Two Ways the Hope of Heaven Battles Your Anxiety
Understanding Anxiety
Some find it helpful to contrast anxiety with fear. Fear and anxiety share many of the same symptoms and cause the same reactions. But fear is focused on a present threat, something right in front of you, like a rattlesnake slithering on the trail. Anxiety is focused on a possible threat. Fear focuses on what is happening. Anxiety focuses on what might happen. Fear goes as easily as it comes, once the snake slithers away into the brush. Anxiety is far more slippery, far more diffuse, far more difficult to get behind you.
Consider a few definitions of anxiety. The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as a “future-oriented, long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat.”1 The American Psychiatric Association says “Anxiety refers to anticipation of a future concern.”2 And here is perhaps the most helpful definition I’ve seen: “Anxiety is both a mental and physical state of negative expectation. . . . Anxiety is meant to capture attention and stimulate you to make necessary changes to protect what you care about. . . . Anxiety can be considered the price we humans pay for having the ability to imagine the future.”3
Whatever else may contribute to our feelings, anxiety is an orientation toward the future. And underneath that orientation, we will find two basic assumptions that work together to make us miserable: my future is vulnerable, and my future is up to me.
Our Future Is Vulnerable
Several hundred years ago French philosopher Blaise Pascal gave one of my favorite descriptions of what it is to be human. He described us as thinking reeds.4 A reed is vulnerable. It can be trampled, scorched by sun, starved by lack of rain, eaten by bugs or animals, or burned by fire. And it’s only a matter of time before summer turns to fall, fall turns to winter, and so the reed dies with the season. Humans are vulnerable too. A single drop of water can kill us, Pascal noticed, if it comes with the right contamination. And under the best possible circumstances, the Bible says that we are all of us like grass of the field (Isa. 40:6–8; 1 Pet. 1:24–25). We grow and thrive for a moment. We wither and fade over time.
But our glory and our misery is that we have to think about it. We’re thinking reeds. It’s tough to live in a world full of dangers as a reed who knows its vulnerability. We live in a world where stock markets crash. So do cars at high speeds. Tornadoes form up and drop down out of nowhere. Housing markets fluctuate. Jobs get downsized. Kids drown in swimming pools. As effective as medical care has become at protecting us and at putting us back together, the goalposts just keep moving. Early Americans worried about smallpox. My grandparents worried about tuberculosis and polio. Those problems are distant memories now, but nearly half of us will get cancer at some point. And when, Lord willing, we figure out a cure for this disease, some other killer will rise up to take its place. Our lives in this world are as vulnerable as ever. And Pascal was mostly thinking about our vulnerable bodies, but we could add to that the vulnerability of our relationships, social status, and all the adjacent anxieties unleashed in the age of social media. There are so many ways our lives could be upended, so many possibilities we want to avoid. As humans, we’re stuck with the ability to know this about ourselves and to feel it in advance.
Remember Heaven
Matthew McCullough
In these practical meditations on biblical promises, Matthew McCullough shows how cultivating heavenly mindedness shapes readers’ lives in the meantime.
Our Future Is Up to Us
A second assumption combines with the first to make up a miserably bitter cocktail. It’s not just that we know we’re vulnerable, with an ability to imagine the future and all the things we’d like to avoid. We also tend to feel responsible for those uncertain futures and never more so than in the modern world.
According to Hartmut Rosa, for the last three hundred years Western culture has been driven by the goal of “relentlessly expanding humanity’s reach.” We moderns have what he calls an “aggressive relationship to the world.”5 By instinct, we try to bring as much of the world under our control as possible so that we can optimize our experience of it wherever possible.
You can now wear a watch that measures everything from your heart rate to the number of steps you’ve taken in a given day or week. It will track these metrics and display them for you with measurable results you can use to optimize your performance from one day to another and compare them with where you’ve been and where you want to be.
You can buy a grill that lets you set the temperature you want, monitor the temperature of your meat, and make adjustments on the fly all from an app on your phone, whether you’re sitting on the couch or across town running errands. It’s wild how much of our lives is customizable.
