The hope of heaven

Two of my favorite Bible verses come from Psalm 73: “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you?” They show how God helps us in this world and the next, and point out that we have no reasonable alternative but to believe in Him. They also suggest that this life is important—why else would we need God’s counsel?—but the next is wonderful.

Some hymns over the centuries have tried to capture that wonder. Example: “What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul, what wondrous love is this, O my soul! … and when from death I’m free, I’ll sing and joyful be, and through eternity I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on.” Or, “And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior’s blood? Died He for me who caused His pain? For me, who him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”

Covenant Theological Seminary professor emeritus David B. Calhoun brings the prose equivalent of those hymns to his concluding chapter in a new, multi-authored book, Heaven, published by Crossway and edited by Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson. Polls show few Americans see death as the last stop before hell, but many think we move from being to nothingness—and that is terrifying enough. Their last thoughts in this life are likely to be forlorn, but Christians have “The Hope of Heaven.” —Marvin Olasky

The hope laid up for you in heaven. —Colossians 1:5

My seven-year-old grandson, Ian, asked me a question, “Granddaddy, what is hope?” I answered with some difficulty, “Well, hope is wanting something good to happen. It is expecting it to happen but not being sure it will happen.” Ian thought for a moment, then said softly to himself, “That’s not hope.” Ian was right. That’s not hope. What, then, is hope?

Definition of Hope

The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language gives two meanings of the word. First, hope is to “entertain expectation of something desired.” We can call this common or natural hope. Second, hope is “to trust, have confidence.” This meaning, the dictionary states, is obsolete except as a “biblical archaism.” Christians use hope to mean “to trust, have confidence,” as the Bible generally does. We can call this biblical or theological hope.

Jerome Groopman, professor at Harvard Medical School, in The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness writes that for his patients hope has proved as important as any medication he might prescribe or procedure he might perform. “Hope, I have come to believe,” writes the doctor, “is as vital to our lives as the very oxygen that we breathe.” Acknowledging that there is no uniform definition of hope, Groopman proposes one that seemed to capture what his patients had taught him: “Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see—in the mind’s eye—a path to a better future.” This kind of common or natural hope can be a good thing, but it will ultimately disappoint. In the movie Candles on Bay Street, a young mother tells her little son that she is dying of cancer. Devastated by such news, he says through sobs, “But can we keep on hoping?” “Yes,” she answers, “we can keep on hoping”—but soon she dies.

Words from Writers and Poets

John Ruskin in his Stones of Venice describes the facades on that city’s Ducal Palace to illustrate the change the Renaissance brought to the word hope—a change that in time rendered the definition of hope as “trust and confidence” obsolete and archaic. In the fourteenth century, hope was personified as “praying, while above her a hand is seen emerging from sunbeams—the hand of God (according to that of Revelation, ‘The Lord God giveth them light’); and the inscription above is ‘Spes optima in Deo.’ This design is rudely and with imperfect chiseling imitated by the fifteenth-century workman. Hope is still praying but she is praying to the sun only: The hand of God is gone.”

When “the hand of God is gone,” the stronger meaning of hope—“to have trust, confidence”—is gone. Hope without God cannot reach beyond the sun. It can only say what I said when I tried to tell Ian about hope: “Well, hope is wanting something good to happen. It is expecting it to happen but not being sure it will happen.”

In A Diary of a Country Priest, a doctor tells the priest that once or twice he has killed “a man’s hope with one blow, one word.” He goes on, “I know what you’ll answer: your theologians have made a virtue of trust in the future, your trust has folded hands. All very well for ‘trust’—nobody’s ever seen that angel very closely.”

Many modern people, like the doctor, think of hope—in the strong sense of confident trust—as a pious delusion with “folded hands.” In a letter to the New York Times Book Review, someone wrote: “Faith is, by definition, make believe. … People recognize it as magical thinking.”

Not long before he died of cancer in 1991, Howard Nemerov, professor at Washington University in St. Louis and poet laureate of the United States, wrote this short poem of two sentences:

What rational being, after seventy years, When Scripture says he’s running out of rope, Would want more of the only world he knows? No rational being, he while he endures Holds on to the inveterate infantile hope That the road ends but as the runway does.

Nemerov says people can’t seem to give up the childish hope that at the end of this life, there is something more—and perhaps better.

