(extracted from our television series, “What’s So Exciting About Heaven?” Edited for publication.)
I had a good friend, a Bible-believing pastor, who confessed to me one day. He said, “You know, the truth is, I would rather be annihilated when I die than go on forever, forever, on and on in eternity.” And I said, “Why would you say that?” He said, “Because it’s just, the idea is so tedious, it’s so boring, nothing to do. I mean, I know we’re going to worship God, and I love the Lord, but I just would like to be able to do some other things too.” And I thought, here’s a pastor, a graduate of a Bible college and a seminary, and he’s not excited about heaven, so obviously he’s not going to communicate excitement about heaven. And I think for a lot of people it’s kind of a neutral subject where, yes, it’s a great idea, yes, heaven’s a lot better than hell, I mean, it’s a lot better than the alternative. But they’re not really excited about it.
Then I think about how excited we get. If you’re going to go to Disney World, or you’re going to go to the Grand Canyon, what do you do? You find out everything you can find out about it, and you talk to people who can give you little clues about what’s there. And I think, as Christians, we need to go to God’s Word and see what it says. And when we see what God’s Word says about heaven, this place that Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, has gone to prepare for us, the place He’s been preparing for us for 2,000 years. And He’s a builder, He’s a carpenter; He knows how to build stuff, and He knows how to repair stuff. And He built this world, and this world went bad, and then He’s going to repair it, and we’re going to live on a new earth forever. And when you get that in your mind, you can’t help but be excited about heaven.
New Heaven and New Earth
Often we think about heaven only in the short term. We think about, okay, somebody dies, they loved Jesus, they go to heaven. “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). That’s right—you die, you go to heaven.
But heaven is now in a location that it will not always be. We are told that God will bring heaven down from the invisible realm and place it on a new earth, a new creation. We’re told that in Revelation 21-22, Isaiah 60, Isaiah 65, other passages. And when God comes down to live with us on this new earth, it says His throne is going to come down and He’s going to dwell among His people.
We will be resurrected; we will have new bodies. And the new earth will be parallel to our new bodies. Our old bodies die; over a period of time they decompose; and then God raises them in the resurrection.
Likewise, the earth we’re living on now is going to be destroyed, but then it’s going to be resurrected, and there will be a new earth we will live on forever. And that new earth will have most of the features that we know of in this present earth; and we will have bodies where we will eat and drink and be happy and celebrate and tell stories at the dinner table. Abraham and Isaac, they’ll come from the east and the west and sit down with them at the table. And this is what we have to look forward to.
“She’s in Jesus’ lap”
My daughter Karina was very, very close to her grandmother. And she would go over every Monday, spend the day with grandma, and grandma would read her Bible stories and take her places and do special things with her. And when my mom was dying of cancer, we would take Karina over to visit her. And she saw her grandma deteriorating. And it was hard on her, and it was hard on us, but we had that special time together.
And one night I got the call in the middle of the night that my mom had died. I went over, dealt with the situation. I came back home and I thought, you know what, I’ve got to wake up Karina, because she is so close to her grandma. She needs to know. And so I woke her up in the middle of the night. I will never forget it.
I looked at her and I said, “Karina, do you know where Grandma Alcorn is?” And before I finished the question, she said, “Yes, daddy, she’s in heaven.” And then a few minutes later she said, “She’s no longer in that hospital bed. Now she’s in Jesus’ lap.” And the thing that struck me as I heard my daughter say this, is she believes everything we’ve taught her about heaven; all the Bible says that she’s heard about heaven, she absolutely believes it.
This is the faith of a child. And we’re to come as children. And what she realized was that everything was okay now. She had known that her grandma was suffering, and Karina was actually happy. And so, we’re feeling this great sense of loss, happy that mom’s with the Lord, but she’s overwhelmed with joy. And now everything is okay for our daughter whose grandma is with Jesus.
God’s Dwelling Place
Sometimes we forget that the last few chapters of Revelation correspond perfectly to the first few chapters of Genesis. The story begins in this powerful way God intends for righteous man and woman to rule the earth to His glory. And then we think, well, Satan messes everything up. But then move forward through the redemptive work of Christ, and the culmination in the last couple of chapters of Revelation. And now we have God restoring—all the “re” words in the Bible, redemption, and reconcile, and all those “re” words. He’s going to make it better than it has ever been. But He’s going to restore what was lost. Paradise was lost; Paradise will be regained. No more sin, no more suffering, no more pain.
