The Activity of Heaven - GraceLife Church of Pineville

Introduction: What Will We Do Forever?

The activity of Heaven, the relationships of Heaven—these are our focus over the next few weeks, and that should make sense.

If I told you we were going on a trip to a nice destination, your question would likely be, “What will we do there?” and “Who will be there?”

And so for our eternal destination, the answer to those questions have even more meaning:

What will we do forever?
Who will we be with forever?

Your gut reactions to the answers to those questions may reveal a need to examine more carefully your thoughts toward Heaven. Or perhaps a better word would be your imagination about Heaven.

We begin with the activity of Heaven, and later we’ll deal with the relationships of Heaven. And while these might be pleasant enough topics for most, some might struggle with the idea.

What if I’m bored in Heaven? What if I don’t like the activities there—or the people? Eternity is a long time to be around people and doing activities that you don’t like.

Some might think, and have said out loud, “Quite honestly, I’d rather cease to exist.”

This sentiment was captured by the legendary cartoonist Gary Larson in the following Far Side “Wish I’d brought a magazine” comic:

As he often does, Larson packs a lot into a single panel. Here we have Heaven depicted as little more than cloud sitting taking place. It’s boring and static—restful, perhaps, but that probably would soon give away to restlessness. This cartoon captures so many of the cultural errors that are made in characterizing Heaven. (Hopefully, you can spot those errors after this study, particularly if you’ve been following the entire Oracles of God series that we’re in.)

Larson’s cartoon confines Heaven to the sphere of up. Forget the notion of uniting Heaven and earth.¹ It’s just up, and, well, all that’s really up is clouds—light and fluffy stuff with little substance.

This cartoon is also a case of wrong identity. It pictures a man having become an angel,² complete with halo and wings, of course; the only thing missing is the harp. (Curiously, Heaven couldn’t do anything about his vision—he still has the eyeglasses.)

The next comic, however, did not leave out the harp:

The upper scene of the cartoon has an angel saying, “Welcome to heaven … here’s your harp.” In the lower scene, a demon is saying, “Welcome to hell … here’s your accordion.” What’s highlighted here is also the discrepancy in tastes. I imagine the accordion player doesn’t appreciate this one. I imagine even more people don’t necessarily think of harp playing as their idea of a good time. Want to divide Christians? Ask them what music should be played in church. Ask them what music will be played in the next life. So what will become of our differing likes and dislikes in the next life? It’s a common question.

Here’s the last Far Side comic for this sermon:

To illustrate the point, Larson shows a man on a cloud shooting into the heavens and a bird falling down. The caption says, “You sure you’re supposed to be doin’ that, Mitch?”

This one appeals to me. What if the things that I like in this life are missing from the next? I desire to hunt in the next life. But there’s something probably about death that just doesn’t quite square.

The Enemy’s Influence

It should be no surprise that worry or anxiety about the nature of the next life is common. The enemy’s lie from the beginning to humanity has been, “Are you sure this place is really all it’s cracked up to be? God is really holding back from you, you know.”

Our confusion about what is good, and our inability to enjoy the good, results from the influences of our enemy and from our fallen nature. Even for the believer, we can easily fall short in our imagining and embracing of the next life. We are the victims and perpetrators of our own failed imaginations.

Our confusion about what is good, and our inability to enjoy the good, results from the influences of our enemy and from our fallen nature.

It bears repeating: Our confusion about what is good, and our inability to enjoy the good, results from the influences of our enemy and from our fallen nature. However, in the next life, our enemy will not be there, and we will be changed.

Remember, part of Heaven’s perfection is the passing away of former things.³ The influence of the enemy will be one of those former things. We will be saved from him and from his effects. Our prayer “Deliver us from the evil one” (after the pattern Jesus taught His disciples in Matthew 6:13) will finally be answered. It will be the final form of salvation. As we often say at GraceLife Church, salvation can be thought of in three forms—justification, sanctification, and glorification:

We are saved from the penalty of sin (justification).
We are saved from the power of sin (sanctification).
We are looking forward to being saved from the presence of sin—both in our external environment and within ourselves (glorification).

The Issue of Boredom

So from the start, let’s address this idea of Heaven as boring.

What would cause boredom? What causes boredom in this life? One thing would be a lack of variety. Repetition. The same old thing.

Or perhaps there’s a lack of challenge or stimulation. On the other hand, perhaps it will require so much challenge that it will be beyond us. Perhaps there will be so much stimulation, we won’t even want to try things.

Think about playing games. Candy Land is entertaining only for so long. On the flip side, some consider Trivial Pursuit another level of boring—not because it’s easy but because it’s a challenge that’s simply beyond our knowledge base. Depending on who you’re playing with, there could be a lack of a challenge, or the game could seem impossible; either way, the result is boredom.