Other poets and writers have tried to hold on to hope as trust and confidence but have found it difficult to see “that angel very closely.” Robert Louis Stevenson writes:

With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night That somehow the right is the right And the smooth shall bloom from the rough: Lord, if that were enough?

Stevenson hopes for the best, but he can’t be sure things are going to work out well—that “the right is the right” and “the smooth shall bloom from the rough.” His little poem ends not with an affirmation but with a question.

To Emily Dickinson,

Hope is the thing with feathers— That perches in the soul— And sings the tune without the words— And never stops—at all.

Dickinson’s hope is like a bird that keeps on singing, but it sings a song without words.

Songs in the Night

Real hope is more than a tune without words. Elihu was wrong about Job but right about God when he said it is God “who gives songs in the night” (Job 35:10).

Dante opens his Divine Comedy with these words: “Midway along the journey of our life I awoke to find myself in a dark wood.” When I was fifty years old, I suddenly found myself in a dark wood. A little lump in my neck turned out to be a relatively rare form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, almost always fatal within five years. The nights were my worst times. If I died, would my wife and children be all right? What about the goals of my life and ministry that were far from being reached? When radiation burned my vocal cords and I could no longer teach my classes, I felt useless. I was often sick with the brutal regimes of chemotherapy. More than once I asked, “Where is God, my maker?” And more and more God gave me “songs in the night.” “There is great beauty in this expression,” writes Albert Barnes. “It has been verified in thousands of instances where the afflicted have looked up though tears to God, and their mourning has been turned into joy.” Here are a few “songs in the night” God’s people treasure, songs I sang in my heart “in the valley of the shadow of death.”

After their sin, Adam and Eve “hid themselves from the presence of the LORD,” but God found them and gave them a song (Gen. 3:8, 15).

Sin’s bond severed, we’re delivered; Christ has bruised the serpent’s head; Death no longer is the stronger; Hell itself is captive led. Christ has risen from death’s prison; O’er the tomb he light has shed.

“The wickedness of man was great in the earth,” and God sent a flood but then he gave a rainbow (Gen. 6:5; 9:12-16).

O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee: I trace the rainbow through the rain And feel the promise is not vain, That morn shall tearless be.

There is a “valley of the shadow of death,” but God walks with us through it (Ps. 23:4).

Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale, Yet will I fear none ill, For thou art with me; And thy rod and staff me comfort still.

The psalmist prayed, “O LORD. … I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping” (Ps. 6:4–6), but there is coming a day when God “will wipe away every tear” and “night will be no more” (Rev. 21:4; 22:5).

God shall wipe away all tears; There’s no death, no pain, nor fears; And they count not time by years, For there is no night there.

In heaven there will be no songs in the night because there will be no night; there will be songs of gladness and joy, when “the ransomed of the LORD shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isa. 35:10; 51:11).

Pictures of Hope

The word hope appears 151 times in the ESV as the translation of a number of Hebrew and Greek words. Hope in the weaker sense, as the expectation of something desired, appears in the Bible from time to time, as when Paul writes to Timothy, “I hope to come to you soon” (1 Tim. 3:14). But in most of the Bible references hope has the stronger meaning of trust and confidence.

Robert A. Webb gave the Thomas Smyth Lectures at Columbia Theological Seminary in 1914 on “The Christian’s Hope.” He began with these words: “Everywhere hope looks out of the windows of the Christian Scriptures.”

“The psalmist prayed, “Uphold me according to your promise, that I may live, and let me not be put to shame in my hope” (Ps. 119:116). The apostle rejoiced “in the hope of the glory of God,” confident this hope does “not put us to shame” (Rom. 5:2, 5). Paul told the Christians in Colossae that their hope was laid up for them “in heaven” (Col. 1:5). These two words, hope and heaven, belong together. We now “hope for what we do not see,” but in that day we will see and hope will become heaven (Rom. 8:25).

Biblical hope refers to the Christian’s assurance and confidence that springs from God’s covenant promise repeated throughout the Bible—“I will make my dwelling among you. … And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people” (Lev. 26:11–12; cf. Ezek. 37:26–27; Hos. 2:23; 1 Pet. 2:10).

Throughout the Old Testament God’s people turned from the woes and uncertainties of their lives to the faithfulness of God and certainty of the father of many nations, as he had been told” by God (Rom. 4:18).

Abraham “in hope … believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told” by God (Rom. 4:18). Abraham did not believe in hope, but in hope he believed in God’s promise, although the fulfillment of that promise seemed humanly impossible.

