Goin' up to the Spirit in the Sky | Heaven

The first depiction of Heaven that I remember seeing was from a Jehovah’s Witness leaflet that was posted through our door.

 

I can’t remember it exactly, but having seen other leaflets since then, I think it’s fair to say that they are “distinctive” in their style and theme. They are usually colourful drawings of people in the countryside, perhaps in a picturesque valley where the sun is shining, and people of all colours are enjoying outdoor activities like having picnics, running, jumping, hugging and holding hands.

 

There is usually some kind of petting zoo element, like a child stroking a baby deer or cuddling a wolf, and also some fruit eating activity taking place. I distinctly remember one leaflet which showed a young boy feeding berries to a tiger, which really tickled me for some reason. From most of these depictions of Heaven, it seems that people live in the open fields and valleys, like sheep. There are never any pictures of houses or even of tents, so I don’t know where people sleep in Jehovah’s Witness Heaven. The Bible says that God has a house which has many rooms, so maybe God’s giant, super hotel is located away from the fields and valleys there everyone frolics during the day time.

 

It’s a shame it never features in these leaflets, but perhaps the people who draw the pictures of Jehovah’s Witness Heaven can’t be bothered to imagine what God’s hotel complex looks like or they’re too busy drawing lions eating bananas; or perhaps they do know what the hotel looks like, but it’s next to an industrial estate, and so they exclude it from their promotional materials, in case it puts people off joining them.

 

Whilst I was fascinated with these depictions of Heaven, even as a child I never really took these images seriously.

 

Maybe it was the style in which they were drawn, that they looked like they were from the 1950s Ladybird children’s books that my Gran had on her bookshelf, or that the world they were showing was one dimensional and unrealistic, and showed heaven as an eternity of skipping in fields and all-you-can-eat fruit buffets.

 

Besides, I already knew what heaven was like because when I was about 8 years old, my parents brought home a VHS cassette from church called “A Glimpse of Eternity”, which I was obsessed with. For those of you born after 1998, a VHS cassette was a bit like a DVD, but instead of being a compact item that stores digital data, it was a big plastic box that stored images and sounds on enchanted brown tape. “A Glimpse of Eternity” at face value looked like a bad pirate video, the cover looked like it had been photocopied down the corner shop, and the film itself was shot like hostage video, but it was amazing. I loved this video and I watched it a lot.

 

It featured a man called Ian McCormack, who is from down under, New Zealand in fact, and it was just him sat in front of a camera, telling his amazing story, of how he died and went to the eternal Down Under, Hell, and then to Heaven. Ian was travelling as a student, and while he was in Mauritius he went diving one night, and got stung by five box jellyfish, a creature that will ordinarily kill you with a single sting. As he was slowly dying from the venom that was moving through his body, he prayed the Lord’s Prayer.

 

Ian did indeed die and he described how he woke up in Hell and then explained how he was taken from Hell into Heaven. He was pulled out of Hell into a circle of bright light, and as he moved into it, he could see a figure before him. He entered into the light and discovered that the figure was Jesus. He had a chat with Jesus, then was presented to God, and he had a chat with him too, and he also described seeing through a window to a place where there were green fields, mountains and rivers, and that this was the new earth that God had created, which believers would inhabit after our world was destroyed. He explained how he asked God to return him to his body, so that his mum would know that he hadn’t died and gone to Hell, and so he could tell her that her belief in Heaven was true, and that he had met God and Jesus.

 

God agreed to his request and returned Ian to his body, which by that time had been moved to the morgue. The medical staff, having regaining their composure, having seen a corpse suddenly become reanimated, explained that he had been declared dead nearly 20 minutes earlier.