Boredom can also be caused by the lack of appeal just based on personality. There are things that you simply do not enjoy and that bore you.

A warning here: Attempts to give a strict logic about why Heaven won’t be boring will fall short. Even if I give counterparts to all of the reasons I just listed for us being bored, the rebuttal will quickly follow. If I say, “Listen, in Heaven, there’ll be lots of variety and lots of stimulation and lots of things for you to do based on your personality,” you might respond, “As lovely as all of that sounds, I will inevitably get tired of those things. After all, eternity is very long.”

Attempts to give a strict logic about why Heaven won’t be boring will fall short.

In some instances, our best option for understanding the activity of the world to come is to understand how the frustrations and shortcomings of this life do not exist there. And (maybe even better) we can look at how our mindset about such things will undergo a purification, a perfection, that brings about real, final, true joy and pleasure. We only get hints of it in this life.

“The Ethics of Elfland”

Let me share some of the thoughts on this topic from someone who wrote one of my favorite chapters in all of literature. It is written in a book, ironically, with a very boring title: Orthodoxy. It’s a book in which the author, G. K. Chesterton, defends Christianity. It’s an apologetic, but it’s not giving a defense for the faith on a rational basis but on his own personal conviction. Chesterton called the book his spiritual autobiography. One modern writer called it “Thomas Aquinas Meets Eddie Van Halen.”⁴

The title of the chapter in Orthodoxy that I call to your attention is “The Ethics of Elfland.”⁵ Why that title? Because it’s Chesterton’s appeal to how the underlying lessons of fairy tales speak of a truer reality. He uses it to remind us that the basis of measurement is not this fallen world but, rather, a fantastical life with God from which we’ve fallen.

Chesterton warns us that his writing in this chapter is an “unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter unutterable things.” I want to steal that phrase and apply it to this sermon. Any sermon on Heaven is an “unavoidable inadequacy,” but I hope his masterful writing helps you draw your mind away from the idea of heavenly boredom.

Any sermon on Heaven is an “unavoidable inadequacy.”

Chesterton writes:

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork.⁶ People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into a [bus] because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired … the very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Chesterton, in drawing the analogy between Heaven and Elfland, says, “Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.” And he makes a statement regarding judgment that we do well to hang onto for this series on eternal judgment. He writes, “It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.”⁷

“[Children] always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. … It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” —G.K. Chesterton

Let me try to summarize what he means: We’ve in large part lost our ability to wonder, and it is the land of wonder that will win out in the end. And so we should embrace, I think, these appeals to the movements of celestial bodies and the possibility of God’s fascination with the individual daisy, because those things, in a sense, judge us. Rest assured, to become bored of such wonder is not an indictment upon the moon or the daisy.

I challenge you to embrace these physical descriptions because they point to this underlying reality: Eternity will be physical. Heaven will be physical. The description we’ve seen multiple times now in our series on Heaven, as the end of the book of Revelation is certainly physical.⁸ I hope the repetition hasn’t bored you. If you can embrace one more sermon of not being bored by the same chapters, you will recall that the new Jerusalem has walls and foundations and a measurable shape. It has a river, trees, and fruit. There is activity as people move in and out of its gates.

Eternity will be physical. Heaven will be physical.

And although you might argue that Revelation is symbolic, good theology demands some measure of physicality. You must deduce as much from the resurrection of the dead. We will be reunited to our bodies, and bodies must have places.

Variety in Heaven

The physical world we get to enjoy will have variety. In recent sermons, we’ve looked at Revelation 21 and 22—particularly the big idea of those passages, that we are not escaping this earth to go to Heaven; rather, Heaven is going to join us. It is going to come down, and earth and Heaven will be united. Then, we began to make some observations about this new existence, that Heaven is perfect, and we listed five ways in which it is perfect.

In this sermon, we’re going into some more details.

Revelation 22 describes a tree with multiple fruits:

On either side of the river, was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. (v. 2)

This tree with multiple fruits suggests physical delights for the senses and for the body, and, of course, variety, as there’s not just one fruit on this tree, but multiple. For those not dulled by this world, it also suggests magic. Again, let’s hear from Chesterton:

All the terms used in the science books,⁹ “law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on, are unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree.¹⁰

I find that sort of approach to things of God far more useful than some of the contemporary approaches that dull the senses, that leave the bookends of Genesis and Revelation as just symbol.

