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by
Randy Alcorn
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April 3 - December 4, 2022
Some of Satan’s favorite lies are about Heaven. Revelation 13:6 tells us the satanic beast “opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander
his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven.” Our enemy slanders three things: God’s person, God’s people, and God’s place—namely, Heaven.[18]
After being forcibly evicted from Heaven (Isaiah 14:12-15), the devil became bitter not only toward God, but toward mankind and toward Heaven itself, the place that was no longer his. It must be maddening for him that we’re now entitled to the home he was kicked out of. What better way for the devil and his demons to attack us than...
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As long as the resurrected universe remains either undesirable or unimaginable, Satan succeeds in sabotaging our love for Heaven.
The command, and its restatement, implies there is nothing automatic about setting our minds on Heaven. In fact, most commands assume a resistance to obeying them, which sets up the necessity for the command. We are told to avoid sexual immorality because it is our tendency. We are not told to avoid jumping off buildings because normally we don’t battle such a temptation.
Our minds are so much set on Earth that we are unaccustomed to heavenly thinking. So we must work at it.
Most of us find it very difficult to want “Heaven” at all—except in so far as “Heaven” means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it. C. S. Lewis
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.
For every American who believes he’s going to Hell, there are 120 who believe they’re going to Heaven.
Satan has obvious motives for fueling our denial of eternal punishment: He wants unbelievers to reject Christ without fear; he wants Christians to be unmotivated to share Christ; and he wants God to receive less glory for the radical nature of Christ’s redemptive work.
The best of life on Earth is a glimpse of Heaven; the worst of life is a glimpse of Hell. For Christians, this present life is the closest they will come to Hell. For unbelievers, it is the closest they will come to Heaven.
Consider the wonder of it: God determined that he would rather go to Hell on our behalf than live in Heaven without us. He so much wants us not to go to Hell that he paid a horrible price on the cross so that we wouldn’t have to.
Soon you will read in the newspaper that I am dead. Don’t believe it for a moment. I will be more alive than ever before. D. L. MOODY
The Greek word translated “it is finished” was commonly written across certificates of debt when they were canceled. It meant “paid in full.” Christ died so that the certificate of debt, consisting of all our sins, could once and for all be marked “paid in full.”
A Christ-centered church is not a showcase for saints but a hospital for sinners.
There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. C. S. Lewis
In the words of C. S. Lewis, “All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”
Rather than our going up to live in God’s home forever, God will come down to live in our home forever. Simply put, though the present Heaven is “up there,” the future, eternal Heaven will be “down here.” If we fail to see that distinction, we fail to understand God’s plan and are unable to envision what our eternal lives will look like.
Often our thinking is backwards. Why do we imagine that God patterns Heaven’s holy city after an earthly city, as if Heaven knows nothing of community and culture and has to get its ideas from us? 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.
The word paradise comes from the Persian word pairidaeza, meaning “a walled park” or “enclosed garden.”
We must also keep in mind that Revelation 21:4, the verse most often quoted on the subject of sorrow in Heaven, refers specifically to the eternal Heaven, the New Earth. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Christ’s promise of no more tears or pain comes after the end of the old Earth, after the Great White Throne Judgment, after “the old order of things has passed away” and there’s no more suffering on Earth.
“The eternal phase of Heaven will be so unlike what we are familiar with that our
present language can’t even describe it.”[2] Certainly our present language can’t fully describe it, but it does in fact describe it (e.g., Revelation 21–22).
Rather, God will bring Heaven and Earth together into the same -dimension, with no wall of separation, no armed angels to guard Heaven’s perfection from sinful mankind (Genesis 3:24). God’s perfect plan is “to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ” (Ephesians 1:10).
22:5): “The sun will no more be your light by day, nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you, for the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory. Your sun will never set again, and your moon will wane no more; the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your days of sorrow will end” (vv. 19-20).
Will it be like alaska ; always day never night?
God doesn’t throw away his handiwork and start from scratch—instead, he uses the same canvas to repair and make more beautiful the painting marred by the vandal. The vandal doesn’t get the satisfaction of destroying his rival’s masterpiece. On the contrary, God makes an even greater masterpiece out of what his enemy sought to destroy.
Heaven is God’s home. Earth is our home. Jesus Christ, as the God-man, forever links God and mankind, and thereby forever links Heaven and Earth. As Ephesians 1:10 demonstrates, this idea of Earth and Heaven becoming one is explicitly biblical. Christ will make Earth into Heaven and Heaven into Earth. Just as the wall that separates God and mankind is torn down in Jesus, so too the wall that separates Heaven and Earth will be forever demolished. There will be one universe, with all things in Heaven and on Earth together under one head, Jesus Christ. “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he
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God will lift the Curse, not only morally (in terms of sins) and psychologically (in terms of sorrows), but also physically (in terms of thorns in the ground).
Of Americans who believe in a resurrection of the dead, two-thirds believe they will not have bodies after the resurrection.[3] But this is self-contradictory. A non-physical resurrection is like a sunless sunrise. There’s no such thing. Resurrection means that we will have bodies. If we didn’t have bodies, we wouldn’t be resurrected!
We do not just say what we believe—we end up believing what we say. That’s why I propose that we should consciously correct our vocabulary so it conforms to revealed biblical truth.
John Piper argues that God did not create matter to throw it away. He writes, “When Revelation 21:1 and 2 Peter 3:10 say that the present earth and heavens will ‘pass away,’ it does not have to mean that they go out of existence, but may mean that there will be such a change in them that their present condition passes away. We might say, ‘The caterpillar passes away, and the butterfly emerges.’ There is a real passing away, and there is a real continuity, a real connection.”[4]
Think for a moment what this will mean for Adam and Eve. When the New Earth comes down from Heaven, the rest of us will be going home, but Adam and Eve will be coming home.
No wonder Satan doesn’t want us to learn the truth about Heaven. If we fall in love with the place and look forward to the future that God has for us, we’ll fall more in love with God, and we’ll be emboldened to follow him with greater resolve and perspective.
Not only will we see his face and live, but we will likely wonder if we ever lived before we saw his face! To see God will be our greatest joy, the joy by which all others will be measured.
Because of the current darkness of our hearts, we must be careful not to make idols out of God’s provisions. But once we’re freed from sin and we’re in God’s presence, we’ll never have to worry about putting people or things above God. That would be unthinkable. (Were we thinking clearly, it would be unthinkable to us now.)
We will see Christ in his glory. The most exhilarating experiences on Earth, such as white-water rafting, skydiving, or extreme sports, will seem tame compared to the thrill of seeing Jesus. Being with him. Gazing at him. Talking with him. Worshiping him. Embracing him. Eating with him. Walking with him. Laughing with him. Imagine it!
It might be better, then, if we think of the location of the present Heaven as not in another universe but simply as a part of ours that we are unable to see, due to our spiritual blindness. If that’s true, when we die we don’t go to a different universe but to a place within our universe that we’re currently unable to see.
If the “wrong side” of Heaven can be so beautiful, what will the right side look like? If the smoking remains are so stunning, what will Earth look like when it’s resurrected and made new, restored to the original?
In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We have joy whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it does not. Randy Alcorn
Eden is a picture of rest—work that’s meaningful and enjoyable, abundant food, a beautiful environment, unhindered friendship with God and other people and animals.
Work wasn’t part of the Curse. The Curse, rather, made work menial, tedious, and frustrating:
