Four Under-Emphasized Things About Heaven

I would like to share with you four things the Bible says about heaven. These are not the only things. The list could be longer and arranged differently. But I have deliberately selected these four in order to challenge misapprehensions about heaven that appear in pop culture and that often affect the thinking of devout Christians.

1. Heaven is a place where God's will is done.

How do I know that? It’s in Lord’s Prayer. The disciples said to Jesus “Teach us to pray.” And he said, “When you pray, say this, ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.’” There it is: we are to pray for God’s will to be done here just as it is in fact always done in heaven. Here on earth, God’s will is typically defied, resisted, held in contempt, and rebelled against. We ourselves defy the will of God every time we sin. For example, it is God’s will that we tell the truth, that we not be lazy and self-indulgent, that we honor our commitments, fulfill our promises, remain faithful to our spouses, that we show kindness to the weak and miserable, that we exercise self discipline so as not to become enslaved to vice, and so on. And it is the Bible’s sad verdict that everyone, without exception, regularly defies the good will of God. God’s prescriptive will for how we should behave is not done on earth by anyone.

And that could be cause for despair with regard to the world in general and our hearts in particular. But don’t despair. There is a place where God’s will is always done all the time. That place is heaven. In my own prayers, I often repeat the Lord’s Prayer and elaborate in various ways on its seven petitions. One of the things that I like to do now is to give thanks that when I am tempted to despair over the way people behave – they just won’t repent, they don’t even feel guilty, they have no sense of conviction about the galling, self-destructive, others-destructive patterns of behavior that characterize them, behaviors that can be perfectly obvious to their family members and peers - and then the thought haunts me about my own patterns of defiance, perhaps things hidden from me but very clear to others – in those moments of sorrow I can give thanks to God that it is not like this everywhere. Sin does not contaminate and spoil all of universal reality. There is a place where God’s will is done. In heaven, the angels and departed saints never cross their arms and glare at God in bitter defiance of what he ordains. They delight to do his will, and they always do it.

Heaven is a place where God’s will is done. Not your will, not my will - God’s will. Once you have that thought locked firmly in your mind, then dare to ask yourself this question, “Do I want to go to heaven when I die?”

Here is why I ask. If you spend your life defying the will of God, going your own way, not caring whether what you do pleases him, but caring mainly about whether you please yourself, fulfill yourself, do what you want to do, stay dead center in the comfort zone of your desires and ambitions and identity – then unless you turn around completely, you won’t like heaven. Heaven will be a very distasteful, alien place to you. If you are comfortable defying the will of God here, why would you think you will suddenly start liking it there? This is the place to be remade, the place to be born again. This is the place to learn to love that holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

Every pop-culture reference to heaven that I am aware of gets this feature of heaven wrong. And not just wrong, but backwards - 100 percent backwards. Pop culture makes of heaven a place where our will is done, and we get our wishes fulfilled. Heaven is even shaped and contoured according to our desire. Here are some examples:

In the 1998 film What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams dies and enters a beautiful place. His guide, Cuba Gooding Jr tells him, “You’re creating an entire world here from your imagination. Anything you want!”

In the 2002 book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, a 14-year-old girl is murdered, goes to heaven, and gets exactly what she wants. Her intake counselor explains how heaven works: “All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why – really know – it will come.”

In the 2013 apocalyptic comedy This Is The End. Seth Rogen and a buddy get raptured to heaven where Rogen’s first question is, “Is there weed in heaven?” A marijuana joint instantly materializes between his lips. And he says, “That’s insane!” and a friend says, “No, no, no. That’s heaven. Anything you can think of – it’s yours.”

More recently there is the song Fishing in the Sky, recorded by Travis Smith. Smith’s grandmother wrote the song 30 years ago. He made an arrangement for it and then posted a video of her listening to him sing the song for the first time. It’s a very moving video as she is overcome with emotion and weeps even as she sings along. The last I saw it had some 12 million views via Facebook.

