“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” Revelation 21:1
The popular conception of heaven is something I don’t want to have anything to do with.
Close your eyes. Picture heaven. What do you see, or not see? Are the images based on stories or movies, or on what Scripture actually says?
Whoever thought it was a good idea to depict heaven as the complete negation of everything good that we know in this life should be made to stand waist-deep in a cloud for ten years and see how he likes it.
This is a picture of a colorless heaven: white robes, white clouds, white everything. A heaven with no style. (Same old robes for millennia on end?) And the music? Now I like harp music, for a while. An hour or two is just fine. But heaven can’t possibly be harp music in a non-landscape, a mere cloud, no activity, few conversations.
In attempts to depict a realm that is other-worldly, people have drifted toward images that are only sub-worldly. Even if we don’t take these images literally, should we even suggest that the afterlife is basically the complete loss of everything good and beautiful you have experienced on earth?
The Bible speaks of fulfillment in heaven, something that makes this life in this world seem only a shadow compared to the Real Thing. Heaven must be a life of continual discovery, of unceasing awe, where blue is bluer than you’ve ever seen it, and fellowship with other people is like being in the best family in the world-nothing awry, nothing missing, nothing in excess. Heaven is a place of no tears because there is no reason for crying.
Peter put it this way: “But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.” Now what precedes that is a fiery rebirth, but we’ll come back to that.
I couldn’t even guess how many times over the years I’ve talked with people about the losses and pains and disappointments of their lives in this world. They talk about their lives “falling apart,” or “falling to pieces.” And I’ve found that there is one biblical passage I come back to more than any other when I think of offering some assurance. It is a kind of map of all of life, and within its edges are the promises of life beyond this life. But I mostly turn to it because it so accurately captures the truth that though this world is bound to corruption, God and his undying love are the stable core of life, and out of that love, God is one day going to remake this world, and remake us. Then there will be no more tears. The passage is Romans, chapter 8:
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
A suffering man wrote this, and he truly believed that a future glory was ahead that would make our sufferings in this world close up like a wound that doesn’t even leave a scar. Here is the honest assessment: the whole creation is frustrated by its bondage to decay. It is not just that human beings get divorced and get fired and get sick. Every living thing succumbs to decay. Every bird drops from the sky and every tree falls. Earthquakes crack the world. Drought burns the land. There is a certain unfortunate consistency here, so we are not to think that when we go through a hard time God is singling us out for special treatment. Yes, there may be a causal link in some forms of judgment, as when people put harmful drugs in their bodies or expose themselves to disease through sexual immorality. But many of our losses are not directly linked to particular mistakes and transgressions. We live in a diseased world. That may not be good news, but it is honest news, and it is the one explanation of life that is most consistently true.
And so “we groan inwardly as we eagerly await our adoption.” Oh, God. Oh, God. How long? It is a groaning that is not just an expression of pain, but of longing. That is why we say of a woman bearing a child that she is in labor, not that she is being tortured. It is pain toward an end, a spectacular end. And so the rest of creation joins with us in the groaning.
But there is “eager expectation” here, and real hope.
Paul goes on to say (and notice how future and present, pain and restoration are all reconciled):
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God if for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but give him up for us all-how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things. Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died-more than that, who was raised to life-is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?… No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
For as many times as I’ve read this text, it becomes more powerful each time I come back to it. For all of our piecemeal approaches to life, here is a singular perspective that brings together God and humanity, sin and forgiveness, suffering and health, death and life, loss and love.
God knows this world is broken. But he doesn’t intend to leave it that way. We are in labor pains, but labor comes to an end, and then there is new life. Mighty forces work to separate us from God, but God’s love is a bond that nothing can break. Something glorious is coming, and the substance of that glory is shining back into this day that we live as surely as the glory of the first creation shines forward. We may feel as if we’re stumbling in a cave, but there is light and life all around.
In the Old Testament the prophets talked about the coming “day of the Lord.” They spoke of two characteristics of that divine interruption of human affairs: judgment and vindication. God will settle scores. He will judge the wicked, and vindicate their victims. A new kingdom is coming.
In the New Testament, this climax of human history unfolds in much greater detail. With the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the kingdom of God has already been impressed upon this world. It is not a kingdom that can be located “here” or “there,” but is, as Jesus said, “among you.” Whenever Jesus healed someone, or cast out a demon, or performed some other miraculous sign, he was giving evidence that God’s power was being unleashed in the world, although the remaking of the world will happen at a later time. He healed some, but not all. Someone has compared this to D-Day, when allied forces landed decisively on the coast of France and thereby signaled that the beginning of the end had come. But the end of the end only came years later at V-Day, victory day.
