Heaven Is

We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about heaven. Not unless we are facing death, our own or a loved one’s. We have all we can handle right now; we are not ready to let go and move on to some unknown realm beyond here, whatever it may be, if it is at all.

Heaven is not the place where everybody gets to go simply by virtue of dying. Heaven is the realm of highest privilege, for that is God’s own special place to dwell, where you can see God – and not worry about living through the impact of beholding the holy.

The ancient Greeks believed that we humans came from a heavenly realm before our birth, and that we longed to return to our true home. They said your origin determined your destiny, where you came from where you are going, or at least where you long to go. Further, until you get to your true origin, which is your final destiny, your heart will remain restless.

Jesus left this earth to return to the Father, to heaven. He did so because that’s where He belonged, as God’s Pre-existent Son, with God from before the foundations of the world. While here, Christ merely “tented” among us, as a stranger in a stranger land.

Heaven is where we really belong. We live now in a land of forgetfulness. Still, we have many fears about heaven. We fear it may not really exist. We fear we may not get there. We fear who we may or may not find there, loved ones and those we disliked or disliked us here. We wonder: if we didn’t get along in this life, how will we ever get along in the next one?

We fear heaven may not be everything we hope and dream it will be. At the same time, we fear it might be so superior to anything we had thought or imagined that we won’t know what to do. We fear we will not like it – and won’t be able to tell anyone! Or we fear that we will like it too much, and will run the risk of losing it somehow, through some transgression we might knowingly or unknowingly commit there.

We cannot imagine true heaven here. All we can do is imagine a life like this one only greater. That may scare us all the more, because who wants to go to what you cannot imagine, giving up all you’ve known?

Yet heaven is our true home. It is where we were born, even before our birth on this thin plane of existence. Jesus tells us to put our treasures, and then our hearts, in heaven, for “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). Your heart follows what you treasure, whether that is friend or fortune, persons or pleasures. Find where your heart is, and you find also what you treasure.

Jesus says that the treasures that really matter, which nothing can destroy or take from you, are the treasures of heaven. Only these treasures grant peace, strength and perpetual well-being. Heaven’s treasures are all of God, of love, of your first and final home.

One of the greatest treasures of your heart, put there by God, is a morsel of the manna of heaven, a tiny fragment of the sod of paradise. It is sufficient to nurture and sustain the faith of your heart all your days; nothing on earth can tarnish or eradicate heaven’s sod.

Heaven is the time and place for our coming consummation in God. It is that communion with God which, once entered upon, shall go on forever. Heaven is also the time and place for our reunion with loved ones who have gone before; it is the place for the fulfillment of human love. Which is the more important to you: communion with God or with loved ones? To answer either way may well leave you feeling uneasy, as if you have neglected something most vital to you. No wonder then that the history of the concept of heaven has vacillated between these two emphases.

The first emphasis is the “theocentric” or God-centered view. The second is the “anthropocentric” or human-centered view. Which is more important to us is a statement of our current values. Of course we do not want to make heaven an either/or, but a both/and – for both kinds of communion are necessary for our true and lasting fulfillment. How could it be heaven if we attained only the one or the other, but not both unions? And wouldn’t an eternity of one kind of communion without the other become boring? God forbid that heaven should in any way become stale to us! Imagine how great our disappointment would be if we should find ourselves grumbling, “Is this all there is?”

One or the other vision of heavenly communion predominates for each of us. Ask yourself this question: If there were a “Y” in the road beyond the grave, the one leading to God and the other to your lost loved ones, which path would you take? I would take the path to God – and rely on God’s love to build a bridge to my loved ones. I would want to make my home in God, then invite my loved ones to dwell there with me.

The bridge between God and our loved ones has already been built. Jesus Christ is its name. For in Christ we are both one with God and one with each other (see John 17). Christ is the Source and Ground of our unity with God and with one another in God.

Another issue concerns whether heaven is something we enter right after death, or only at some future point, say when the “new heaven and new earth” are revealed and the “General Resurrection” takes place. Is heaven a place for our souls and spirits now, or for our entire being, including our new and eternal “spiritual body,” when God consummates this creation? What can we expect now, and what later?
In accordance with the Biblical witness, heaven appears to be a time and place of two phases. First, it is the abode where we go immediately after our death, the realm of the dead referred to in the Psalms and the Parables of Jesus. Secondly, heaven is where we shall live forever with God and one another in a new creation, a new cosmos, with new and never-decaying, never-dying bodies (Revelation 21-22).

We wonder what our bodies will be like. This is a great mystery of our looming destiny, for we do not yet know what we shall be like, but when Christ appears, we shall be like Him. We shall have attained, we shall have become what the apostle Paul witnessed on the road to Damascus: a spiritual body, like our Lord’s, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
I believe our spiritual body will include wings, and the ability to fly like angels. For we shall be like angels not only in terms of not marrying, as Jesus tells us, but also as regards finally being able to know the flight our hearts may only dream of and pine for, here.

What must we do to get to heaven? While in a real way our whole lives is a preparation for heaven, Scripture teaches we are saved through faith in Christ, not from works. Yet without works, our faith is dead, just as without deeds, love is dead. Holiness both of heart and hands, both of soul and life are necessary for entering into and abiding forever within, paradise.

We do deeds of service not in order to get saved, but because we are saved. Just so, we do deeds of love not to be loved, but because we are loved. Our works of love prepare us for entrance into heaven. As the Bible warns, only the holy, only those who let God sanctify them through and through, may enter. Christ came to sanctify or purify us with His life, His body and blood, His Holy Spirit. That is why we must all be baptized; that is, we must all be cleansed by the waters of the Spirit, and washed in the forgiving, healing blood of the Lamb, who takes away the sins of the world.
What of those who die who are not fully prepared for heaven, those who had some faith, but never developed into full scale lovers of God and humanity? It is not for us to judge, for we shall be judged with the very same scale we use to judge others. We must leave to God the final disposition of all persons, including ourselves.

That being said, since we are talking about most of us, who are neither good nor bad, hot nor cold, who are ready neither for heaven nor hell, the question of where we go has urgency. For over a thousand years, the Church believed in a “Purgatory.” Purgatory was the place most of us went at first, a hospital-like abode not for punishment but healing, maturing and preparing us for our long-sought entrance into heaven proper.

God, I hope, will do whatever is necessary, even after the grave, to prepare God’s own children for entrance into paradise, for their return home.

According to Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, in their fascinating book, Heaven. A History, the prevailing view of heaven today has eight common characteristics. See how they accord with your view:
1. Only a thin veil divides heaven and earth.
2. Heaven is seen as the continuation and fulfillment of earthly life, rather than its opposite.
3. Though still the place of “eternal rest,” it is a place of continuing activities.
4. There is a focus on continuing communal and familial love and concerns.
5. Describability: heaven shares with earth characteristics of concrete and describable existence.
6. New experiences: a real life continues with new experiences in both a time and place existence.
7. Self-consciousness: we continue as persons, with a continuous self-identity and consciousness.
8. Relatedness to God: we have a much greater, more intimate connection and communion with God.

In sum, let us hold to the faith that the best is yet to be. Let us trust in our heart’s manna of heaven. The Holy Spirit will give us a “down payment” of paradise now. Heaven here is the communion with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit – and also the sweet communion with one another in love, which means in God. If we are not open both to the Spirit and each other now, we will not be ready for a heaven of endless communion and community later. Love God and one another to the full now, and heaven is already yours.