But the truth is that no one can customize the future. And the more you expect to customize, the more bothered you are by what you can’t. Rosa cites research showing that the more security cameras, burglar alarms, and protective fencing people install, the less secure they feel. He writes, “The lack of effective individual control over something potentially controllable evidently transforms uncontrollability into powerlessness and insecurity.”6 In other words, the more you think you should be able to control, the more you’re burdened by what you can’t control. The allure of more and more influence over your future creates an illusion that complete control is possible. And if you could control your future, you should control your future. We know and influence just enough to be miserable.
Everywhere we turn in this modern, secular age we’re offered the freedom to build our lives on our terms. We’re told to decide what to be and go be it. We’re told to remember we’ve got what it takes, that we’re strong enough, brave enough, and smart enough to grab life by the horns and go where we want to go. But in our hearts, in our chests, in our lungs, and in our shoulders we know better. When we push back on anxiety by looking at all we bring to the table, we are feeding the very problem we hope to solve.
There are any number of books, movies, podcasts, and influencers who will tell you the future is up to you and believe they’re doing you a favor. But behind that glistening smile and all that positive energy is a truly terrifying prospect. “The future is up to you” is just another way of saying, “You’re on your own.”
In a way, anxiety is a form of loneliness—the inevitable lot of the thinking reed who’s all alone. If this world is everything, and if it’s on us to make the most of it, anxiety really does make sense. And I don’t know of any way to get past it—unless this world is not everything, and we’re not on our own after all. I don’t know any way to get past it without the hope of heaven.
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Looking to Heaven
First Peter 1:3–5 offers one of my favorite summaries of the hope of heaven. And at the core of what it celebrates are two pillars to our hope that are perfectly matched to the two major factors in our anxiety. On earth we are vulnerable, but our inheritance in heaven is not. We’re tempted to feel responsible, but our lives are guarded by God. Peter writes,
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Pet. 1:3–5)
Peter shows us the two most important things to know facing the future.
Our Inheritance Is Kept in Heaven, So Our Future Is Not Vulnerable
Peter is overflowing with praise for God. He may as well be shouting from the page. And he quickly tells us why. God by his mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. God has given us new birth into a new family, with a new citizenship and a new identity defined by the hope that Jesus was really dead but really came to life again.
What is this hope that makes us new, this hope that depends on him being alive again? Peter attempts to put words to it in 1:4. And the best he can come up with to describe this inheritance we’re born into is a series of words that tell us what it’s not.
This inheritance is imperishable. In this world every good thing is vulnerable. In heaven nothing dies.
This inheritance is undefiled. In this world every good thing comes tainted. More often than not, it is tainted by me—by my greedy desire for more, my preoccupation with what others have that I don’t, my unrealistic expectations, or simply by my knowledge that no good thing lasts forever. In heaven all joy is pure.
This inheritance is unfading. In this world every good thing eventually ends. It’s not just that it’s perishable—that it could be destroyed.
It’s that it will be, eventually, lost to time. We tend mostly to fear what can be lost in a moment. But time brings a kind of slow-motion trauma that amounts to the same thing. On earth, everyone loses everything eventually. But not in heaven. There, no joy ever fades. It’s as if Peter is screaming at us, “This world is not everything!” Another world is coming because Jesus came out of his grave. And that world, where our inheritance is kept, is a world of untouchable security.
It’s also as if Peter is simply passing on the message of Jesus he heard from the master teacher in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal” (Matt. 6:19). On earth, everything is vulnerable. Whatever we love can be lost in a moment, and sooner or later it will be lost to moth or rust. When our hearts are attached to what can’t be protected, we have reason to be anxious. But Jesus also said, “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (6:20–21). To have any peace, we need a treasure that can’t be touched. That’s what God is keeping for us in heaven.
With good reason, Revelation 21 pictures this new world as a new Jerusalem and gives detail upon detail about the walls that surround this happy place. To us that may seem a little anticlimactic, but in the ancient world there was no better way to picture security than with city walls. All those ancient stone walls all over Europe and Asia weren’t built to look pretty or for the pleasure of future tourists. They were built because back then there was always someone out to get you and no way to feel safe but to live behind such walls. Heaven is a walled city. Nothing can get to what God has prepared for his people in that place. And that’s why, in the words of Revelation 21:4, it is a world where “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
How can we have peace when we know that we are vulnerable? Only if we know this world is not everything. A new world is coming where nothing is vulnerable. And we have an inheritance in that world, kept in heaven for us. This is our future when we’re born again to a living hope.