Jeremiah calls God the “hope of Israel, its savior in time of trouble,” and prays, “You, O LORD, are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name; do not leave us” (Jer. 14:8–9).

God says to Hosea, “I will … make the Valley of Achor a door of hope” (Hos. 2:15). Achor, where Achan was cursed for his disobedience, is a place of trouble. But even there God opens a door of hope. “If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:12–13).

In one of the last books of the Old Testament, Zechariah tells the people to “rejoice greatly” because their king is coming to them. The prophet says, “Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free. … Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double” (Zech. 9:11–12). To be prisoners is a distressing thing, but to be “prisoners of hope” is a liberating truth. God’s people are held by hope. Thank God—we can’t get away from it. It is always there, shouting aloud, “Your king is coming to you.”

The Old Testament saints of Hebrews 11 “died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar,” desiring “a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (vv. 13-15).

In these passages and many others hope is “something greater even than confident expectation”; it is “something more closely related to the character of God.” Biblical hope is not a wish tinged with doubt, not merely an expectation of something yet to come. It is grounded in nothing so uncertain as circumstances, still less in our feelings, but in the absolute reliability of God’s character. When God desired to show to Abraham “the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath,” that is, he swore by himself, giving his words unique authority, because “it is impossible for God to lie” (Heb. 6:17–18).

God’s people “have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” and “rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2). In the New Testament, Christian hope still rests upon the covenant promise of God but now more explicitly upon Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection.

In Thessalonians “the hope of salvation” is called a “helmet” that protects the Christian’s head—our thinking—by assuring us that “God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us” (1 Thess. 5:8–9).

Hope is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,” providing security and stability in the storms of life. Anchored in the promise of God, it “enters into the inner place behind the curtain”—that is, the Most Holy Place in the tabernacle and temple—“where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.” The risen Christ in heaven is our eternal High Priest, so we have the strongest “encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us” (Heb. 6:18–20). Just before he died, Jaroslav Pelikan said, “If Christ is raised, nothing else matters. If Christ is not raised, nothing matters.”

Much of the Bible sets forth in history, poetry, prophecy, and letters the reality of the Christian’s hope: from the promise of Genesis 3:15—“He [Christ] shall bruise your [Satan’s] head”—to almost the last words of the Bible, where the promise is turned into a prayer—“Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20). Much of the rest of the Bible is about keeping that hope alive—when the garden of Eden is closed (Gen. 3:24), food runs out in the wilderness (Ex. 16:3), children and possessions are lost (Job 1–2), and enemies are coming (Hab. 1:6); when “our outer self is wasting away” (2 Cor. 4:16), “the mystery of lawlessness” is at work (1 Thess. 2:7), and “the nations rage” (Rev. 11:18).

Suffering and Hope

The certainty of our hope is as strong as the covenant promise of God and the resurrection of Christ, but our grasping of that hope in times of trouble is often difficult.

Believers ask the question David asks: “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 13:1). Jeremiah asks, “Why should you be like a stranger in the land, like a traveler who turns aside to tarry for a night? Why should you be like a man confused, like a mighty warrior who cannot save?” (Jer. 14:8–9). Habakkuk asks: “O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” (Hab. 1:2). “The souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne” cry out, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Rev. 6:9–10).

Seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert wrote about his disappointment and frustration in “Hope”:

I gave to Hope a watch of mine: but he An anchor gave to me. Then an old prayer-book I did present: And he an optic sent. With that I gave a vial full of tears: But he a few green ears: Ah Loiterer! I’ll no more, no more I’ll bring: I did expect a ring.

The watch suggests the giver’s notion that the time for fulfillment of his hope is nearly due. The anchor given in return shows he will need to hold on for some time yet. The old prayer book tells of prayers long used and nearly worn out. The optic, or telescope, shows their fulfillment can be seen only from afar. Tears receive in return only a few green ears, which will need time to ripen for harvest. Then the poet’s patience gives out. He will no longer bring his hopes to such a “loiterer.” Furthermore, he expected a ring. This may be an allusion to the rings John Donne sent, shortly before his death, to Herbert and a few other friends. Engraved on the rings was a picture of “Christ crucified on an anchor, which is the emblem of hope.” In another poem Herbert acknowledges receiving the ring from Donne and writes, “When wind and waves rise highest, I am sure, this Anchor keeps my faith … secure.”