A recent example of this, and I’ll name names because he’s been so forward about it recently, would be William Lane Craig. He’s a man whose intellect no doubt cannot be questioned, someone who is a useful defender of the faith, but whose approach to Scripture I find suspect. Not too long ago, in an interview, Craig claimed that Genesis

includes elements which, if taken literally, would be so extraordinary as to be clearly false. Take, for example, magical trees with fruit that, if eaten, would impart the knowledge of good and evil or immortality, or the presence of a talking snake that tempts the man and woman to sin.¹¹ (Emphasis mine)

My hypothesis is that eternity will include elements so extraordinary as to be clearly true. There will be no other explanation. And this world has always pointed toward such things, but only as a remnant, something that both haunts and promises. And I would find it most reasonable that the ancient world used to point to such things more often and more extraordinarily in its younger years. You see, the world has aged alongside us. Its glory is fading.

Activity & Rest

In what ways will we act and interact with this physical eternity? A recent project by an artist named Sam van Aken comes to mind. He has “created” a tree that produces 40 different fruits. He didn’t actually make the tree, of course. Through much planning and learning and hard work, he gathered and grafted and manipulated the world in which the magic is already built in.

An activity like that, for some, might be a nod toward heavenly existence. When I heard about that project about five years ago, an activity like that sounded wonderful. A friend even suggested I take it on. Right now, having the time to even think about the activity sounds more wonderful than the activity itself.

For some, that might sound way too much like work to be Heaven. For others, it speaks of a leisure or freedom that you don’t currently have because of higher obligations or physical limitations or the demands of living in a world that will kill you if you don’t try to stay alive. Gotta work, gotta eat, gotta sleep. Then, gotta get up and do it all again.

So where’s the carryover from this world in terms of being bored, if there’s not a challenge or stimulation contrasted with being overwhelmed if there’s just too much? On some days, monumental projects that could only be completed in eternity sound exciting; on other days, a thousand-year nap sounds really good. Which will be the case in eternity? Will Heaven be about great activity, or will it be about great rest?

I think we have to conclude that the pleasure found both in activity and in rest will be preserved. And it will fit perfectly the personalities of the inhabitants of Heaven.

The pleasure found both in activity and in rest will be preserved [in Heaven].

Growing up, I played on several sports teams, and there was a friend whose house I would usually go to on game day. Whether it was the court or the diamond or the field or the track, we were usually in the event together, side by side. We were headed to the same game, playing complementary if not interchangeable roles. But our pregame approach, outside of the shared meal, could not have been more different. I’d sleep before the games, while he had to be active (he’d go cut the grass or something similar). Same team, same goal, same role in many cases; but quite different personalities. In my freedom, I wanted rest. In his freedom, he wanted more activity.

It doesn’t seem to me that Heaven demands either of those things to pass away. In fact, the early chapters of Genesis teach us that God Himself was actively creating and resting. What passes away, it would seem, is rest due to weariness or fatigue. What passes away, too, is work that is toilsome.

Heaven will be a place of intensity and rest, and both will be a pleasure. And we’ll be able to sustain the pleasure of both without becoming tired or bored.

Heaven will be a place of intensity and rest, and both will be a pleasure. And we’ll be able to sustain the pleasure of both without becoming tired or bored.

Sustained pleasure isn’t a mark of this world. We’re not capable of it. Unending pleasure, in fact, would be painful in this world. And so we have the various aspects of moments of pleasure in this world that point us to something beyond. We see this in the relationships between lovers who experience the pleasure of anticipation and activity and union, and then repose. We see it in the satisfaction of a feast—the pleasurable hunger associated with anticipating the taste of a fine meal, and then the contented fullness of having eaten, along with the revelry of sharing the meal with someone else. But if we were to attempt to sustain such pleasures, that attempt would not only be painful in this world, but potentially fatal.

The excess of pleasure in this life can turn to deadly sins. But there is nothing deadly about eternity. And so, in that land, the feast is never gluttonous, the relationship is never lustful, the gain is never greed, the rest is never sloth, and the glory is never pride. And those pleasures being fulfilled leaves no room for wrath or envy. Consequently, there is room for the celebration of shared pleasures, but also the celebration of our differences.

In that land, the feast is never gluttonous, the relationship is never lustful, the gain is never greed, the rest is never sloth, and the glory is never pride.

It will be interesting to see how that develops. We like to do different things. How does the person whose idea of a good time that looks like a midnight rave dwell with a person who would rather have afternoon tea? It’s not the case that one will simply be done away with, no matter how superior you think one is to the other. It won’t simply be the case that Heaven is big enough for each of you to have your own separate quarters away from each other. Whatever good exists in those things is preserved in some fashion; and it may not be that we and all enjoy the same delights, but I think it will be the case that we will always enjoy someone else’s enjoyment.

Again, children help us understand this. They engage in activities that we would never find enjoyable on our own; things that would be downright insane if you did them on your own.

