I Don't Know How Heaven Works!

But I Know What the Cross Says!

Even though I am a Pastor, I can’t say that I’ve thought a lot about heaven. Life on planet Earth has plenty of excitement on its own and navigating it takes a lot of time.

It’s obviously more on my mind now since Jan passed away on May 3.

What many Christians may find surprising is that the Bible isn’t crystal clear on heaven. It sends mixed signals.

How can it not? Not one of the Biblical writers had been there when they were writing. It has to be and can only be a mystery. It has to be and can only be described with poetry and metaphor.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that we can’t speak about it with some wisdom and faith.

Much of what we often hear, regardless of the mixed messages of the Bible, or maybe because of them, isn’t really Biblical at all. Perhaps that’s because, in part, in the face of death, we need certainty, not mystery or poetry or metaphor.

Not that it’s bad. It’s meant to comfort after all. But it’s not really in line with what the Cross and Empty Tomb have to say.

For example, one way we comfort one another is to say something like this: God welcomed another angel into heaven.

Except, the Bible doesn’t say we will become angels. The Bible seems to suggest that God places a higher premium on us than on angels, for lack of a better word. Again, we will be fully human on the day of the resurrection. We don’t become angels.

(There is one passage where Jesus says that we will be like the angels in that we won’t marry. This is a simile or comparison: we will be like but not…)

Or we talk about going up to heaven. But the Bible seems to suggest that heaven is not a place we will go to up there somewhere. Rather, heaven, or God’s rule, will come to earth, transform our planet with grace, love, justice, and life, and we will reside here. (Maybe, just maybe, the Vikings and the Cardinals will win a Super Bowl then!)

Perhaps the most common way we speak of heaven is saying our souls immediately go to heaven, with Jesus, reuniting us with loved ones. Again, comforting. But not Biblical.

The Bible doesn’t speak about souls going to heaven. It speaks about a one-day bodily resurrection. Just as Jesus rose from the dead bodily, with the scars still evident, with the ability to eat food, recognizable and yet somehow radically different, so one day we will be raised bodily to new life.

But here it gets even more confusing.

On the one hand, Jesus seems to suggest an immediate entrance into heaven/paradise when he says to the thief on the cross: TODAY you will be with me in Paradise.

But Paul, on the other hand, uses the image of sleeping; that somehow we are in a state of suspended animation until the call of Jesus reanimates and resurrects us bodily. This suggests a waiting period.

For me, it may be one and the same. If dying is like sleeping, we all know what it’s like to fall asleep and “instantly” wake up 8 hours later!

The point is: how heaven works is a mystery. What happens immediately after we die is a mystery.

And mystery doesn’t sit well when we are going through death or watching the death of a loved one.

So here’s what we can know:

There is nowhere we can go and be outside of the presence of God in Christ. Nowhere! As in… nowhere!

Psalm 23 reminds us that when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we need not fear for we are not alone. God is with us.

Paul says it this way in Romans 8:

³⁵ Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?…

³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹ nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

When Jesus, on the cross, cried out, My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?, feeling abandoned by God, he found that God was there all along: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

We are never outside of God’s presence, even in death!

Which means, however it works, we are never outside of the realm of heaven.

So… regardless of how it works and what it looks like, right now and forever more you live in the grip of the love of Jesus.

The one who went ahead of you in death, Jesus the good shepherd, will be present with you in death as well, or, in my case and the cases of so many like me, the experiencing of death as profound loss.

There is nowhere you can go and be outside of the presence of God.

Nothing can ever separate you from the love of Jesus.

And that’s heaven.