Here are some of the words:

“When we get to heaven God will know just what we like.
He’s got a lake for me in my sweet by and by.
I’ll have a silver boat that sparkles. It will be lined with fleece of white.
I’ll have a rod and reel that’s made of gold. The fish will always bite.
I’ll have a cabin by the lake. Shade trees will grow so high.
There’ll be crickets and birds to sing when I’m fishing, fishing in the sky.”

That sounds like a fisherman’s (or a fisherwoman’s) paradise. “God will know just what we like,” the song says. For some that’s fishing, for Seth Rogen it’s marijuana, for Susie in The Lovely Bones it was a high school where she only went to art class. For the terrorists who flew planes into buildings on 9/11 it was 72 willing consorts. Or maybe unwilling powerless victims if that’s what got them really excited. Whatever you want, right? Whatever makes you happy.

Listen, heaven is where God’s will is done – not your will, my will, or anybody else’s will, but God’s will. Heaven does not shape-shift to conform to you. You soul-shift to confirm to it. I believe C.S. Lewis was right when he said in one of his letters, “Heaven is an acquired taste.” Thankfully we can get plenty of practice in acquiring that taste here by submitting ourselves to God and to his work of grace within us so that we can be transformed into the kind of person who will like heaven rather than be repulsed by it. Make it your prayer and your goal to be able to say with the King David, “I delight to do your will, O God” (Psalm 40:8). Because if you can learn to delight to do God’s will, then you will like the heaven that exists, and you will not be susceptible to that pop-culture abomination that would say, “I delight for you to do my will, O God, and I’m so glad that in heaven you will finally get it right.”

2. Heaven is a place where God is worshiped.

In Revelation 4 and 5 you have astounding imagery concerning what might be called the ecstatic celebration of God. I don’t have time to go through all those images even if I felt I understood them well. But let me just reference the concluding words of that text, which say, “The elders fell down and worshiped.” They worshiped God.

What is “worship” - what does that mean? In North American evangelicalism, the word “worship” seems to have been co-opted to mean the singing we do in church before the sermon starts. Which is why singers and musicians are typically called a “worship team”. I have also heard the word “worship” used as a virtual synonym for “praise”, “adoration”, and “exaltation”. Those words are definitely related and have overlapping semantic domains - but they are not identical. Of course there is praise, adoration, and exaltation in heaven, but here I will just focus on worship. Worship means, at its bare bones, to bow down. To incline your head, to kneel, to lie prostrate before.

When you worship anything or anyone, you are declaring the superiority of that person or thing. You are acknowledging your inferiority, your subjectitude, and declaring - by voice, posture, actions - that the person or thing to which you ascribe worship has authority over you, dominion over you.

Here we can contrast the word “worship” with some of the words with which it gets comingled and confused - like “praise,” “exalt,” or “glorify.” There are verses in the Bible (believe it or not!) that say that God will praise, glorify, or exalt certain human beings. For example John 12:43: They loved praise from men rather than praise from God. (Indicating that there is such a thing as praise from God.) John 5:44: You receive glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from God. (God will indeed glorify some people.) 1 Peter 5:6: Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, so that in due time he may exalt you. Sometimes God does the exalting.

So according to the Bible, God loves us, and he may exalt, praise, or glorify at least some of us. But God never worships us. That’s unthinkable. God never declares our superiority over him. He serves us, and has done so supremely in Jesus Christ his Son, but he never bows to our authority. We bow to his. We worship him. It’s all one way.

Now among human beings there is such a thing as mutual worship. A worships B and B worships A. A spectacular example occurs in the wedding vows written into the Book of Common Prayer ( 1549), which guided Anglican worship for centuries and probably still does in some places. The vows used to say things like “I plight thee my troth.” We’ve gotten rid of that because no one knows what it means. I myself do not know what “plight” means as a verb, and I don’t know what “troth” means – I’d have to look them up. But in those classic vows, something that the bride and groom say to each other is “With my body I thee worship.” That sounds crazy to modern ears. “I worship you with my body”?