Just this week, I found one of my younger children having dumped all of their clean clothes into the bathtub and then commenced to taking the wet clothes and throwing them against the wall with great laughter. I was able to enjoy the activity through them, but it would be quite odd if I were the one dumping my clothes into the bathtub, throwing them against the wall by myself and laughing with great joy.

We will be able to enjoy one another fully in Heaven.

If what you desired in this sermon on the activity of heaven was an exact description of what we will be doing, an itinerary of sorts, I’m sorry to disappoint, but the truth is that attempts at specific details are often more disappointing, or they lead to perplexities that are hard to answer.

But I’ll play the game for a moment. I’ll give you some popular examples of questions that are always there.

But What Will We DO Forever?

Someone always asks, will there be sports in Heaven? (Is there a cornfield that gives way to a baseball field? Or is that just Iowa?) I don’t know. Hitting a homerun feels really good … as the batter. Giving up the homerun as the pitcher does not feel so good. I’m not quite sure how both can exist.

Will there be art in Heaven? I don’t know. But it would be strange to meet Rembrandt there and have him say, “Yeah, I don’t paint anymore.” But I can also understand how one might behold the face of God and never care to look at anything else. That’s the sort of mystery that it takes an artist to answer, or at least one that can paint well with words.

C.S. Lewis, in his creative book about the differences between Heaven and Hell, titled The Great Divorce, imagined a person in Heaven having this discussion with a person in Hell:

“When you painted on earth—at least in your earlier days—it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here [in Heaven] you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came. There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already. In fact we see it better than you do.”

[Then, the disappointed painter, having not yet arrived to Heaven, says:] “Then there’s never going to be any point in painting here?”

“I don’t say that. … [Eventually] there’ll be some things which you’ll see better than anyone else. One of the things you’ll want to do will be to tell us about them. But not yet. At present your business is to see. Come and see. He is endless. Come and feed.”

Will I explore in Heaven? Will I learn in Heaven?

Well, it depends on who you ask. One writer on Heaven said, “We won’t ever know everything, and even what we know, we won’t know all at once. We’ll be learners, forever. Few things excite me more than that.”¹²

Another writer, however, concludes that there will not be “ceaseless discovering” but, rather, “endless delighting in what we have already discovered in God”; because we will “know everything our finite capacity will allow us to know directly through the infinite mind of God.”¹³

And so you see, I think, how both of these things—seeking and possessing—have their own enjoyment. It might be the case that we know everything and have the capacity to eternally revel in the knowledge. Or it could be the case that we have to gain knowledge via the senses and have the capacity to eternally enjoy that process. We desire both, and it’s hard at times to know which we desire more, because in this life we seek and we desire to possess. But when we find ourselves in possession of what we hope for, we find ourselves once again desiring to seek.

It’s this longing in this life that C.S. Lewis thought pointed us toward Heaven. He called it “the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.” He adds:

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. [Some have identified] it with certain moments in [their] own past. But all this is a cheat. If [a person] had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.¹⁴

In a description like that, there is a hope and a sadness, a longing. It echoes what we see in Scripture, in Hebrews 11, that great chapter of faith, where we read about people who

died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own. And indeed if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them. (vv. 13–16)

I suppose that I should have said that the activity of Heaven is worship. That’s what the pastor should say, right? But that’s a letdown for some of you, if your definition of worship is small—associated only with music, perhaps. (Then, you’ll just be hoping that certain people aren’t in charge of the playlist.)

Conclusion: Not Yet Fit

I will close with a strange verse and the way in which it helps us understand worship. Revelation 22:8 says:

I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed me these things.

That’s a pretty embarrassing revelation. John—the close apostle to the Lord Jesus, the one whom Jesus loved, the one with whom He entrusted this final revelation of the Scripture—finds himself worshiping something other than God.

You see, we are not yet fit for Heaven. Even John, upon hearing and seeing the things of Heaven, fell down and worshiped the being in front of him!

What do we learn from a verse like that? We have some idea of what we will be doing or could be doing or want to do in Heaven, but even the best of us would, in our current capacity, fall short of knowing how to go about the activity of Heaven.

We are not yet fit for Heaven. … Even the best of us would, in our current capacity, fall short of knowing how to go about the activity of Heaven.

The angel had to say, John, don’t do that. John was right—fall down and worship. But John, hold on, this was just an angel.

You, believer, in eternity will be higher than the angels. You will be higher than something that if you were to see it right now, you would want to worship it. You will become so able in your activity in the next life that you will judge angels. It will be the place where what you do and who you are will finally exist in perfect unity. And you will be like God, and you will participate in the activity of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, because you will be united to them.

And it will not be boring.

[Heaven] will be the place where what you do and who you are will finally exist in perfect unity.

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