Heaven (14 page)
Authors: Randy Alcorn
Christ came to remove the curse of sin and death (Romans 8:2). He is the second Adam, who will undo the damage wrought by
the first Adam (1 Corinthians 15:22, 45; Romans 5:15-19). In the Cross and the Resurrection, God made a way not only to restore
his original design for mankind but also to expand it. In our resurrection bodies, we will again dwell on Earth—a New Earth—completely
free of the Curse. Unencumbered by sin, human activity will lead naturally to a prosperous and magnificent culture.
Under the Curse, human culture has not been eliminated, but it has been severely hampered by sin, death, and decay. Before
the Fall, food was readily available with minimal labor. Time was available to pursue thoughtful aesthetic ideas, to work
for the sheer pleasure of it, to please and glorify God by developing skills and abilities. Since the Fall, generations have
lived and died after spending most of their productive years eking out an existence in the pursuit of food, shelter, and protection
against theft and war. Mankind has been distracted and debilitated by sickness and sin. Our cultural development has likewise
been stunted and twisted, and sometimes misdirected—though not always. Even though our depravity means we have no virtue that
makes us worthy of our standing before God, we are nevertheless "made in God's likeness" (James 3:9). Consequently, some
things we do, even in our fallenness, such as painting, building, performing beautiful music, finding cures for diseases,
and other cultural, scientific, commercial, and aesthetic pursuits, are good.
The removal of the Curse means that people, culture, the earth, and the universe will again be as God intended. The lifting
of the Curse comes at a terrible price: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" (Galatians
3:13, ESV). God's law shows us how far short we fall. But Jesus took on himself the curse of sin, satisfying God's wrath.
By taking the Curse upon himself and defeating it through his resurrection, Jesus guaranteed the lifting of the Curse from
mankind and from the earth.
The removal of the Curse will be as thorough and sweeping as the redemptive work of Christ. In bringing us salvation, Christ
has already undone some of the damage in our hearts, but in the end he will finally and completely restore his entire creation
to what God originally intended (Romans 8:19-21). Christ will turn back the Curse and restore to humanity all that we lost
in Eden, and he will give us much more besides.
FAR AS THE CURSE IS FOUND
Jesus came not only to save spirits from damnation. That would have been, at most, a partial victory. No, he came to save
his whole creation from death. That means our bodies too, not just our spirits. It means the earth, not just humanity. And
it means the universe, not just the earth.
Christ's victory over the Curse will not be partial. Death will not just limp away wounded. It will be annihilated, utterly
destroyed: "[God] will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up
death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from
all the earth" (Isaiah 25:7-8).
Isaac Watts's magnificent hymn "Joy to the World" is theologically on target:
No more let sins and sorrows grow
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessingsflow
Far as the curse is found.
God will lift the Curse, not only morally (in terms of sins) and psychologically (in terms of sorrows), but also physically
(in terms of thorns in the ground). How far does Christ's redemptive work extend?
Far as the curse is found.
If redemption failed to reach the farthest boundaries of the Curse, it would be incomplete. The God who rules the world
with truth and grace won't be satisfied until every sin, every sorrow, every thorn is reckoned with.
In the Reformed tradition, Albert Wolters embraces an expansive redemptive worldview: "Biblical religion . . . views the
whole course of history as a movement from a garden to a city, and it fundamentally affirms that movement. . . . Redemption
in Jesus Christ reaches just as far as the fall. The horizon of creation is at the same time the horizon of sin and of salvation.
To conceive of either the fall or Christ's deliverance as encompassing less than the whole of creation is to compromise the
biblical teaching of the radical nature of the fall and the cosmic scope of redemption."
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Jesus came not only to rescue people from ultimate destruction. He came also to rescue the entire universe from ultimate destruction.
He will transform our dying Earth into a vital New Earth, fresh and uncontaminated, no longer subject to death and destruction.
The Curse is real, but it is
temporary.
Jesus is the cure for the Curse. He came to set derailed human history back on its tracks. Earth won't be put out of its misery;
it will be infused with a greater life than it has ever known, at last becoming all that God meant for it to be.
