Heaven is Not My Eternal Home

In my last post, I made the startling declaration that I don’t believe Christians go to Heaven when they die. I suspect so many do believe this first because it is widely taught by respectable Christians. I think that adherents to this opinion err because it seems to make sense – it seems natural to say that Heaven is our eternal home. That is the second reason this idea has become so popular: it seems right to our natural, soulish mind. To correct that, we must abandon natural thinking and seek spiritual understanding.

A.W. Tozer put it like this: “Surely God has something to say to the pure in heart which He cannot say to the man of sinful life. But what He has to say is not theological, it is spiritual, and spiritual truths cannot be received in the ordinary way of nature…. The necessity for spiritual illumination before we can grasp spiritual truths is taught throughout the entire New Testament and it is altogether in accord with the teachings of the Psalms, the Proverbs and the Prophets. The New Testament draws a sharp line between the natural mind and the mind that has been touched by divine fire…. what I am saying is that there is an illumination, divinely bestowed, without which theological truth is information and nothing more. While this illumination is never given apart from theology, it is entirely possible to have theology without the illumination!”

God regularly condescends to our human level to reveal His truth to us. He must! Because His ways are immeasurably higher than ours, He often brings things down to our level to make His point. You might say that God provides a natural metaphor for a spiritual truth that would otherwise be difficult for us to understand. The most astounding example of this is the incarnation of His Son, Jesus. Paul tells the Philippians that Jesus, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming in the likeness of people. And being found in appearance like a man.” Php 2:7 And yet, “in him all the fullness of deity dwells bodily.”

Someone has said that everything we can know about God can be seen in Jesus. This fits what the Scripture says: According to Jesus Himself, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" and Paul describes Jesus Christ as "the image of the invisible God" That does not mean that God is limited to what we can see in the physical person Jesus. It means that in Jesus, God provided a sufficient representation of Himself for our natural minds to lead us to the spiritual truth of who God is. There is solid physical evidence that Jesus lived, died, and rose again. That evidence is intended to lead us to the spiritual truth that He became our Savior. There are many people who see the physical evidence of Jesus and either deny it or ignore it and never get to the spiritual truth that He died for them.

I think something similar has happened with regard to our understanding of what the Bible says about Heaven. People use a number of Bible passages to defend the idea of Heaven as our eternal home. I think these interpretations arise from the practice of thinking something is true and then finding Scripture to back it up. This is a type of logical fallacy called assuming the conclusion. If you believe Heaven is where Christians go when they die, you can find passages that seem to lead to that conclusion.

One passage frequently cited is Jesus’ word to the thief on the cross that, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Those who believe Heaven is where believers go when they die take the word “paradise” to mean heaven. The word appears only two other times in the New Testament, and neither unarguably means a place called heaven. Paul tells the Corinthians that he was taken to paradise to receive special revelation. Two verses earlier he described the place he went to as “the third heaven.” In the cosmology of the first century Jew, the third heaven was God’s dwelling place. As I have said before, the use of heaven as God’s dwelling place is meant to explain God’s spiritual nature. Paul was translated temporarily to a spiritual state so he could have an audience with Jesus who was by then in His spiritual body.

I believe Paul was in the spirit the same way John was for his revelations of the things to come. They were both taken “to heaven” to describe the phenomenon John described as being “in the spirit on the Lord’s Day.” In Revelation 2, Jesus tells the Ephesian church that, “To the one who conquers, I will grant to him to eat from the tree of life which is in the paradise of God.” I believe that is a reference to the Eden-like state of the new Earth rather than a synonym for Heaven. I may be committing the same fallacy as those I am disagreeing with. If so, it only proves that the true meaning of the word paradise is disputable.

Another passage frequently cited as proof that believers go to heaven when they die is Paul’s assertion that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. If you couple this with the statement that Jesus is at the throne of God interceding for the saints, you might conclude that Jesus in is Heaven, therefore, Paul expected to go to Heaven when he died. However, when you understand that “heaven” throughout the New Testament refers to a spiritual state rather than a place, and add to that the fact that God’s throne, the true temple, and the New Jerusalem are all symbolic of spiritual realities, what Paul was actually saying was that he would be in the spiritual presence of Jesus when he died, not that he expected to go to a place called heaven.

