Heaven, Here and There
Revelation 21:1-6
by Dr. David Rogne

When Henry David Thoreau was dying, his friend, Parker Pillsbury, asked if he could see anything of the next world.  Thoreau opened his eyes and said, "One world at a time, Parker, one world at a time." Many of us are like Pillsbury.  If there is something beyond this life, we certainly would like to know what it is.

In the passage we read this morning from the book of Revelation, the author, John, has much to say about heaven. The word, "heaven," undoubtedly conjures up all kinds of images in our minds, for we are products of widely ranging traditions.  I'd like for us to think together about what is meant by the word "heaven."

The first thing I want to say is that heaven is not so much a place as it is a state of being. There have been a great many pictorial descriptions of heaven which only confuse the issue. Some of those descriptions of heaven as a place have arisen because of the insufficiency of language to say what we would like to say.  The writer of Revelation had a vision.  He described heaven as a city. For him it was the New Jerusalem. God was seen on a throne; the streets were of gold; the gates were of pearl.  Christian hymn writers have embellished that picture.

“There's a beautiful city that lieth

foursquare.

Wide open its pearly gates stand

 And the angels are standing beside

them to greet

The earth-weary pilgrim band."

John had to use words with which his audience was familiar.

What would we do if we had to describe Southern California to an Eskimo who had never been beyond the snowy ranges of Alaska? We would have to talk mostly in negatives.  We could tell the Eskimo that Southern California is a place where there is no ice on the ground, no midnight sun and no whale meat.  But would such a description be satisfactory to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce? We have to start where people are when we try to communicate the unfamiliar.  John was trying to communicate something beautiful about the future but he was limited by the experiences of his audience.

Other material conceptions have arisen out of the need for oppressed people to find fulfillment.  The thought was that in heaven God would make up whatever was lacking in this life.  What the poor slave needed was shoes, so he sang: "I got shoes, you got shoes."

All God's children got shoes.
When I get to heaven
Gonna put on my shoes and
Walk all over God's heaven."

Even the Arabic conception of a physical paradise entered Christian thinking. Jesus himself told the thief on the cross, "Today you shall be with me in paradise." (Luke 23:43)  Marc Connally went to work on that idea and in his play about early negro aspirations, Green Pastures, he envisioned heaven as a place of "fish fries and ten cent ceegars", a place where all the good things of life are finally realized.

Still another reason for misconceptions about heaven is the literal interpretation given to symbolic or pictorial language which is found in Scripture.  I remember one evangelist who used to give the exact measurements of heaven on the basis of his computations from Scripture.  I remember hearing another who steadfastly maintained that heaven was a city with walls and gates because the Bible said so.  We may not be so material in our expectations, but we do generally attempt to localize heaven as "up there” someplace, don't we? Still others have interpreted heaven as an eternal vacation:  no tears, no pain, no work, no excitement.  It becomes a place so uneventful as to make some long for the adventure of hell.  A Christian hymn writer put it thus:

Father of Jesus, Loves reward,

  What rapture will it be

Prostrate before thy throne to be

  and gaze and gaze on Thee.

To which one honest churchman responded:  "Lord I've been active all my life.  This idea of eternal rest frightens me.  The Beatific something or other they talk about in sermons doesn't mean a thing to me.  I’ll be thoroughly miserable if all I have to do is gaze and gaze.  Isn't there anything to do in heaven?"

Lloyd George confessed to an associate:

"When I was a boy, the thought of heaven use to frighten me more than the thought of hell.  I pictured heaven as a place where time would be perpetual Sundays, with perpetual services from which there would be no escape.  It was a horrible nightmare. ... .And made me an atheist for ten years."

Indeed, the idea of heaven as an interminable church service would be repugnant to most preachers, unless, of course, they got to do the preaching.

On a more positive track, any ideas we have about heaven need to spring from the acknowedge that we are dealing with a mystery. King Solomon discovered this. After spending many years in the construction of the temple at Jerusalem, he came to a staggering realization.  In prayer to God he said "Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house which I have built." (I Kings 8:27)  He came to the conclusion that God is beyond our power to conceive and understand.  We can never pack God in a box, never translate God into words, never explain God by analysis.  If heaven cannot contain God, how much less the houses we have built, whether they be houses of brick and stone, or houses of mind, pen and tongue constructed with words.

If God is a mystery, then that must bear on our understanding of heaven.  Heaven is in the realm of spiritual things, not physical, and our vocabulary is not very adequate for dealing with it.  In fact, the idea that something is spiritual suggests to many people that it is not real.  I was speaking with a young engineer who was deeply interested in understanding the Christian faith.  His problem, he said, was with belief in a spiritual world.  He was used to working with concrete things that obeyed certain laws.  I asked him if he loved his wife.  He responded, "Yes."  I asked him if he knew beauty when he saw it.  He said he thought so.  I asked him if he had felt loyalty, experienced trust, believed in honor.  To all these he answered, "Yes."  I tried to indicate that these concepts were all a part of the spiritual world, abstractions, experienced as reality, but not entirely subject to scientific verification.  So it is with some of the things that may be said about heaven; we are trying to use physical images to describe something that is not physical.

On the other hand, we need to be careful lest our conversation about heaven makes it so otherworldly as to be irrelevant. Channing Pollack wrote an article for the "North American Review" a while back entitled, "Heaven Doesn't Matter."  In it he said, “I've never been able to get excited about heaven myself.  The truth is not so much that I don't believe in heaven as that I don't care whether it exists or not.....The only heaven that really interests me is the heaven that could be made right here." It is easy to be in accord with such a statement, but there is something within us that calls for more than just the here now. Most of us are not that satisfied with a life that ends at the grave.  Neither have we been particularly successful in our efforts to create a heaven on earth.

