Heaven 2 - 9th Nov

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare”. 2 Peter 3 v10.

Fire is a sign of purification, and what is bad on earth will cease to exist in heaven whilst what is good will survive. So there will be continuation of what is good in this life. Things will also be made new.

John and Anne Coles say there is a lot we can deduce about Heaven from the Bible. Two general principles, they suggest, are that that in heaven there will be more not less and things will be better not worse.

Maybe we have built up some false images of Heaven . Maybe you think it is like one long worship time? The book of Revelation tells us there will certainly be worship far exceeding our experience of it on earth. Does “eternal” mean there is no sense of time? ..but there is music in heaven, which needs time to distinguish between notes and make rhythms, so this cannot be the case.

Will there be work in heaven? God put Adam and Eve to work in the Garden of Eden.. but this was not drudgery. Some professions we know will be redundant (policemen, evangelists, firefighters), but if what is good survives then so probably does our creativity as artists, musicians, poets gardeners and engineers. That thought can inspire us on earth as we build for eternity.

Will there be men and women in heaven? Well if men and women are needed to reflect the image of God, then maybe that part of us survives in Heaven. So although marriage will not continue, maybe our sexuality does in a transformed way, that removes the tensions that can exist between men and women. John and Anne imagine far greater intimacy than we know in marriage.

These thoughts are extrapolations of what we can deduce from the Bible. Maybe it won’t be exactly as we imagine, but unless we engage with Heaven in our imaginations in a Biblically informed way, we will probably miss out on looking forward to the wonderful life to come.

People talk about the afterlife. Maybe we should talk about this as the before life, because we can be sure that what is to come is greater.