Garret Keizer, a minister in the Episcopal church, writes:

More and more I see God as the Almighty Listener. More and more I see how preoccupied we are with the “answers” to our prayers, never acknowledging the utterly omnipotent and compassionate act of God’s hearing them. In contrast with the half-open ears of even our dearest friends, we have a listening as large as the universe, a listening so profound we can almost hear it—and it unsettles us, like the breathless silence of someone on the phone who does not even mutter an “uh-huh” to our confessions until we feel compelled to ask, “Are you still there?”

Yes, God is still there, and he is not a “loiterer.” “Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For, ‘Yet a little while and the coming one will come and will not delay’” (Heb. 10:35–37).

Romans 8:18–25 and 2 Corinthians 4:16–18

Suffering comes to all who are members of God’s family. “Not all are martyrs; not all are captives; not all are driven into exile for Christ’s sake. … And yet even those whose path has been most sheltered in the goodness of God will be called to encounter suffering.”

In the midst of the horrors depicted in Revelation 13 are the words: “Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints” (v. 10). There are words like that throughout the Bible. Paul writes that it is “through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures” that we have hope. Not only do we have hope but we “abound in hope” “by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 15:4, 13). The Holy Spirit, writes C. D. F. Moule, is “the present tense of hope.”

In Romans 8 Paul encourages Christians to endure “the sufferings of this present time,” because we know they “are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (v. 18). We do not yet see that glory, but “we wait for it with patience” (v. 25).

Nowhere more fully than in the opening chapters of 2 Corinthians does Paul describe the trials and distresses of his life as ambassador of Christ in which he “despaired of life itself” (1:8). A little further on he writes that he was afflicted in every way, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down. Startlingly Paul then calls his—and our—suffering “light” and “momentary.” How can he possibly describe great trouble this way? He does it by comparing it with something else. Fifty pounds seems so heavy until compared with a ton. A year, ten years, fifty years is a long time until compared with eternity. Troubles are sure to come, but so will the eternal glory that “far outweighs them all.” John Calvin writes that heaven “makes light what before seemed to be heavy, and brief and momentary what seemed to last forever.” Furthermore, “this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” It is not merely that troubles are followed by glory; our affliction is adding to the coming glory to be ours. That is why slaves could sing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” and then add words that at first don’t seem to fit: “Glory, hallelujah!” Like the slaves, in our sickness and suffering “we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:8–9, 16–18).

Timothy Keller writes: “The doctrine of the resurrection can instill us with a powerful hope. It promises that we will get the life we most longed for, but it will be an infinitely more glorious world than if there had never been the need for bravery, endurance, sacrifice, or salvation.” Missionary John Nevius wrote from China to his father-in-law on September 1, 1869: “My thoughts often fly homeward, and my heart yearns after those loved scenes which no one prizes more highly than I do; but I feel thankful for the privilege of being here, employed as I am, and I believe that the ‘rest that remaineth’ will be all the sweeter after toil, and perhaps suffering, for Christ.”

James 1:2 and 1 Peter 1:3–9

James tells us to “count it all joy” when we meet “trials of various kinds,” because these trials are a testing of our faith that “produces steadfastness” (James 1:2). Not only will trouble in this world bring greater glory in the world to come, but trials bring blessings in this life. Therefore, we not only endure suffering but rejoice in it. The suffering may continue, but also should the joy.

“Suffering and hope belong together in 1 Peter,” writes Christiaan Beker. “Hope is not simply otherworldly hope, suffering is not simply passive endurance. Rather, hope in the imminent coming of God’s definitive victory and glory motivates these Christians to devise strategies of hope amidst their daily experience of suffering.”

After his greetings, Peter writes:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Pet. 1:3–9)

The source of our “living hope” is the mercy of God. The substance of our hope is the living Christ. The aim of our hope is the completion of God’s saving work “to be revealed in the last time.” This hope is not “the expectation of something desired.” It is certain—“imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.” As we wait for it, various trials will come to us in the “little while” of our earthly lives. These trials come from God. They come for a good purpose—to test the genuineness of our faith. And they come only if necessary (we can be sure that no unnecessary trial will ever come to us).

