What Will Heaven Be Like?

This week on Things Unseen, our theme has been the four last things, the traditional topics in the Christian church for the Sundays in Advent. And today, we’ve come to the third of these four things: death, judgment, and now heaven. And I can almost hear a corporate sigh of relief because it’s been a week of heavy reflections, and there’s still one more to come. But today the clouds part, the sun shines, glory appears—heaven is our theme. And who doesn’t want to go to heaven?

Actually, I think that’s a more searching question than we might at first think. What do I mean? Well, years ago, I was driving some distance at home in Scotland to speak at a weekend conference, and as I was listening to BBC radio in the car, I was surprised to discover a program about heaven. And of course, it attracted my interest immediately. And so, for the next thirty minutes, I listened to a series of interviews with very well-known personalities, who were all asked the same question: What do you think heaven will be like?

And I began to notice a consistent pattern in the replies. It was the same in every single interview. It wasn’t what was said, it was what was never said, not even once. Not even once in all the descriptions of heaven did anybody mention the presence of God. I was reminded of the words of the psalmist, “God is not in their thoughts.” But I thought, “This is a staggering illustration.” If you don’t want God at the center of your life now, then you’ll not want Him at the center of the world to come. The person who lives without God naturally imagines a heaven without God. But as we’ll see tomorrow, a future world without God can’t possibly be heaven.

The program I was listening to was an illustration of a puzzle we often encounter: Why do people who have not wanted God in their lives think that dying will change all that and that they’ll then trust and love and adore Him? And here was the answer in this program: they don’t. They don’t want life with God and, therefore, they don’t really hope for heaven. The tragic mistake is to live without God and then die without God.

But what does it mean for someone who lives with God? What is heaven? Well, it’s being in the presence of God in a way we can only glimpse here. It’s experiencing the reality that’s so beautifully pictured for us in John’s vision in Revelation 4 and 5—descriptions of that reality in picture language and symbols. And that’s why, in a way, the central message of the book of Revelation is actually easy to grasp, even if some of the details seem mysterious: heaven is where God is enthralled in glory, where the Lord Jesus is seen as the Lion-King who became the slain Lamb, where the presence of the Spirit feels like rivers of fresh water, where amazing supernatural creatures are soloists in leading the heavenly anthems that are reflected, of course, in Handel’s Messiah. It’s a place where elders and martyrs lead a choir of innumerable size, where, as the hymn says, angels and men agree and sing from the same hymn book. Of course, all of this is symbolic language, but the important thing to grasp is that the reality is greater than the symbol. And when we experience the reality, we will see it’s totally consistent with the pictures that we’ve been given, only greater, more real, more wonderful, more beautiful.

I remember as a teenager dreaming that I’d died and gone to heaven and was being greeted by Christian friends who were already there. And I remember, in the dream, I saw myself pushing them aside—not sure if pushing is actually allowed in heaven, but this was a dream, after all. And I still remember saying to them: “Let me get to Jesus. I want to see Jesus.” Friends, that will be heaven. He is at its center. And we need to understand, there’s no other heaven than the one in which our Lord Jesus is present and reigns.

But before we go there, there are questions I imagine that some of us have. So let me answer two. Question one: When do Christians go to heaven? Answer: the moment we die. Question number two: Will we recognize each other in heaven? Answer: yes. After all, we’ll recognize Jesus but it may just take a few minutes before we recognize our dearest friends who have been transformed into His likeness, and then we say: “That’s who you are. That’s absolutely glorious.” And all this awaits those who trust in Jesus Christ. I hope you do.