Canaan Cannot be Heaven

We are justified according to Charles Spurgeon in a devotional I read this morning. “The believer in Christ receives a present justification. Faith does not produce this fruit by-and-by, but now. So far as justification is the result of faith, it is given to the soul in the moment when it closes with Christ and accepts him as its all in all.” Spurgeon continues to explain using Scripture to make his point. There is NOW no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ, and we are accepted in the Beloved and blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies.

As usual, Spurgeon is spot on with his devotional theology. He corrects the common misunderstanding that Christians must work for their acceptance by God. However, in the middle of this encouraging piece, he uses a metaphor regarding the land of Canaan that is improperly applied. Spurgeon refers to entering Canaan as if it were a metaphor for going to Heaven. This idea became quite popular in the nineteenth century as evidenced by the number of sermons and hymns that use the analogy. The sequence those ideas followed was that Egypt was bondage to sin; the wilderness was our time on earth; Canaan was our entrance into Heaven.

I pray this is not true mostly because of what happened to the Israelites when they entered Canaan: they fought tremendous battles with enemies bent on their destruction. The Heaven I look forward to will be absent all enemies, because they will have been defeated and assigned to Hell at the final judgment. The other distressing aspect of Canaan as Heaven is that the Israelites lost the land through disobedience. Once gained, Heaven can never be lost; it is our eternal home in a manner of speaking. By contrast, on earth we do have enemies to fight and a “land” to maintain.  (For a good sermon on the Canaan issue see J. Vernon McGee “Have You Crossed Over Jordan.”)

I don’t believe the childish view that Christians leave this earth to spend eternity strumming harps and floating on clouds. Many people are repulsed by such a thought, as they should be. This idea minimizes the glory that will be ours when we meet our Savior and our Father. Nor do I expect to see a giant floating cube as the new Jerusalem. The writer of Hebrews says people in his day had already come to the new Jerusalem, so I believe it exists in some form yet today. People who mistakenly look for literal fulfillments of symbolic images often fall prey to error.

It gets tricky trying to understand the imagery and symbolism of the Bible’s apocalyptic literature. (See Understanding the Bible as Literature.) The waters are especially dangerous when challenging another person’s eschatology. It is my belief that the popular premillennial – dispensational (P-D) view of the end times rides on the same wave of misunderstanding that encouraged the Canaan-as-heaven mix-up. They both became popular in the nineteenth century alongside the British version of Christian Zionism that motivated John Nelson Darby’s “discovery” of the P-D interpretation of end times events. C.I. Scofield borrowed Darby’s ideas and they took off in America soon after.

I have no doubt that some of my readers are seriously offended at my position against P-D eschatology. If that includes you, please accept my apology; I don’t want to offend unless offense is necessary to make my point. The point is that we often cling to an idea drawn from a biblical interpretation that is not based on solid biblical theology. We need clear heads and pure hearts when approaching differences of interpretation that do not affect the ultimate message of the Scripture: Christ came with God’s call to bring His people back into His fold.

Answers may differ when asking what Canaan stands for or if the millennium is literal or figurative. Answers must not differ when asking why Christ came or what we are supposed to do about Him. I will quote Spurgeon’s closing remark from the devotional I mentioned at the top: “Let present privilege awaken us to present duty, and now, while life lasts, let us spend and be spent for our sweet Lord Jesus.” We are privileged to be children of our Heavenly Father. May we stop acting like children when debating disputable interpretations.