What is Heaven like? Do we stay there, is it the place we are supposed to go to after we die?

The Bible's story may actually tell us a different answer than we assume... That's right, "Heaven" as we imagine it from the cartoons of our childhood, may not be where our "forever home" is.

Scripture points us to a New Heaven and New Earth, where our forever is much more of an Eden on Earth 2.0 - a physical place of fullness that we get to adventure in and enjoy for eternity with God's presence. Embracing a totally and solely spiritual afterlife apart from a material restoration is a platonic (even gnostic) belief that rejects the physical world as irredeemably corrupted.

From the first page of the Bible, we see God create a beautiful, pure, physical world created for embodied, physical humans. And the place that God started is where He wants our Human Family to continue on in our forever!

"When Paul says that his desire is ‘to depart and be with Christ, which is far better’, he is indeed thinking of a blissful life with his Lord immediately after death, but this is only the prelude to the resurrection itself.... the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world."

-N.T. Wright from "Surprised by Hope"

Let's dive in and talk about what things may be like after our life here is done.

Scripture to Read:

• Ezekiel 37:27
• Isaiah 65:17; 66:22
• Romans 8:19-23
• 2 Peter 3:10-13
• Revelation 21-22

Additional Reading: (Study using Logos Bible Software!)

• C.S. Lewis, "The Great Divorce"
• N.T. Wright, "Surprised by Hope"
• Dr. Kenneth Gentry, "The new Creation," Tabletalk Magazine, March 2004: The New Heavens and the New Earth. 2004.
• P. S. Johnston. “Heaven.” In New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2000.