Warning: what I am about to say is going to be surprising, perhaps disturbing to most of my readers. I have certainly been surprised as I shouldn’t wonder since the title of the book I am reading is Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright. I have mentioned this book previously along with Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible by Michael S. Heiser. (See below) The impeccable scholarship of these two highly regarded professors has caused me to rethink and recover some deep biblical truth that has been misunderstood and misapplied by the church for hundreds of years.
I am aware of the danger present in any “new” interpretation
of the Scripture. Heresies that pretended to be founded on the Bible began less
than one hundred years after the last page was written, and they continue to
this day. With that potential for error paramount in my mind, I still believe
the truth of what I am about to suggest is based solely on the Bible text
properly interpreted. Although the caliber of the authors is of the highest
order, it is my own reading of the Scripture in the light of their exposition
and the light of the Holy Spirit upon my reading that gives me confidence in
the truth that follows.
Most Christians do not know what salvation is. Surprised? My
own seventy years of church attendance and personal study enhanced by Bible
college and seminary left me thinking, as with most of my fellow-believers, that
getting saved means we get to go to heaven when we die. A fresh look at
Scripture unfettered by traditional teaching reveals two things wrong with that
proposition. First, neither Jesus nor the authors of the New Testament ever said
we go to heaven when we die. When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven (or the
parallel phrase Kingdom of God) He was speaking of the rule of God over all
creation, not some place we enter after we die. Jesus’ teaching was that the
Kingdom either had already come or its coming was on the horizon.
The second thing that is wrong with thinking salvation is
about going to heaven when we die is that it completely misses the point of
what we are saved for. To say we are saved for our own personal benefit is not
only mistaken, it misdirects people from their true responsibility as saved
people. (See It’s
Not All About You) I quote N.T. Wright: “Faced with his beautiful and
powerful creation in rebellion, God longed to set it right, to rescue it from
continuing corruption and impending chaos and to bring it back into order and
fruitfulness…. He did not want to rescue humans from creation…. He wanted to rescue
humans in order that humans might be his rescuing stewards over creation.”1
Wright notes that this nicely fits one of the synonyms for salvation: rescue.
I have known many people over the years – even Christians –
who expressed some dismay at the thought of spending eternity sitting on a
cloud playing a harp. This image is cartoonish, of course, but absent any real
evidence of what it means to go to heaven, all sorts of silliness has entered
the picture. Wright suggests, and I half agree2, that there may be a
“place” one could call heaven or paradise (as Jesus did when speaking to the thief
on the cross) where one goes upon death. However, Wright insists that such a
place (if it is “place” at all) is only a temporary stop on the way to life eternal
on the recreated earth in the recreated body we are all promised. In support of
his thesis, Wright points out that when Jesus
promised “mansions” to be prepared when He left, He used a word that we
might translate as hotel or inn – a stopover for a traveler.
According to Wright, and here I fully agree, heaven is no
one’s final destination. God’s chosen people are going to fulfill the mandate
given to Adam and Eve in the beginning. This explains why all creation is waiting
– the
groaning Paul mentions in Romans chapter eight. Creation awaits the revealing
of the sons of God because they will be the agents of God to dress, till, keep,
and to have dominion over the recreated earth. God will reinstate the order
lost to chaos at the fall, and He will empower us to keep that order for Him.
But one may argue that the Bible speaks of a new heaven
alongside the new earth. There are two possible explanations for that apparent
contradiction. First, in Bible times, the word heaven might refer first to the
place where birds fly or second to the place where the stars are or, third, to the
place where God and the angels dwell. When
Paul writes of our enemies being “spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies,”
he has in mind the third heaven which is a dimension parallel to our earthly
existence but distinct from it. Obviously, the two dimensions intersect on occasion
as when angels or demons appear on earth. In a future time, the intersection
will be complete.
A simpler explanation for the new heaven is that the first
and second meanings of heaven – the sky and outer space – will be made new
along with the earth. This makes sense when you consider that the earth and the
two heavens (as it were) were created by God as a package. The third heaven (as
it were) won’t need to be renewed because it was not affected by the fall of
Adam and Eve. It remains the eternal dwelling place of God and His created host
forever before Earth came to be and forever after Earth is renewed.
One might ask where the New Jerusalem fits in this scheme.
Revelation pictures New Jerusalem as a golden city floating in the sky over
Earth where God sits enthroned, and people go there to worship Him. There are
two ways to answer this. First, ever since the earthly Jerusalem ceased to be the
location of God’s special presence, symbolized by the tearing of the veil to
the holy of holies when Christ was crucified, the New Jerusalem has been the
location of God’s throne (if a spiritual existence can have “location”). Both Galatians
and Hebrews
state that believers have come (perfect tense) to the heavenly Jerusalem. The
verb tense means we are already there. The heavenly Jerusalem with God’s throne
is available to us now. The writer
of Hebrews says we can approach the throne of grace with complete confidence
on account of the saving work of Christ.
The other way to imagine what it means for the New Jerusalem
to “come
down out of Heaven,” as Revelation describes is to understand that in that
new situation, with all God’s enemies defeated, the dwelling place of God and
the dwelling place of humans have been reunited. As the book records, “, “Look!
God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with
them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be
their God.” Lest one think that this is a future reality held off until the
final chapter, remember Jesus promised when He left that, “If
anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will
come to him and will take up residence with him.” When we
joyously sing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus we often imagine we are speaking of a
future hope when in fact the kingdom we are proclaiming has already come.
Already come, I know, but not yet. The already/not yet dynamic
applies to most of our Christian experience. We are already sanctified, but not
yet. We are already glorified, but not yet. We are already saved, but the full
meaning of being saved is not yet available to us. We are living in the tension
of the Lord’s Prayer request, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.” (My italics.) Along
with all creation, we groan as in childbirth for the fullness of our salvation.
Not to escape Earth and dwell among the clouds, but to be clothed in our incorruptible
bodies, as Paul calls them, to do the work we were originally designed to
do. In the meantime, we can begin our kingdom work; everything we do in the Spirit
will
bear fruit in the New Earth. If you understand what salvation is, you can
see that you have work to do. Get to it.
1 N. T. Wright; Surprised by Hope: Rethinking
Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church; 2008; Harper One;
New York.
2 I say I half agree with Wright’s suspicion that
there may be a waiting place for all who die prior to the final judgment. Half
of me thinks that there is no need for a waiting place because when we die, we
depart the time/space creation. Time has a different meaning in the spiritual
realm where God exists. Remember that with God, a
day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day.
Related posts: Defending Resurrection Faith; Why Heaven Matters; Bringing the Kingdom
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