Another passage that is misunderstood frequently is found in 1 Thessalonians. Paul says that on the last day, Jesus will descend from Heaven. At that time, believers living and dead will join Him “in the air,” and henceforth be with Him forever. Remembering that heaven is a metaphor for the spiritual state, Paul is saying that Jesus will appear to us in His spiritual body to receive us to Himself. Paul told the Corinthians that at this point, we will receive our spiritual bodies. It is a false assumption that we go to heaven at that point. I contend that we will meet Jesus “in the air” (in the spirit) to follow Him to the renewed Earth to experience His reign there forever.

N.T. Wright casts some light on the curious condition we find on the last day Paul described to the Thessalonians. Wright reveals that in Jesus’ time, conquering leaders would return home and stage a victory parade. People would come out of the city to meet the conqueror and join his “triumphal entry.” I used that phrase on purpose because it sounds just like what the Jews of Jerusalem did for Jesus when He entered the city to the shouts of the people proclaiming Him King. We know now that His entry on that occasion was not a victory procession, but we also know that one is coming on the “last day” because of what He accomplished in Jerusalem on that earlier day.

There will be a wonderful victory parade on the Last Day when Jesus returns to put all things under His feet. Jesus’ victory over sin and death and Satan are earth-centered, spiritual accomplishments. The “city” to which Jesus returns triumphant is the dwelling place of His people, the Church. The Church is an earthly expression of Christ’s body. Once the earth has been restored to its Eden-like perfection, God’s people can live there and do the work God intended Adam to do. And we can do that work forever without interruption. That is why I believe Earth is my eternal home, not heaven.

Related Posts: Living the Examined Life; Heaven Can Wait; Another Jewish Temple; Binding Satan

P.S. If you wish to discuss this idea with me, go to my website clairverway.com and click Contact Clair.

Is Heaven a Wonderful Place?

It is a sad truth that millions of sincere Christians are sincerely wrong about something in their doctrine or practice. Many believe that a human priest is necessary to access the grace of God. Quite a few believe that it is necessary to baptize infants for salvation. Countless numbers of people who claim to believe the Bible think that their good behavior puts them in good standing with God. I am quite certain that these people are wrong because these beliefs do not square with the truth taught in the Scriptures. I believe that they hold these erroneous opinions because they have sought truth through natural means rather than spiritual means.

This condition is inevitable since Christians are human. Truthfully, though, Christians are not supposed to be thinking like other humans. People without God have no choice but to seek truth by natural means; Christians have the option, no the command to live under the control of the Spirit of God. According to Jesus, that Spirit is intended to “lead you into all truth.” A.W. Tozer says, “Were this an unfallen world the path of truth would be a smooth and easy one. Here the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God; the flesh lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary one to another. In that contest there can be only one outcome. We must surrender and God must have His way. His glory and our eternal welfare require that it be so!” (A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Evenings with Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings,Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2015, 257.)

In the natural world, we can use the scientific method to ferret out the truth. For the Christian, natural truth can be revealed in a natural way, but spiritual truth must be discovered in a supernatural way: the Holy Spirit makes it known primarily through the Bible. Tozer was quoting Paul when he said that the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit. The Greek is more emphatic; it says the natural (soulish) man cannot receive spiritual truth. Tozer points out something else Paul wrote: the things we might think are true in our natural selves (souls) are often at odds with the actual truth as revealed by the Spirit.

Some spiritual truths are pretty straightforward. God loved the world so much that He sent His only Son to die for us. The Son, Jesus, came to earth as a baby born of a virgin, and He grew to be the Lamb of God who took away the sin of the world. After His death, burial, and resurrection, Jesus returned to the presence of His Father and sent the Holy Spirit to dwell in and empower believers. That last bit is where many believers begin to struggle with what is truth. Because our human nature is so strong, we go with what seems “natural” rather than seeking the spiritual truth.

I am about to suggest something that will shock most people who believe the Bible. I am not alone in this belief; many trusted Bible scholars teach this. In fact, it was their teaching that led me to the Scriptures and the radical conclusion I have come to. Here it is: I don’t believe Christians go to heaven when they die. I realize this idea has been taught for centuries, and the majority of Christians believe it. I have joined the minority; I don’t believe heaven is our eternal destiny. I will explain why.