Abraham Kuyper writes:

A year of your life can never be understood by itself. Every year of your life must be viewed in connection with your whole life here, and with your whole life in the hereafter, because it stands so, and not otherwise, before God, and is so, and not otherwise to be explained. … But if this year [the child of God] must go through a period when God puts him in the smelting furnace, or makes finer cuttings on the diamond of his soul, then, though tears make his eyes glisten, he will nobly bear up in the exaltation of faith; for then it is certain that he is in need of this, that it can not be otherwise, and that, if it did go otherwise, his life would be a failure forever.

The Future of Hope

“Hope stands up to its knees in the past and keeps its eyes on the future,” writes Frederick Buechner. Gerhard Tersteegen describes in a hymn the backward and forward look of hope:

There is a balm for every pain, A medicine for all sorrow; The eye turned backward to the Cross, And forward to the morrow.

The morrow of the glory and the psalm, When He shall come; The morrow of the harping and the palm, The welcome home.

Meantime in His beloved hands our ways, And on His heart the wandering heart at rest; And comfort for the weary one who lays His head upon His Breast.

There is a past tense of hope—our eyes turned back to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. There is a future tense of hope—our eyes turned forward to heaven and the resurrection of the body and final judgment. There is also a present tense of hope—“meantime” our eyes turn upward to the Lord who reigns in heaven and inward to the same Lord who dwells in us by the Holy Spirit.

C. F. D. Moule pictures hope as “faith on tiptoe.” Frederick Buechner calls hope “the outermost edge of faith.” Young John Calvin compared faith and hope:

Hope is … the expectation of the things that faith has believed to be truly promised by God. Thus Faith believes God to be truthful: Hope expects that he will show his veracity at the opportune time. Faith believes God to be our Father: Hope expects that he will always act as such toward us. Faith believes the eternal life to be given to us: Hope expects that it shall at some time be revealed.

Faith believes what God has said and rejoices in what he has done. Hope stretches to see what God will do for those who love him and will do about this broken creation. In their first Communion, Christians of the early church were given, in addition to bread and wine, a cup of milk and honey as a foretaste of the heavenly food of which the blessed partake in the kingdom of God.

Hope looks to the future, but we do not yet experience “the hope of heaven” and “the redemption of our bodies.” As Paul writes, “Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:25). Our hope is not uncertain, but its fulfillment is future. “The work of grace and the life of faith will yet be crowned with final glory, and it is in respect of that great hope that we were saved.” We wait for it. We wait eagerly but also patiently.

Heaven

What does hope see when it stands on tiptoe and looks into the future? It sees survival after death, and for Christians a blessed life thereafter in heaven. Jesus told the disciples there are “many rooms” in his Father’s heavenly house (John 14:2). And he promised believers a reward in those “eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:9). He told the dying thief he would be with him “in Paradise” that very day (23:43). Paul had a “desire to depart and be with Christ,” which, he wrote, “is far better” (Phil. 1:23). Hebrews describes God’s people as “strangers and exiles on the earth” who are seeking a homeland, “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” And that God “has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:13, 16).

In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin writes a section called the Christian’s “Meditation on the Future Life.” “When we think of our crown,” he tells us, “we are to raise our eyes to heaven.”

Heaven is beyond our understanding but not our comprehension. It will be amazing, astounding, and overwhelming, but it will not be strange. Going to heaven will not be like going to a foreign country, where we don’t know the language, the customs, or the people. It will be like coming home after a long (or perhaps not so long) journey in a distant land. I received a letter from a friend in India with the message that Sinkhokam Tombing, eighty years old, “left for his heavenly Home today at around 10 p.m. (Indian Standard Time).”

Two great Christian writers imagine what it is like to go home to heaven. At the end of part 2 of The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan describes the homegoing of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth. When he was summoned to cross the river of death, he called for his friends and said:

I am going to my Father’s, and tho’ with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My Sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage, and my Courage and Skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought His battles, who will now be my Rewarder. When the day when he must go hence was come, many accompany’d him to the Riverside, into which as he went, he said, “Death, where is thy sting?” And as he went down deeper, he said, “Grave, where is thy victory?” So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

On the last page of The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis writes in The Last Battle about what happens when Peter, Susan, and Lucy are killed in a train wreck:

The things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

The Intermediate State

It is not only the Westminster Confession of Faith but also Scripture that teaches “the bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep … immediately return to God who gave them: the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies.” In the beautiful language of the Larger Catechism we read that our bodies “continue united to Christ, and rest in their graves as in their beds, till at the last day they be again united to their souls.”

