I want to write about Christian hope. What do we hope for? I suppose the obvious answer is “heaven” or “eternal life”.
When you think about heaven, what comes to mind?
Maybe you don’t think about it – God has it all under control so there’s no need to worry about it.
Perhaps you think of eternal rest, with no work.
Maybe you think of the caricature of playing harps on fluffy clouds.
The Bible has a great deal to say about heaven. In my experience most Christians have very little understanding of what the Bible teaches about heaven and therefore only a vague understanding of Christian hope.
Until comparatively recently I was well and truly numbered amongst those who had precious little understanding of our glorious hope. All I knew was that there had to be something more than my poor understanding allowed for. My wife Kay and I both attended Melbourne Bible Institute in the late 60s. As I recall there was absolutely no teaching whatsoever about Christian hope whilst we were there. I’ve read and studied goodness knows how many books since then but none of them contained any clues that helped me expand on my rather poverty stricken notion of Christian hope — until . . .
About fourteen years ago I read a brief article in a magazine by a Baptist theologian who lives in Sydney which piqued my interest. I wrote to him, asking if he could suggest a few books which would put flesh and bones on the article. He replied with several suggestions, I bought the books and read them, and the result has been the most profound spiritual renewal in my more than 50 years Christian pilgrimage. It has been a renewal with enormous implications for the way in which I live my life today.
The purpose of this article, therefore, is to share something of what I have discovered about our glorious hope.
One of the first, and most surprising things I discovered, is that heaven is a two stage process!
In John 14: 1-3 we read ‘Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.’
I suspect most of us see this famous and much loved passage as a reference to our final destination, but I don’t believe it is.
The word translated “rooms” or “dwelling places” is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place, but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run. So these much loved words do not refer to our permanent abode.
In similar vein, Jesus’s words to the dying thief on the cross ‘today you will be with me in Paradise’ refer not to a final destination but the blissful garden, the parkland of rest and tranquility, where the dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day.
For those who die in faith, before the final reawakening, the central promise is of being ‘with Jesus’ at once. ‘My desire is to depart’, wrote Paul, ‘and be with Christ, which is far better’.
If the present heaven is not our final destination, then what is? More on that later.
I discovered the massive importance of the resurrection of the body.
I think for a lot of Christians — perhaps for the vast majority of Christians — the resurrection of Jesus Christ means little more than ‘Christ is risen, that’s great, it means he really is divine, so my sins are forgiven, and I’m going to heaven when I die’. I guess I was like this, although very unwillingly — I knew there HAD to be more to it, but I was very fuzzy of what that ‘more’ might be.
I learned that at the second coming of Christ I will be given a new body, a gift of God’s grace and love. I learned that eternal life will be lived in a physical body.
I learned that in this present life I am a mere shadow of my future self. I will be given a new body the purpose of which will be to rule wisely over God’s New World. There will be work to do and I will relish doing it.
Theologians in the 12th and 13th centuries taught that the resurrection body will be identical with our earthly body but transfigured:
‘It will be immune from death and sorrows; it will be at the height of its powers, free from disease and deformity, and around 30 years old, the age at which Christ began his ministry. It will surpass anything we can imagine, even from the accounts of Christ’s appearances on earth after his own resurrection.’
If you want to read up on this, 1 Corinthians 15 is all about the resurrection of the body. It is the longest discussion anywhere in Paul.
There are a couple of hymns that get this exactly right.
Oh how glorious and resplendent
fragile body, thou shalt be,
when endued with so much beauty,
full of health, and strong, and free!
Full of vigour, full of pleasure,
that shall last eternally.
The other hymn is ‘For All the Saints’. The last three verses read:
The golden evening brightens in the west:
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest,
The peaceful calm of paradise the blessed.
Alleluia, alleluia!
But look! – there breaks a yet more glorious day;
Saints all-triumphant rise in bright array –
The king of glory passes on his way!
Alleluia, alleluia!
From earth’s wide bounds, from dawn to setting sun,
Through heaven’s gates to God the Three-in-One
They come, to sing the song on earth begun:
Alleluia, alleluia!
Then, to my great surprise, I came to see that heaven is a place on earth and ‘eternal life is life AFTER life after death’.
Revelation chapter 21 is the answer to the question I posed earlier — ‘If the present heaven is not our final destination, then what is?’ — the answer is the new earth that God will one day make.
It is not we who go to heaven, it is heaven that comes to earth; indeed it is the church itself, the heavenly Jerusalem that comes down to earth as the bride of Christ. Here is the final answer to the Lord’s prayer that God’s kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as in heaven.
Verse 4 of that great hymn ‘Crown Him With Many Crowns’, put it this way:
Crown him the Lord of peace–
his kingdom is at hand;
from pole to pole let warfare cease
and Christ rule every land!
A city stands on high,
his glory it displays,
and there the nations ‘Holy’ cry
in joyful hymns of praise.
I have made many more discoveries along the way, for instance, that the last judgement is something to look forward to, and that we shall rule with Christ, but perhaps the greatest discovery of all has been to come to understand that the way we live now, the life we have lived, we are living, and continue to live actually contributes to, is taken up and used in, the new creation.
For instance, in Revelation chapter 19, we read about the Marriage Supper of the Lamb
6 Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,
‘Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
the Almighty reigns.
7 Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
8 it was granted her to clothe herself
with fine linen, bright and pure”—
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
As Randy Alcorn, author of a superb book on Heaven writes ‘The bride’s wedding dress is woven through her many acts of faithfulness while away from her bridegroom on the fallen Earth. Each prayer, each gift, each hour of fasting, each kindness to the needy, all of these are the threads that have been woven together into this wedding dress. The bride’s works have been empowered by the Spirit, and she has spent her life on Earth sewing her wedding dress for the day when she will be joined to her beloved bridegroom.’ I would want to add that much of what we have done in our daily work, our raising of children, our work in the community and so on should also be included.
Tom (N.T) Wright puts it this way: ‘What we do in the present — by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving our neighbour as ourself, raising our children, by being outposts of the Kingdom, by practising Kingdom values, by seeing where we live, work and volunteer as God’s mission field, by the ways we behave, by the values we incarnate, in our relationships, the contributions we make — all of this will last into God’s future.’
Miroslav Volf takes up this theme in writing ‘The noble products of human ingenuity will be cleansed from impurity, perfected and transfigured, to become part of God’s new creation.’
The famous missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin wrote ‘All who have committed their work in faithfulness to God will be by him raised up to share in the new age, and will find that their labour was not lost, but that it has found its place in the completed kingdom.’
Francis Schaeffer wrote ‘Contrary to what people say — that you can’t take anything with you — yes, you do take your work with you. It’s a biblical teaching, that what you do matters and will continue on into eternity — building houses, walls, and hiking paths and the whole of human existence.’
Let Tom Wright have the final say. ‘It is hugely important that each one of us, and the church as a whole recapture the biblical vision of the new heavens and the new earth. For so many Christians for so long, hope has simply meant pie in the sky when you die, or going to heaven. The biblical picture is not about what happens immediately after death, but about what happens after that again — life after life after death. Christianity is not about heaven and hell, it is about God making a new heaven and new earth and raising people to a new life some time long after their death to be part of that new world. Hope is a virtue, something that doesn’t come naturally, something you have to work at in the power of the Spirit. It means being so grasped by the vision of the new heavens and the new earth, based on the resurrection of Jesus that we teach to think hopefully in a world without hope all around us.’