak of imagining heaven does not imply or entail that heaven is a fictional notion, constructed by deliberately disregarding the harsher realities of the everyday world. It is to affirm the critical role of the God-given human capacity to construct and enter into mental pictures of divine reality, which are mediated through Scripture and the subsequent tradition of reflection and development. We are able to inhabit the mental images we create, and thence anticipate the delight of finally entering the greater reality to which they correspond.

ALISTER MCGRATH

When Marco Polo returned to Italy from the court of Kublai Khan, he described a world his audience had never seen—one that could not be understood without 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.[1]

The writers of Scripture present Heaven in many ways, including as a garden, a city, and a kingdom. Because gardens, cities, and kingdoms are familiar to us, they afford us a bridge to understanding Heaven. However, many people make the mistake of assuming that these are merely analogies with no actual correspondence to the reality of Heaven (which would make them poor analogies). Analogies can be pressed too far, but because Scripture makes it clear that Jesus is preparing a place for us, and God’s Kingdom will come to Earth, and a physical resurrection awaits us, there is no reason to spiritualize or allegorize all earthly descriptions of Heaven. Indeed, some of them may be simple, factual statements. Too often we’ve been taught that Heaven is a non-physical realm, which cannot have real gardens, cities, kingdoms, buildings, banquets, or bodies. So we fail to take seriously what Scripture tells us about Heaven as a familiar,  physical, tangible place.

As human beings, whom God made to be both physical and spiritual, we are not designed to live in a non-physical realm—indeed, we are incapable of even imagining such a place (or, rather, non-place). An incorporeal state is not only unfamiliar to our experience, it is also incompatible with our God-given constitution. We are not, as Plato supposed, merely spiritual beings temporarily encased in bodies. Adam did not become a living being—the Hebrew word nephesh—until he was both body and spirit (Genesis 2:7). We are physical beings as much as we are spiritual beings. That’s why our bodily resurrection is essential to endow us with eternal righteous humanity, setting us free from sin, the Curse, and death.

THE IMPORTANCE OF USING OUR IMAGINATION

We cannot anticipate or desire what we cannot imagine. That’s why, I believe, God has given us glimpses of Heaven in the Bible—to fire up our imagination and kindle a desire for Heaven in our hearts. And that’s why Satan will always discourage our imagination—or misdirect it to ethereal notions that violate Scripture. As long as the resurrected universe remains either undesirable or unimaginable, Satan succeeds in sabotaging our love for Heaven.

After reading my novels that portray Heaven, people often tell me, These pictures of Heaven are exciting. But are they based on Scripture? The answer, to the best of my understanding, is yes. Scripture provides us with a substantial amount of information, direct and indirect, about the world to come, with enough detail to help us envision it, but not so much as to make us think we can completely wrap our minds around it. I believe that God expects us to use our imagination, even as we recognize its limitations and flaws. If God didn’t want us to imagine what Heaven will be like, he wouldn’t have told us as much about it as he has.

Rather than ignore our imagination, I believe we should fuel it with Scripture, allowing it to step through the doors that Scripture opens. I did not come to the Bible with the same view of Heaven that I came away with. On the contrary, as a young Christian, and even as a young pastor, I viewed Heaven in the same stereotypical ways I now reject. It was only through years of scriptural study, meditation, and research on the subject that I came to the view of Heaven I now embrace.

Nearly every notion of Heaven I present in this book was stimulated and reinforced by biblical texts. Though some of my interpretations and speculations are no doubt mistaken, they are not baseless. Rightly or wrongly, I have drawn most of them from my understanding of the explicit and implicit teachings of Scripture. Discussions of Heaven tend to be either hyperimaginative or utterly unimaginative. Bible believers have tended toward the latter, yet both approaches are inadequate and dangerous. What we need is a biblically inspired imagination.

We should ask God’s help to remove the blinders of our preconceived ideas about Heaven so we can understand Scripture. The apostle Paul said, Reflect on what I am saying, for the Lord will give you insight into all this (2 Timothy 2:7). I encourage you to pray, Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law (Psalm 119:18).