We have never seen the earth as God made it. Our planet as we know it is a shadowy, halftone image of the original. But it
does whet our appetites for the New Earth, doesn't it? If the present Earth, so diminished by the Curse, is at times so beautiful
and wonderful; if our bodies, so diminished by the Curse, are at times overcome with a sense of the earth's beauty and wonder;
then
how magnificent will the New Earth be?
And what will it be like to experience the New Earth in something else we've never known: perfect bodies?
A mature Christian Bible student wrote me a note after reading a draft of this book: "I realize now that I have always thought
that when we die we go immediately to our eternal home. After I was there, that would be the end of the story. I wouldn't
care about what happened to Earth and everything on it. Why
should
I care about a doomed planet?"
Without Christ, both the earth and mankind would be doomed. But Christ came, died, and rose from the grave. He brought deliverance,
not destruction. Because of Christ, we are not doomed, and neither is the earth.
Earth cannot be delivered from the Curse by being destroyed. It can only be delivered by being
resurrected.
As we'll see in the next section, Christ's resurrection is the forerunner of our own, and our resurrection is the forerunner
of the earth's.
WHY IS RESURRECTION SO IMPORTANT?
Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the
amino acids rekindle, the Church •willfall.. . . Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping transcendence; making
of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.
John Updike
I
n the late 1990s, a group of scholars assembled to evaluate whether Jesus actually said the things attributed to him by the
Gospel writers. Although they employed remarkably subjective criteria in their evaluation of Scripture, members of the self-appointed
"Jesus Seminar" were widely quoted by the media as authorities on the Christian faith.
Marcus Borg, a Jesus Seminar leader, said this of Christ's resurrection: "As a child, I took it for granted that Easter meant
that Jesus literally rose from the dead. I now see Easter very differently. For me, it is irrelevant whether or not the tomb
was empty. Whether Easter involved something remarkable happening to the physical body of Jesus is irrelevant."
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As a child, Borg was right. As an adult—though considered a spokesman for Christianity—he couldn't be more wrong. What Borg
calls irrelevant—the physical resurrection of Christ's body—the apostle Paul considered absolutely essential to the Christian
faith. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. .
. . [and] we are to be pitied more than all men" (1 Corinthians 15:17, 19).
The physical resurrection of Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of redemption—both for mankind and for the earth. Indeed, without
Christ's resurrection and what it means—an eternal future for fully restored human beings dwelling on a fully restored Earth—there
is no Christianity.
RESURRECTION IS PHYSICAL
The major Christian creeds state, "I believe in the resurrection of the body." But I have found in many conversations that
Christians tend to spiritualize the resurrection of the dead, effectively denying it.
†
They don't reject it as a doctrine, but they deny its essential
meaning:
a permanent return to a physical existence in a physical universe.
Of Americans who believe in a resurrection of the dead, two-thirds believe they will not have bodies after the resurrection.
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But this is self-contradictory. A non-physical resurrection is like a sunless sunrise. There's no such thing. Resurrection
means
that we will have bodies. If we didn't have bodies, we wouldn't be resurrected!
The biblical doctrine of the resurrection of the dead begins with the human body but extends far beyond it. R. A. Torrey writes,
"We will not be disembodied spirits in the world to come, but redeemed spirits, in redeemed bodies, in a redeemed universe."
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If we don't get it right on the resurrection of the body, we'll get nothing else right. It's therefore critical that we not
merely affirm the resurrection of the dead as a point of doctrine but that we
understand the
meaning of the resurrection we affirm.
Genesis 2:7 says, "The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,
and the man became a living being. "The Hebrew word for "living being" is
nephesh,
often translated "soul." The point at which Adam became
nephesh
is when God joined his body (dust) and spirit (breath) together. Adam was not a living human being until he had both material
(physical) and immaterial (spiritual) components. Thus, the essence of humanity is not just spirit, but
spirit joined with body.
Your body does not merely house the real you—it is as much a part of who you are as your spirit is.
If this idea seems wrong to us, it's because we have been deeply influenced by Christoplatonism.
