Kathi and I love to travel. Frankly, we don’t do as much of it as we would like. But when we are able to get away, we enjoy seeing new places, whether they be historical sites or settings that display the beauty of nature. We also look forward to visiting family and friends in various parts of the country. But, to be honest, after a week or two of being on the road, we are usually anxious to return home—to get back to the regular routine, eating meals at our kitchen table, and sleeping in our own bed. As the saying goes, “There’s no place like home.” Undoubtedly, many readers are familiar with this feeling.
Heaven in the Popular Imagination
The Bible likewise describes Christians as “travelers” or “sojourners” who look forward to going home to their final resting place. King David, for all his wealth and power, describes himself as a “guest” or “alien,” and his days on earth as a mere shadow (1 Chron 29:15; Ps 39:12). And the writer of Hebrews describes Christians as strangers and exiles on earth who are seeking a homeland (Heb 11:13-14). If we are honest with ourselves, however, many of us try to satisfy this homesickness by investing in pleasures of the here and now.[1] In his classic work, The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis describes us as half-hearted creatures who satisfy ourselves with “mud pies” of drink, sex, and ambition when we are offered infinite joy. We are far too easily pleased.[2]
Yet every person experiences well-being in this world as fleeting and uncertain. When we or others we know and love experience a heart-wrenching divorce or face a life-threatening illness; and when we are confronted with the persistence of terrorism, the rise of ruthless dictators, and the possibility of nuclear war, we have the deep sense that we (and this earth) were made for more. This sense that the present world is not all there is to life is expressed in the song by Los Lonely Boys entitled “Heaven,” which has been widely played on both pop and country music stations:
In this crazy world, how far is heaven . . . Cause I know there’s a better place Than this place I’m living.[3]
Best sellers such as Anthony DeStefano’s A Travel Guide to Heaven and Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven are indicative of the fascination that Americans have with heaven. Polls consistently show that between 80 and 90 percent of Americans believe in heaven; and a recent Gallup poll reported that 77 percent rate their chances of “going to heaven” as “good” or “excellent.”[4]
Most Americans, including many Christians, picture heaven as the ultimate resort. DeStefano, the CEO of Priests for Life, a Catholic antiabortion organization, describes heaven as “Disney World, Hawaii, Paris, Rome, and New York all rolled up into one.” God, he says, is the “king of all travel agents” who has spent 4.6 billion years creating his incredible resort—a never-ending vacation, great big family reunion, and ultimate adventure for travelers of all ages.[5] This image of heaven in the popular imagination is reinforced by books such as Erwin Lutzer’s One Minute After You Die, which maintains on the basis of Revelation 21:16 that heaven “will be composed of 396,000 stories (at twenty feet per story) each having an area as big as one half the size of the United States!” Lutzer continues: “Divide that into separate condominiums and you have plenty of room for all who have been redeemed by God since the beginning of time.”[6]
Bringing Heaven to Earth
Contrary to the beliefs of many Christians, however, the Bible does not portray the Christian’s ultimate hope as disembodied souls flying off to some distant paradise where they will spend eternity. Admittedly, this is a difficult topic to address. Our own personal desires and longings to be reunited with loved ones who have passed away often strongly influence our perceptions of heaven. While this is understandable, the Bible actually does not say much about what happens when we die. There are some passages in Scripture (i.e., Lk 23:42-43; 2 Cor 5:1-10) which do suggest that in their postmortem state, believers experience a spiritual mode of existence in heaven.[7] Paul seems to indicate that immediately following death, believers go to be “with Christ” (Phil 1:23). Revelation also indicates that martyrs of the faith are in the present heaven (6:9-11). It is reasonable to assume that the same is true of loved ones and will be true of us when we die.[8]
But this “glorious interlude,” or what is often referred to as the “intermediate state,” is not the final state.[9] Our ultimate hope—and the emphasis of Scripture—is that God is going to redeem this world, including you and me.[10] When all is said and done, as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 15, our spiritual bodies will be reunited with our resurrected bodies in a “new heaven and new earth.” The picture of the ultimate end in Revelation 21-22 is not one of ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven “but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.”[11] The essence of the Christian hope, then, is in a very real sense the expectation of the final marriage of heaven and earth, of God and his creation. This is what is celebrated in the Lord’s Supper! The Eucharist is a condensed summary of the final climax of redemption when heaven is brought to earth.[12]