What a perspective. And if you realize where we’ve come from and where we’re going, it helps you today to think the way you should and to rejoice; because you know that God’s working everything together for good, and one day you’ll be in a world where everything will be right.
A Garden, a Paradise, a Country, and a City
The book of Revelation describes the multifaceted nature of the new earth, where we’re going to live with our Lord and with our spiritual family for all eternity. In Revelation 22 we’ve got the stream, the river, that’s flowing from the throne of God. And it’s got the tree of life growing on both sides of the river, so it’s like a forest of life now. It’s like Genesis 1-2, except on a much grander scale. And it’s also got the benefits of cultural development, because you’ve got building projects. You’ve got these huge walls. You’ve got the jewels and you’ve got the beautiful architecture. And you’ve also got the natural wonders and resources of the river that’s flowing. And then it says the tree of life is producing this fruit.
So it’s a city, the new Jerusalem; it’s a country; it talks about the kings of the nations of the earth will be bringing their treasures into the new Jerusalem, presumably to set them at the feet as tribute, so to speak, of their Lord who they love and they’ve done the works of their hands for His glory. So heaven is those things. It’s paradise; it’s city; it’s country. We will be citizens of that world, and we, as God’s men and women, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, will reign over the earth. He is the King of kings, so He is above all. But He’s the King of kings—capital “K,” King, and lower case “k,” kings—His children serving under Him and ruling the world to the glory of God so that His original purpose from Genesis will be fulfilled for all eternity. And what an exciting prospect that is.
It’s described as being 12,000 stadia, and that comes out somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 miles, a 1400-mile cube; so, as high as it is wide. We’re talking about a base that would go basically from Canada to Mexico, from the West Coast to the Appalachian Mountains. So you’re talking about an incredibly large structure. But that’s just the new Jerusalem. Then we’re told that you can go outside of the gates and there are nations of the earth, and the kings of the nations of the earth that bring their treasures in. So we’re talking about an amazingly large place that God has prepared for us.
The Present Heaven
We’re given a picture of the present heaven in several passages. One is in Revelation 6, where you have the martyrs who have died. They’re with the Lord, and they’re in conversation. And they cry out together. They say, “How long, O Lord, before You bring judgment on those who murdered us?” Well, we learn a lot about life in the present heaven. One, of course, people are in the presence of God; and, as Paul says, that’s better by far. So they’re without sin. But they’re communicating, so they still have their rationality; they have consciousness; they have interaction and relationship; they have memories of their time on earth. A lot of people say, “Well, maybe we will be able to remember a few things, but we won’t be able to remember any of the bad things.” Well, they remember that they were murdered. It doesn’t get much worse than that.
But the thing is, the key to heaven is not that you have a memory loss because you can’t cope with what happened to you when you were on the earth. Rather, you have a perspective that God gives you, and you see His plan. So they can remember that they’ve been murdered, but they pray to God. So people in heaven are talking with God; they’re praying to Him. They’re saying, “How long, O Lord, before You will do this?” And that’s another aspect about it; there is time in the present heaven. We know this because it’s, “How long, O Lord,” and then the Lord responds, “You must wait a little longer.” So clearly there is time in heaven. In fact, Revelation 8:1 says there was silence in heaven for half an hour. So it’s pretty clear that we are finite beings who experience space and time in heaven.
The Promise of Resurrection
I think the key to everything is to understand what resurrection means. That’s the promise of Scripture. In 1 Corinthians 15 we’re told, “if the dead are not raised we are of all men most to be pitied.” It’s all about the resurrection. This notion that the spirit must be delivered from the body—it’s in bondage, it’s in chains to the body, which was a teaching of Plato—it’s foreign to Scripture. Scripture says God created us to be physical beings as well as spiritual beings. And so the promise of resurrection is, we will live forever in a redeemed condition, but we will have real bodies—our original bodies made perfect; and we will live on a real earth—the original earth made perfect, restored, brought back from destruction, resurrected for all eternity. And then all the promises, all the joys of life, the relational things, the communicative things, the wonders of the world. Romans 8 teaches that the whole creation is longing; it’s crying out for deliverance. And it says that it will be delivered on the coattails of humanity. So when humanity is redeemed in our resurrection, the creation that fell under us will rise again with us. And this is so exciting.