What happens when we die? When my oldest son, Drew, was just a toddler, we had the conversation that parents dread. No, not that conversation. The other one. Something had happened that prompted him to ask us about death. We tried to answer as gently as possible, in terms a small child could understand. We shared the good news of the gospel with him. Along with it, we talked about the hope of heaven. We told him that if he died, he would be with Jesus. But his reaction was not what we expected. Rather than being reassured, he burst into tears. He wailed in sorrow. “Where will you be?” he asked. “Who will take care of me?” It was sweet, in a way. It was also a little unnerving because I could identify with his anxiety.
Much of what the Bible has to say about what heaven is like seems ambiguous. It’s almost as if Scripture speaks in code about this subject. It is, at least, expressing itself by way of images that are both strange and familiar simultaneously. We take comfort from the sight of things we know, but their juxtaposition with the strange is often unsettling. Saints cry out from under the altar. There are rivers and trees, or at least one river and one tree. The old heaven and earth pass away and are replaced by the new.
Shakespeare called death “the undiscovered country.” More precisely, Shakespeare’s Hamlet describes death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveler returns . . .” Most who travel to the undiscovered country do not come back, which is Hamlet’s point. But there have been some, like Samuel, Moses, Elijah, and Lazarus, to name a few. However, they don’t tell us what happens after death. Then, of course, there is Jesus, the one that Revelation 1:5 calls “the firstborn from the dead.” Yet, even he did not describe that place to us in the kind of detail that most of us would prefer.
In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet seems to speak more of ordinary experience than these extraordinary cases. He has just seen a ghost, and he questions his senses. Or perhaps it is that he is pondering what might lie beyond the senses. Hamlet goes on to assert, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This is certainly true when it comes to heavenly reality.
On the one hand, the apostle Paul quotes Isaiah 64:4 when he describes the life to come and speaks of “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived,” calling them “the things God has prepared for those who love him.” Then, with his next breath, he claims, “these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:9–10). What things does Paul mean? They are what the apostle elsewhere characterizes as “things above,” which he also urges us to set our hearts on, seek, and set our minds upon (Col. 3:1–2).
It’s hard to think about things we don’t know. It’s even harder to set our hearts on something that seems to be at odds with everything we have always known and experienced. This is one of the problems we face when it comes to thinking about heaven. My son couldn’t imagine being happy in a world without the people he already knew who loved and cared for him, even if it was God who was taking their place. He knew his mother. He did not know God, at least not in the same way.
“Heaven is rhetorically anti-world,” Baylor University professor of theological ethics Jonathan Tran has observed. “Whatever we don’t like about this world, heaven promises the opposite.”[1] But our difficulty isn’t just that we have been taught to expect the opposite of all we hate about the present world in the life to come. It’s the impression we have that heaven stands against all that we know and love. While this is certainly true when it comes to sin, we have come to believe that it is also true of the more concrete aspects of earthly life that we know. To many, heaven is an amorphous realm of spirits, clouds, and gossamer wings. It is too indistinct to describe and too immaterial to look forward to.
Mark Twain, a religious skeptic, lampooned the popular stereotype of heavenly bliss by characterizing it as a place where the newly arrived expect to be fitted out with a harp, a halo, a wreath, and a hymnbook. If, as Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 15:50, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, why does the Christian message place so much emphasis on bodily resurrection?
The heaven of Scripture is not a fantasy or a philosophy. Neither is it merely a projection of our personality, style, and individual tastes into eternity. Heaven is not an invention of the church meant to serve as the carrot that motivates its members to toe the line on this side of death. It is a real location where an embodied and resurrected Christ is seated at the right hand of God (Col. 3:1). Heaven is also an order or rule that intrudes into our earthly experience even now and will one day control it entirely.
The landscape of the undiscovered country is not as alien as we thought. Nor do we have to wait until we pass through the gates of death to catch a glimpse of its powers. In fact, if we take Scripture at its word, all those who are in Christ are already in residence there in some mysterious sense. At the same time, “we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:11). What is more, those same passages that speak of the believer’s dual residency on earth and in heaven, also promise that we have begun to experience the righteousness that is characteristic of the new heaven and earth even now.
The discomfort that some Christians feel when speculating about what is to come is often not due to uncertainty about their ultimate destination but rather anxiety about what that transition will be like. After Adam’s fall, the Lord warned that the first stage of life’s journey would be marked by discomfort. God told the woman, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children” (Gen. 3:16). It is the hope of new life that enables those who suffer such pain to bear with it.
Although the Lord doesn’t mention it there, subsequent human experience showed that the final stage of life’s journey would also often be accompanied by discomfort. Perhaps Paul is alluding to this when he writes about bodily resurrection and admits that “while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Cor. 5:7). The apostle goes on to say that God has “fashioned us for this very purpose” (v. 8). God designed us for bodily life. That is what the future holds for us. One of the first confessions of faith recorded in Scripture, at least in terms of chronology, was that of Job, who declared:
“I know that my redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:25–27)
Shakespeare was right. The country for which we yearn is still undiscovered by us. But it is not as unfamiliar as we thought. There is far more to the Christian’s heavenly hope than harps, halos, and hymnals. In fact, none of these seems to figure in it at all. The hope of the Christian is the hope of things above. That same hope is also the secret to holy living in the here and now. We are going there. But the real secret is that we have already arrived.
To learn more about John Koessler’s new book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, watch the video below or click here.
[1] Jonathan Tran, “Looking to Heaven Without Looking Past Earth,” The Christian Century, September 2022, 36.
One thought on “What is Heaven Like? Discovering the Undiscovered Country”