A little cemetery on Elbow Cay, one of the northeasternmost islands in the Bahamas, is near a sandy beach, right by the ocean. It is a beautiful place, a quiet place, a place to watch the morning sun rise over the sea. Its name is “Asleep in Jesus Cemetery.” One of the graves has a little wooden cross with the name “Mary Thompson,” the dates “1920–1999,” and words that, I think, must have often been on her lips: “I am fine.”

Mary Thompson and all the saints in heaven eagerly look forward to what is yet to come. For Old Testament saints there was an “already” and a “not yet.” For New Testament believers there is more “already” but still much “not yet.” We do not yet see clearly the face of God; we do not yet know completely what we will know someday. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). For souls in heaven there is much more “already,” but there is still a remaining “not yet.” When we die and go to heaven, we are gloriously free from sin and the trials and troubles of this world, but we are not completely free from the effects of the curse until our bodies are raised from the dead. Calvin says the life of believers in heaven is only a “stage,” not to be thought of as equivalent to complete blessedness, which involves the resurrection of the body.

A preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead says, “When someone dies the body is just a suit of old clothes the spirit doesn’t want anymore.” But he did not get that from the Bible. The body is our earthly home, an important part of who we are, and death is unnatural. “Even more—death is evil, sin’s offspring, Christ’s enemy, Satan’s servant; and every Christian heart must stand aghast before it.” We dread death, but we do not fear it. We are not yet delivered from Satan, sin, afflictions, or death, but we are already “being delivered” from bondage to Satan, dominion of sin, the evil of afflictions, the sting of death, and the victory of the grave.

At death the soul goes directly to heaven to be with the Lord and experiences completed salvation, finished sanctification, entire holiness. The bliss of the intermediate state is infinitely more to be desired than anything that can come to us on earth; it is less desirable only than the completed redemption yet to come. “The salvation is complete, but it is as yet only an incomplete man that is saved.” B. B. Warfield describes the Christian now in heaven “as the storm-tossed mariner” who “desires the haven which its vessel has long sought to win through the tossing waves and adverse winds—gate only though it be of the country which he calls home, and long though he may need to wait until all his goods are landed.”

The New Heaven and the New Earth

“The hope of heaven” brings us great encouragement and comfort, but Christian hope looks forward to even more than heaven. It looks beyond heaven to the new heaven and the new earth. The God who will say to you and me one day, “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” will also say someday, “Behold I am making all things new.” The Christian hope in the complete triumph of God over the poisonous reality of death goes beyond our personal and individual salvation to the ultimate goal of God, who will make all things new.

Revelation 21 and 22 open a window through which we can catch a glimpse of the new heaven and the new earth. In Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, Ian Maclaren describes a sunset in the glen of Drumtochty when an elder of the Scottish Free Church, Jamie Soutar, and Mr. Hopps, an English visitor, were walking in the gloaming. Mr. Hopps was so inspired by the sunset that “he tried to drive Jamie into extravagance. ‘No bad! I call it glorious, and if it hisn’t, then I’d like to know what his.’ ‘Man,’ replied Soutar austerely, ‘Ye’ill surely keep ae word for the twenty-first o’ Reevelation.’”

When the Bible writers speak of the blessedness of heaven, they speak sparingly of the state of the separate soul; but when they describe the resurrection, they seem to be enraptured. In the eighth chapter of Romans, the “Magna Carta” of Christian hope, Paul points to the resurrection of the body and deliverance of the whole creation from the bondage of corruption into glorious liberty, when he writes:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom. 8:19–23)

No part of the universe is untouched by the longing with which everything in this world hopes for resurrection and restoration.

In Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard, the theologian stops his horse to read the Good Friday office in the woods.

Leaning with one arm flung across the mare, he began to read. “Come, and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn and he will heal us; he hath smitten and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.”

With our arms around all of groaning creation, we long for the time when we together will “obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21).

The vision of Revelation 21 and 22 sets forth the culmination of the promise, the realization of our long-hoped-for hope. When Boswell objected to the words of the Anglican burial service—“in the sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection”—Dr. Johnson was scarcely justified in replying: “It is sure and certain hope, sir; not belief.” “The sure and certain hope of the resurrection” is hope that is belief and belief that is hope. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).

In Revelation 21 we hear “a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God’” (v. 3). The covenant promise of God, the foundation of Christian hope, is loudly and triumphantly repeated three times for emphasis. He is our God, who keeps his promise to his covenant people.

