Ideas with real foundation

Coming up to Easter is, I suppose, as good a time as any for headlines to scream things like “Christians got it wrong about Heaven, says Bishop”. Bishop “Tom” Wright has a book out, Surprised by Hope, in which he quotes from a children’s book about heaven: it is “a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk . . . If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go there . . . When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you to heaven to be with him”. That, says Wright, is a good example of “what not to say”.

But it’s for the kiddies and surely it’s harmless? Well, kiddies have a habit of growing up to be adults. And they also have a habit of taking early, religious beliefs with them. So? what is wrong with that? What’s wrong is that Wright is right when he says our common ideas of what happens after death are, largely, without any real foundation in the Bible.

In fact, when Christians die, they do not go to heaven! The bishop calls us back to the Bible. It tells us that, on death we enter a sort of ‘holding station’ in a state called ‘sleep’ [not ‘purgatory’.] ‘Sleep’ was the closest the Apostle Paul could get to precision – we will be conscious, with God and with Christ in rest and refreshment. It will be Paradise, as Jesus told the repentant thief on the cross. But compared to what comes after, it will be like being asleep.

And what does come after? Well, at the end of time Jesus returns; the dead are raised from sleep [that couldn’t happen if they were in heaven]; they are judged. And, oh yes, bodies. Bodies? Yes, Christians will receive imperishable, glorious, powerful and spiritual bodies [see I Cor. 15:42-44.]

And then they get to go and play harps on cotton wool clouds? If harps are your thing, fine. But for most, I suspect that, if that were the case, we would be demanding something to send us back to sleep!

No; there is to be true fulfilment in the world to come.

We all know the frustrations of our limitations here below – surely God has made us for something better?

And He has. In the new heavens and the new earth, which Scripture speaks about, there will be unending bliss as we take part in the renewal, continuing, in a way, the work Adam started in Eden.

Someone has put it: ‘God will download his software onto our hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.’

With the Resurrection of Jesus the renewal has already begun!