I am convinced that, for the
most part, the Church has left the riches of Heaven sitting in the bank,
thinking that we only get them when we die and go there. The belief that Heaven
is entirely a future reality has reduced far too many of God’s declarations in
Scripture about the believer’s identity and calling to “positional” truths that
are acknowledged but never experienced. It is time for that to change.” - Jon Tyson
There are two common mistakes we make in thinking about Heaven.
The first is the mistake of disbelief: the personal conviction that heaven -
that realm of existence where the will and glory of the sovereign creator God
hold ultimate sway and directive power - is a lie, a dream, or a myth. Or perhaps
simply that even if such a place should exist in any form or fashion, it would
still remain utterly inconsequential to our human experience. In either case Heaven
is essentially a lie, a pipe dream: this is the mistake of disbelief, and there
are a great many who hold to this conviction.
Now, for those of us who have stepped beyond willful disbelief of
this sort and have opened ourselves to the possibility of a God like the God of
Scripture and the vision of eternity afforded us therein, there still remain
potential pitfalls when it comes to how we think about Heaven. The second most common
mistake we make, after outright disbelief, is a belief in a Heaven that is real
(to a point), but distant. If the first mistake is disbelief, then the second
is distance: the belief that heaven, the dwelling place of God, is far away -
somewhere past the edge of the observable universe, placed in some cloudy,
ethereal locality off the edge of the map - hidden, unsearchable, mysterious…
distant.
The funny thing about these two mistakes is that, though one involves
willful disbelief and the other is held by many people who would call
themselves believers, followers of Jesus, the end result is largely the same.
In both cases we end up with a Heaven – a vision of eternity - that has little
to no bearing on the lives we live here and now. And is this not the most
crushing indictment of a church, called out as we are to be a vehicle of
worship and witness? That, in spite of what beliefs or creeds we might utter
with our mouths or post on our Facebook profiles, or preach in our services on
a Sunday morning, the lives we actually live are otherwise practically
indiscernible from the world of disbelief that surrounds us? Because whether Heaven
is a lie, or just too far away to make a difference, the end result is the same:
we just end up living our lives the best we know how with whatever resources we
can muster, and hope it turns out alright in the end. These are different
mistakes; which nonetheless yield very similar results.
Against both these mistakes, we find the invitation of Jesus – the
invitation of the Gospel – which is to a life that is much richer and deeper
and truer than either of these errors can lead us to. The vision of reality
that scripture opens before us is one in which Heaven – the realm and rule of
God – is both very real and very near: where Heaven and the world we know stand
in the shadow of one another, touch one another, bear upon one another. Ours is
the world into which Jesus – God himself - came, and ours is the world into
which he could proclaim “The Kingdom of God is at hand”. Ours is the same world
in which the creator God walked in the midst of His creation: where burning
bushes have spoken and seas have parted, where the sick have been healed and
the dead have been raised, where Jacob could stumble across the doorway to the
throne room of heaven itself and wrestle with God. Ours is the same world where
life itself, as well as every miraculous, heavenly thing and occurrence – from
the days of Adam to our own – is made possible because the fully expressed
realm and rule of our creator God is simply not as far away as we might tend to
think.
In truth, there is but a veil – a thin curtain – that separates
heaven and earth: a veil that at this moment both blinds us to and protects us
from the nearness of Heaven. It is a veil that will one day be drawn back to
bring the full force of the glory of God to bear upon the earth as both
ultimate joy and ultimate judgment, and in the meantime we live in a world of
glimpses and revelations. Glimpses that are possible because Heaven is near,
and the veil is thin. Ours is a world in tension: tension between what Jesus
has already accomplished and what yet remains to be completed, between Heaven’s
nearness and the veil which blinds us to that nearness.
Followers of Jesus, too, are a people in process and in tension;
in a daily struggle between the “old man” and the new birth, between the old
fruit and the imperishable seed. And, if we are being honest, oftentimes we can
use the reality of this tension as a justification for our own mediocrity. We
know that we will struggle, and it is an easy move for us to then simply become
comfortable in that struggle, with no real expectation of victory. No real
expectation that the work of God will yield genuine, measureable transformative
changes in our day-to-day lives. But this is not a life lived in the
understanding of the nearness of heaven. That is a mediocrity only made
possible by an eternity, a Heaven and a God somewhere on the other side if the
universe, which and who is not near, not close to us in the midst of our
struggle and tension. That is a complacency that lives in the conviction that
we are somehow hidden from God, not laid bare before him in all our beauty and
brokenness, in every moment of both tension and triumph. God is near, and the
veil is thin, and as such we can never be content to simply cultivate a longing
for the eternal, we must see our LONGING become LIFE.
There’s a classic Christian book written by a Catholic monk by the
name of Brother Lawrence called “Practicing the Presence of God” which, in
actuality, is a great description of both the Christian life in general, as
well as the spiritual disciplines that he encourages in that book. As followers
of Jesus, the invitation at hand is not to merely LONG for the life of eternity,
but to practice living it: To taste of it, to invite the Holy Spirit to teach
us how to walk in it here and now.
For many people Jesus Christ is simply seen as a religious oddity,
a frustration: a new moral law or puzzle for us. Perhaps we see him as something
that we might try and ‘bolt on’ to the life we were in the middle of living
apart from him, anyway. But in reality, Jesus can never be that. And whether we
reject him outright or attempt to co-opt Jesus into the service of our own ends,
he will ultimately become a stumbling block for us. Because Jesus is either the
invitation and the doorway into a new kind of life altogether – that life
beyond the veil – or he is nothing at all. And it is through the discipline of
discipleship that we daily offer ourselves to Jesus as building materials in
his hands to be built together into a work and dwelling place of God, both in
our own lives and in our lives together. As disciples and as a church, we need
to learn how to practice the presence of God, to tune our hearts to perceive
the nearness of Heaven, and to begin to live as a people of that eternal life
now.