 

I loved Ian’s testimony and he was an amazing story teller, he was captivating. But I mainly loved how he came back alive in the morgue and scared all the doctors, who probably thought a zombie apocalypse was about to begin. It was a great prank for God to play on them! I wanted to make sure I remembered the basic facts of his story, and so looked Ian up, and I found that he is still giving his testimony and telling people about God’s love. I listened to a podcast that he was on, and he is still as captivating as he was, and he genuinely seems to be a lovely bloke. He hasn’t attempted to profit of his story, he gives his resources away for free, and allows people to do what they want with them. His main mission is to preach the love of God, and share God’s heart for the lost. He’s amazing and I genuinely encourage you to check his videos out on YouTube, especially the 80’s recording which I think is Ian at his best.

 

His story was definitely an influence on how I viewed Heaven. I never thought of Heaven as a place where St Peter was at the pearly gates acting as a bouncer, and with people sitting on clouds strumming harps, and despite this secular perception of the Christian Heaven, I don’t think this is a view that most Christians have either. I had been taught that in Heaven, everything would be new, sparkly and gold. There would be no more death, sorrow, pain or tears, and there would be everlasting peace. We would still have physical bodies and would be recognisable as ourselves, but there would be no marriage and no need for sex or reproduction, and so our resurrection bodies would have no genitals, and our groins would presumably be smoothed over like Barbie and Action Man dolls, but we wouldn’t care because we would be too busy worshipping and praising God. To top it all off we would be with God forever, and we would meet Jesus.

 

This sounded good to me to begin with, the whole absence of genitals and not having sex thing, was a bit of a shame, but I figured that the everlasting joy and peace would make up for all that. The idea of Heaven was exciting to me, but the more I thought about it over time, the more unenthusiastic I felt. I even started to become worried that I wasn’t actually that excited about Heaven, and if I wasn’t excited about Heaven then I didn’t how I was going to sell it to people and bring them to Jesus. I could threaten them with Hell, which works a treat, as we know, but how was I going to sweeten the deal with a boring Heaven that was like an everlasting church service, as I once heard someone describe it.

 

I resigned myself to Heaven, believing that the alternative was worse, and that I should be grateful that I wouldn’t be burning in Hell. I assumed that it would probably be alright, but then I realised something that really turned me off Heaven. It was the realisation that I would be stuck for eternity with loads of smug, self-satisfied, holier than thou Christians. Sure, there would be some cool Christians who were normal and nice, but everyone would want to hang around those guys. Maybe I would eventually get to spend some time with some cool, famous Christians, like Tom Hanks, Bono from U2, or Mr. T from the A-Team, but that might not happen for millennia. 

 

I appreciate that this is a stupid way of thinking and I didn’t really expect to become best friends with Tom Hanks, although it would be nice to meet him, being such a big fan, but the thought of being eternally trapped with a load of sanctimonious gits, did bother me. I don’t hate Christians, some of my best friends are Christians, and I’m married to a Christian. I do know that most Christians are nice, and not all of them are self-righteous, pompous, arrogant, and annoying, but I also know that I like to be around normal people who have normal secular tastes and interests, like I do. I also like to be around my family, and given their views on Christianity, it was likely that they wouldn’t be there, and although I would be too supernaturally happy to feel their absence, or worry about them being tortured in Hell forever, wouldn’t I miss them, even just a little? Even if I was high on the drug of God’s holy love, I would know they weren’t there, intellectually, and that might be a bit of a downer.

 

I also love music, but if eternity only consisted of Christian Contemporary Music, then I think that would be a real loss. I appreciate a lot of Christian music and love lots of worship songs, but you know, most Christian artists don’t hold a candle to bands like The Beatles, A Perfect Circle, Depeche Mode, Chvrches, Killswitch Engage, Biffy Clyro, etc. And what about comedy? I love comedy and I love laughing. Some of the best times in my life have been when I was laughing until my belly was sore, I couldn’t breathe, and my eyes were filled with tears. Most Christians have never made me laugh that way. Would Heaven mean I was resigned to laugh inanely at bad vicar jokes for eternity, or would I be so off my head and joyful, that everything would be that hilarious to me, and the sight of a passing sparrow would send me into uncontrollable hysterics.

