Pastor Mark Driscoll
What would your honest first response be to this question: Do you think Heaven or Hell will be more boring? I’m guessing most people assume that Hell will be filled with party-goers and Heaven filled with party-poopers.
In his book on Heaven, Randy Alcorn quotes the now-deceased science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, “I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse”.
The common pictures of Heaven and Hell are completely wrong. Here’s a comparison and contrast of what the Bible actually says:
- Hell – isolation; Heaven – relationships
- Hell – pain; Heaven – pleasure
- Hell – boredom; Heaven – adventure
God is fun, exciting, and made us like Him for fun and excitement. The adrenaline rush, taste buds, and sex organs were all made by God intentionally.
God also has a sense of humor which means we will laugh a lot in Heaven:
- Psalm 2:4 “He who sits in the heavens laughs…”
- Psalm 37:13 “…the Lord laughs…”
- Psalm 59:8 “But you, O LORD, laugh at them…
The problem is that it’s easy to equate religious people and Heaven. This equation, however, is flawed. When on the earth, Jesus kept going to parties and having people throw parties when He showed up, including kids. The religious fundamentalists who were no fun but were damned and mental kept hounding and harassing Jesus who often responded by making jokes about them. Of course, they never got the punchline because they had apparently missed Ecclesiastes 3 in their Bible studies, “there is…a time to laugh”.
Jesus has the perfect sense of humor and tells us that this life has some tears, but that Heaven is the place of laughing, rejoicing, and jumping up and down like grown men do when other grown men carry the skin of a pig over a chalk line as time runs out on a clock, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh…Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven…” (Luke 6:21,23).
When the Bible uses the words joy some 200 times, and throws in the word laugh some 40 times, it reminds us that laughing is practice for Heaven. Martin Luther once said, “If you’re not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.”
In conclusion, a cheerless, critical, boring Christian is a bad advertisement for Heaven.
Who is the most fun person you know to hang out with? Why?
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