How much do you know about Heaven? And how much do you think about Heaven in your everyday life?
I’ve been a Christian for about 30 years, and I’ve been aware of how little I really knew about Heaven for most of that time … but I believed that no one knew much about Heaven with any degree of real certainty, so that was okay. “Heaven,” even for Bible-reading Christians, is one of those words that gets mentioned enough in a sort of vague way that you feel pretty comfortable with its fuzziness and uncertainty after a while.
As for how often I thought about Heaven, well … when someone close to me passed away, I thought about it. Other than that, unless I was specifically studying a section of the Bible or listening to a sermon that was about Heaven (both of which are more infrequent than you’d think), I didn’t think about it much in my daily life.
And now I’ve just finished reading Randy Alcorn’s Heaven (Tyndale, 2004), and all of this has changed.
Alcorn spent 25 years in extensive research on Heaven, and this book is the result. (Why am I capitalizing Heaven? In his book, Alcorn capitalizes it, and he explains why.) The publisher calls it “the most comprehensive and definitive book on Heaven to date,” and that is not hyperbole. Not only that, Alcorn is an excellent and trustworthy writer who makes complex topics easy to understand and enjoyable to read.
It’s a big book, nearly 500 pages, and at the rate of a chapter or two each day, it took me about six weeks to read. But this was perfect because I needed time to absorb all of the new information and integrate it into my daily thoughts. Part 1 is A Theology of Heaven; Part 2 is Questions and Answers about Heaven; and Part 3 is Living in Light of Heaven. Now, if you get this book (and you should!), you’re going to be tempted to head straight for Part 2 and get all of your questions answered. You need to resist that temptation. Start at the beginning and read the theology (he makes it easy to understand) because you’re going to need that as the foundation when you get to all the questions and answers. Without the theology, you’ll be wondering how he can make certain claims and statements … but if you read the first part first, you’ll see exactly why he answers the questions in the way that he does.
For me, Part 1 explained something critical to know: that there is a “present Heaven” (or “intermediate Heaven”), where believers who have died are with Jesus. The Second Coming of Christ will usher in the eternal Heaven, where we will live with Jesus in our resurrected bodies on the renewed Earth—forever. Right now, all believers who have gone before are in the present Heaven, and the eternal Heaven does not exist yet. Perhaps I knew this at some point, I don’t know. But I certainly didn’t understand it well until I read this book.
After you understand the theological concepts behind Heaven, you’re on to Part 2, and all of those questions (200 pages of questions and answers!) are just exactly the things that you would want to know. What will the resurrected Earth be like? What will our lives be like? What will our relationships be like? What about animals? What will we do in Heaven? Every one of these sections has subsets of questions that detail just about anything you might want to know. The answers might surprise you. (Of course, Randy Alcorn may be, and no doubt is, wrong about some things. He’s very aware of this and clearly states it several times in the book. But he’s not just making things up out of his head—he’s clear about that, as well.)
Part 3 is very short and ends with questions to ask yourself in light of your (new) knowledge of heaven. I found these questions very convicting and helpful, and a reason to be glad that I own this book and can refer back to it often.
A couple of practical takeaways for me when I finished this book were:
Comfort and satisfaction about the present—I have a better understanding of my life on this present Earth now that I have a more solid view of eternity in mind. Where my thoughts about “eternity” were once hazy and unformed, they are now clear and distinct—which helps to make my very imperfect life in a sin-filled and corrupted world something that I can put into perspective and be more at peace with on a day-to-day basis.
Excitement and peace about the future—Alcorn paints an amazingly clear and exciting picture of the eternal Heaven. He answers all of the questions I still had when I wrote “Mansions in Heaven” a few years ago, and goes so much farther, to the questions I didn’t even know I had. I know now that the Bible does tell us a lot about heaven, when you put it all together—far beyond just the mansions/many rooms, the streets of gold, and the gates of pearl.
It’s so much more than what you might have imagined, or thought you knew. As Alcorn says in Heaven, you’ve probably had a time or two in your life where you’ve looked around with deep satisfaction and said, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” But it does. Oh, how it does!
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Two recent songs about heaven that you might like:
Toby Mac with Forrest Frank, Heaven on My Mind My dear mother-in-law passed away last year, and this is the song that was playing in my head for months afterwards:
“When this world’s behind me and my days are all through / You try and find me, I’ll try and find you
When this world’s behind me and we see it’s all true / You’ll know where to find me, I know that I’ll find you”
Phil Wickham, Homesick for Heaven “To see the ones I love, who’ve gone before, When death is a memory and tears are no more, To hear the angels praise, can you even imagine…”. I wrote about a similar homesick feeling in “Longing, Loss, and the Life to Come.”
And before I leave this post, I want to give a mention to another one of Randy Alcorn’s books that was hugely influential for my husband and me back when our family was young. In 2003, we were part of a church plant, and our pastor gave everyone a copy of Alcorn’s The Treasure Principle: Unlocking the Secret of Joyful Giving, which was then a fairly new book. It changed our entire view of what it means to store up our treasure in heaven rather than here on earth. The edition linked above is revised and expanded, based on questions that Alcorn received after the first edition was published.
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Great and Noble Tasks 