All that’s good Part II

Some speak of spiritual resurrection, but as the sunrise requires a sun, resurrection requires a physical body. That’s what resurrection means. To simply to speak of a ‘resurrection’ of the dead is to imply physicality. The Bible has no categories for the concept of a resurrected body that remains dead and physically lying in a grave. Since Christ's resurrection is the pattern of our resurrection, we will therefore be raised in a physical body as well when Christ comes again.

When we die, our spirits go to the present heaven while our bodies go to the grave, awaiting resurrection. We will never be all God intended until body and spirit are reunited in heaven. And just as our new bodies won’t be non-bodies, but real bodies, so the new earth will be a real earth, not a non-earth. But it’ll be this earth that God redeems because he loved this earth so much He sent His only Son.

We err when we confuse the present heaven with the future heaven that God will bring down to the new earth. The present heaven is “far better” (Philippians 1:23) than our current lives now under the curse of sin and suffering. Upon death, we will be “at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). But the point is, wonderful though it will be, we shouldn’t think of the present heaven as if it were our ultimate home. The best is yet to come — eternal and delightful life worshiping and serving the forever-incarnate Jesus on the new earth. Paradise comes after death, but the Kingdom comes when Christ comes again. God never changes, but heaven will change. The Bible indicates that after our resurrection, God will relocate his central dwelling place to the new earth:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. . . . I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. . . . I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21:1-3)

We’re told “the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it [the new earth], and his servants will worship him” (Revelation 22:3). Heaven is where God’s throne is, where he dwells with his people. Hence, the new earth will be heaven on earth. When Christians die, we go to live with God in his place. That’s the present heaven. But after the resurrection, God will come down to live with us in our place. The future heaven, on the new earth, will not be “us with God” but “God with us.”

If Satan can get us to buy into an eternity unearthly, ghostly, or (God forbid) boring, we won’t think about eternity. And if we don’t think about it, why would we tell others or orient our lives toward it? Trying to develop an appetite for an eternity of disembodied existence is like trying to develop an appetite for gravel. The only good news about this view is that it’s absolutely false. The Bible’s actual teaching should thrill us: eternity in a redeemed physical body living on a new physical earth.

The hope of heaven consumed Paul. Why? Because he thought well about heaven. When our thoughts run in biblical tracks, we begin to understand that the joys of heaven will be full and deep and exuberant — pleasures enormous! We will not float as disembodied spirits strumming harps for eternity (however that works). Heaven will brook no boredom. It will be more solid, not less — more physical, more tangible, more diamond-hard, more real than anything we experience now. And yet, everything we experience now helps us imagine what is coming. Paul himself teaches us how to think about heaven when he says, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). We may infer that paradise will be better than the best things we experience now, better even than the wildest joys we can imagine. You can learn to think well about heaven by enjoying all the good things in this life now, lifting them as high as your imagination can go, and saying, this, but better. After all, the best things now serve as a mere taste test, as echoes of the music or bright shadows of the far better country to come.

And what about suffering? It’s not a mere comforting pat on the back and a cease in suffering that you’ll get upon resurrection. It’ll give you the real, material life you really want— hugging, dancing, laughing, loving! In a new physical body. When you lose something valuable to you then find it, you appreciate it more and enjoy it more after you find it. Thus, even the worst suffering you have in this world will only make your eventual joy even greater for it having happened. Read that again! We feel like this life is the only life we’ll only ever have, that his body is the only body we’ll ever have, that this money is the only money we’ll ever have. But the doctrine of resurrection doesn’t just say that someday you’ll go to heaven and get consolation for all the things you’ve lost or suffered on earth, but it says God will renew this material world.

Have you ever thought about why the very first sign that Jesus performed was not healing or raising from the dead, but turning water into wine at a party? Because the Bible is filled with prophesies that say the natural world is just a shadow of what it’s going to be like when Jesus comes back. He’s the King of the ultimate feast.

“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, ‘Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.’” - Isaiah 25:6-9

- Tim Keller and John Piper