heaven

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Heaven

What the Bible says about Heaven

Heaven is very real, but it is easy for heaven to be misrepresnted. The Bible does not offer a guided tour of heaven, but it does answer some of our most common questions, including .

What is heaven? What most people call "heaven" is actually an eternal city which the Bible calls the "new Jerusalem" (Revelation 21:2). The new Jerusalem will be the eternal home of God's people. The Bible says that "nothing unclean and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in [Jesus'] book of life" (Revelation 21:27).

The idea that everyone will go to heaven and see their relatives is not a biblical idea at all. Rather, Jesus said that those who believe in Him would find life, because "no one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6). Whatever we consider to be a joy here on earth will be beyond anything we can conceive when we get to heaven. The apostle Paul put it this way: "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him" (I Corinthians 2:9).

The Bible also talks about crowns and thrones in heaven. There will be different functions and different levels of responsibility assigned to different people. For there will still be levels of order and structure throughout God's universe.

Different levels of heaven

The closest thing Scripture says to there being different levels of Heaven is found in

2 Corinthians 12:2, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know-God knows.”

Some interpret this as indicating that there are three different levels of Heaven. The supposed levels of Heaven are divided into a level for "super-committed Christians" or Christians who have obtained a high level of spirituality, a level for "ordinary" Christians, and a level for Christians who did not serve God faithfully.

First, most students of Scripture accept that Paul is writing this verse about himself, and that he is referring to his own visionary experience on the road to Damascus some years earlier (Acts 9:1-9, 22:6-11).

It was this experience that caused Paul to claim in another letter that he had seen the risen Christ (1 Cor 15:1-10, cf. Gal 1:12). His half-hearted attempt at modesty in addressing the Corinthians led him to claim rather weakly that he knew a man who had this experience. Well, that man was Paul. He was not trying to be deceitful or evasive, but used this method of writing as a means of getting his point across in the letter

Revelation 21 -22

Many people have a misconception of what Heaven is truly like. Revelation chapters 21-22 give us a detailed picture of the New Heavens and the New Earth.

After the end times, the current Heavens and Earth will be done away with and replaced by the New Heavens and New Earth. The eternal dwelling place of believers will be the New Earth. The New Earth is the “Heaven” on which we will spend eternity. It is the New Earth on which the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city, will reside. It is on the New Earth were the pearly gates and streets of gold will be.

Heaven, the New Earth is a physical place on which we will dwell with glorified physical bodies (see 1 Corinthians 15:35-58). The concept that Heaven is “in the clouds” is unbiblical.

The concept that we will be “spirits floating around in Heaven” is unbiblical. The Heaven that believers will experience will be a new and perfect planet on which we will dwell.

The New Earth will be free from sin, evil, sickness, suffering, and death. It will likely be very similar to our current Earth, or perhaps even a re-creation of our current earth – but without the curse of sin.

Heaven at the Moment of Death

Two related and often confused concepts of heaven in Christianity are better described as the "resurrection of the body", which is exclusively of Biblical origin, as contrasted with "the immortality of the soul", which is also evident in the Greek tradition.

In the first concept, the soul does not enter heaven until the last judgement or the "end of time" when it (along with the body) is resurrected and judged.

In the second concept, the soul goes to a heaven on another plane immediately after death. These two concepts are generally combined in the doctrine of the double judgement where the soul is judged once at death and goes to a temporary heaven, while awaiting a second and final physical judgement at the end of the world.

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