We see “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (v. 2). Timothy Keller writes, “The Bible teaches that the future is not an immaterial ‘paradise’ but a new heaven and a new earth. In Revelation 21, we do not see human beings being taken out of this world into heaven, but rather heaven coming down and cleansing, renewing, and perfecting this material world.” And we see the church of God cleansed, renewed, and perfected “as a bride adorned for her husband.”

There is something else we see in Revelation 21, or rather some things we don’t see—death, mourning and crying, pain—“for the former things have passed away” (v. 4). The defeat of death had already taken place at the death and resurrection of Christ, and now “death shall be no more.” “Death, thou shalt die,” wrote John Donne.

God himself, who is our God, “will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (v. 4). Just before he died, John Ames, the Congregational minister in Gilead, concluded a journal written for his young son: “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” Tears introduced by humanity’s fall will be wiped away by the one who wept in the face of death at the tomb of Lazarus, whose soul was “very sorrowful” in Gethsemane, and who cried out on the cross.

Revelation 22:3 sums up the glory of the new heaven and the new earth with the words, “No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.” “The biblical vision of hope,” writes Christiaan Beker, “is the longing for that benign and just sovereignty of God which will right all wrongs and which will finally make our tears cease and give our restless heart its final rest in the merciful arms of God.”

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver speaks of that time to come, when he recites a famous rhyme of Narnia:

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes into sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

The words of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov look forward to that day when “wrong will be right”:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage. In the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice. It will comfort all resentments. It will atone for all the crimes, for all the blood that has been shed, that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify everything that happens.

In his great sorrow Job asks, “Why is light given to him who is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who longs for death, but it comes not?”(Job 3:20–21). Garret Keizer writes about the question his friend Pete, an old man living in a nursing home in Vermont on the Canadian border, constantly asks him: “Why does a person keep living? Why do you just go on and on? What is the point?” Keizer tries to answer Pete’s question, but he knows, even as he tells Pete about “God’s unseen purposes” and “the value of each person’s unique struggle in God’s plan, this is a question he has every right to ask and no one but God could answer.” And God will answer. Pete now has his answer. So does Job.

When we read the last chapter of a good book, we are disappointed that the book is finished. But the last chapter of the Bible will take us an eternity to read. At the end of The City of God, Augustine declares epochs of history could be reckoned as days of the week. He writes:

However, it would be a long task to go on to discuss each of those epochs in detail. The important thing is that the seventh [day] will be our Sabbath whose end will not be an evening, but the Lord’s Day, an eighth day, as it were, which is to last forever, a day consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, foreshadowing the eternal rest not only of the spirit but of the body also. There we shall be still and see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what will be, in the end, without end! For what is our end but to reach that kingdom which has no end?

The first professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, Thomas Goulding, told his students, “Let every sermon preached contain so much of the plan of salvation that should a person come in who never heard the gospel before, and who should depart never to hear it again, he should learn enough to know what he must do to be saved.” May I follow Dr. Goulding’s advice about preaching as I complete this chapter in this book about heaven? What is probably the best-known verse in the Bible sums up the Bible’s message: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The way to God and eternal life is Jesus, who is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6). The nearly last words in the Bible repeat again God’s invitation: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Rev. 22:17). Come to Jesus, just as you are. Then you, too, can sing with hope that is both trust and confidence, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O what a foretaste of glory divine!”

The Bible’s final words, followed only by the benediction, are “Come, Lord Jesus” (v. 20). Matthew Henry writes in the conclusion to his Commentary on the Bible:

Thus beats the pulse of the church, thus breathes that gracious Spirit, which actuates and informs the mystical body of Christ; and we should never be satisfied till we find such a spirit breathing in us, and causing us to look for the blessed hope and glorious appearance of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ. This is the language of the church of the first-born, and we should join with them, often putting ourselves in mind of the promise. What comes from heaven in a promise should be sent back to heaven in a prayer. “Come, Lord Jesus”; put an end to this state of sin, sorrow and temptation; gather thy people out of this present evil world, and take them up to heaven, that state of perfect purity, peace and joy, and so finish thy great design, and fulfill all that word in which thou hast caused thy people to hope.

Somebody say, “Amen!”

Taken from Heaven edited by Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson, ©2014, pp. 243–62. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.