Heaven

Heaven. Our eternal home. Our destiny. Where we will be forever with God.

The sense that we will live forever somewhere has shaped every civilization in human history. Australian aborigines pictured Heaven as a distant island beyond the western horizon. The early Finns thought it was a distant island in the far away east. Mexicans, Peruvians, and Polynesians believed that they went to the sun or the moon after death. Native Americans believed that, in the afterlife, their spirits would hunt the spirits of buffalo.

The Gilgamesh epic, an ancient Babylonian legend, refers to a resting place of heroes and hints at a tree of life. In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies had maps placed beside them as guides to the future world. The Romans believed that the righteous would picnic in the Elysian Fields, while their horses grazed nearby. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said, "The day thou fearest as the last is the birthday of eternity."

Although these depictions of the afterlife differ, the unifying testimony of the human heart throughout history is belief in life after death. Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal—that this world is not all there is.

C.S. Lewis writes, "If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next … Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither."

What is heaven to you? What is your concept of heaven?

Someday you and I will be there. In one sense we long for heaven don't we?

But in another sense, shouldn't we be longing for God, not heaven?

That may sound spiritual, but is it?

The writer to the Hebrews (11:16), speaks positively about longing for a better country.

Let me say it this way. To long for heaven is a longing for God, and longing for God is longing for Heaven. If we understand what Heaven is (God's home) and who God is, then there won't be any kind of conflict between the two. Jesus uses the two words interchangeably in His sermons.

Or why talk about Heaven when we can just talk about Jesus? Well, the two again go together.

We were made for a person (Jesus Christ) and a place (Heaven). Again, there is no rivalry between the two.

Jesus said, "I'm going there to prepare a place for you." (John 14:1,2). Now think about it for a moment - God made the Heavens and the Earth in 6 days, and he's had over 2000 years to prepare a place for you and I. What a place it is going to be.

I can only imagine.