I have almost always thought that it all ended for Christians in heaven: you die, you go to heaven. But the Bible doesn't teach this. This is not a bad hope, but it's so much less than what God really has planned for us. When Christians die they go to heaven - "today you will be with me in paradise," Jesus told the thief on the cross. But once there, in what theologians call "the intermediate state," they wait for Christ's return and the final chapter in God's plan of redemption: the resurrection of the body. This is the hope we affirm in the creed! Perhaps there will be "time" as we know it in heaven/paradise, but maybe not. Jesus will be there. All I know for sure is that all of human history, from the days of Adam and Eve, is moving towards a greater reality than life on earth followed by life in heaven: towards a new geography where heaven will come down to earth and all of creation will be redeemed and renewed. It's life after life after death that is our blessed hope. As I imagine it, in the renewed Heaven and Earth, doctor's offices will be turned into art museums and flower shops, abortion clinics will become party rooms for children's birthdays, and graveyards will become dream parks where families, who were once separated by death, will come with blankets for picnics to hear musicians that make James Galway and Esperanza Spalding sound like amateurs!

The I'm-going-to-heaven-thinking is a small view. It casts a shadow on the stuff, the physicality, of this world. It sees the material world, and the people and things in it, as temporary and passing away. And it is then a small step to the idea that the mortal human body is the container of an immortal spirit - which is the gnostic heresy! In fact, all the stuff of this world is created by God and is very good - and our ultimate end is the New Heaven and the New Earth. Heaven will come down to earth uniting the two in an everlasting union (Rev 21, 22). It's infinitely more than just life after death in general terms (i.e., going to heaven), but God's New Jerusalem on earth, of which our being a "new creation" (2 Cor 5:17) here and now is only the first installment of a thousand installments. Maybe a million!

We say in our creed that we believe "in the resurrection of the body," not just the spirit. We believe that God is going to do for the whole physical creation what he did for Jesus on Easter. We see glimpses of this when the psalmist alludes to a time in the future when the mountains will sing and the trees will clap their hands. The New Heavens and New Earth is what all of creation groans for now (Rom 8:19), and of which the prophets described as a place full of gladness and rejoicing (Isa 65:17-25), where boys and girls will fill the streets with play (Zech .

Our ultimate goal as Christians is both God's material creation redeemed and united to God's immaterial world where he is enthroned - heaven on earth.

What this means should be obvious for those of us who wait for Jesus's return: the beauty, grace, justice and love of this world will continue forever in their magnified forms in the New Jerusalem. Our days on the earth are like a shadow (1 Chron 29:15) of what awaits us. And any movement on our part towards the New Heavens and New Earth here and now is participating in eternity. What we do in this world effects eternity! We are saved forever by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, not because of anything we do. But once we are reborn by the merits of Jesus Christ and "know" God for eternity ("This is eternal life..." John 17:3), we are invited into God's redemption story and into those things that will survive death: justice, mercy, beauty, and love.

I once invited Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft to come our church to talk about heaven. What he describe was "life after life after death" - life after the intermediate heaven - life in the New Jerusalem. He began by quoting C.S. Lewis: "None of us would ever imagine an orange if we'd never seen one before." Then he asked us to imagine a baby inside his mother's womb for nine months who knows nothing more than that limited reality. It never crosses the baby's mind that there is anything else. "It's a great life there," Dr. Kreeft suggested. All his needs are attended to, it's warm, and he is fed and well cared for.

Then one day, all of a sudden, that baby is thrust into a whole new reality that is so much bigger, more glorious and colorful, and filled with new excitements than could ever before be imagined. Dr. Kreeft said, "This is how it will be when we experience the ultimate reality that God has prepared for us." We know and experience such limited reality here and now; but then we will come face-to-face with reality as God created it to be in all its beauty and glory. We will share that glory! This makes this life and the partnerships we have with justice, love, mercy, and beauty so much more meaningful and congruent with our eternal destiny.

Today I give thanks for the life and ministries of Tim and Kathy Keller. They have blessed me and so many others with their teaching and with the example of their lives lived with hope and joy. I marvel at the fruit of their ministry in life and as they contemplate death, how well God has used them to prepare a way of everlasting life for many who will believe. I am thankful to God for Easter and for giving us such a great hope!
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"Everything you love on earth will be in heaven in the same way that a child's crude attempts to draw shapes are present in the pictures painted by that child when he becomes an artist."
-Peter Kreeft
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in the world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. . . I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death."
-C.S. Lewis
"Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn't a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death."
-N.T. Wright