Back in the day, we used to sing, “Heaven is a wonderful place, filled with glory and grace.” But eternity is a long time. For some, the few pictures of heavenly activity that we have in the Bible are insufficient to convince us that this is truly the case. I have heard more than one Christian express reservations about what we can look forward to in the age to come.

It is tempting to blame this anxiety on the nature of the descriptions themselves. It is certainly true that the Bible is remarkably spare in its details about such matters. We know a little about Heaven, but not as much as we would like. What is more, the few depictions that we do have are either so strange that we cannot relate to them or so familiar that they fail to capture our imagination.

The Bible’s visions of crowns, thrones, and four-faced cherubim may be of some interest. Yet, for most people, this is not the kind of landscape that would inspire us to pack our bags and move. As a result, many believers are puzzled about what their heavenly experience will be like, and some are anxious.

Signs and Wondering

Theologian Josef Pieper’s observation about Scriptural imagery offers a helpful starting point for considering such matters. Pieper warns that “one must clearly distinguish the images that are meant to make the essence of the matter visible to the imagination from the essence of the matter itself.”¹ Pieper is actually talking about Hell, but his point is equally applicable to Heaven.

We should not think so narrowly about the imagery that the Bible uses that we miss the essence of what it is intended to signify. There is more to heaven than white robes, fantastic creatures, and glass seas. The reality to which these signs point is more expansive than the pictures the Bible uses to convey it. The whole truth of what is coming to the believer cannot be contained in the images alone.

However, we also need to guard against a view of heaven that is so abstract that its reality becomes completely obscured from our sight. The symbols that Scripture uses to speak of Heaven are concrete enough to suggest the old Sunday school song was right. Heaven is a wonderful place. It is more than a philosophy, moral rule, or spiritual principle. Heaven is a true location.

Heaven is where Jesus “came down from” and was “taken up into” (John 3:13; Luke 24:51). Whatever is intended by this directional language, we can at least say that heaven must be a place that is substantial enough to receive the human body of the resurrected Christ (Luke 24:39). Furthermore, our heavenly experience is personal, conscious and human. In the life to come, our humanity does not dissolve. We are not absorbed into the Godhead. We do not turn into ghosts or lose all memory of our earthly life. As the patriarch Job declared, after our skin has been destroyed, we will see our redeemer with our own eyes (Job 19:26-27).

These earthly descriptions are signposts more than they are windows. They are intended to spark recognition and enable us to make correlations. They are not meant to show us the features of heaven in photographic detail. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to dismiss the literalistic language that the Bible employs to speak of Heaven as a kind of baby talk that says less than the words themselves convey. These familiar images are used precisely because they imply more than the images themselves.

Hungering for Heaven

The song the children used to sing is correct on two points. Heaven is indeed a place, and it is wonderful. Such an assertion begs an obvious question. Is there anything so wonderful that we can enjoy it for eternity? On the one hand, human beings possess a capacious desire that the earth does not seem to have the ability to satisfy. “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it, the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing,” Solomon complains in Ecclesiastes 1:8.

Is our problem that we want too much? It may seem so when we read Hebrews 13:5, which urges us to “be content with what you have because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’” Yet the point of this verse is just the opposite. Our difficulty is that we want too little. As theologian Josef Pieper observes, the real difficulty is “that every fulfillment this side of Heaven instantly reveals its inadequacy.”²

Nevertheless, there is a corollary truth in Solomon’s complaint. The weakness he speaks of is not only in the objects themselves; there is also weakness in us. The dissatisfaction that Solomon laments is the result of a weariness which suggests that, as much as we might desire eternity, we are not yet suited for it. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun,” Solomon complains (Eccl. 1:9).

Mark Twain seems to intuit this in one of his last tales when a fictional resident of Heaven observes that eternal rest may sound comforting from the pulpit, but “you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands.”³ Eternal existence without a corresponding change in our nature would not be a blessing but an intolerable burden.

We Shall Be Changed

This intuitive sense that no pleasure we now know would be expansive enough to occupy our attention for all eternity is a sign that we must be changed before we can enjoy heavenly experience. All Christian traditions acknowledge this, but focus primarily on the moral side of this dilemma. Without the perfection of holiness, “no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14).

