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Heaven and Earth, part 1 — Fixing our eyes away from the lies

Avatar by Dr Ransom at 06:37 PM ET , Monday, Apr 13, 2009
Tags: Columns, Deep Doctrine Magic: Biblical Theology, Heaven



Easter / Resurrection Sunday has come and gone, leaving Christ-followers around the world even more grateful for Christ’s resurrection and the hope of our own — but this weekend I realized even more that some ideas about how God will rise His people again to live everlasting need to be put to death and never brought back to life.

And then we ought also to dance with joy on the graves of such myths!

My thoughts came from yesterday, when I was told that a family I knew was saying goodbye to visiting relatives. Some voiced wishes that they could have more time to talk and visit. Well, at least we’ll have time in Heaven, one family member said.

But then another responded with something like, Oh well, we may not remember, you know.

Hearing about this expression of such a belief made me feel almost as grieved and disappointed as those who hold such ideas would feel, if they truly allowed themselves to consider. What a hopeless notion — Heaven, a world of perpetual “spiritoid” Alzheimer’s patients?

Some months ago, as part of an online discussion about the true nature of Heaven — the New Heavens and New Earth that God promises to create — a friend of mine said (slightly edited):

I was watching a movie the other night, with my dad, and the main character was sitting in a lovely grove of tree, and it looked so beautiful, and I looked to my dad and asked him, “Dad, do you think they’ll be places like that in heaven?”

He replied, “Hmm, I think so.”

It worries me that he didn’t say with certainty, “YES!”

I remember picking peaches one time, and it was so beautiful in that grove of trees, eating fruit from the trees. I was enjoying myself so much, that I thought, “I hope heaven is like this.”

When I mentioned it to my grandma, she replied. “Like what?”

“Just like this, with the sun and the trees, and the birds singing.”

“Don’t be silly,” was her response.

Why is this thought of as wrong, or at least silly? Why do so many Christians believe such things about Heaven, or their resurrection bodies? Where are such notions found in Scripture? How could such a strange environment, in which it is assumed God’s people will be even less knowledgeable than they are now, be properly classified as Heaven? And how could such an existence be better without such simple gifts from God as His creation of nature?

Unlike other false views contrary to Scripture, myths about Heaven are far more harmful both to how we view our own resurrection and how we view God’s glory and Christ’s resurrection. Is God truly glorified by rescuing His bride from a universe beyond repair, and turning His people into “spiritoids” floating in some kind of ethereal world? Does Scripture really tell us this?

And unlike how many Christians handle some false views, I approach this with far more earnestness and heartfelt passion to show what Scripture says so clearly and in contrast. This isn’t to be right, or even to Stand on the Word just to look cool. And this is not about proving some peripheral point or “accessory” belief, either, such as end-times events or even political positions. This is vital — so vital to our hope for God’s after-world, and for our rejoicing in how He will make all things new!



Paradise lost — or ignored?


These are not some kind of “secret” teachings, either. Instead, they’re what was so clearly in the Bible all along: that God wants people to desire Himself, and His gifts of new and glorified material bodies because they give Him glory. We will not lose our bodies, or ourselves; we will not be dumber in Heaven than we are here on Old Earth. And the New Earth will be a literal, physical world that will last forever and ever!

People don’t seem to get that, though. And I’m not just talking about non-Christians. It seems the ideas of Heaven as a mystical, floating-out-there, “spiritual” dimension of weirdness where things may get really boring and you might even lose your personhood — those ideas are floating out there, just as much, and they’re just as vague and impossible to define:

Have you ever heard “time shall be no more”? Ah, but where does Scripture tell us this?

Or “we will never work, we’ll just praise Jesus”? Again, which verse? And why wouldn’t we also praise Him by working — just as we will by playing, fellowshipping, eating, learning, exploring?

Or “we don’t know much about Heaven”? Rather, we just don’t read what God’s word does say!

So, in the coming days and weeks I hope to write this series about many different aspects of Heaven and Earth. Lord willing, I’ll touch on the lies about how we are to think about Heaven (if we permit ourselves to think that way at all!), the nature of the world to come, and (especially) the nature of Christians’ resurrected bodies. And a lot of this, though I have read and studied it myself, has been so wonderfully revealed to me in Randy Alcorn’s excellent book Heaven.

I’m certain very few mistaken Christians really intend to hold such wrong ideas about our existence in the afterlife. They just don’t think about it, for various reasons. And before I myself got into really studying and taking delight in the truth that God will recreate the universe, I would have bought into many of these myths myself.

Why — was I some kind of heretic? No. At first I just didn’t see how it mattered. It was a completely blind spot to me, and God had to use others over time to get through my dense head. (I wonder what other blind spots I still have that God will help me look into later!)