The concept of heaven that I find to be most meaningful is one to which Jesus referred frequently, the "Kingdom of God." This suggests that heaven is wherever God reigns, wherever his will is fully carried out, where everything finds its plan and purpose, where everyone discovers what he or she was created for and attempts to fulfill that role. The reign of God is concrete enough to be applicable to this life, and remote enough to cover the life to come.  Heaven is not so much a place, as a state of being.

The second thing I want to say is that heaven is not simply future, but present as well.  Through all the centuries of the Christian era there has been a tremendous emphasis on the future life.  In fact, the church has sometimes discouraged social change here by playing up the blessings of the future.  Look at some of our hymns:

"Onward to the prize before us,

Soon his beauty we'll behold.

Soon the pearly gates will open

We shall tread the streets of gold."

 

“When the Roll is called up Yonder I'll be there."

"There's a land that is fairer than day

And by faith we can see it afar.

 For the Father waits over the way

 to prepare us a dwelling place there."

Where? "In the Sweet By and By." It is understandable that such ideas have been criticized as an opiate of the people.  Such sentiments can desensitize people to what is happening around them now.  Such ideas express the feeling that the only important thing is the future.

The Bible does not divorce this life from the one to come. Rather, it sees life as a continuum, with the present flowing into the future.  Jesus says that eternal life begins in the present.  He says, "Everyone who believes in him...may have eternal life."( John 3:16) Eternal life is not something we finally receive at the end of this life; it is something we may have now.  But an everlasting existence could as easily be hell as heaven if the circumstances were poor. We need to understand that the word "eternal" that Jesus uses to describe desirable life is not simply an indication of length, but of quality.  It endures forever because it is worthy of enduring forever.  In the midst of life it is possible to be dead, that is, to know an existence without love, destitute of worth, dogged by despair and pursued by the shadow of some impending horror.  On the other hand, in spite of the inevitable death of the body, it is possible to know the fullness of life. To the degree that our lives are oriented toward God, we are living eternally now.  We are in Eternity.  The difference is in how we experience it.

Another statement of Jesus expresses this continuum:  "The Kingdom of God is among you." (Luke 17:21)  Don't go off looking for some future event to be thrust upon the world from the outside.  God's reign is expressed wherever people will submit to it.  It starts within the heart of a person and moves into ever widening circles as the reign of God in individual lives gains expression in an increasing number of lives. Though we are slow to submit to God's will, there are those moments when God's reign is demonstrated by something that we do, and we get a taste of what it would be like to live life in the full awareness of God's presence.  When that happens, heaven is no longer simply future, but present as well.  We take our heaven with us when we die.

The third thing I want to say is that heaven is not so much a reward as it is a result of a relationship.  There is the idea prevalent in Christianity that heaven is something we merit.  We talk about salvation by faith, but we really seem to feel that heaven is for the good guys and hell is for the bad ones.  We are content to say that we are saved by the graciousness of God, but we hate to see anyone else get away with something.  I was talking with a group of adults at a church camp about God's grace, when one of the ladies present asked if I thought that a person who had lived a wicked life, but who repented on his death-bed, would really make it to heaven.  It was her contention that it would be unfair if such a person went to heaven.  Here was this room full of Christians who had been good, struggled with their temptations, done all those decent things, and there is that other fellow who has lived it up:  wine, women and song.  Then with his last breath he repents of his evil ways.  Does he get all this and heaven too? Most of us can identify with her perplexity, because we want such a person to suffer a little.  We are not concerned for his salvation; we want justice.  The Bible says that there is great joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. (Luke 15:10)  Not so with us; we are inclined to be jealous because we feel that such a person gets the best of both worlds.

If we feel that way, perhaps we had better rethink what it means to be a Christian.  Has our relationship with God been such a great inconvenience that we envy the person who has no such relationship? Has Christianity been such a millstone around our necks?  Do we have the impression that we are the ones who have been deprived of the richness of life because we had to be Christian?

Adopting a Christian life style is not a price we pay for salvation.  Jesus said He came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. (John 10:10 ) I think that a person may get right with God after eighty-five years of wicked living, but it should be pointed out that he has already deprived himself of eighty-five years of salvation, eighty-five years of living with God, eighty-five years of feeling useful, eighty-five years of heaven.

As I see it, Christianity is its own reward:  it is better to be honest than dishonest; it is better to be loving than to be hateful; it is better to live like a child of God than to live like an animal; it is better to live a disciplined life than to live as a reprobate.

That is what it means to put faith in Jesus.  Christian faith is not a question of whether Jesus did this or that miracle. Rather, it is trust that what he said about life is the truth; trust that the person who lives for himself is going down the wrong road; trust that the truly abundant life is to be found by putting God first and living as God's child.

St. John, writing in the Book of Revelation, gives another description of the relationship which is called heaven.  He says, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”  John was writing these words from the Isle of Patmos, where he was condemned to spend the rest of his days, working in the stone quarries for the crime of being a Christian.  Always, between him and the land he loved, were the waters of the ocean, and he probably spoke from his own need when he recorded his vision that in the new heaven and the new earth “the sea was no more.”  In saying that, I think he was really saying, “separation will be no more.”  No more separation from those we love, from those who have gone before, from those who remain behind.  Neither shall we be separated from those we have hated.  Barriers will be broken down.  But most of all, we shall not be separated from God. "See," said the great voice from the throne in John's vision, "the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples.... he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more; for the first things have passed away."  To be in heaven is to be in a close relationship with God, in this world and in the next.