Reveling in the Joy That Awaits You

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.
—Isaiah 35:10

Jesus Is the Prince of Mirth

Jesus Christ is the happiest person to ever walk the earth. He is the Son of the God who is himself joy, and he conjured up planet earth to spread it. God created this world to give vent to his joy, for real joy is inherently of a spreading nature, a contagion.

When God finally responds to Job’s complaints, for example, he identifies his purpose in creating.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
     Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
     Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
     or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
     and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4–7)

Time and again therefore throughout the Scripture, God calls not only his people but his creation to rejoice.

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
     let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
     let the field exult, and everything in it!
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
     before the LORD, for he comes,
     for he comes to judge the earth. (Ps. 96:11–13)

The entire created order—we humans, and the rest of creation in our train—is straining forward, on the edge of its seat, yearning for the consummation of that sacred rapture with which even this fallen existence is unmistakably marked. But it is a rapture of which we achieve only the most tantalizingly passing glimpses (Rom. 8:19–23). Jesus Christ parachuted into the ruin and rubble of our world, down into death itself, “for the joy that was set before him” (Heb. 12:2). But on Easter morning he burst through the other side. And for those who are joined to him, his present perfect joy is our future. “Great is the joy of our Lord; that joy which was set before Christ, that is the joy of the saints in heaven,” preached the Puritan William Bridge.¹ Here and now we walk in tears and futility. Our best friendships wither, our bodies fall apart, and the pleasures of life never last.

Not so in heaven.

In that new world, we join Jesus Christ in perfect elation as the creation erupts all around us in that Edenic mirth that necessarily defines any project of which God is the architect (cf. Heb. 11:10). Heaven is where joy will flood but never drown—

So many streams of happiness flow down
     Into my mind that it grows self-delighting
     At being able to bear it and not drown.²

What an unspeakable relief. No wonder, then, that Scripture speaks of a common element to life in the new earth, an element not found in hell: singing (Isa. 35:10). “Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord, for he comes” (Ps. 96:12–13).

Song is the language of joy and therefore the language of the new earth. Mirth refuses to remain a whisper. Joy does not dress up in drab monotone but instead requires music and melody.

After all, Jesus is the tone-setter for life in the new earth, and he is the Prince of Mirth. Our singing in the next life will simply be following his lead. If Jesus Christ led his disciples in singing on the eve of his death—“When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives” (Matt. 26:30)—what swelling chorus will come thundering from his chest on the morning of that great eternal Day?

Jesus is the tone-setter for life in the new earth, and he is the Prince of Mirth. Our singing in the next life will simply be following his lead.

Permanent Graduation

Apparently, when Paul tells us to walk the painful road of this life “singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Col. 3:16), he is simply telling us to practice for the life to come. We all know the feeling of mouthing words of praise in a dry and perfunctory way, too weighed down by the cares of this world. And we all have tasted the wonder of a sudden surprising joy whereby humming and singing erupts unbidden. Heaven is the permanent graduation from the former and the permanent enjoyment of the latter.

Cascading choruses of praise and wonder and love and relief and defiance, flowing flood-like from an unrestrained and undistracted heart lost in the disbelief of gifted forgiveness. The old English bishop Handley Moule, seeking to strengthen Christians during World War I with the coming glory of heaven, understood this well:

Praise will be the native language of the very being of the saints, the voice of a joy which looks out from self, with an unspeakable content, upon the excellencies of others; delighting above all in the supreme Excellence of the all-satisfying God, and then in the excellences, the holy glory and beauty, of the blessed lives around. That praise will be an eternal song. . . . The whole life, motion, action, will be music; one melody of self-forgetting praise.³

Once more, then:

Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
     they shall obtain gladness and joy,
​​     and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. (Isa. 35:10)

What is upon your head today?

What weights, agitations, burdens, worries, are preventing your inner life from standing up straight?

One day soon—God knows the date, and the clock is ticking down inexorably toward it—all sorrows will be lifted entirely off you. You will feel strangely light. In its place: “everlasting joy shall be upon [your] head.” Your defining crown, your very being, will be “gladness and joy.” And all sorrow will disappear like the smoke of an extinguished candle, brief and passing. Even “sighing”—that breath we take as we struggle to process the pains of life—will evaporate. “We will rest from sin but not from worship, from suffering and sorrow but not from solace!”⁴

Sing and Dance Now

Therefore we messy, inconsistent Christians have every right to sing and dance our way through this Normandy Beach of a life. Dangers are whizzing past our ears left and right, and we may step on a mine and blow a leg off. The emotional and relational ordeals we absorb are far more traumatizing, in their own way, than such a bodily disaster.

But we’re on that beach for only a few moments. Then—everlasting bliss. Fully alive.

And we are free to draw strength and gladness from that future day now, ruggedly defying the encroaching darkness that threatens to swamp our emotional equilibrium. God gives us the sacred promises such as Isaiah 35 to reassure us and to keep us going, as Sam Gamgee was given as he trudged through Mordor.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.⁵

Pure fiction? Not for Tolkien. And not for you and me. The characters and places of Middle-earth are fictional, but the truths embedded and incarnated in those made-up characters are not. It’s why Lewis said its readers “will know that this is good news, good beyond hope.”⁶ And Tolkien himself knew it. It’s why he wrote. “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true,” he said of the gospel.⁷

And to keep us believing in this almost unbelievable tale, we are given Isaiah 35—a white star twinkling; strength for the journey. Whatever anguish in which we find ourselves emotionally suffocating this very day, there is light and high beauty that will win out in the end.

It is joy that is standing tall, rugged and scarred, as happy as ever, at the end of all things. And that joy is ours. It belongs by right to anyone united to the Savior who is now himself standing tall, rugged and scarred, as happy as ever.

Perhaps joy is long gone in your life. You see old photos from years ago and think to yourself, as Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff did looking back on old family photos after his twenty-five-year-old son died in a climbing accident, “That’s when we were still happy. . . . What’s over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence.”⁸

Was Chesterton wrong about joy being the fundamental thing in man?

No. But for many of us we will not know Chesterton’s claim till the next life. It is available in this life, and if we come short of it, we do not lay the blame at God’s door. It was of this life that Christ tells us, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). There it is before us, offered freely. Here is happiness, in me, Christ says. Take, eat.

Yet it eludes us, shoved aside by a hundred disappointments, distractions, frustrations, unexplainable darknesses—slipping through our fingers for reasons we do not understand. Cynicism swamps. Disappointments wash like waves upon our hearts, and we have hardly the emotional energy to hope in heaven. As a defense mechanism we withdraw our longings, unable to handle letdown in the next life after so much of it in this one.

Satan smiles. He delights to keep you bored and flat with the coming future.

What madness. This earthly voyage through pain is not a voyage across an ocean but a stream. The ocean awaits. And the ocean is joy. The happiest man in the world is there. And there, as here, we will find ourselves unable to hold back the tears. But not those kinds of tears.

All sorrow, all sighing, banished once and for all. “The very hope of our souls is there: all our hope of relief from our distresses; all our hope of happiness.”⁹ As the curtains are thrown wide open and the sunlight pours in, the nightmare of this fallen life will melt into fast-fading memory as song effortlessly breaks out.

We will awake and stretch our limbs, clothed head to toe in the ever-dawning brightness for which we were created. We will be ourselves.

We will be home.

This article is adapted from Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven by Dane Ortlund.

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.

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