But all that is is a vow to obey the implied commandment in 1 Corinthians 7:4, which says, the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. In Christian marriage, the husband and the wife say to each other “I no longer have autonomy over my own body. Even as personal a thing as my body I yield to you.” What could be more personal than one’s body? You could lose your home and your property and your job and your belongings, but at least you’ve still got your body, right? “My body at least is something over which I exercise control!” Well, no, not in a loving Christian marriage. Even that is yielded up in joyous mutual subjection. “With my body I thee worship.”

But there is something that even a traditional Anglican would never say in his or her wedding vows. There is something even more personal than your body, which is the thing that will survive your body’s death. Anglicans never said to their spouses, “With my soul I thee worship.” The soul, the whole self, must only worship God.

There is a quote attributed to 19th century novelist George MacDonald to the effect that you do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. I believe that gets it right. We are souls, and as souls - with or without a body, as the case may be – we yield ourselves in subjection to God, and in heaven will have the delight of doing so without hindrance. There is so much here in our fallen world and in our fallen selves that gets in the way of worship, spoils it, makes it boring, tempts us to look inward rather than toward God. But in heaven, everything that can be called me – body, soul, mind, spirit, brain, habits, choices, identity, consciousness – everything bows before God in glad subjection.

Our worship song Shout To The Lord gets it right when it says, “Let every breath, all that I am, never cease to worship you.”

I have never seen a pop-culture reference to heaven that includes an acknowledgment of this fundamental feature of heaven, namely, the glad worship of God. In Philippians 2 it says that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, whether in heaven or on earth or under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Every knee will bow, and those who are bowing their knees in heaven will know no greater joy.

3: Heaven is a place where God is known.

In Philippians 3:10 the Apostle Paul makes an interesting statement. He says, I want to know Christ. You scratch your head at that and say, “What do you mean, you want to know Christ? You already know him. You’ve met him and talked to him. You’ve written a bunch of letters about him and will wind up writing almost half the books of the New Testament about him. Don’t you already know him?” And the answer of course is yes, Paul knew him, but not as much as he wanted to. Not as much as he would have liked.

In 1 Corinthians 13 he compares his knowledge of Christ to seeing him through a dirty lens or a fogged-up mirror. In the Elizabethan language of the King James Version it’s Now we see we see through a glass darkly – so it’s not a perfectly clear image of Christ that we get here. But, Paul continues, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

I heard Pastor John Ortberg say that while the Bible speaks often of “eternal life” – 45 times, by my count – there is only one text that gives a definition of eternal life. And it is John 17:3: Now this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.

Eternal life is knowing God. That is not to say that eternal life is not also an endless state of comfort and bliss - it is just that that is not the direction the Bible chooses to go in the one passage where it actually gives a definition of the term. When it comes to defining eternal life, The Bible chooses to emphasize knowing God and his Son Jesus Christ.

4: Heaven is a place where God is present.

It may seem odd to put this last because it is a fundamental truth that is presupposed in my other three points. If heaven is a place where God is known and worshiped and his will is done, clearly he’s got to be there, right? Yes, but I am giving this point its own treatment and ending on it because it seems to me to be the most important thing about heaven and the thing that is so utterly neglected in the popular mindset about heaven. The neglect is so pervasive I have cause to think that the omission is not accidental but sinister.

The last 9 chapters of the book of Ezekiel describe in extraordinarily rich and symbol-laden detail what I and many scholars take to be a depiction of heavenly realities. It is a challenge to read, and I’m sure it was a challenge for Ezekiel to write it. Because how do you describe the indescribable? How do you then have it make sense to a 6th century BC Hebrew refugee in Babylonian exile? How do you explain general relativity and quantum mechanics to a 5-year-old?

Thankfully the last verse of the book, Ezekiel 48:35, provides the golden nugget, the bottom-line takeaway that hopefully even a fool can grasp. It says, The name of the city from that time on shall be, “The Lord Is There.” There it is - that’s what you need to understand if you can’t figure out anything else. The Lord is there.

Likewise today – let us move forward 2600 years - there are Christians who have different understandings of how the events of the last days will work out, in what order and according to what timeframe things will occur. But even if there are disagreements about the nature of, say, the rapture and the millennium, there is no disagreement about the bottom line in 1 Thessalonians 4:17: And so we will be with the Lord forever.