C. S. Lewis takes it a step further by speculating that believers must also be strengthened before they can truly enjoy and even endure the beauties and pleasures of the heavenly realm. Perfection in holiness is certainly part of this transformation. But there must also be a corresponding strengthening of our humanity as well. Lewis pictures Heaven as a place that is so substantial, we are mere ghosts by comparison. This is the solid country, a reality whose flowers are diamond hard, its grass rock solid, and the drops of rain that fall upon those petals as sharp as a bullet.⁴ He is not trying to be literal, but neither is he speaking allegorically.⁵

The world as we know it is not enough to make a heaven. No earthly pleasure can be sustained for an eternity. The distracted search for fulfillment that Solomon laments is a clue that we were designed for something more, something higher. Correspondingly, we are not yet substantial enough to endure the eternal joy that we crave. Just as the world must be remade before its pleasures can truly satisfy, so also must we.

Infinite Possibility

Scripture is deliberately ambiguous when it compares this life to that which is to come. This indefiniteness is born of infinite possibility. “‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ the things God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit,” the apostle declares in 1 Corinthians 2:9-10.

The things we look for in the world to come are both promised and beyond words. Heaven is real, not only because it is literal, but because the life it brings is even more substantial than the one we are living now. Like our spiritual forefather Abraham, we are “looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10). The world to come is one with an. entirely different kind of gravity than the world we now inhabit. Its name is glory.

In the Greek text of 2 Corinthians 4:17, the apostle speaks of an eternal “weight” (baros) of glory. The word is missing from the NIV, possibly because translators considered it redundant. Its absence is unfortunate because it causes us to miss Paul’s startling juxtaposition of light and weight.

Lewis seems to have got it right after all, with the more substantial light, grass, and flowers of his heaven in the Great Divorce, as well as the “solid people” who inhabit it. This is the lesson behind all our unfulfilled desires. This is the sacred reminder embedded not only in our delight but also in our hunger and our disappointment. We were meant for more. We were made for eternity.

Josef Pieper, The Concept of Sin, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 90. ↩︎
Josef Pieper, Happiness & Contemplation, (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1979), 16-17. ↩︎
Mark Twain, Excerpt From Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, (Amherst: Prometheus, 2002), 41. ↩︎
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 28,47, 57. ↩︎
Ibid., 8. ↩︎

I only ran for office once. It was during my junior year of High School. I ran for vice-president of the senior class. To be honest, I wasn’t as interested in the office nearly as much as I was in a girl who was running for one of the other posts on the ticket. So when I learned that I had lost the election, I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. I felt bad, of course. Nobody likes to be rejected. But I was actually kind of relieved that I wouldn’t have to concern myself with student government. I had never given it much thought prior to the election. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be that interested in it while in office either.

We do not always want the things we strive to get. What looks good from a distance may lose its luster upon closer inspection. We apply for our dream job and after we get it we wonder why we ever wanted it in the first place. We move to a warmer climate to get away from the harsh mid-western winter only to miss the changing of the seasons. We pray with all our might for God to deliver us from bondage and then remember how we loved the garlic and leeks we used to get for free when we were slaves in Egypt.

I see this in organizations as often as I do in people. Churches that are looking for a new pastor often base their choice on the negative traits of the pastor they just sent packing. If he was strong in the pulpit but ineffective in relationships, they look for a “pastoral” pastor who is more interested in people than in preaching. If the pastor had a good bedside manner during hospital visits but was painful to listen to on Sunday, they select a prophet. He’s not much of a counselor but he can call down seven woes on the congregation like nobody else. The change feels good…at first.

In time our compliments are tempered with nostalgic remembrances, if not outright regret. “The new pastor is great,” someone says wistfully, “but do you remember how our last pastor used to…?” You can fill in the blank. As a result, many churches bounce back and forth between sharply different leadership styles. It could give a person whiplash.

It’s Election Day and I am not writing this to tell you how to cast your ballot. You have enough voices shouting in your ear already. The great thing about our electoral system is that you can vote for whoever you want and you don’t have to tell anybody how you voted. You don’t owe anyone an explanation and you don’t have to give them one. Go ahead. Vote your conscience. It’s nobody’s business but your own.

But if your candidate does happen to get elected, there is a good chance you will have mixed feelings about the result by the time his or her term of office is up. Maybe it’s because our expectations are too high. Perhaps the job is too big for any one person. I don’t know. It just seems that whoever we elect, we are sick of them by the time they are done. As for the losers, I imagine that, for some at least, their disappointment will be mixed with a measure of secret relief. Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.