Thoughts on Heaven

Over time I have noticed Heaven is a difficult topic to approach mainly because it is talked about much more allusively then straight forward throughout the Bible.  While it is central in Christian thinking and hope I think it can only be fully realized in light of Christ.   At the same time Heaven, like many Biblical notions, acts as a Rorschach test of sorts for how people are perceiving things. For instance, it is often imagined as a fairytale-like place that acts as the grand telos in our salvation, or the ultimate destination after we die and when this whole thing wraps up.  We will be raptured into our new celestial-home in the sky where people become angels, play harps and sit on clouds… or something like that.  No matter how it is described, however, God’s “rescue mission” for us does not exactly play out this way.      

            Let me first say that for the Kingdom of Heaven to be a kingdom, by its definition, needs a king to reside and rule over it.  While this seems commonsensical, it is pertinent to Heaven being talked about in tangible and locative terms.  What most people do not know is God’s Kingship was addressed in Genesis 1-2 as the central point of the creation narrative.  Most act as if these Genesis chapters should be titled Creating The Earth In 7 Days: How I Did It –God, but it has something other than actual science to reveal (which I have pointed out more fully in a previous post… see here).  After the six days of creation, where God ordered and assigned function to the cosmos, it is said on day seven that he rested.  God’s rest was not a physical rest (like many suppose) but divine-rest was a term in the ancient world that meant the deity was ruling from that place.  The revelation of God creating and resting was that God had tabernacled within the cosmos signifying that the Heavenly Kingdom was overlapping and knit into the fabric of our cosmological universe.  While sin and the exit from Eden symbolizes a kind of disjointing of the two spheres, the ancient Hebrews/Israelites then came to know God tabernacling among them (Exod. 25:8; Psalm 132:7-8, 13-14) thereby making them an oasis in the desert or, once again, a sign of Heaven on Earth.

    

It was not until the intertestamental period that God and Heaven were seen as being distant.  The Hellenization period brought with it the Epicurean belief that God or the gods were long gone and humans were on their own epic journey back to the divine.  This is precisely why Jesus came with his “on Earth as it is in Heaven” and the “Kingdom of Heaven has come near” message (Matt. 4:17; 6:10).  He is recovering the Father’s heart and embodying the action of dwelling among his people. This is to suggest that Jesus is God tabernacling in creation.  Moreover, we tend to miss the point that Jesus came to restore creation and not destroy it.  As Tom Wright said:

God did not want to rescue humans from creation any more than he wanted to rescue Israel from the Gentiles. He wanted to rescue Israel in order that Israel might be a light to the Gentiles, and he wanted thereby to rescue humans in order that humans might be his rescuing stewards over creation. That is the inner dynamic of the kingdom of God.[1]

In this sense Heaven is both here (but veiled) and is within us (via the Holy Spirit).  Christians, however, have long struggled with the concept that Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God as being both here and yet to come (Matt. 5:3, 10; Acts. 1:6-8), but they are both true. God’s tabernacling with humanity keeps coming to new levels of fruition throughout the Bible from the desert tabernacle, to Jesus entering the human condition, to the last instance (but not the final) God’s Spirit tabernacling within the people.  Yet, this wraps up with God’s compounded Heaven/Earth kingdom coming into renewed fullness.

This raises the question, then what happens when we or a loved one dies? Where do we or they go?  Well there are vague assertions from Jesus and Paul which suggest a resting place with Christ on the other side of the veil until the day of Christ’s return.  Jesus tells the thief on the cross that he will be with him that day in paradise (Lk. 23:43) and Paul says that if he were absent from his body that he would be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8).  While our eternal dwelling with and in God will certainly continue onward, this state of life after death is not the end.  The future hope is the final resurrection of spirit and body with a renewed Heaven and Earth where God as King will be observed throughout.

Therefore, this cannot be reduced to just worrying about where we go when we die because that too shall pass.  So to reiterate, the overarching narrative of the Bible suggests that the two spheres belong together under God’s Lordship.  If that is true then the hope and task of the Church is to live right now like Christ has actually taken his throne as King over Heaven and the Universe because in some initial sense (in which God has pre-claimed what is his) it has begun. What most do not realize (at least not in any present sense) is that this is politically subversive statement. It says that Jesus is ruler and all other caesars, kings, presidents, prime ministers and so on are temporary imposters.  These offices that usurp God’s role were never ours to bear.  God’s Kingship and indwelling exists over all of it and our role as God’s stewards and ambassadors can only truly be reestablished when we allow God to fulfill his role as King.  If the Church is not living this way then it has missed the point of the Kingdom of Heaven that intends to fully redeem the earth and cosmos.

         

        

[1] N.T. Wright. Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperCollins 2009), 202.