meditatio at the water's edge

I Don't Believe in Heaven

I don’t believe in heaven—not the heaven that many people seem to believe in today. A recent article on heaven in ‘The Lookout’ (a weekly publication of Standard Publishing) betrays how far off we have gone from a biblical imagination of the future. The author writes some very good stuff about how our citizenship is in heaven. I was reading it and thinking, “Right on, man!” But then I read this: “When Jesus returns, it will be to take us to our real home.” Huh? What about resurrection? What about the renewal of all creation?

What bugs me about that ‘this-earth-is-not-my-home-I’m-just-a-passing-through’ kind of thinking is that it is just not consistent with what the prophets hoped for. It’s not what Jesus hoped for. Jesus didn’t pray, “Father, take us off of this dirty old planet.” He prayed, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The prophets never looked ahead to some distant, beyond-the-stars existence, but rather a this-world-put-to-rights kind of existence.

When Jesus returns, it will not be to “take us to our real home.” It will be to make this creation the home of God himself. Read Revelation 21 and you will see that the bride (also symbolized as the holy city or New Jerusalem) comes down to the earth—-not up, up, and away from the earth. And the great hope of that chapter is found in the statement, “Look! Look! God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women! They're his people, he's their God” (Rev 21:3, The Message, italics mine).

Heaven is the 'realm' of God. It is the 'realm' in which God’s will is completely done. It is not a place somewhere beyond the edge of the universe. It is the unseen reality that is all around us. It is hidden, or veiled, at the present, but one day will be un-veiled. The Apostle John had a word for this: Apocalypse, or Revelation. John’s Revelation does not break camp with the prophets of Israel. He alludes to them over 500 times! His hope, therefore, was consistent with their hope—that God would ‘return’ to heal and restore his broken and wayward creation. He did not imagine the end of the space-time universe. He imagined the restoration and healing of it. He imagined our new place within it as resurrected, re-embodied people.

I am convinced that we need to re-think our thinking about heaven. We need to get off the escapism-train and start listening to the hope of the prophets who looked forward to a time when “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them…. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11). I’m looking forward to that.