How can we have peace when we know that we are vulnerable? Only if we know this world is not everything.
We Are Kept for Heaven, So Our Future Is Not Up to Us
In 1 Peter 1:5, Peter points to the second pillar of hope. It’s not just that there is an inheritance kept in heaven for us, invulnerable to loss, change, decay, or anything. It’s that we are being kept for heaven by God’s power and not ours. On our own we would be vulnerable. But we are not responsible for our future. God is: “By God’s power [we] are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
Peter is once again looking to the future. He’s speaking of a salvation not yet visible to us, ready to be revealed in the last time. But whether we get there depends upon God from beginning to end. God’s mercy started all this (1:3), giving us new life, a new family, and a new hope of an inheritance. God’s power raised Jesus from the dead (1:3). God keeps the inheritance secure beyond all threat (1:4). And God guards every one of his children all the way home (1:5). God is the golden thread binding this wonderful package together.
We are anxious when we feel responsible, as if all the outcomes depend upon us. But God is responsible for this future. Everything depends on him.
Once again, Peter is simply echoing what he heard from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Soon after Jesus said to lay up treasures in heaven, beyond the reach of time or evil, he said not to be anxious about your life. But there, his focus was squarely on the God who is your Father and loves you too much to leave you on your own:
Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matt. 6:26–33)
What Jesus says about God was as radical in his time as the command not to be anxious. When he refers to the Gentiles and their seeking after all the material things of life, he’s talking about how ancient pagans related to the world. They saw this world as everything. They believed there were gods, but their gods belonged to this world and none of them ruled over all of it. Most important of all, none of these gods was paying attention to their lives unless they did something to get the gods’ attention. As one historian sums it up, “A god or goddess might occasionally take a liking, or a loathing, to some particular mortal. . . . For the most part, though, the gods were out for themselves, so to speak. They were mostly indifferent to the joys and sorrows of all the Marcuses, Gaiuses, and Juliuses of this world.”7 As the pagans saw things, you may not be on your own in this world, but it’s certainly up to you to make the most of it.
It’s as if Jesus is saying, “Of course the Gentiles are anxious about their lives, what they will eat or wear, who they’ll marry, how people see them, how far they’ll climb. They think the future is up to them. If they don’t grab life by the horns, no one else will do it for them. But you don’t have to live like the Gentiles.” Jesus anchors our future in the fatherly care of the God who loves us. “Look at how he feeds the birds. Look at how he clothes the grass of the field. Are you not of more value than they? Of course you are because he loves you. Your heavenly Father already knows what you need without you telling him, and he wants good for you without you paying him. He’s your Father. Just seek his kingdom, and he’ll take care of everything else.”
Applying Hope
For now, we’re still vulnerable, facing all sorts of short-term possibilities we can’t possibly control. That means we’re going to struggle with anxiety for as long as we live, in one form or another. That just is what it is. We do have to live as thinking reeds. But we do not have to live like pagans. God has given us exactly the medicine we need in the hope of heaven—a future that is not vulnerable, guaranteed by a God who is responsible. The key is to figure out where to apply that medicine.
When we feel anxious, we’re expecting something negative for our future. That’s what anxiety is. The hope of heaven gives us another perspective on our future. We have an inheritance to set our hearts on that nothing can possibly touch and a Father who will guard us for that day no matter what may come our way in the meantime. These are the pillars of our hope for the future. When we feel anxious, we should ask which pillar is wavering and shore it up with the truth of the gospel.
Notes:
- “Anxiety,” American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/. Emphasis mine.
- “What Are Anxiety Disorders?,” American Psychiatric Association, https://www.psychiatry .org/. Emphasis mine.
- “What Is Anxiety?,” Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/. Emphasis mine.
- Pascal, Number 200, in Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees, ed. Peter Kreeft (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), 55.
- Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020), 8.
- Rosa, Uncontrollability, 64.
- Steven Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018), 184.
This article is adapted from Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime by Matthew McCullough.
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