Audio Transcript

Today’s episode is a bit longer than normal because it’s a special episode — a celebration. But before we get to that, we begin with today’s question from an anonymous listener who is putting together a few texts that we will be reading together in the next week ahead in our Bible reading. Here’s the question:

“Hello, Pastor John! In Acts 7:44–50, we read that ‘the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands, as the prophet says, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest?”’ So, it appears that God has a dwelling, one that he made. He’s not confined to human-built tents and temples. And Jesus calls heaven ‘the throne of God’ in Matthew 5:34. And Stephen, during his stoning, ‘gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.’ That account is in Acts 7:54–60.

“So, it seems like God has a dwelling place, a place where the resurrected Christ now dwells. If the incarnate Christ is there, I assume it’s a physical place. Do you agree? Is heaven a real place right now? Where is it — inside or outside of our known creation? Is this our eternal home? Is this what descends on earth as the new Jerusalem? What do you know about heaven as it exists right now?”

That’s a big one. Oh my goodness. What do I know?

My counsel for all of us as we ponder what it means that God is in heaven, that the risen Christ with his resurrection body is in heaven, that we will die and go to heaven, that heaven will be part of the new heavens and the new earth at the end of the age — my counsel, as we ponder all of these, is to let us put the primary emphasis on the relational dimension of heaven, not the spatial dimension of heaven. And I’ll try to defend that in just a minute. I don’t mean that we put no emphasis on the spatial, material, creational dimension of heaven, but that it be secondary.

Or to say it another way, I think the Bible encourages us to focus on our being with Christ — with God — as the main blessing of heaven. And the fact that we will eventually have resurrection bodies in a new creation is a glorious but a secondary reality. Now, that may be a controversial statement. I don’t know. I think it’s right. With Christ is primary; a glorious new resurrection body, in a new creation, is secondary. If we don’t have this priority, it will be as though we were admitted to the king’s dwelling, and we were more amazed at his house than at his own wisdom and power and moral beauty, his own personal presence, which I think would be offensive to the king.

God Is Spirit

Here are a couple of reasons why I say that. First, God himself is spirit and is not material. John 4:24: “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” And Jesus said, “A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). Therefore, God has no spatial dimensions. Therefore, when the Bible speaks of God being in a place, it is referring to his special influence in that place or his special, personal, relational presence in that place. It’s not spatial.

I think you can sum up the reality of the presence of God — what does the presence of God mean? — in three ways. One, he is in every place because he has no limits. And he’s in no place, no spatial location, in the sense that a spirit occupies no dimensional space. And third, he is in specific places and persons in the sense of exerting influence or showing a personal relationship.

So, to speak of heaven as the dwelling of God is not a spatial statement. It is a way of saying that God is above, outside his creation. So, Solomon prays in 1 Kings 8:27, “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” In other words, go up through the heavens, and when you get to the highest heaven, God’s not there. That’s not his house. That’s not where he lives. He’s beyond. He’s outside his creation. God will not be there in a limited way.

He’s above and outside what he made. And there are no spatial categories outside the material creation. God is spirit and, therefore, does not spatially inhabit space and time. He’s before space. He’s before time. Titus 1:2 says, “Before the ages began” — that’s where God was. And, therefore, he is outside space and time. He’s not housed in the highest heaven. That’s my first observation for why I say we should be slow to speak of heaven as a spatial place for God to be.

Christ’s Body Is Like and Unlike Ours

Here’s a second reason that I think we should emphasize the relational reality of heaven above the spatial reality. Even though Jesus today has a resurrection body, and he could eat fish in that body (Luke 24:42), at least three biblical facts keep us from being simplistic or naive about speaking of his location in primarily spatial terms today.

First, Christ today is seated at the right hand of God. Colossians 3:1: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” But God has no body. He has no physical hands, neither a right nor a left. He’s not material, not spatial. So, for Christ to be at his right hand is to be in a relationship to him that is kingly, authoritative, but not spatial in any ordinary way that we can fit into our categories. That’s first.

“The Bible encourages us to focus on our being with Christ — with God — as the main blessing of heaven.”

Second observation: the resurrection body that Jesus has is like and yet unlike our bodies. His friends could recognize Jesus after he rose from the dead. They could touch him. He could eat, but he also appeared and disappeared in strange ways, unlike our bodies. Now, that strange fact, together with the fact that he is at the right hand of God, should alert us to the fact that the spatial realm he inhabits, which is suited to his peculiar kind of physical body, is not like ours. That spatial realm is no ordinary space as we know it. That’s the second observation.