I’ve collected more than 150 books on Heaven, many of them very old and out of print, and I’ve read nearly all of them. One thing I’ve found is that books about Heaven are notorious for saying we can’t know what Heaven is like, but it will be more wonderful than we can imagine. However, the moment we say that we can’t imagine Heaven, we dump cold water on all that God has revealed to us about our eternal home. If we can’t envision it, we can’t look forward to it. If Heaven is unimaginable, why even try?

Everything pleasurable we know about life on Earth we have experienced through our senses. So, when Heaven is portrayed as beyond the reach of our senses, it doesn’t invite us; instead, it alienates and even frightens us. Our misguided attempts to make Heaven sound spiritual (i.e., non-physical) merely succeed in making Heaven sound unappealing.

PICTURING HEAVEN

By the time you finish reading this book, you will have a biblical basis for envisioning the eternal Heaven. You will understand that in order to get a picture of Heaven—which will one day be centered on the New Earth—you don’t need to look up at the clouds; you simply need to look around you and imagine what all this would be like without sin and death and suffering and corruption.

When I anticipate my first glimpse of Heaven, I remember the first time I went snorkeling. I saw countless fish of every shape, size, and color. And just when I thought I’d seen the most beautiful fish, along came another even more striking. Etched in my memory is a certain sound—the sound of a gasp going through my rubber snorkel as my eyes were opened to that breathtaking underwater world.

I imagine our first glimpse of Heaven will cause us to similarly gasp in amazement and delight. That first gasp will likely be followed by many more as we continually encounter new sights in that endlessly wonderful place. And that will be just the beginning, because we will not see our real eternal home—the New Earth—until after the resurrection of the dead. And it will be far better than anything we’ve seen.

So look out a window. Take a walk. Talk with your friend. Use your God-given skills to paint or draw or build a shed or write a book. But imagine it—all of it—in its original condition. The happy dog with the wagging tail, not the snarling beast, beaten and starved. The flowers unwilted, the grass undying, the blue sky without pollution. People smiling and joyful, not angry, depressed, and empty. If you’re not in a particularly beautiful place, close your eyes and envision the most beautiful place you’ve ever been—complete with palm trees, raging rivers, jagged mountains, waterfalls, or snow drifts.

Think of friends or family members who loved Jesus and are with him now. Picture them with you, walking together in this place. All of you have powerful bodies, stronger than those of an Olympic decathlete. You are laughing, playing, talking, and reminiscing. You reach up to a tree to pick an apple or orange. You take a bite. It’s so sweet that it’s startling. You’ve never tasted anything so good. Now you see someone coming toward you. It’s Jesus, with a big smile on his face. You fall to your knees in worship. He pulls you up and embraces you.

At last, you’re with the person you were made for, in the place you were made to be. Everywhere you go there will be new people and places to enjoy, new things to discover. What’s that you smell? A feast. A party’s ahead. And you’re invited. There’s exploration and work to be done—and you can’t wait to get started.

I have a biblical basis for all of these statements, and many more. After examining what Scripture says, I hope that next time you hear someone say, We can’t begin to imagine what Heaven will be like, you’ll be able to tell them, "I can."

But before we go further, we need to address some frequently raised objections.

IF NO EYE HAS SEEN, HOW CAN WE KNOW?

A pastor visiting my office asked what I was writing. A big book on Heaven, I said.

Well, he replied, since Scripture says ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him,’ what will you be talking about? Obviously, we can’t know what God has prepared for us in Heaven. (He was referring to 1 Corinthians 2:9.)

I said to him what I always say: You didn’t complete the sentence. You also have to read verse ten. Here’s how the complete sentence reads: "‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him’—but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit" (emphasis added). The context makes it clear that this revelation is God’s Word (v. 13), which tells us what God has prepared for us. After reading a few dozen books about Heaven, I came to instinctively cringe whenever I saw 1 Corinthians 2:9. It’s a wonderful verse; it’s just that it’s nearly always misused. It says precisely the opposite of what it’s cited to prove![2]

What we otherwise could not have known about Heaven, because we’re unable to see it, God says he has revealed to us through his Spirit. This means that God has explained to us what Heaven is like. Not exhaustively, but accurately. God tells us about Heaven in his Word, not so we can shrug our shoulders and remain ignorant, but because he wants us to understand and anticipate what awaits us.

