Heaven?

Heaven isn't somewhere else. I've been thinking about it. Lately I have been reading the Bible in search of what Heaven will be like. Not reading anywhere specific, just watching for glimpses. I tried to explain my idea of Heaven to someone recently and was asked what I was smoking. But really, I don't think that Heaven is somewhere else. I think Heaven is the Earth, when Christ comes back to take eternal possession of what is already His. When the kingdom of God comes, like it says in Revelation, when the new Jerusalem comes. When the knowledge of the Lord has covered the earth as waters cover the sea.

If we die before this happens, we go to be with the Lord, but is that really a place? Well, He says He is preparing a place for us, (John 14:2) but it seems like the Bible talks more about that place coming to us than us going to it. Sometimes, it even talks about God coming to live with us, and not the other way around. "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man." (From Rev. 21:3)

I don't know all the whens and whys, but I do know that Heaven, as we tend to think of it, a quiet, otherworldly place with angels and harps, is never described in Scripture at all. I wonder why that is the traditional view. Where on earth (hah! no pun intended) did that come from? What is described in the Bible is the new Jerusalem, (Revelation 21:10, Micah 4:1-4) the new heaven and the new earth, (Rev. 21:1-2) God's kingdom, and what that will be like. (Isaiah 11:6-9)

As Christians, we can tell that we already live in a picture and a shadow of what the new heaven and new earth will be like. Because when we see the earth--the trees, the grass, the animals, the people, the moon and stars, any beauty at all, any harmony, any glory---we are seeing a tiny bit of what God intended and intends His world to be. C. S. Lewis puts it far more articulately:

The faint, far-off results of those energies which God's creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what now we call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which these lower reaches prove so intoxicating?

~The Weight of Glory

I cannot pretend to know what it will be like, but sometimes it strikes me: What if it really is the same, only without all the effects of sin? If God's kingdom comes here to earth, will the same trees and seas and mountains be here, only glorified as they were meant to be? And then what about Paris and London, and all the wonderful cathedrals? But those are man's creation. But if the earth is redeemed, well, I just don't know. But it is so thrilling to look forward to it--the earth being more of the real thing than it is now, like C.S. Lewis said at the end of The Last Battle:

Lucy looked hard at the garden and saw that it was not really a garden at all, but a whole world with its own rivers and woods and sea and mountains. But they were not strange: she knew them all. "I see, she said. "This is still Narnia, and, more real and more beautiful..."

It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it, if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley... And on the wall of that room opposite the window there may have been a looking glass. As you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different--deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.

And finally, my favorite thought about the reality of Heaven, because I really believe that in writing this one line, said by Aslan to Lucy, Lewis captured what this life will mean when we first step into the next one:

"The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."