Oct 29 2009
Page 1 of 2
8 surprises about that "happy place in the sky."
At Vacation Bible School in 5th grade, I learned a song with a chirpy chorus that proclaimed “Heaven is a wonderful place … filled with glory and grace.” It was catchy—I still remember the tune—but I had no idea what it meant. And honestly, I still don’t. The lyrics are optimistic and encouraging but hard to visualize. Just like the Bible’s descriptions of Heaven.
Most of the heavenly biblical account seems to indicate we’ll spend our eternity in a place filled with the presence of God and lit by the dazzling brightness of his glory, a place where sickness has been banished, where sin is absent, where sorrow is no more. It’s a land of healing and eternal bliss and infinite goodness.
We are finite creatures. Knowing how to even begin thinking (or singing) about something infinite is a real problem. So at some point in our cultural history, we set aside the ethereal thinking and approached Heaven from a new angle. This direction was lots more accessible. We replaced the glory and light and divine presence with stuff borrowed from a 10 year-old girl’s bedroom: puffy white clouds, rainbows, twinkly music and blonde baby angels wearing white robes. We took the most profound idea in Western philosophy and turned it into the lamest place possible.
When it comes to heaven, we Christians have allowed our culture—which includes the Church—to really ruin our thinking.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about what the Bible really said about hell. Let’s turn the coin over. What does the Bible say about heaven? How close does it match what we think we know?
Eight Surprises about Heaven (with Help from N.T. Wright)
-
“The heavens” aren’t always Heaven. In the Old Testament Hebrew, the word we translate “heaven” is samayim. It shows up more than 300 times in the Old Testament, including the first verse of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Samayim is generally used to indicate the part of the natural world that exists in contrast to the ground (the “earth”). Which is why many uses of samayim are most accurately translated “the heavens.” It’s not necessarily the home of harps and apple-cheeked angels, but of birds and stars and rain. In these situations, samayim is just a longer, churchier word for sky.
-
But sometime samayim IS Heaven. We shouldn’t make a blanket statement above, though, because to some Old Testament authors, “the heavens” clearly are more than just the sky. Certain uses of samayim speak of it as the place where God lives (see Deuteronomy 26:15 or 2 Chronicles 30:27). The book of Job describes God holding court in the “heights of heaven” (Job 22:12). The Psalmist tells of the glory of the Almighty having been set “above the heavens” (Psalm 8:1) and proclaims that God is to be “exalted above the heavens” (Psalm 108:5). So the samayim—the heavens—weren’t only a place where the moon and the stars shine, but a created place where God dwells, where he spreads out his glory, and where he is to be worshiped. (Still nothing about harps, though.)
-
The New Testament picture is no clearer. The New Testament word for heaven is the Greek word ouranos, which appears 269 times. Most of these parallel the use of samayim in the Old Testament. It’s a replacement word for “sky” (Mark 13:25 describes stars “falling from heaven”) and it’s also the place where God dwells (see Mark 16:19). But then the concept gets even muddier, because …
-