*
From a christoplatonic perspective, our souls merely occupy our bodies, like a hermit crab inhabits a seashell, and our
souls could naturally—or even ideally—live in a disembodied state.
It's no coincidence that the apostle Paul's detailed defense of the physical resurrection of the dead was written to the church
at Corinth. More than any other New Testament Christians, the Corinthian believers were immersed in the Greek philosophies
of Platonism and dualism, which perceived a dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical. The biblical view of human
nature, however, is radically different. Scripture indicates that God designed our bodies to be an integral part of our total
being. Our physical bodies are an essential aspect of who we are, not just shells for our spirits to inhabit.
Death is an abnormal condition because it tears apart what God created and joined together. God intended for our bodies to
last as long as our souls. Those who believe in Platonism or in preexistent spirits see a disembodied soul as natural and
even desirable. The Bible sees it as unnatural and undesirable. We are unified beings. That's why the bodily resurrection
of the dead is so vital. And that's why Job rejoiced that
in his flesh he would see God (]ob
19:26).
When God sent Jesus to die, it was for our bodies as well as our spirits. He came to redeem not just "the breath of life"
(spirit) but also "the dust of the ground" (body). When we die, it isn't that our real self goes to the present Heaven and
our fake self goes to the grave; it's that part of us goes to the present Heaven and part goes to the grave to await our bodily
resurrection. We will never be all that God intended for us to be until body and spirit are again joined in resurrection.
(If we do have physical forms in the intermediate state, clearly they will not be our original or ultimate bodies.)
Any views of the afterlife that settle for less than a bodily resurrection—including Christoplatonism, reincarnation, and
transmigration of the soul—are explicitly unchristian. The early church waged major doctrinal wars against Gnosticism and
Manichaeism, dualistic worldviews that associated God with the spiritual realm of light and Satan with the physical world
of darkness. These heresies contradicted the biblical account that says God was pleased with the
entire
physical realm, all of which he created and called "very good" (Genesis 1:31). The truth of Christ's resurrection repudiated
the philosophies of Gnosticism and Manichaeism. Nevertheless, two thousand years later, these persistent heresies have managed
to take hostage our modern theology of Heaven.
Our incorrect thinking about bodily resurrection stems from our failure to understand the environment in which resurrected
people will live—the New Earth. Anthony Hoekema is right: "Resurrected bodies are not intended just to float in space, or
to flit from cloud to cloud. They call for a
new earth
on which to live and to work, glorifying God. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body, in fact, makes no sense whatever
apart from the doctrine of the new earth."
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CONTINUITY IS CRITICAL
Paul says that if Christ didn't rise from the dead, we're still in our sins (1 Corinthians 15:17)—meaning we'd be bound for
Hell, not Heaven.
Paul doesn't just say that if there's no
Heaven,
the Christian life is futile. He says that if there's no
resurrection of the dead,
then the hope of Christianity is an illusion, and we're to be pitied for placing our faith in Christ. Paul has no interest
in a Heaven that's merely for human spirits. Ultimately, there is no Heaven for human spirits unless Heaven is also for human
bodies.
Christianity is not a platonic religion that regards material things as mere shadows of reality, which will be sloughed off
as soon as possible. Not the mere immortality of the soul, but rather the resurrection of the body and the renewal of all
creation is the hope of the Christian faith.
JOHN PIPER
Wishful thinking is not the reason why, deep in our hearts, we desire a resurrected life on a resurrected Earth instead of
a disembodied existence in a spiritual realm. Rather, it is precisely because God intends for us to be raised to new life
on the New Earth that we desire it. It is God who created us to desire what we are made for. It is God who "set eternity in
the hearts of men" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). It is God who designed us to live on Earth and to desire the earthly life. And it
is our bodily resurrection that will allow us to return to an earthly life—this time freed from sin and the Curse.
That's God's idea, not ours. Our desires simply correspond to God's intentions, because he implanted his intentions into
us in the form of our desires.
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Corinthians 5:17). Becoming
a new creation sounds as if it involves a radical change, and indeed it does. But though we become
new
people when we come to Christ, we still remain the
same
people.
