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What’s Heaven Like?by Steve Cox,
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As you have probably noticed, most of my monthly articles relate to our personal spiritual growth. One of my greatest passions in my life is to help people grow in their relationship with Christ and grow in becoming like him. However, this month, I feel led to have us look at something related to my usual topics, but still a bit different from the usual. Not long ago, in my men’s accountability group, one of the men mentioned his kids were asking “What is heaven like?” He wanted to give them a Biblically sound answer and asked us to help him determine how to best answer this question from the Scriptures. This is a huge question, which does in fact fill entire books, so in this brief article we can only scratch the surface. Also, I am not a trained theologian by any stretch of the imagination. So the thoughts I share will be primarily limited to what some portions of Scripture clearly tell us about heaven. My hope is that in relaying these thoughts it will encourage you to grow in living a life of hope and joy. Even before considering what heaven is like, there are a couple of related questions we should consider. The Bible makes it clear heaven is our eternal home and we should greatly be looking forward to being there. If so, then why don’t we talk about heaven more often? There are probably a wide variety of reasons we don’t talk about heaven very much (very busy with demands of this life, etc.) but I suspect one of the main reasons is our second question: do we really know a lot of specifics about heaven? So, why don’t we know more about heaven? Although we are granted some views directly into heaven (Isaiah, Revelation, etc.) we are not provided a great deal of specifics about what eternity will be like for us. Paul, describing his personal experience of being “caught up in paradise” and says he “heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.” (2 Corinthians 12:4) In another letter, Paul tells us the eternal relationship between Christ and the church is a “profound mystery.” (Ephesians 5:3) I can’t say this with one hundred percent accuracy from the Bible. But I think the reason we are not told more about heaven in the Bible is because in our limited earthly form and experience, our knowledge and ability to comprehend heavenly things is exceedingly limited. One analogy would be that God revealing the full depths of heaven to us would be like trying to reveal the intricacies of higher calculus to the family dog. (By the way, I don’t understand higher calculus any better than the dog). The dog might be able to comprehend mathematics to the point of understanding that two doggy treats is more than one, but that would be about as far as we could go. In the same way, much of heaven is “inexpressible” or a “mystery” to us. But the Lord does tell us enough about heaven, in terms we can understand, such that we should be “longing for a better country—a heavenly one”. (Hebrews 11:16) Because the Lord helps us understand what we can of heaven, by using words and ideas familiar to us, we might want to consider two thoughts. How is heaven similar to this world and how is it different? Heaven has some similarities to things we see on this earth in that it is described as a country (Hebrews 11:16), a kingdom (Matthew 11:12), a place where we have a citizenship (Philemon 3:20),and a home. (John 14:2-3) There is a ruler, an organization, and a hierarchy. (Rev 3:14) Some verses indicate we will still have a physical body (an imperishable one) and we can still eat! (Luke 24:42) It also appears we will have things to do, work and responsibilities, even though we currently do not know the details of our work (Luke 19:15-18, 1 Corinthians 6:3) We are also told we will have an inheritance and/or reward and what we do now in this life impacts this future reward and/or inheritance. Exactly what this inheritance (1 Peter 1:4) and/or reward (Matthew 5:12, 10:42) entails is not made clear to us at present. Heaven is also extremely different from our current experience in vital ways, in what is missing and what is present. First, in what is missing: There is no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain. (Revelation 21:4) Satan is gone and no longer able to tempt us. (Revelation 20:10) The temptations of this current world are all gone, the old order of things has passed away (Revelation 21:5), and the temptations of our earthly bodies are gone as we are raised in imperishable bodies. (1 Corinthians 15) Second, what is present in heaven is also important to know: God himself lives among us. (Revelation 21:3) He is in charge, operating a righteous and just rule, (Revelation 19:1-2) and we live in perfect peace and harmony and joy. (1 Thessalonians 5:23) The very nature of everything is changed (Isaiah 65:17) to the way it was supposed to be before the fall of mankind. (Revelation 21:5) We are “liberated from the bondage to decay and brought into glorious freedom.” (Romans 8:21) “And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage
each other with these words.” (1 Thessalonians 4:17-18)
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