Here’s a third biblical fact to keep us from being too simplistic about speaking of Christ’s location in primarily spatial terms. For us to be there, to be in heaven now or after we die or in the coming age — that reality of being in heaven, the New Testament describes mainly in relational terms, not spatial terms.

• Colossians 3:3: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” That’s now.
  
• Philippians 1:23: “My desire is to depart and be with Christ.” That’s death. That’s far better, he says.
  
• 2 Corinthians 5:8: “We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”
  
• John 17:24: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.”
  
• Lastly, 1 Thessalonians 4:17, regarding the second coming: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”
  

“With Christ,” “with Christ,” “with the Lord,” “with me,” “with the Lord” — that’s the emphasis of the New Testament. It’s not wrong to think of heaven today as a place where Christ sits in supreme authority over creation, as long as we realize that the spatial reality of this place defies limitation to the ordinary categories of this present creation. It just won’t fit the world that we now know. Heaven will have familiar aspects but vastly new, mind-blowing aspects. And we’d do well not to focus on what we don’t know, but to rivet our attention, our main attention, on the One we do know and be so familiar with him, get to know him so deeply, go down into such depths of love for him that to be with him when we die — and forever — will make all spatial realities precious but secondary.

Aging with Gratitude

That is a beautiful meditation on heaven’s relational focus on Christ, Pastor John. But before we leave this episode and leave this week, I have to say that on Saturday you turn 79 years old. Happy birthday from all of us. We love and appreciate you greatly.

Wow, thank you.

And we thank God for how you have impacted so many lives around the world.

My pleasure. I’ve been thinking about it a lot these days. I read a book recently by Richard Bauckham called The Blurred Cross. He’s exactly my age. He’s a New Testament British scholar. And maybe my biggest takeaway was that getting old is a glorious opportunity for growing gratitude. That’s the theme of the book, really. And I said, “Amen. Amen.” The longer I live, the more grateful I feel toward God and so many other people.

But the second-biggest impact was his wrestling with why it is that those of us who are old don’t feel old. He said it’s almost a universal experience that when you talk to seventy-somethings and eighty-somethings about how old they are, they say, “Yeah, yeah, I am. I feel it, but I don’t feel it the way you think I feel it.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah.” And he said he discovered an explanation that’s the best thing he had seen. And I would say now, so far, it’s the best thing I’ve seen to give an account for why that is. He said, “I don’t think we should think of our lives as a circle, emerging out of nothing and returning to nothing. And I don’t think we should think of our aging lives as a straight line where you’re continuously just leaving the past behind and moving on to something new.”

Here’s what he said, and this is a quote now. And this is a quote, by the way, from Michael Mayne (so I’m getting it third-hand, not just second-hand).

I can . . . see my life as a slowly ascending spiral [so not a straight line, not a circle, but a spiral]. For a spiral suggests a life where each new circle — each new year or decade — still contains within it the make-up of the old, the feeling of familiarity, the octogenarian still aware of what it felt like to be a child, the lover, the parent he or she once was, and still displaying the same recognizable characteristics, but wiser now, shaped by life’s knocks, able to say, “I have been here before and learned a thing or two.” Looking back, we can begin to understand our own unique story and see that we have been moving in a spiral around a center. (10–11)

Now, when I read that, I thought, “That helps.” That really helps. Because as I stand here before this microphone, my 14-year-old experience of shin splints — it’s just like yesterday. I feel those shin splints today and what they kept me from doing for a few weeks. My college excitement when I headed off to college — that’s all right here in my heart right now. My 22-year-old night before I married Noël, I remember that night in the motel just yesterday and how utterly exciting it was. And my first job at 28, all the excitement of walking into that classroom. And leaving teaching at 34. And I could just go on and on.

These moments in my life have not been left behind. All those feelings are there. So, I think that’s partly why I don’t feel old. I’ve got all that stuff, all that glorious reality of experience with God, with people still inside of me — forming me, spiral-like, who I am. And I love that reference to the center. My life has been spiraling around (since I was six years old) the center of God’s grace in Christ. And every new day, the reservoir of past grace gets bigger, and so thanksgiving gets deeper, and every new day the promises are more sure, more intense, more precious to think about. So, I’m excited to get old, Tony. It’s a great thing to grow toward heaven and grow toward Jesus.