First and foremost, there is no Bible verse that says believers go to heaven when they die. The misunderstanding of the word “heaven” has caused most of the problem. Jesus spoke repeatedly about the “Kingdom of Heaven.” We miss the truth if we think of heaven as a place in contrast to the earth as a place. The simple cosmology of the people in Bible times was of a heaven where birds and clouds fly, a second heaven where the moon and stars are, and a third heaven where God “lives.”

We learn an important truth from what Jesus told the Samaritan woman: God is spirit. As a spirit being, God does not occupy a place – take up space – in the same way we do. Saying that God is in heaven is saying that God dwells in the spirit realm. Heaven is not a place; it is a state of being. Jesus’ constant reference to the kingdom of heaven was meant to convey the idea of God’s rule on earth. The Lord’s Prayer asks for the kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. The repeated commands to be filled with the Spirit are intended to accomplish the same thing: God’s rule in our lives.

We sometimes say that Jesus left heaven to come to earth. We say His earthly ministry culminated on the Cross of Calvary, and we say that when He concluded His earthly ministry, He went back to heaven. The truth is that Jesus existed as an eternal spirit before His incarnation, and then, at His resurrection, He was given a “spiritual body” to resume His position with His Heavenly Father during the church age. Paul was talking about this spiritual body when he explained that just as Christ was raised, we shall also be resurrected with a different kind of body – a body like the one Christ has now according to John. Paul describes the new body as, “A building from God, a house not made by hands, eternal in the heavens (the spirit realm.)

When we are resurrected, we should not imagine that we will have two choices for our dwelling: on earth or in heaven. When Christ returns, the Kingdom of Heaven He initiated in His earthly ministry will fully come; heaven and earth will be one. The reality of earth and heaven will be fully integrated. In my previous post, I mentioned Philip Yancey’s comment that heaven and earth are not two separate realities but different expressions of the same reality. I believe the present two-part nature of that reality will be one when Jesus returns.

I suspect that the hope of heaven as our eternal home arose alongside the deteriorating hope that the church would bring God’s kingdom to earth after which Christ would return to reign over it. This idea, known as post-millennial eschatology, gradually faded as it became clear that the world was not becoming more and more like the heavenly kingdom, but instead it was sliding further under the control of the “god of this age,” as Paul called Satan.

That sad realization caused many to abandon the idea of a good earth and revert to the dualism of the Greek philosophers which some early church fathers believed. The Greeks taught that the natural world is bad, and the spiritual world is good. Therefore, we must escape this bad place and go to a better one: heaven. That is not biblical truth. God created the earth good. Yes, it was affected by Adam’s fall into sin, but it remains God’s good world. Paul says the earth groans as it waits for the revealing of God’s people. He also says that we groan with longing for our new spiritual bodies which will inhabit the new earth.

When Jesus returns, I believe God will restore the earth to its original Edenic state and end Satan’s usurpation of Adam’s dominion. I believe this is the “new earth” Scripture envisions. You have to ask yourself why God would bother to establish a new earth if it wasn’t for His children to live on. Paul told the Philippians, “For our commonwealth exists in heaven, from which also we eagerly await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our humble body to be conformed to his glorious body, in accordance with the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” (There’s that idea again that we will receive bodies like the one Jesus has.)

The word Paul uses, commonwealth, is unique; it appears only here in Scripture. It means the governing authority or sphere of control. In other words, our proper controlling power is “in heaven,” meaning it is spiritual. Our essential existence is spiritual. When Jesus transforms our bodies at our resurrection, they will be perfectly suited to live on the recreated earth. The kingdom of heaven – God’s perfect rulership – will fully and finally come to earth when Christ subjects all things to Himself. That will be heavenly, you might say, but I don’t believe it will be in Heaven. It will still be a supremely wonderful place. And honestly, that sounds better to me than sitting on a cloud playing a harp for eternity.

In my next post, I will treat individually several of the Bible passages that are used to support the idea that Christians go to heaven when they die. Stay tuned.

Related Posts: Why Heaven Matters; Understanding Salvation