How we view heaven has profound implications for how we approach life on this earth. To the extent that Christians view the Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven,” of salvation that takes us away from this world, argues N. T. Wright, then there will be little motivation for us to see the biblical hope as having much to do with change or new possibilities within the present world.[13] But the language of heaven as it is presented in the New Testament runs counter to this type of thinking. God’s kingdom in the preaching of Jesus, Wright continues, “refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’”[14]
Jesus the Bridegroom and the Last Supper
The promises made to Israel in the Old Testament as well as the promise in the New Testament of the fullness of our participation in eternal life are fulfilled in the coming of a new heaven and a new earth (Rev 21:1). It is only in a redeemed and transformed creation that we will experience full personal renewal and full restoration of our relationship with creation, with others, and, most importantly, with God, our Creator.[15]
The ancient Jews referred to YHWH, the God of Israel, as the divine “bridegroom.”[16] God is depicted as the bridegroom of Israel in the Song of Solomon and the prophets. Throughout the Old and New Testaments, the concept of the “wedding feast” is used as a metaphor for this final renewal and restoration of creation. More specifically, the image of the bridegroom returning to his bride is used to depict the renewal of God’s “marriage covenant” with his people. In this sense, the story of salvation in the Bible is a divine “love story” between God and his people—and indeed between God and his entire creation. As Pitre perceptively remarks:
From an ancient Jewish perspective, the God of Israel is also a Bridegroom, a divine person whose ultimate desire is to be united to his creatures in an everlasting relationship that is so intimate, so permanent, so sacrificial, and so life-giving that it can only be described as a marriage between Creator and creatures, between God and human beings, between YHWH and Israel.[17]
This is why at the very end of the book of Revelation the “new Jerusalem” is depicted as “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev 21:2; cf. 22:17).
In the Gospels, Jesus describes himself as the divine bridegroom coming for his bride; and he depicts the final age of salvation in terms of the image of a wedding feast. In fact, the Last Supper is in many respects a wedding banquet—the inauguration of a new wedding covenant that looks forward to the final wedding celebration spoken of by the prophets.[18]
Conclusion
For some, the expectation of the great wedding banquet in heaven leads to escapism. But, as Scot McKnight argues, a right understanding of heaven and its promises should lead to a positive engagement with culture and the present world:
Too much focus on the future Heaven or on life in the here and now misses the dual emphasis of the Bible—and indeed of our lives. Heaven people ought to be the most zealous about care for creation, love of others, peacemaking, and social justice. Heaven people have tasted the grandeur of Heaven, and therefore they long for Heaven to begin its work now on earth. But these same active workers can also be those who long for the fullness of God’s presence and the perfection of God’s people in the new Heaven and the new earth.[19]
The core of the heaven promise is that in the new heaven and new earth God will make all things right. This is essentially what Jesus is saying in the Last Supper, when he indicates to the disciples that, as the bridegroom of the future wedding banquet, he will drink of the fruit of the vine anew with his followers “in my Father’s kingdom” (Mt 26:29). The church, as the future bride of Christ, is called to embody, in advance, what will one day happen in heaven.[20]
[1] See Fitzpatrick, Home, 36.
[2] Lewis, Weight of Glory, 26.
[3] Smith, Heaven in the American Imagination, 2.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid. 109.
[6] Lutzer, One Minute After You Die, 83.
[7] For a discussion of alternative views of the intermediate state, see Bird, Evangelical Theology, 317-25; 664-65. See also Burke, Imagine Heaven, 60-61. Randy Alcorn argues on the basis of 2 Corinthians 5:2-4 that there may be “intermediate bodies” with some sort of physical form in the present or intermediate heaven. (Heaven, 57-59) Others argue, however, that 2 Corinthians 5:1-10 describes Paul’s expectation of a redeemed humanity in a new creation. See Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 230-31.
[8] Alcorn, Heaven, 65-67.
[9] Bird, Evangelical Theology, 328.
[10] Ross and Storment, Bringing Heaven to Earth, 60.
[11] Wright, Surprised by Hope, 19.
[12] See Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding, 160.
[13] Wright, Surprised by Hope, 5.
[14] Ibid., 18.
[15] Grenz, Millennial Maze, 214. Some argue that the promises in the Old Testament regarding the particular physical territory of Israel are fulfilled in the final state as part of the restoration of the earth. See James, New Creation Eschatology and the Land, 95-134.
[16] Pitre, Jesus the Bridegroom, 8.
[17] Ibid., 9.
[18] Ibid., 49. See also Long, Jesus the Bridegroom, 202-203.
[19] McKnight, The Heaven Promise, 123.
[20] Ibid., 129-30.
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