Heaven: A Comprehensive Guide to Everything the Bible Says About Our Eternal Home

by Randy Alcorn

We fail to envision God as forever incarnate in the risen Christ, and we fail to recognize the New Earth as a physical environment, civilization, and culture in which God will dwell with us.

What we are suited for—what we’ve been specifically designed for—is a place like the one God made for us: Earth.

In this book, we’ll see from Scripture an exciting yet strangely neglected truth—that God never gave up on his original plan for human beings to dwell on Earth.

The shore we should look for is that of the New Earth. If we can see through the fog and picture our eternal home in our mind’s eye, it will comfort and energize us.

What would have attracted him was a place where he could do meaningful and pleasurable things with enjoyable people. In fact, that’s a far more accurate depiction of what Heaven will actually be like.

What God made us to desire, and therefore what we do desire if we admit it, is exactly what he promises to those who follow Jesus Christ: a resurrected life in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ on a resurrected Earth.

In 1937, Scottish theologian John Baillie wrote, “I will not ask how often during the last twenty-five years you and I have listened to an old-style warning against the flames of hell. I will not even ask how many sermons have been preached in our hearing about a future day of reckoning when men shall reap according as they have sown. It will be enough to ask how many preachers, during these years, have dwelt on the joys of heavenly rest with anything like the old ardent love and impatient longing.”

Too often we’ve been taught that Heaven is a non-physical realm, which cannot have real gardens, cities, kingdoms, buildings, banquets, or bodies. So we fail to take seriously what Scripture tells us about Heaven as a familiar, physical, tangible place.

You will understand that in order to get a picture of Heaven—which will one day be centered on the New Earth—you don’t need to look up at the clouds; you simply need to look around you and imagine what all this would be like without sin and death and suffering and corruption.

We need a generation of heavenly minded people who see human beings and the earth itself not simply as they are, but as God intends them to be.

“The Christian is the really free man—he is free to have imagination. This too is our heritage. The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond

the stars.”36

Schaeffer always started with God’s revealed truth. But he exhorted us to let that truth fuel our imagination. Imagination should not fly awa...

Thus, if Heaven will be consciously experienced forever, Hell must be consciously experienced forever.

In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis writes of Hell, “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.”

Still, the intermediate or present Heaven is not our final destination.

In the present Heaven, we’ll be in Christ’s presence, and we’ll be joyful, but we’ll be looking forward to our bodily resurrection and permanent relocation to the New Earth.

Wayne Grudem. “But in fact the biblical teaching is richer than that: it tells us that there will be new heavens and a new earth—an entirely renewed creation—and we will live with God there. . . . There will also be a new kind of unification of heaven and earth. . . . There will be a joining of heaven and earth in this new creation.”

Only God is eternal and self-existent. All else is created. Heaven is not synonymous with God, nor is it part of his essential being.

The past Heaven, the present Heaven, and the future or eternal Heaven can all be called Heaven, yet they are not synonymous, even though they are all God’s dwelling places.

The present Heaven is a temporary lodging, a waiting place until the return of Christ and our bodily resurrection.

The great redemptive promises of God will find their ultimate fulfillment on the New Earth, not in the present Heaven.

God does not change; he’s immutable. But God clearly says that Heaven will change.

Similarly, what we now refer to as Hell will also be relocated. After the Great White Throne Judgment, Hell will be cast into the eternal lake of fire (Revelation 20:14-15).

The present, intermediate Heaven is in the angelic realm, distinctly separate from Earth (though as we’ll see, likely having more physical qualities than we might assume).

Heaven, God’s dwelling place, will one day be on the New Earth.

We’re told that “the throne of God and of the Lamb” is in the New Jerusalem, which is brought down to the New Earth (Revelation 22:1). Again, it seems clear that wherever God dwells with his people and sits on his throne would be called Heaven.

This is a picture of God’s ultimate plan—not to take us up to live in a realm made for him, but to come down and live with us in the realm he made for us.

The Incarnation is about God inhabiting space and time as a human being—the new heavens and New Earth are about God making space and time his eternal home.

But Scripture indicates they will be joined. Their present incompatibility is due to a temporary aberration—Earth is under sin and the Curse. Once that aberration is corrected, Heaven and Earth will be fully compatible again (Ephesians 1:10).

Utopian idealists who dream of mankind creating “Heaven on Earth” are destined for disappointment. But though they are wrong in believing that humans can achieve a utopian existence apart from God, the reality of Heaven on Earth—God dwelling with mankind in the world he made for us—will in fact be realized. It is God’s dream. It is God’s plan. He—not we—will accomplish it.

Every reference in Revelation to human beings talking and worshiping in Heaven prior to the resurrection of the dead demonstrates that our spiritual beings are conscious, not sleeping, after death.

Our works do not affect our salvation, but they do affect our reward. Rewards are about our work for God, empowered by his Spirit. Rewards are conditional, dependent on our faithfulness (2 Timothy 2:12; Revelation 2:26-28; 3:21).51

The Bible teaches that sometimes humans are allowed to see into Heaven. When Stephen was being stoned because of his faith in Christ, he gazed into Heaven: “Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God’” (Acts 7:55-56). Scripture tells us not that Stephen dreamed this, but that he actually saw it.

In either case, it seems likely that God didn’t merely create a vision for Stephen in order to make Heaven appear physical. Rather, he allowed Stephen to see an intermediate Heaven that was (and is) physical.

Physical and spiritual are neither opposite nor contradictory. In fact, the apostle Paul refers to the resurrection body as a “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44). God is a spirit, and angels are spirit beings, but both can—and on the New Earth will—live in a physical environment.

Likewise, we should not assume that the Bible describes Heaven in physical ways merely to accommodate us. It is fully possible that the present Heaven is a physical realm.

But saying that God is spirit is very different from saying that Heaven is spirit. Heaven, after all, is not the same as God. God created Heaven; therefore, he did not always dwell there. Though God chooses to dwell in Heaven, he does not need a dwelling place.

Why are we so resistant to the idea that Heaven could be physical? The answer, I believe, is centered in an unbiblical belief that the spirit realm is good and the material world is bad, a view I am calling Christoplatonism.

Plato, the Greek philosopher, believed that material things, including the human body and the earth, are evil, while immaterial things such as the soul and Heaven are

good.

Though the idea of Earth as Heaven’s shadow is seldom discussed, even in books on Heaven, it’s a concept that has biblical support.

The book of Hebrews seems to say that we should see Earth as a derivative realm and Heaven as the source realm.

We should stop thinking of Heaven and Earth as opposites and instead view them as overlapping circles that share certain commonalities.

C. S. Lewis proposed that “the hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as a substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.”

Isn’t it more likely that earthly realities, including cities, are derived from heavenly counterparts?

We tend to start with Earth and reason up toward Heaven, when instead we should start with Heaven and reason down toward Earth.

In the Judaism of the New Testament era, “The site of reopened Paradise is almost without exception the earth. . . . The belief in resurrection gave assurance that all the righteous, even those who are dead, would have a share in the reopened paradise.”59

Eden was not destroyed. What was destroyed was mankind’s ability to live in Eden. There’s no indication that Eden was stripped of its physicality and transformed into a “spiritual” entity. It appears to have remained just as it was, a physical paradise removed to a realm we can’t gain access to—most likely the present Heaven, because we know for certain that’s where the tree of life now is (Revelation 2:7).

The tree of life’s presence in the New Jerusalem establishes that elements of Eden, as physical as the original, will again be part of the human experience.