I daresay this is not something that too many people would debate, either. If faithful Christ-followers were really asked not only to consider the plain meaning of so many texts, but to think about the topic of Heaven altogether, they would laugh instead at the silliness of the myths that have infiltrated Christianity from dualism, Gnosticism and pagan afterlife ideas.



Objection 1: Heaven irrelevant?


Heaven doesn’t seem to have much bearing on our lives now. And you don’t want to be “so heavenly minded that you’re of no earthly good,” right?

The Apostle Paul would disagree. He devoted much time in his writing to explaining the resurrection, and eagerly anticipated his afterlife and the world to come. 1 Corinthians 15 is a fantastic exposition on what our real resurrection bodies will be like. And in Colossians 3:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Colossians 3: 1-4 (ESV)




Objection 2: ‘No eye has seen’?


God never told us all that much about Heaven. After all, doesn’t the 1 Corinthians 2:9 passage (“no eye has seen, no hear has heard …”) say that we should not try to figure out “what God has prepared [in Heaven?] for those who love Him”?

Yet that is not what the passage is saying at all (more here)! Read the rest of the verse, which is rendered even more clearly in the English Standard Version as part of a whole thought:

[A]s it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

1 Corinthians 2: 9-10 (ESV)

The verse is not talking about Heaven at all, but the spiritual truths of God that have been hidden from His people until now.



Objection 3: A wrong antimatter ratio?


It’s just not “spiritual” to talk about Heaven in anything other than “spiritual” terms. That’s why it’s silly for people to think of Heaven as natural, or material, or “earthly.”

Someday I hope someone will do a case study — perhaps in New Heaven/New Earth itself! — about how this mythology got started. We can trace it back to Gnosticism and other dualism-based philosophies. Those hold that somehow matter is automatically evil and thus escaping our bodies and world, not desiring new and resurrected ones, is highly Spiritual.

But God created the first humans to be both physical and with souls, and every indication throughout Scripture is that separation of body and soul is not to be desired:

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

2 Corinthians 5: 1-5 (ESV)

Here we gain so many glorious truths — I wish I could hear a whole sermon series about them!

  • Verse 1: If the “tent that is our earthly home” — our body — “is destroyed,” God will provide a new body that He personally stitched together with the fabrics of Heaven.

  • Verse 2: We are meant to long for a new body, even “groaning” for it. Paul expanded this point in Romans 8: 22-23, in which he noted that “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now,” and “we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, [also] groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”

  • Verses 3 through 4: Without a body, it is as if a person were naked. Will God leave His children naked for eternity? Paul says we long “not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed.” Further clothed could not mean unclothed, without a body, but that we would have more body than we ever had in Old Earth!

  • Verse 5 and further: This is how Christians should be encouraged. It is not that God will free us forever from the constraints of a body, as anti-matter views would hold. Rather, God’s Spirit is our guarantee that He will recreate our bodies, more amazing than ever.

Furthermore, the myth-conception of people being spirits forever, in some kind of nonmaterial realm, bypasses passages such as 1 Corinthians 15. There, Paul shows clearly that we will have resurrection bodies just like Christ did. Our risen Savior was as physical and material as we are now — only more so, clearly with new abilities that we may or may not share.

That passage is where I hope to begin in my next installment of this Heaven and Earth series. Both this and the realization that God is sovereign over humans’ salvation has brought so much joy to my life, and has made God even “bigger” and more glorious to me.

Again, my purpose is not to nitpick, or quibble over trivial matters. Our eternal destination is not trivial at all, and neither is the myth about God’s redemption of the universe. This is the world His people were made for, and it is beyond worth considering and proclaiming as we seek to fix our eyes on things above — New Earth — not the myths of below — Old Earth. Soli deo Gloria!


Comments


Shallbe, aka Queen Mum

02:08 PM ET , Wednesday, Apr 15, 2009

Wahoo!!! now if I could only show it to a certain family member...Oh, well. Me, I'm gonna REMEMBER...because when I get THERE, I'll know the reason WHY all that stuff happened...and it will glorify GOD!


Dr Ransom

07:42 PM ET , Tuesday, Apr 21, 2009

Hmm, actually, I wrote it with that family member in mind. I kept thinking, “How could this best be said if she were reading this?”


Sarah

Sarah

05:12 AM ET , Sunday, Apr 26, 2009

Hi Dr.Ransom,

Interesting article about heaven! It's not so unreal, is it? I'm glad to have read the scriptures you pointed out, because though I believe heaven will be more than just continual worship through song (an old belief I had from people telling me you worship Jesus 24/7 in heaven, heh) it's nice to be reminded of what Scripture actually does tell us about it. I, for one, am extremely excited to get there!

Peace and blessings,

Sarah :) (aka StudyMate, if you remember me from Nweb)




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