What comes to mind when you think of heaven? If you search “heaven” on Google Images, you might find caricatures with the following themes:
people waiting at the pearly gates for St. Peter to check the dossier for their name;
a location somewhere above the earth in a cloudy environment with a shining bright light; and
people with wings on their backs and halos over their heads floating around and maybe even playing a handheld harp.
(11 min. reading time)
First impressions
When I look back at my early church experience, heaven and hell were presented as co-equal counterparts competing for my eternal destiny. This was captured in a memorable and dramatic presentation entitled, “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames.” The dramatization was designed to scare the “hell” out of the audience to ensure that they would choose heaven. How did this portrayal compare with the Bible’s presentation of heaven and hell? To find out, I followed an enlightening experiment suggested by Joshua Ryan Butler in The Skeleton’s in God’s Closet. 1 Now I would like to invite you to try the experiment with me.
Heaven Experiment – Step 1
Go to https://www.biblegateway.com/, select the NIV translation and type “heaven hell” into the search function. The results will show how many times “heaven” and “hell” appear in the same verse. When I tried this, it came up with one result. However, the verse in question didn’t use the word “hell” but “the depths,”
“If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there” (Psalm 139:8).
From Genesis to Revelation there are no other verses where heaven and hell are found in the same place. Based on my church upbringing, this is not what I would have expected.
Heaven Experiment – Step 2
Next, instead of “heaven hell” type “heaven earth” into the search function. There are 195 verses which contain both “heaven” and “earth” and they are spread evenly throughout the Bible in forty-four books starting with Genesis 1:1 and ending with Revelation 21:1.
What’s the point of this experiment? To show that heaven’s primary counterpoint is earth – not hell. According to Butler, “Heaven and earth are threaded throughout the biblical drama of creation, rebellion, and redemption.” 2
Butler said that it is a mistake to use the caricature of heaven as being a future place to spend eternity. Instead, he says “Heaven is part of God’s creation here and now.” 3 The second correction we need to make is that heaven does have a counterpart, but it is not hell. Heaven and earth were created to be in an integral relationship with each other.
Creation – One Space
In the book of Genesis, we are given a picture of heaven on earth at the very beginning when God created the world and placed humans in the Garden of Eden. Heaven and earth were not separate spaces in the garden. Instead, God and people lived in perfect harmony. God provided for people in abundance and his wisdom ruled creation. God partnered with people to build a beautiful flourishing world.
“Heaven and earth are not meant to be separate realms. Rather they are meant to completely overlap. God appointed creation as the place where humans would be united with the beauty and presence of God for all eternity.” 4 Heaven and earth as a single space was God’s design from the beginning.
Rebellion – Separate Spaces
Instead of trusting in God’s wisdom and rule, people were tempted to doubt, and they chose to create a world apart from him. Because of this, we now have two separate spaces. While inside the garden was a place of God’s trust, generosity, and protection, outside the garden was a wilderness characterized by fear, scarcity, and self-preservation. There are now two separate spaces – the heaven-like garden where people were fully united with God and experienced the presence of God, and the rest of the earth where people were driven from the presence of God.
By desiring to have autonomy from God, to be “like God”, and to trust in human wisdom instead of God’s wisdom, humanity received what it wanted – a world without God. Adam and Eve’s intimacy with God was lost and, in Butler’s words, “their rebellion has cosmic consequences: earth is ruptured from heaven. Heaven is then depicted as the dwelling place of God in the biblical story.”5
The intimacy of walking with God in the garden was lost. Like the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable, humanity asked for its inheritance; not to enjoy it together with God, but to squander it on themselves away from him. And God respected humanity’s wishes.
“The earth is in a state of exile and alienation from its intended home with God.” 6
Humans desire for a separate space led to a rupture of cosmic proportions. However, God doesn’t leave humans alone in their separate space but puts a plan in action to bridge the gap.
Redemption – Overlapping Spaces
God’s purpose from the beginning was for humans to partner with him in building a beautiful, flourishing world – heaven. The rest of human history is the story of how God brought the two distinct spaces back together again, or in the words of Tim Mackie from the Bible Project, how these spaces can “overlap”. 7
In the Old Testament, the Jewish people experienced God’s presence by going to the temple (see Blowing in the Wind post). The temple was decorated with fruit trees and flowers, gold and jewels and images of angels. The purpose of the decorations was to make the people feel like they were back in the garden of Eden. “And at the centre of the temple was a place called the holy of holies, which was like the hotspot of God’s presence.” 8
How was this overlap of God’s presence and humanity possible in the temple?