The main thing about heaven is that the Lord is there and that those who are in heaven are with the Lord.

That truth is presented in three passages in the New Testament that speak of the status of the believer immediately upon his or her death. Those passages are Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23; and 2 Corinthians 5:6-8:

In Luke 23, Jesus tells one of the men being crucified next to him, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Today – not thousands of years from now after your body is resurrected, but today. The man was going to die that day. And that day he would be not just in any old paradise but specifically a paradise with Christ. The Lord would be there.

In Philippians 1, Paul knows that he might be executed soon. But that does not bother him – in fact he says he would rather depart and be with Christ, which was better by far. Dying would mean that he would instantly be with Christ.

And in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul contrasts life with death by saying that if we are at home in the body (alive) we are away from the Lord, but if we are away from body (dead) we are at home with the Lord. The main thing about heaven, the thing that makes it heaven, is not bliss, endless duration, beautiful scenery, or meeting loved ones. The main thing about heaven is that the Lord is there. People in heaven get to see Jesus face to face.

How badly this truth is neglected and therefore must be all the more boldly proclaimed may be illustrated by a song from Canadian folk singer Roger Whittaker where he celebrates the beauty of Cape Breton, a National Park in Nova Scotia. I’ve never been there but I’ve seen pictures and it’s very pretty. He sings this line:

If my time could end perfectly,
I know how I’d want it to be.
God’s gift of heaven would be made up of three:
My love, Cape Breton, and me

I am indebted to my teacher D. A. Carson who said, “Oh dear Roger. You’ve just described hell.” If heaven is composed of three things, “my love, Cape Breton, and me,” what’s missing? Well for one thing, the multitude of the redeemed with whom we will be able to share our joys! But of course most importantly, Jesus is missing from that picture. If Jesus isn’t there, it means I’m in hell.

There is a fireball of a preacher named Paul Washer – he’s worth looking up on YouTube. He is fond of saying, “We all want to go to heaven, we just don’t want God to be there.” Plenty of people want the nice things God can give, but not God. Now if he can just give me nice things and lots of pleasure and then go away and mind his own business, then everything will be fine.

Recognizing this temptation to value God’s gifts over God himself, a pastor’s wife named Ann Ross Cousin penned these words in 1854:

The bride eyes not her garment, but her dear Bridegroom’s face;
I will not gaze at glory But on my King of grace;
Not at the crown He giveth, But on His pierced hand;
The Lamb is all the glory Of Immanuel’s land.

There is a danger in absorbing into our mindset pop-culture references to heaven like those in What Dreams May Come; The Lovely Bones; This is the End; Fishing in the Sky; and My Love, Cape Breton and Me. Because all those secular pictures of heaven lack God. Jesus is never there. And for that reason alone, they are closer to hell than they are to heaven. If I don’t see Jesus, it isn’t heaven. If God’s not there, I’m in hell.

I will close with this. In John chapter 11, we read the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead after he had been dead four days and his body had begun to decay. No one knows what Lazarus experienced in those four days. I deny that the experience of a man whom God knows he will resurrect in four days is necessarily the same as that of a man whom God knows he will not resurrect for thousands of years. So we don’t know. But whatever Lazarus experienced, it is a fair bet that when Jesus raised him Lazarus did not blurt out, “Oh come on Jesus, what did you do that for? I was enjoying such bliss and you brought me back here??? Thanks a lot!” No. A wise Professor, Michael Wittmer, pointed out that the first thing that Lazarus saw when he opened his eyes was the face of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And that made that location at the tomb in Bethany, for Lazarus, in that moment, heaven on earth. There was no better place to be than in the presence of Christ. There is never, ever, a better place to be than that. Let us pray.

Father in heaven, Forgive us our sins by the grace you made available through the death of your Son Jesus on the cross, and give us that new birth by which we can become the people who live in your presence forever, and know you, and worship you, and delight to do your will. Amen.