Other verses are likewise pulled out to derail discussions about Heaven. For example, The secret things belong to the Lord our God (Deuteronomy 29:29). Heaven is regarded as a secret thing. But the rest of the verse—again, rarely quoted—completes the thought: But the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever.



Although fundamentalists would discard the suggestion that heaven no longer is an active part of their belief system, eternal life has become an unknown place or a state of vague identity. Conservative Christians . . . do not return to the rich heavenly images of previous generations. The drama of the future is decidedly this-worldly; it occurs during the period before and during the millennium, not in a heavenly world.

Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang



We should accept that many things about Heaven are secret and that God has countless surprises in store for us. But as for the things God has revealed to us about Heaven, these things belong to us and to our children. It’s critically important that we study and understand them. That is precisely why God revealed them to us!

Another silencer is 2 Corinthians 12:2-4. Paul says that fourteen years earlier he was caught up to paradise, where he heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell. Some people use this verse to say we should not discuss what Heaven will be like. But all it says is that God didn’t permit Paul to talk about his visit to Heaven. In contrast, God commanded the apostle John to talk about his prolonged visit to Heaven, which he did in detail in the book of Revelation. Likewise, Isaiah and Ezekiel wrote about what they saw in Heaven.

Although it’s inappropriate for us to speculate on what Paul might have seen in Heaven, it’s certainly appropriate to discuss what John saw, because God chose to reveal it to us. If he didn’t intend for us to understand it, why would he bother telling us about it? (When was the last time you wrote someone a letter using words you didn’t expect them to comprehend?) So, we should study, teach, and discuss God’s revelation about Heaven given to us in his Word.

Certainly, not everything the Bible says about Heaven is easily envisioned. Consider Ezekiel’s description of the living creatures and their wheels, and the manifestation of God’s glory that leaves the prophet groping for words (Ezekiel 1:4-28). Still, many other passages concerning Heaven are much easier to grasp.

Isaiah 55:9 is another verse often cited in support of a don’t ask, don’t tell approach to Heaven: As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. God’s thoughts are indeed higher than ours, but when he reduces his thoughts into words and reveals them in Scripture, he expects us to study them, meditate on them, and understand them—again, not exhaustively, but accurately.

SETTING OUR HEARTS AND MINDS ON HEAVEN

Set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God (Colossians 3:1). This is a direct command to set our hearts on Heaven. And to make sure we don’t miss the importance of a heaven-centered life, the next verse says, Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. God commands us to set our hearts and minds on Heaven.

To long for Christ is to long for Heaven, for that is where we will be with him. God’s people are longing for a better country (Hebrews 11:16). We cannot set our eyes on Christ without setting our eyes on Heaven, and we cannot set our eyes on Heaven without setting our eyes on Christ. Still, it is not only Christ but things above we are to set our minds on.

The Greek word translated set your hearts on is zeteo, which denotes man’s general philosophical search or quest.[3] The same word is used in the Gospels to describe how "the Son of Man came to seek . . . what was lost (Luke 19:10, emphasis added). It’s also used for how a shepherd looks for his lost sheep (Matthew 18:12), a woman searches for a lost coin (Luke 15:8), and a merchant searches for a fine pearl (Matthew 13:45). It is a diligent, active, single-minded investigation. So we can understand Paul’s admonition in Colossians 3:1 as follows: Diligently, actively, single-mindedly pursue the things above"—in a word, Heaven. (Now you have a clear biblical reason for reading this book!)

The verb zeteo is in the present tense, suggesting an ongoing process. Keep seeking heaven. Don’t just have a conversation, read a book, or listen to a sermon and feel as if you’ve fulfilled the command. Since you’ll spend the next lifetime living in Heaven, why not spend this lifetime seeking Heaven, so you can eagerly anticipate and prepare for it?

The command, and its restatement, implies there is nothing automatic about setting our minds on Heaven. In fact, most commands assume a resistance to obeying them, which sets up the necessity for the command. We are told to avoid sexual immorality because it is our tendency. We are not told to avoid jumping off buildings because normally we don’t battle such a temptation. The command to think about Heaven is under attack in a hundred different ways every day. Everything militates against it. Our minds are so much set on Earth that we are unaccustomed to heavenly thinking. So we must work at it.



Most of us find it very difficult to want Heaven at all—except in so far as Heaven means

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