Heaven

Ask most people what heaven is and you get some version of the same picture: disembodied souls drifting on clouds, strumming harps, in an endless and frankly rather boring church service in the sky. This picture is almost the opposite of what the Bible actually promises. The biblical hope is not less physical than this life but more, not escape from the world but its healing, not the end of our humanity but its completion. Heaven, rightly understood, is the most solid and earthy hope there is, and the dull caricature has done real damage by making the best news in the world sound tedious.

First, where the dead in Christ are now

The Bible does speak of a present heaven, where those who have died in Christ are with Him now, conscious and at peace, awaiting the resurrection. Paul says to depart this life is "to be with Christ; which is far better" (Philippians 1:23), and "to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8). Jesus told the dying thief, "To day shalt thou be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). This is real comfort for grief: the believer who dies is not annihilated and not asleep in nothing, but with the Lord. Yet the New Testament treats even this blessed state as an intermediate one, not the final hope. The best is still ahead, and it is bodily.

The real hope: resurrection and a new creation

The Christian hope has always been, in the words of the creed, "the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." We are not meant to stay disembodied spirits forever; we are promised new, glorified, physical bodies like the risen Christ's, who Himself ate and was touched after He rose (see the resurrection). And those bodies need a world. So the last vision in the Bible is not of us flying up to a misty heaven but of heaven coming down to a renewed earth: "I saw a new heaven and a new earth," and "the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them" (Revelation 21:1-3). The whole groaning creation is to be set free, "delivered from the bondage of corruption" (Romans 8:21). The God who made matter and called it good does not finally scrap it. He makes it new.

Every tear wiped away

What will the new creation be like? The Bible is restrained, but its central promise is the removal of every evil that has ever made us weep. "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away" (Revelation 21:4). Read that slowly, because every word of it is a funeral undone: no more death, no more of the grief that has broken us, no more pain in the body or the mind. And the One on the throne stakes His own character on it: "Behold, I make all things new" (Revelation 21:5). Not all new things, but all things new, the very world we know, mended.

The joy at the center: God Himself

It is possible to want heaven for everything except the one thing that makes it heaven. The deepest joy of the new creation is not its streets or its reunions, wonderful as those are; it is God Himself, seen at last face to face. "Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12); "they shall see his face" (Revelation 22:4); "we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). This is what older Christians called the beatific vision, and it is the true heaven of heaven. Every good thing we have ever loved was a beam coming from that Sun; in the end we get the Sun. A heaven full of gifts but empty of God would not be heaven at all, and a heaven with God needs nothing added to it.

What it is underneath the pictures

Scripture gives several pictures and we hold them all loosely: the city, the garden, the feast, the country, the Father's house of many mansions. This is not an argument that the pictures are wrong or that one of them is the real one. It is a suggestion about what they are all pictures of, and the suggestion is union with God, and the restoration of it. Offered as a way of reading, not as another line.

Read it the way this site reads salvation, in three tenses (see The Three Tenses of Salvation), and the whole story lines up.

It was. The first thing lost in Genesis is not a location; it is a walk. "They heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God" (Genesis 3:8). The garden is still there when they leave it. The walking is what stops.

It is. Union is not postponed to the end. Paul calls it the whole mystery: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). And Christ prays it as a present possession with a future completion, "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one" (John 17:23). Real now, and not yet perfect.

It will be. "When he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). The seeing and the likeness arrive together, which is the point: you cannot have the one without becoming the other.

The requirement, and who meets it

There is a condition, and Paul states it without softening: "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption" (1 Corinthians 15:50). Not a threat. A statement about capacity. As we are, we could not survive the thing we are asking for.

So something has to change, and Paul says that too, in the same breath: "Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:51), and "this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality" (1 Corinthians 15:53).

Notice the voice of those verbs. We shall be changed. We do not change ourselves. And the process is already running: "we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the LORD" (2 Corinthians 3:18). Beholding now, changed now, by the Spirit and not by effort.

Which is the same shape the rest of this site keeps finding. A real requirement, and a gift that meets it, and neither one cancelling the other. God asks for what we cannot produce, and then supplies everything needed to produce it. The demand and the supply come from the same hand.

And this is why the lines matter, or rather why so many of them do not. If what is coming is union with a Person, then everything that actually prepares us for it is the walking, the abiding, the being changed from glory to glory. Very little of what the church has divided over touches that at all. Paul drew one line and told us where he put it: "For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). Everything the Body has broken itself over beyond that line is worth asking hard questions about, and this page is not trying to add one.

How the oldest church said it

None of this is a modern recovery. The men closest to the apostles held it plainly, and two of them guard it from the two opposite mistakes.

Against spiritualizing the new earth away, Tertullian will not have it. Having quoted that "the first heaven and the first earth passed away," and that even "the sea shall be no more," he adds: "Now if any person should go so far as to suppose that all these passages ought to be spiritually interpreted, he will yet be unable to deprive them of the true accomplishment of those issues which must come to pass just as they have been written."

Irenaeus, a century earlier still, builds his whole case for a renewed creation on the same chapter, quoting it at length: "I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth have passed away... And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them; and they shall be His people." The promise this site keeps returning to, God with His people, is where the earliest reader of Revelation lands too.

And against making the seeing too literal, Chrysostom guards the other flank. On "then face to face" he notes carefully: "Not as though God has a face, but to express the notion of greater clearness and perspicuity." Clement of Alexandria reads it the same way, as "the clear revelation in the future world, like food, face to face," set against the milk we are fed here.

So the shape held early: a real new creation rather than an escape from creation, and a real seeing rather than a diagram of one. Both guarded, in the second and third centuries, by men who would have found the modern arguments about clouds and harps unrecognisable.

Where this lands

Heaven is not a consolation prize for people too weak to face reality; it is reality finally come into its own, the world unbroken, the body raised, the tears wiped, and God in the midst of His people forever. It is the home you have been homesick for without a name to put to it, the place every earthly joy was quietly pointing toward. And the way in is a Person. Jesus said it to friends afraid of the future: "In my Father's house are many mansions… I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2-3). The door is already opened by the cross and the empty tomb; the invitation is to come to Him now, and one day to come home (see the resurrection that guarantees it, and the God who is its joy).

Related: What About the Children?, The End Times in the Prophets and the Apostles, The Resurrection, The Judgment, Hell, The Character of God, Last Things, and C.S. Lewis. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.