 

I have only laughed that hard once at a Christian, and that was when we went to a conference one year, and I saw the comedian Tim Vine, try to catch a pen behind his ear, accompanied by a song he had written about catching a pen behind his ear, for about 15 minutes straight. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I laughed so hard at it, but when I saw it on one of his DVDs a few years later, it just wasn’t as funny the second time. If the best Heaven could offer comedically, was Tim Vine performing that routine into eternity, as much as I love it, I’m pretty sure it would stop being funny and eventually, and I might even begin to resent Tim Vine and his stupid pens.

 

The concept of Heaven has always been confusing for me. I believed that Heaven was a separate place that we went when we died, but I owned a Children's Bible which spoke of a new Heaven and a new earth, and it had pictures of a new temple that God was going to build. If there was going to be a new Heaven and a new earth, then what did that mean? Would we go to Heaven when we died, then be sent to earth to live our lives again, then have to die in order to get to the new Heaven? Would we live on the new earth and God live in the new Heaven, which we would get to go to now and again, perhaps for a cup of tea and a platter of fruit with God? It didn't match up to what I was being told about Heaven, and whenever I asked questions or heard discussions about the exact details of Heaven, the answer was usually that we just don’t know.

Over time this view of Heaven has shifted or maybe my experience of other beliefs about Heaven has widened. I’ve heard theologians talk about how the traditional view of Heaven was wrong, that we wouldn't be evacuated from earth to a magical realm where we would be in an everlasting church service, and I don't hear as many people preaching this model of Heaven anymore. The growing understanding now seems to be that the earth will be renewed, and believers will inhabit the renewed earth and work in partnership with God in taking care of it. The New Testament scholar, NT Wright, talks a lot about the traditional view of Heaven and how it’s a misconception. His opinion is that the traditional idea of Heaven is not the view held by the early church, and in fact comes from Greek philosophy. He argues that the first century Jewish understanding, was that Heaven and earth were two parts of the same creation, and that God would bring together both Heaven and earth in an act of new creation, and those who were raised from the dead at the end of the age would be stewards over this creation. This was also achieved in part, by the death and resurrection of Jesus, which in effect, united earth and Heaven, meaning that Heaven is also for us, here and now.

 

The different views of Heaven aren't entirely opposite, the result is the same, a final end point in a kingdom of peace, whether on this earth or another. Sure, the implications of the views differ for how we live our lives now, but the end result is the same. God’s faithful will be there, there will be no more pain or sorrow, and there will be everlasting peace and communion with God.

The theology of Heaven doesn't really concern me. There isn't any contention around Heaven, and so I haven't really had to worry about it. If it is an everlasting church service, then maybe it won't be as bad as I imagine. The music will at least be better than some of the Christian music that we have at the moment. The dead Christian composers will be there, we will hear Handel's Messiah, conducted by Handel himself. King David will lead worship services and sing his psalms and Daniel Bedingfield will provide backing vocals and beatboxing, and so at least we won’t have to suffer an eternity of generic, formulaic, bland, Hillsong style worship music.

 

I am drawn to the newer interpretations that I hear, that Heaven and earth will be renewed and both will be united. That understanding of Heaven means something to me now, because we get to take part in the stewardship of creation at this moment in time, and we also get glimpses of what that renewal means for us right now. It also means that when this finally takes place and we are with God, we won’t be eking out eternity by mindlessly skipping through green pastures, or passively sitting around laughing at birds, we will have purpose.

 

This seems much better to me, but it does also mean we have a responsibility to creation now. We shouldn’t be willfully polluting the air with gas guzzling vehicles and tearing down rain forests, just because we believe that the earth is going to be destroyed, and we’re going to end up in a better place.

Our concepts of Heaven are ultimately elusive, no one can know for sure exactly what Heaven is, and what it will be like, but I think it’s important to be open to different understandings, because they help us grow in our knowledge of God.

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music