Heaven: Start with the Sky

I’ve got a friend. I’m not sure she would call herself a Christian, but she is around Christians enough to be curious. A while ago I asked her what I should write about on my blog. She said that she was thinking a lot about heaven, so I should write about that.

I appreciated the suggestion for a couple of reasons. First of all, heaven is one of the happiest topics in all of theology, which means it should be fun to talk about. Secondly, most people have a really lousy understanding of what Christians think about heaven. To be blunt, most of the popular conceptions of heaven are complete nonsense. Even the average churchgoer usually has a pretty skewed idea of what heaven is or what it will be like. Because of that, I am kind of excited to try and explain heaven here on the blog. I don’t know how long it will take, or how much detail I will go into, but I’ll try and do my best. So, let’s get started…

[Sidenote: N. T. Wright just published a book on the Christian hope for the future called Surprised by Hope. I have not read it yet. However, I have read enough Wright to guess what is in it, and I am willing to recommend it. You can see an interview with Wright on Colbert, discussing this book here.]

“Heaven” usually refers to the sky.

Heaven very often refers to simply the sky above, the place where birds fly, clouds move, and stars make their rotation. The term “heaven” or “heavens” is the same word as “sky” and sometimes it refers simply to what you saw when you looked up. The majority of time, when the Bible uses the word “heaven,” this is what it means. It is the place of air, birds, stars, clouds, rain, and the tops of mountains. In a very real sense any of us who have been to the summit of a high peak or flown in an airplane have been to heaven and back. That is the most common way for the Bible to use the term “heaven.” Much of the time, the Hebrew and Greek words for heaven are translated “sky” or “air.”

“Heaven” is where God is.

However, we have to remember that in ancient times, people assumed that their gods actually lived in the sky. To ancient eyes, it seemed that the top of the sky must be solid, like a big metal dome over the earth. They figured that the gods must live on top of the dome of heaven in a palace in the sky. Because of this, they could talk about the sky as the place where the gods dwelled. Where was the home of the gods? In the heavens. This was the common understanding in the ancient world, and so the term for the place where birds fly is the same as the term for where God lives. Although, we would not say today that God literally lives in the sky, the word has stuck, and the term “heaven” refers simply to the dwelling of God.

So this is where we will start our discussion of heaven, with the most basic fact: Heaven is the place where God lives.

This may seem very rudementary, but it will be important later on as I develop my understanding of heaven.