What is heaven like?

Suffering, Evil & Hard QuestionsIn theological review

The short answer

Heaven, in the Bible's final picture, is a renewed earth, not an escape from one: God dwelling with his people in a vast, garden like city, with death, mourning, crying and pain ended, and a river and a tree of life at its centre. Scripture holds two things together: Paul says no eye has seen what God has prepared, and Revelation still gives real pictures. They are pictures, stated plainly, of a real place.

The fuller answer

Start by correcting the cartoon. The Bible's final destination is not clouds, harps and disembodied floating. It is a new heaven and a new earth, with a city that comes down to earth and a voice announcing that God's dwelling place is now among his people. Bodies are raised, a world is renewed, and the story ends where it began, with God and humanity together in a garden, except that the garden has become a city and the curse that drove them out is gone for good.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

Revelation 21:1 (BSB)

Revelation's last chapters name what will be absent and what will be present. Absent: death, mourning, crying, pain, night, curse, and the sea that ancient readers associated with chaos and separation. Present: the river of the water of life, the tree of life bearing fruit through the year with leaves for the healing of the nations, work and worship side by side, and God himself wiping tears from faces. These are pictures, using the best images its first readers knew, of realities John insists are coming, not symbols of nothing.

‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’ and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Revelation 21:4 (BSB)

Isaiah saw it centuries earlier: new heavens and a new earth, houses built and inhabited, long lives, a wolf and a lamb feeding together, and no harm on God's holy mountain. Paul holds the other end of the rope. Quoting prophecy, he says no eye has seen and no ear has heard what God has prepared for those who love him. Both belong in the answer. The pictures are true guides to the character of the place. They are not a floor plan, and the reality is promised to be more, not less, than them.

For behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.

Isaiah 65:17 (BSB)

The centre of heaven, in every picture, is not scenery but a person. The city has no temple because the Lord God and the Lamb are its temple, and no sun because his glory is its light. Heaven is heaven because God is there, seen face to face at last by people made whole. That is also why Scripture's invitation is never simply to a place. It is to the Lamb whose death opened it. Whatever else surprises us on arrival, Christians expect recognition at the centre: we will know whose home we have come to.

Sources

Berean Standard Bible (BSB)

Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.

Dig deeper

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What happens when we die?The Bible says we die once, and after that face judgment. For those who trust Christ, death is not the end or a long unconscious wait: Jesus told the dying thief, today you will be with me in Paradise. Beyond that lies what the whole story leans toward, resurrection of the body and a renewed world where death itself is finished.What happens between death and the resurrection?Scripture teaches that those who die in Christ are with him immediately, consciously and in rest, while they await the resurrection of the body: to be away from the body, Paul says, is to be at home with the Lord. Jesus promised the dying thief that they would be together in paradise that day. The view called soul sleep, that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection, is stated fairly below, but the direct statements of Jesus and Paul point the other way.Will we know each other in heaven?The Bible gives good reason to expect that we will know each other in heaven, though it answers the question indirectly. Jesus's teaching that there is no marriage in the resurrection answers a question about marriage, not about recognition. His parable of the rich man and Lazarus pictures the dead recognising one another, and Paul comforts grieving believers with a reunion: the dead in Christ rise, and then the living are caught up together with them, with the Lord.What is the resurrection of the body?The resurrection of the body is the Christian hope that God will raise the dead bodily at Christ's return, transforming the bodies of believers into imperishable, glorious bodies like Christ's own. It is not a soul escaping the body forever: it is the body redeemed. Paul devotes the longest chapter in his letters to it and stakes everything on it: if Christ has not been raised, he says, the faith is futile.Bible Character: John, the apostleThe disciple whom Jesus loved, who leaned against him at the supper, stood at the cross and received his mother, ran to the empty tomb, and wrote the fourth Gospel and the Revelation.Bible Character: JesusThe Son of God, born of Mary in Bethlehem, who preached the kingdom of God, was crucified for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was raised on the third day.Lesson: The big story of the BibleThe Bible is one story, not sixty-six separate ones. Walk the whole arc once, from creation to new creation, and every book you open will have a place to sit.