How Great is Our Anticipation
Reflection Roundup has undergone a facelift of sorts, turning toward reporting conversation couched in relationships, boots-on-the-ground and “live from the field” items important to Christian leaders in a monthly rhythm. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but with which we may not concur. This month’s conversation includes some vital nuggets about heaven that readers will not want to miss.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecc. 3:11).
In the Western part of the Northern Hemisphere, we live a privileged life. Gautam Nair reports for The Washington Post, “even the developed world’s poor and middle classes are, by global standards, extraordinarily rich. After adjusting for cost-of-living differences, a typical American still earns an income that is 10 times the income received by the typical person in the world.”1
This month I experienced my privilege along with several others who have been literal life-long friends. We have loved each other since before many of us were born. God commissioned the prophet Jeremiah saying, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” (Jer. 1:5). We share this same sentiment on a human level, cognizant of its rarity and uniqueness. In this way also, we are the richest people on earth. With great relational privilege comes the responsibility to shoulder one another’s burdens, and we bear this as a community, often stewarding one another’s questions. Hence, the impetus for this month’s Reflection Roundup. What do we have to look forward to in heaven? How can it possibly get better than this?
It is likely that this question garners visceral responses for the reader—in the mind and possibly even the body—and for different reasons. I ask that you simply hang in there, and tenderly consider the honest possibilities of perspective that lie behind a heartfelt query vulnerably voiced. Part of the privilege of relationship is dwelling with one another in our honest questions, witnessing in the Spirit to one another. Here the Spirit does God’s best work in our hearts and lives, simultaneously enhorting and resurrecting our thoughts (Jn. 16:8-15).
Reflect, for a moment, on what it was like to be a young adult celebrating singleness one moment and then wondering the next where the heck your soulmate is? Vacillating between “Lord come quickly” and “I haven’t even had sex yet!” I remember what it was like to place contingencies before the Lord, things I knew of in this world, but did not yet know (in the biblical sense). What about the successful business person, who has yet to encounter a need they themselves could not address and meet? “Is this not magnificent…which I have built… by my mighty power and for my glorious majesty?” (Dan. 4:30). If we have read the story of King Nebuchadnezzar, we know this is dangerous territory, yet our pride continually takes us there if unchecked.
Here’s why I can’t leave this alone. This week, two polar opposite events took place in my personal circumstances. First, a college student with whom I shared the exploration of the bulk of the New Testament last semester passed away tragically in a car accident. Second, a young man who has come to mean a great deal to our family, who happens to experience life in a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, stood up in water on his own two feet surrounded by supportive and safe friends. One of these experiences has brought great sadness to all involved, the kind we never want to experience; one brought overwhelmingly deep joy, the kind that causes us to rewind our memories and relive them again and again. Both situations have their emotional “punch” because this world is incredibly uncomfortable in ways of which we are reminded while walking through these events. Both point our hearts and minds to when all things will be restored, when this earth and the heavens above it will be made new (Rev. 21:1-4).
Heaven brings to earth the restoration of all things. Glance at the image associated with this article. Can any of us almost physically feel the knees of this runner, wrapped in braces, trying to maintain his own body, to do what makes him feel most alive? Been there. Rich Atchley says, “Death was never meant to be normal.”2 Paul centers his theology on this fact.
We know that everything God made has been waiting now in pain, like a woman ready to give birth. Not only the world, but we also have been waiting with pain inside us. We have the Spirit as the first part of God’s promise. So we are waiting for God to finish making us his own children, which means our bodies will be made free (Rom. 8:22-23).
This is what we have to look forward to: freedom from death and the parts of our physical selves that feel dead even while we have God’s breath of life.
Privilege blinds. This world is distracting, but ultimately our physical bodies have their limit and we die. Somewhere in the world at any moment, someone is dying. “Death reveals the futility of much of what we chase in life.”3 Contemplating the fullness of life that Christians have the privilege to anticipate requires that we consider where this hope actually comes from. Do we experience this hope only during the moments in which we let “#blessed” fly from our social media accounts, or when we are face to face with the concrete depths of our own human vulnerability?4
If eternity is seated in my heart, why don’t I sense it more? Crave it? N. T. Wright declares the new world is as “hard to believe as the resurrection itself” because we are looking, we’re expecting, within human frames.5 A new heaven and earth are difficult to imagine because, well, God’s power is “abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). Imagine! Incorporating Wright’s thinking, artist Makoto Fujimura names “three main pathways toward preparing for God’s new world to enter ours: the work of compassion and mercy toward justice, the work of creating beauty, and the act of evangelism to proclaim this Good News to all of creation.”6
Wright describes the mission of God in the restoration of the world within and through the people of God this way. “Every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or walk’ every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.”7 These things will last. They will not burn. Jesus says, “Earth and sky will be destroyed, but the words I have said will never be destroyed” (Matt. 24:35). Neither will the fruit of those words.
We’ve each had experiences that connect to a deep place within us. Nature facilitates this, watching the joy bubble up within someone standing with the assistance of water and a few friends also created this deep connection. Stewarding one another’s faith through our questions creates an eternal bond. These things last and pale in comparison to all the restoration we have to look forward to. Lord, come quickly.
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1 “Analysis | Most Americans Vastly Underestimate How Rich They Are Compared with the Rest of the World. Does It Matter?,” Washington Post, accessed July 22, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/08/23/most-americans-vastly-underestimate-how-rich-they-are-compared-with-the-rest-of-the-world-does-it-matter/.
2 Atchley, Rick, Home Is Coming (The Hills Church, 2020), https://thehills.org/sermon/home-is-coming/.
3 Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night : For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (IVP, an imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2021), 119.
4 idem.
5 N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope : Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, 1st ed. (HarperOne, 2008), 208.
6 Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (Yale, 2020), https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=lsdar&AN=ATLAiACO210614001270&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s8479690, 141.
7 Wright, Surprised by Hope, 208.