There was more to the temple than a beautiful building depicting the garden of Eden. The overlap of the two spaces – God’s goodness, justice and beauty with human’s sin, injustice, and ugliness – was made possible through animal sacrifice. The animal died in place of the person, absorbing the sin and making the person clean to enter into God’s presence.
This picture pointed ahead to Jesus who, as the spotless lamb, gave his life as the sacrifice to bring humanity back into the presence of God and to provide a space where heaven and earth could again overlap. The difference between Jesus’ sacrifice and the animal sacrifices from the Old Testament is that Jesus’ sacrifice has the power to keep spreading and reuniting more and more people into God’s presence.
Jesus’ atonement healed the rupture brought by our rebellion and through his sacrifice on the cross, Jesus reconciled creation to God.
Paul tells us in Colossians 1:19-20,
“For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.” (NLT)
God’s purpose throughout history has been to redeem humanity and not to abandon it by bringing heaven back to earth. God wants to heal the rupture that separated heaven and earth, not by whisking us out of earth into heaven, but rather by ushering his heavenly kingdom to reign on earth. 9
Pockets of Heaven
Not only did Jesus’ sacrifice bring heaven and earth together, but his interactions with people also brought the spaces of heaven and earth together. John described Jesus as being the Word that made his dwelling among us (John 1:14). The word “dwelling” is the same word used for tabernacle in the Old Testament. The tabernacle was the tent that housed God’s presence before the temple was built. John was saying that Jesus was a temple. Jesus was God’s presence among his people – heaven and earth overlapping. Jesus affirmed this when he declared, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:18-22). Through his sacrifice, Jesus himself became the place where heaven and earth overlapped.
The interesting thing with Jesus is that as a “temple” he did not sit around in a prominent place in the middle of the city like the physical temple and expect people to come to him. Instead, he went and intentionally hung out with sinners. In these interactions, Jesus brought little pockets of heaven to earth. Jesus told many parables of what the kingdom of God would be like on earth, and he encouraged his followers to pray that God’s kingdom would come, and his will be done on earth just as it is in heaven.
I Can Only Imagine
When I try to get a glimpse of what heaven might look like, I think of the down and out people that Jesus interacted with, and how he transformed their lives from hopelessness and suffering to promise and life. I try to put myself into the shoes of a blind person who has spent their entire life in darkness, and then they are able to see the world around them for the first time. Or the lame person who has relied completely on other people to take them places and bring things to them, now having the ability to do those things for themselves. Or the demon possessed person who was tormented in their mind and made to do awful things that frightened away people, now at peace and calmly pointing people to Jesus as the source of their deliverance. Or the person who was publicly shamed and used by the religious leaders, and instead of being stoned in the public square, they now walked away forgiven from their sin.
When John the Baptist’s disciples came to Jesus and asked if he was the Messiah or should they be looking for someone else, Jesus replied. “Go back to John and tell him what you have seen and heard—the blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is being preached to the poor” (Luke 7:22, NLT). The message was straightforward. When God’s kingdom comes and his will is done on earth as in heaven, lives will be transformed.
Heaven will be a transformation of earth. God will remove sin from the earth and everything that sin has taken away from how we were meant to experience God, each other, and this world. Here are some of the things that we get to look forward to when heaven and earth become the same space under God’s restoration:
A new citizenship and a new body (Phil. 3:20-21);
An eternal body made by God (2 Cor. 5:1);
A better country than the current earth (Heb. 11:6);
A place of newness characterized by righteousness (2 Peter 3:13);
A place permanently removed from death, suffering, and pain (Rev. 21:4);
A place with the throne of God and the Lamb at the centre. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads (Rev. 22:3-5); and
A place where there will be no darkness (Rev. 22:5).
While scripture provides these descriptions, the apostle Paul wrote that he was unable to describe heaven, “But I do know that I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell” (2 Cor. 12:4).
How does the heavenly space that God created and described in the Bible compare with the caricature from my Google search? People’s caricature of heaven as captured by Google is far from the Bible’s description, and I’m grateful for that because the caricature looks quite dull and boring next to Paul’s words that heaven is so amazing that we cannot comprehend it.
Up Next
In “Show Me the Way” we’ll consider “the way” of the righteous at the end of Psalm 1.
This is my favourite post yet. We’ll said! Christians live differently when they stop trying to escape this world to heaven and begin the work of bringing heaven to earth. “Thy kingdom come”
Head and Heart Collide 
This is my favourite post yet. We’ll said! Christians live differently when they stop trying to escape this world to heaven and begin the work of bringing heaven to earth. “Thy kingdom come”
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