10 Things You Should Know About Heaven

This article is part of the 10 Things You Should Know series.

1. Heaven is temporary.

Heaven is temporary—if by “heaven” we mean the place you go if you’re a Christian and you die before Jesus returns. Theologians call this “the intermediate state.” Paul called it “far better” to go and be with Christ in this way (Phil. 1:23). Better—but not best, because though we’ll be sinless, we’ll also be body-less (2 Cor. 5:6–8). And best, according to Scripture’s teaching, is to be on the other side of Christ’s return when we will still be sinless but we’ll also get our body back—permanently.

In other words, our life as believers goes through four phases: bad, good, better, best. We start bad (sinful and in a state of condemnation). When we become Christians, we go from bad to good—forgiven and adopted! When we die, we go from good to better, leaving all sin and sadness behind forever. But that’s not the final phase. The final phase is in what Scripture calls “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1) when we will have physical bodies on this very planet, rinsed clean and renewed. And that is best.

2. The new earth is Eden 2.0.

This permanent situation of God’s people, in new bodies on a new planet earth, is a better way to comprehend heaven. When you read Genesis 1 and 2, you’re not just reading about your past. You’re reading about your future. Adam, Eve, and you—and every other believer in Jesus Christ across the ages.

The last two chapters of the Bible make this plain by speaking of the coming new earth as a recovery of Eden, but in an escalated and inviolable way. This is why we read in Revelation 21–22 of a tree of life, and a river, and gold and precious stones, and the presence of God dwelling among his people. All these were marks of the beauty and bliss of Eden.

If living in the perfect paradise of Eden is something you long for and pine after and wish you could go back and experience—take heart. You will. Dwelling with the animals and the entire created order in perfect harmony.

Finally Home

Dane Ortlund

In Finally Home, Dane Ortlund ushers readers into the surprising wonders of our final future in the new heavens and the new earth. It provides deep comfort and joy that outweigh all our many heartaches as we journey through this broken world.

3. All sadness will melt away.

“Sorrow and sighing shall flee away” on that final day when we are with the Lord (Isa. 35:10). Not just sorrow. Sighing. Every heartache, great and small, that causes your heart to drip with even the slightest sigh will melt away. No, “flee away”—evaporate instantly when we wake up from death in the presence of Christ.

This earthly life is the accumulation of pain. Our hearts come to the end of life scarred with a thousand knicks and sores. Soured relationships. Physical pains. Traumatic memories. Aborted dreams. Self-inflicted anguishes.

Your final future will drain out of you everything that has ever made you cringe or wince or cry.

“And the ransomed of the LORD shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” (Isa. 35:10)

4. All pain will be reversed.

Not only will all sadness and sighing drain out of you. The promise of Scripture is even greater than that. Twice as great. All of your pain will not only go away, it will fold back onto itself in joy as piercing as the pain was.

Scripture teaches that “this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). The shock of this text is that Paul says “is preparing,” not “will be made up for by.” The future glory with which we will be clothed is not a consolation prize, as if the joy then will be greater than the misery here. Our misery here is positively a key ingredient in our joy there. Every little “crucifixion”—every rejection, every betrayal, every abandonment, every disappointment, and yes, even every sin of your own, will all experience a corresponding resurrection. This is what it means to be united to a Christ who was crucified unto resurrection.

5. You’ll get your body back—invincibilized.

From about age thirty on, we’re powering down. We feel it a little more with each passing month. A lifelong stiffening. It’s bewildering because it’s not what we were made for.

When Jesus returns, we all get resurrected—not the way Lazarus did, who rose to a mortal existence (John 11:38–44), but the way Jesus was, who rose to an immortal existence (John 20:1–18). Who would want what Lazarus got? Wake up back into all our old aches and pains, fears and shames?

But as 1 Corinthians 15 makes plain, Jesus is the first model off the assembly line of the kind of body we’ll get—a fully physical body that eats (John 21:9–12) and can be touched (John 20:27), but also one that can appear in locked rooms (John 20:19) and is at times hard to recognize (John 20:14).

In other words, the laws of nature are no longer our master but our servant.

6. Jesus is what makes heaven heaven.

What do you call heaven without Jesus?

Hell.

All the other joys of heaven—reunion with friends, freedom from toil, the end of temptation, a resurrected and invincible body—wonderful as these will be, they are rays from the sun. The sun is Jesus. Remove the sun, and all rays instantly vanish.

The presence of Christ, the Greatheart, the mighty friend of sinners, whose love for us, the real us, down to all our particularities and overwhelming all our weaknesses, enjoyed in personal fellowship, without end—this is heaven.

7. You’ll work—and like it.

Work existed in Genesis 1–2 (God put man in the garden “to work it” [Gen. 2:15]). Work is not a result of the fall; futility in work is a result of the fall (Gen. 3:18). Work is good. We were built to be productive (whether for pay or not). Imagine a world where everything you put your hand to whirred along in perfect ease with fruitfulness and effectiveness. The singing you are gifted to unleash, the culinary interest you have, the teaching gift, the love for woodworking, the love of painting, the writing gift—all engaged with zero resistance and fulsome fruitfulness.

While all lines of work associated with the fall will melt away (the legal field, medicine, insurance, firefighting, law enforcement, etc), all other lines of work will presumably continue. We will deeply enjoy the productivity as God-imaging sub-creators that he made us to be.

The sun is Jesus. Remove the sun, and all rays instantly vanish.

8. You will judge angels.

It’s right there in Scripture: “Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? . . . Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” (1 Cor. 6:2–3).

Ponder the sheer ennobling that God has prepared for us. Angels are beings before whom humans consistently cower in terror throughout the Bible. And at the end of human history, God will hand the gavel to us and entrust the judgment both of unbelievers and even angels to believers. The most unassuming, out-of-the-way Christian today will stand in judgment over the most powerful headlining world leaders who do not in this life bow the knee to Christ. What a sight that will be to behold.

9. It’s closer than you know.

You might wake up in heaven tomorrow, a red grape neatly lodged in the windpipe of the quickly-cooling corpse you’ve just left behind. That’s not a morbid thought. That’s a realistic thought. Or, you might be released to heaven many decades from now.

My question is: What’s the difference?

What difference does another forty years make?

Compared to eternity, your life is just a few seconds, appearing on the world stage and then disappearing immediately. There is a plot of land, right now, where a minister will one day speak a few words over your lowered casket. Tears will be shed that day. But your great-grandchildren will probably not know your name. They certainly won’t know what your laugh sounded like.

You are dying; we call it aging, but that’s a sanitized word for dying. Die well, therefore, over these decades ahead, ever mindful of what awaits you just around the next bend in the road.

10. It lasts longer than you know.

“. . . and they will reign forever and ever.” (Rev. 22:5)

No more hurriedness. No more low-grade anxiety that a joy will soon end. No more trying to enjoy the moment before it passes.

In this time-bound world, beauty and strength fade as quickly as they come. An orange, finally ripe, begins to dry. A rose, having perfectly blossomed, loses its first petal the next week. The greatest athletes of the world, a few years after winning the championship, retire, retreating into wrinkles and a growing waistline.

The new earth is the place where perfect ripeness, blossoming, and strength are all we ever know. Every fruit perfectly ripe, every rose ever blossoming, all strength untiring. “Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month” (Ezek. 47:12). For ever and ever, world without end.

I’ll see you there.

Dane Ortlund is the author of Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven.

Dane C. Ortlund (PhD, Wheaton College) serves as senior pastor of Naperville Presbyterian Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Gentle and Lowly and Deeper. Dane and his wife, Stacey, have five children.