So we live in a kind of in-between time. D-Day has happened, but V-Day is yet to come. The kingdom of God has come, but the remaking of heaven and earth, the final redemption, is yet to come. Jesus has come, but one of the promises he made again and again in his teaching is that there will come a day when he will return. He taught his followers that they should not speculate exactly when or how or where it will happen. But he did teach the certainty of his return, and that he would usher in both judgment and vindication, and so we should be ready.
The New Testament also refers to the new creation as “restoration” and “rebirth.” “He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything as he promised long ago through the holy prophets” (Acts 3:21; italics mine). “At the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne…” (Matt. 19:28).
There is one coherent picture here: the end of all things is a remaking and renewal of heaven and earth. So forget the image of the soul of a human being lifting from a person’s body at death to drift toward some ethereal, impersonal eternity. We can contemplate, instead, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead into a new and utterly transformed body. Heaven does mean real ongoing personal existence, the ability to have genuine relationships, consciously communing with God in ways that we cannot even imagine because our worship now is limited by the earthiness of our life in this world.
Now there are some who have said that they see in the Bible a complete annihilation of the world, and images of nuclear holocaust make it easy to imagine. Didn’t Jesus say, “Heaven and earth will pass away,” and Isaiah, “All the stars of the heavens will be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll”? How about 2 Peter 3:11-12, “That day will bring destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.” But it is this same passage that goes on say, “We are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.”
Fire can mean judgment and purification, not annihilation of the universe. That dreadful promise and prediction goes back to the prophets, and continues right through Jesus’ teaching. The “day of the Lord” will be a time when evil is judged for what it is, and the fire of God’s judgment will not be able to stand against it. Would any other outcome do? Do we not find ourselves looking for the final gavel in courtrooms, some decisive discernment of guilt and innocence, and do we not know that at the end of time as we know it a divine gavel must fall? If there is no moral clarity then why should I look for any moral clarity now? The reason we stand against a neighbor stealing our possessions or a teacher sexually abusing a student or a cop taking a bribe is because justice is woven into the created world and will one day be fully revealed in the end.
Tragically, this means that those who have wanted nothing to do with God in this life, who have ignored him, insulted him, inspired others to reject him, will get for eternity what they have chosen in this life. Hell is, at its essence, separation. Irreparable loss. It is us getting precisely what we wanted, if what we wanted in our lives was to not have the hassle of dealing with a divine sovereign, even though every requirement of that king is grace wrapped in love and mercy.
We cannot even imagine what the new heaven and earth will be like, but that existence is not about wading knee-deep in cloud and losing everything good we have ever known.
C. S. Lewis once said that it bothered him that he didn’t long for heaven more. We grow quite fond of things in this life, and often fonder the older we get. And then, he said, it struck him: maybe there is nothing he’d ever longed for that isn’t heaven. What do we enjoy in this life? A vivacious creation, full of life and yet-to-be discovered mysteries. Friendships that are a true joy. Taste and touch, sight and sound and smell. Lewis was saying, isn’t the view of the new heaven and earth as we get it from Scripture a promise for a fuller measure of just these things than we could ever experience in this life? The life hereafter is life transformed and fulfilled, not life taken away. It is all of God’s goodness emerging in a brand new shape, but still with the same essential qualities of beauty, grace, and companionship.
In the Apocalypse of John, the exploding series of visions that give us the meaning of things to come, we receive these symbols: no more sea (that is, no longer a world full of threats), God dwelling with man, no more tears, a new city, nations at peace, golden streets, brilliant sun, a new community merged with the heavenly beings. “The old order has passed away.” “I am making everything new.” God says, “It is done.”
All this is the big “yet to come,” and we live now in the “meantime.” We can be encouraged by the empathy that comes through Romans 8 (yes, it is as if we are going through birth pains as we long for something better). We can get a head start on the new heavens and new earth: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come.”
Already come. That’s something to hold onto.
It’s a funny thing, but whenever I board an airplane to go to some far away place, whenever I settle into that seat and buckle up, then feel myself pressed back into the seat as the plane shoots down the runway and then lifts its wheels off the bumpy concrete runway, I feel that I’ve already come to the place I’m going to. Maybe it’s because air travel has so amazingly closed distances-almost like magic. Close your eyes, count to three, and you’re there.
Maybe it’s also like that in our conscious experience of the “here” and the “there,” the “now and the “then,” of hope.
If you have come to Christ as an ordinary person approaching him and choosing to believe in him, then you have already come to the fulfillment of all he offers.
But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
[excerpt from Putting the Pieces Back Together: How Real Life and Real Faith Connect by Mel Lawrenz]