Contemplating Heaven

I have been thinking about Heaven lately. I wonder what that means? Heaven has always been the goal of being a follower of Jesus, but in all of my years, I have never had more than a very dim (nearly dark) understanding of what Heaven would be like.

The progressive story of redemption contained in the Bible gives us only glimpses at best. I am afraid my picture of heaven may have been formed by cartoons as much as anything else. There was always someone or something in a cartoon that got crushed and then floated upward with a harp and wings. But I am beginning to believe that Heaven will be both dramatically similar and correspondingly antithetical to life as we now know it.

Here’s what I mean: The opening pages of Genesis take great care to help us understand that the Earth and all that exists here were created on purpose and were “good” in the eyes of God. The epitome of all this created goodness was the Garden and humanity was placed in the Garden to have fellowship with God, each other and the created universe. But there was one unique thing in this Garden. There was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Humanity was forbidden to eat from it. This was the sole restriction of life that we know of in the beginning. The fruit of the tree was not special or bad, in my opinion. The fruit had no magical powers or special qualities. The issue was that God in His sovereignty had said we could not eat from it.

I believe Adam and Eve had the freedom to choose to obey God in a way that no human has had since. Adam and Eve were unstained and perfectly naive. But the enemy of God, Satan, caused them to question God; to believe for a moment that they could make decisions for themselves rather than obey God. In that instant, all was lost. For each of us, the moment we begin to believe that we can or should make decisions for ourselves apart from obeying God, we become lost.

BUT…God is a searcher for lost souls. The rest of the Bible describes God’s work to redeem and restore. The final word God gives us in the book of Revelation is that at the end of history, the Garden will return. I imagine it to be Heaven and I think it will look curiously familiar and gloriously different. God will be there and will be our Light. And the Tree of Life will be there and will bring healing to the Nations.

One thing will not be there, however: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of rebellion will not exist anymore. Everyone who reaches Heaven will be there because they have chosen to place their life in the hands of God, in the grace of our Lord Jesus. The decision to trust God comes prior to Heaven, and Heaven is then the eternal expression of that trust in a God who is good and loving and powerful and glorious and adventurous. I want everyone to be there. I want everyone to understand.