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Novelist John Updike tells the story of a fourteen-year-old boy named David. When it\u2019s time for questions in his catechism class, David looks to his pastor for answers:<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked Reverend Dobson about Heaven, and he said it was like Abraham Lincoln\u2019s goodness living after him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd why didn\u2019t you like it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, don\u2019t you see? It amounts to saying there isn\u2019t any Heaven at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t see that it amounts to that. What do you want Heaven to be?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, I don\u2019t know. I want it to be something. I thought he\u2019d tell me what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
We all want Heaven to be something. The Bible teaches it is something. Yet when it\u2019s spoken of so vaguely by Christian leaders, who speak so clearly about other aspects of life, it appears to us\u2014as it did to Updike\u2019s David\u2014that Heaven amounts to nothing at all.<\/p>\n
How many ministers have said at funerals, \u201cshe will live on in our memories\u201d? That sentiment suggests that though we might remember her, she will not live on. The Bible teaches that when Christians die, we will live on in Christ\u2019s presence, awaiting the greatest day in the history of the universe\u2014the Resurrection\u2014all Creation renewed and living on forever, real people on a real earth.<\/p>\n
Few, however, really seem to believe this. \u201cScientific, philosophical, and theological skepticism has nullified the modern Heaven and replaced it with teachings that are minimalist, meager, and dry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heaven was once an elementary teaching in which believers were solidly trained. This is no longer the case. Vagueness and dimness characterize our modern view of Heaven. We, our children, our churches, and our culture are thereby impoverished.<\/p>\n
Paul, in 2 Corinthians, wrote, \u201cWe groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling. . . . As long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. . . . We . . . would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord\u201d (5:2,6,8)<\/p>\n
Paul wasn\u2019t alone in his longing, then, and we\u2019re not alone in ours now. Following are some of my favorite quotes written by people who also anticipate the coming happiness of Heaven:<\/p>\n
To speak of \u201cimagining heaven\u201d does not imply or entail that heaven is a fictional notion, constructed by deliberately disregarding the harsher realities of the everyday world\u2026 We are able to inhabit the mental images we create, and thence anticipate the delight of finally entering the greater reality to which they correspond.<\/p>\n
Alister McGrath,\u00a0A Brief History of Heaven<\/em><\/p>\n
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One of the most disconcerting experiences which can come our way is to make a long journey, perhaps even to the other side of the world, and to discover on arrival that we have not been expected. \u2026 Heaven, however, is guaranteed not to disappoint. . . . We are expected.<\/p>\n
Bruce Milne,\u00a0The Message of Heaven and Hell<\/em><\/p>\n
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Our deepest instinct is heaven. Heaven is the ache in our bones, the splinter in our heart\u2026<\/p>\n
Homesickness\u2014this perpetual experience of missing something\u2014 usually gets misdiagnosed and so wrongly treated. . . . All our lives we take hold of the wrong thing, go to the wrong place, eat the wrong food. We drink too much, sleep too much, work too long, take too many vacations or too few\u2014all in the faint hope that this will finally satisfy us and so silence the hunger within.<\/p>\n
. . . We are metaphysically handicapped. This is not so much a design flaw as a designed flaw, a glitch wired into the system, a planned obsolescence.<\/p>\n
. . . This shaking, unslaked desire in me is a divining rod for streams of Living Water. . . . He put in me, in you, a homing device for heaven. We just won\u2019t settle for anything less.<\/p>\n
Mark Buchanan,\u00a0Things Unseen<\/em><\/p>\n
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O my Lord Jesus Christ, if I could be in heaven without You, it would be a hell; and if I could be in hell, and have You still, it would be a heaven to me, for You are all the heaven I need.<\/p>\n
Samuel Rutherford, quoted in\u00a0Morning and Evening<\/em><\/p>\n
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Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. \u2026I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.<\/p>\n
C. S. Lewis,\u00a0Mere Christianity<\/em><\/p>\n
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Can you hear the sighing in the wind? Can you feel the heavy silence in the mountains? Can you sense the restless longing in the sea? Can you see it in the woeful eyes of an animal? Something\u2019s coming . . . something better.<\/p>\n
Joni Eareckson Tada,\u00a0Heaven: Your Real Home<\/em><\/p>\n
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What can this incessant craving, and this impotence of attainment mean, unless there was once a happiness belonging to man, of which only the faintest traces remain, in that void which he attempts to fill with everything within his reach?<\/p>\n
Blaise Pascal,\u00a0Pens\u00e9es<\/em><\/p>\n
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The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.<\/p>\n
G. K. Chesterton,\u00a0Orthodoxy<\/em><\/p>\n
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The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. . . . Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.<\/p>\n
C. S. Lewis,\u00a0The Weight of Glory<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Nothing is more often misdiagnosed than our homesickness for Heaven. We think that what we want is sex, drugs, alcohol, a new job, a raise, a doctorate, a spouse, a large-screen television, a new car, a cabin in the woods, a condo in Hawaii. What we really want is the person we were made for, Jesus, and the place we were made for, Heaven. Nothing less can satisfy us.<\/p>\n
When I see ocean fish in an aquarium, I enjoy watching them, but I feel as if something\u2019s wrong. They don\u2019t belong there. It\u2019s not their home. The fish weren\u2019t made for that little glass box; they were made for a great ocean.<\/p>\n
I suppose the fish don\u2019t know any better, but I wonder if their instincts tell them that their true home is elsewhere. I know our instincts tell us that this fallen world isn\u2019t our home\u2014we were made for someplace better.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never been to Heaven, yet I miss it. Eden\u2019s in my blood. The best things of life are souvenirs from Eden, appetizers of the New Earth. There are just enough of them to keep us going but never enough to make us satisfied with the world as it is or ourselves as we are. We live between Eden and the New Earth, pulled toward what we once were and what we yet will be.<\/p>\n
Browse more resources<\/a>\u00a0on the topic of Heaven, and see Randy\u2019s\u00a0related books<\/a>, including\u00a0Heaven<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Promise of the New Earth<\/a>.<\/em><\/samp><\/p>\n