Two Misconceptions About What Heaven Will Be Like

Go After God Now

I think the first misconception that I’ve experienced, and the one that I’ve probably heard the most often, is a misconception focused on how fun heaven will be and whether or not it will be boring. I think the issue there is that people just don’t have great biblical, relatable images for what life will be like, and there are plenty of pop culture references out there to fill that gap. Heaven is often thought of as a place that’s purely spiritual and therefore cut off from all the things we love about this material world that we live in now, and there’s not enough awareness that the ultimate future that God has promised us—the world to come when Christ has returned and when all who have died in faith are resurrected into new bodies—is wonderfully material and will be an expansion of everything we love most about this world—never a subtraction of it.

There’s way more that we don’t know about what heaven will be like than what we do know, but we do know the Bible speaks often of physical experiences as a key part of it. Things that will be to what we love now like watching a movie in an IMAX theater compared to streaming it on your phone. That’s something I can relate to. I know what it is to try to watch a movie on a phone. It’s not great compared to what it’s like to be an IMAX theater, where you’re just completely surrounded by sound and by images. It’s fully immersive. That’s how the world to come will relate to this world. And every good thing that we enjoy now expresses something of God’s goodness that we’ll know in full then.

Remember Heaven

Matthew McCullough

In these practical meditations on biblical promises, Matthew McCullough shows how cultivating heavenly mindedness shapes readers’ lives in the meantime.

That’s a crucial misconception I’m constantly trying to beat back against, because there’s so much goodness when you can see the truth of what the Bible says about our future.

On the opposite end, when I talk to people who do have a lot of focus on heaven and who often find themselves thinking ahead and wanting to be there (this is sort of a misconception based on something that’s true), I think what they’re often focused on is seeing loved ones again. Obviously, this is one of the core promises of the gospel. First Thessalonians 4 says, “All who have died in faith in Christ will be raised, and they will together meet the Lord.” So reunion is coming, and it’s right to long for it.

But I’ve been helped by historians who have shown that over the last 150 years, where there’s been much thinking in America about heaven, reunion with loved ones has completely dominated what people are thinking and what they’re looking forward to. They describe it as a shift from a theocentric view of heaven to an anthropocentric view of heaven, where the main attraction is us and our love with one another. And that’s gone too far. That’s a misconception about what heaven will be.

The center of heaven’s joys is a God whose presence is already offered right now.

God is the center of what heaven will be. He’s its main attraction. And even in ways that are tough to imagine now, our relationships with each other, when we’re reunited, will be centered on him more deeply than they ever could have been here. We will be drawn to him, and through being drawn to him, we will be drawn closer and closer to one another.

I think that’s important to know now because it means that if you’ve been separated by death from somebody you love, you’re not just playing a waiting game until you can see them again. The center of heaven’s joys is a God whose presence is already offered right now. He’s someone you can pursue, know, and love—at least in part if not in full—right now. And so there’s no time like the present to start preparing for heaven’s joys. There are so many reasons to go after him in the places he’s made himself available now.

Matthew McCullough is the author of Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime.

Matthew McCullough (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is the pastor of Edgefield Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime.

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