Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

A Better Hope

The idea of Heaven is fascinating.  It’s actually one of the few universal human fascinations. Pretty much everybody thinks about heaven. Even if it’s your own made-up, private version of “heaven,” you think about it. C.S. Lewis once described heaven as that remote music we’re born remembering. I think that captures it pretty well. The whole human race has a kind of deep memory of paradise lost, a faint but powerful awareness that there must be a better, different world that we were designed for.

So what is heaven like?  For too many people, heaven offers not hope, but disappointment. Consider these thoughts from John Eldredge:

“Nearly every Christian I have spoken with has some idea that eternity is an un-ending church service…We have settled on an image of the never-ending sing-along in the sky, on great hymn after another, forever and ever, amen.  And our heart sinks.  Forever and ever?  That’s it?  That’s the good news?  And then we sigh and feel guilty that we are not more ‘spiritual.’  We lose heart, and we turn once more to the present to find what life we can.”  

 

A non-biblical view of heaven presents an existence that is boring and disappointing.  So it should not surprise us that people are searching for significance and satisfaction in this life—they don’t have much to look forward to in the next.  If Heaven is just a bunch of halo-wearing, cloud-sitting couch potatoes, bored out of their mind and wishing they brought a magazine, why should anyone care whether they go to heaven or not? 

 

The Bible offers a better hope.  You and I were not designed to have a taste for some disembodied existence in a non-physical Heaven.  What God made us to desire, and what we do desire if we are honest, 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.  Our desires correspond to God’s plans.  It’s not that we want something, and so we engage in wishful thinking.  It’s just the opposite—the reason we want it is because God has planned for it to exist.  Resurrected people living in a resurrected universe isn’t our idea—it’s God’s.