Hallelujah! Our heavenly GPS, also known as the grace of God, has finally brought us “through the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4). We have passed from death to everlasting life (John 5:24), to the place we longed for (Psalm 84:1-2), strived for (Luke 13:24), and most importantly trusted God throughout the trials, troubles and temptations of our life in this world to ultimately bring us to – namely Heaven, the throne room of God’s Kingdom (Acts 14:22) (Jude 24-25). We have thus passed from the realm of the temporary to the realm of the eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18). What we could only see by faith while in the temporal or material world, we now see by sight (2 Corinthians 5:6-7).
Here we reside in the paradise of God (Revelation 2:7), the place the Apostle Paul was given by God either a visit to or vision of in 2 Corinthians 12:4. He tells us that he was forbidden by God to speak of what he saw/experienced, most likely because he would have had no words to adequately represent the beauty, wonder and glory of it. Here we join the thief on the cross (Luke 23:42-43), the poor beggar Lazarus (Luke 16:22), the first Christian martyr, Stephen (Acts 7:59), as well as the many who would follow in his footsteps (Revelation 6:9-11). Here we are in intimate fellowship with the great cloud of witnesses identified in Hebrews 11 and Hebrews 12:1, fellow sojourners through this present evil world, whose faith encouraged us to continue to faithfully run the race that would result in our presence here with them.
Most importantly, Heaven is where we have come into intimate, unhindered fellowship with the One who was our exceeding great joy while on earth (Psalm 43:4), the One who was and is and will be throughout eternity the desire of our heart and the delight of our soul, the object of our deepest love and source of our greatest joy (Luke 10:25-28), the One who loved us and gave His life for us (Galatians 2:20), so that in the ages to come He could demonstrate the exceeding riches of His grace toward us (Ephesians 2:6-9), namely our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
In Heaven Jesus will still appear to us as a man, but as the God-man who will manifest/display all of the infinite perfections of the glory of God (Colossians 2:9); the beauty of His holiness, the excellence of His infinite wisdom, the awesomeness of His majestic power, the splendor of His abundant goodness and amazing grace etc., all communicated and displayed for the everlasting and ever-increasing joy, pleasure and satisfaction of His people in Him (Psalms 16:11). We will know Him intimately and personally as our closest friend (John 15:15), sharing in His glorious existence and enjoying His abundant goodness. Every righteous desire, every noble longing we have ever had in this world and will ever have throughout eternity will be perfectly satisfied, perfectly fulfilled in Him, by Him and through Him (Psalms 65:4) (Romans 11:36), as we behold Him face to face in all of His glory (1 Corinthians 13:12) (2 Corinthians 4:6).
Here our thirsty souls are finally satisfied (Matthew 5:5:6) (Psalm 63:1-5) as upon seeing our great and glorious Savior we will be perfectly conformed to His righteous nature and character (1 John 3:1-2), free from the sin that so easily beset us and tormented us while we were in our mortal bodies (Hebrews 12:1) (Romans 7:15-24). Here we will finally love God as He deserves to be loved (Matthew 22:37) and serve Him with pure and sinless motives (Psalm 51:10).
Jonathan Edwards, in describing this glorious experience he anticipated we will have in Heaven writes:
“They (those in heaven) shall see everything in God that tends to excite and inflame love i.e. – everything that is truly lovely – everything that will exalt their esteem and admiration of Him – that will warm and endear their hearts to Him. The effect of this vision is that the soul is inflamed with love for and satisfied in the pleasure of the infinite perfections of His being.”
Edwards’ description is evidenced in the fact that our first glimpse of Heaven in the Bible is that of worship. The Book of Revelation gives us a portal or window into Heaven to see its present activities in somewhat of a compacted and representative form. These events are presented to emphasize the preeminence of the worship of King Jesus in Heaven as the sovereign ruler of His creation, the victor over sin, death and the devil, and, as noted above, the One who satisfies the deepest needs and desires of our redeemed heart (Revelation 4) (Revelation 5:8-14) (Revelation 7:9-17) (Revelation 15:1-4) (Revelation19:1-16).
Here our worship is not forced or coerced; it is not done out of duty or obligation, but is a natural and spontaneous response to seeing and experiencing the unveiled glory of God – what Jewish and Christian theologians have referred to as the “beatific vision”.
Worship, in its most practical form, is the acknowledgement of God as the most glorious, most desirable, most excellent, most essential, most awesome, most valuable being in the universe, and our subsequent pursuit of Him as the object of our deepest love and source of our greatest joy.
Although our existence in the Heaven we will enter at the time of our death will be glorious (2 Corinthians 5:8), our redemption – our full restoration to the glorious beings God created in His image in the beginning, as well as our enjoyment of God Himself (and His enjoyment of us)- will not be fully realized until Heaven is joined with the new heavens (universe) and new earth that Jesus will establish at His second coming, described in Revelation 21. At that time, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, our spirit man will be joined to our resurrected physical body (1 Corinthians 15:51-52), a body that will be as immortal and as glorious as Jesus’s body (Philippians 3:20-21). It will be a body in which we will be incapable of sinning and through which we will be able to freely enjoy all of the pleasures and delights of the glorious material universe God created in the beginning and called “very good” (Genesis 1:31) (1 Timothy 6:17). And it is this glorious new and everlasting world and our life in it that we will begin to explore in my next post.
Grace and Peace ×