When I came to Christ as a high school student, I became a new person, yet I was still the same person I'd always been. My
mother saw a lot of changes, but she still recognized me. She still said, "Good morning, Randy," not "Who arejow?" My dog
never once growled at me—he knew who I was. I was still Randy Alcorn, though a substantially transformed Randy Alcorn. This
same Randy will undergo another change at death, and yet another change at the resurrection of the dead. But through all the
changes
I willstill be who I was and who I am.
There will be continuity from this life to the next. I will be able to say with Job, "In my flesh I will see God; I myself
will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another" (Job 19:26-27).
Conversion does not mean eliminating the old but transforming it. Despite the radical changes that occur through salvation,
death, and resurrection, we remain who we are. We have the same history, appearance, memory, interests, and skills. This
is the principle of
redemptive continuity.
God will not scrap his original creation and start over. Instead, he will take his fallen, corrupted children and restore,
refresh, and renew us to our original design.
Theologian Herman Bavinck, writing in the early twentieth century, argued that a parallel continuity exists between the old
and New Earth: "God's honor consists precisely in the fact that he redeems and renews the same humanity, the same world, the
same Heaven, and the same earth that have been corrupted and polluted by sin. Just as anyone in Christ is a new creation in
whom the old has passed away and everything has become new (2 Corinthians 5:17), so this world passes away in its present
form as well, in order out of its womb, at God's word of power, to give birth and being to a new world."
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The New Earth will still be Earth, but a changed Earth. It will be converted and resurrected, but it will still be Earth and
recognizable as such. Just as those reborn through salvation maintain continuity with the people they were, so too the world
will be reborn in continuity with the old world (Matthew 19:28). In fact, writes Bavinck, "the rebirth of humans is completed
in the rebirth of creation. The kingdom of God is fully realized only when it is visibly extended over the earth as well."
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If we don't grasp redemptive continuity, we cannot understand the nature of our resurrection. "There must be continuity,"
writes Anthony Hoekema, "for otherwise there would be little point in speaking about a resurrection at all. The calling into
existence of a completely new set of people totally different from the present inhabitants of the earth would not be a resurrection."
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Continuity is evident in passages that discuss resurrection, including 1 Corinthians 15:53: "For the perishable must clothe
itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality." It is
this
(the perishable and mortal) which puts on
that
(the imperishable and immortal). Likewise, it is
we,
the very same people who walk this earth, who will walk the New Earth. "And so
we
will be with the Lord forever" (1 Thessalonians 4:17, emphasis added).
Pointing out that God says he is, not was, the God of the patriarchs, Christ says to those denying the resurrection of the
dead, "He is not the God of the dead but of the living" (Matthew 22:32).
THE NATURE OF OUR NEW BODIES
The empty tomb is the ultimate proof that Christ's resurrection body was the same body that died on the cross. If
resurrection
meant the creation of a new body, Christ's original body would have remained in the tomb. When Jesus said to his disciples
after his resurrection, "It is I myself," he was emphasizing to them that he was the same person—in spirit
and
body—who had gone to the cross (Luke 24:39). His disciples saw the marks of his crucifixion, unmistakable evidence that this
was the same body
Jesus said, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days" (John 2:19). John clarifies that "the temple he
had spoken of was his body" (v. 21). The body that rose is the body that was destroyed. Hence, Hank Hanegraaff says, "There
is a one-to-one correspondence between the body of Christ that died and the body that rose."
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In its historic crystallization of orthodox doctrine, the Westminster
Larger Catechism
(1647) states, "The self-same bodies of the dead which were laid in the grave, being then again united to their souls forever,
shall be raised up by the power of Christ."
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The Westminster Confession, one of the great creeds of the Christian faith, says, "All the dead shall be raised up, with the
self-same bodies, and none other."
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"Self-same bodies" affirms the doctrine of continuity through resurrection.
This, then, is the most basic truth about our resurrected bodies: They are the same bodies God created for us, but they will
be raised to greater perfection than we've ever known. We don't know everything about them, of course, but
we do know a great deal.
Scripture does not leave us in the dark about our resurrection bodies.
