The Relationships of Heaven: Loving God - GraceLife Church of Pineville

Introduction

You’re headed out of town for a conference and all the hotel rooms are booked. But there’s an Internet stranger who, for a small fee, is offering to let you sleep on the inflatable mattress in his living room; and he has promised you a Pop-Tart in the morning. Do you take him up on the offer?

Or, from the other perspective, let’s say you can no longer afford your rent, so you come up with the idea of placing an air mattress in your apartment and offering conference guests a place to stay and a quick bite. You give your quirky idea a clever name: Airbed and Breakfast. You would soon have no problem paying your rent, because your bank account enlarges; you then shorten the clever name to simply Airbnb.

That’s how it started. It’s the company that changed modern travel over the past 15 years. And if you’ve used Airbnb, you probably have your own quirks about how you go about the process. For me, it’s the option for self check-in, which makes me forget for a moment that I have agreed to sleep in a stranger’s home.

From the moment you drive up to the door of your rented Airbnb, you’re probably already judging how the stay is going to go. You begin to wonder, is this going to be a three-star scenario? A four-star scenario? Or maybe it’ll be a five-star experience? (From personal experience, I can tell you if you judge it to be two stars, drive away, and find the nearest hotel instead.)

We recently stayed as a family in a lovely Airbnb. It was clean, well kept, and surrounded by beauty and activities that were appealing to the young and the old alike. There was self check-in … or so I thought. Until the owner showed up and began to give me all the rules. Then the owner stayed just a little longer than was comfortable. He gave some rules that seemed to make little sense. I woke up the next morning to the owner watering the flowers on the front porch right outside the bedroom. And so the consensus became, “This is a wonderful place to be—except for the owner.”

I think that’s a reasonable reaction for this life, right? But you must work to understand that our lives in eternity will not be that way. Your life with God will not be that way. Heaven is not the perfect destination ruled by the bothersome landlord.

Heaven is not the perfect destination ruled by the bothersome landlord.

As we continue to look at our life in eternity, don’t sell the afterlife short by assuming that the pleasure is all about the place and not the people. It would be good to correct your thoughts if you’re thinking something like, “Hey, give me the accommodations, but keep the company,” or “I can’t wait to live in Heaven—I just hope God doesn’t visit too often.”

I talked about the “Activity of Heaven” in my last sermon, saying what little we can say (based on the little information the Scriptures give us). Now, we turn to the topic of “Relationships of Heaven.”

When discussing Hell in other recent sermons,¹ we were working off of this premise: Hell is the perpetual unfulfillment of the Great Command. It is the place where no one loves God, no one loves themselves, and no one loves others. It is the place where everyone hates God, everyone hates himself, and everyone hates others—forever.

Heaven, then, I like to describe as the perpetual fulfillment of the Great Command to love God, oneself, and others. Heaven is the uninterrupted, unrivaled, uninhibited, unadulterated fulfillment of love.

So, in this sermon, I will discuss the first and greatest of these relationships: our relationship with God.²

Loving God: The Ultimate Human Activity

If “loving God” sounds sort of ho-hum to you, recognize that it might take a certain level of spiritual maturity and a cultivated spiritual appetite for the idea of Heaven to seem appealing.

It might take a certain level of spiritual maturity and a cultivated spiritual appetite for the idea of Heaven to seem appealing.

At the risk of using the same quote everyone does on the subject, I remind you of the words of A. W. Tozer: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”³ I don’t know that Tozer was right about that, but it is surely at least of very high importance.

So if you can start to grasp the idea—if you don’t fall victim to the world’s lies about who God is, or to your own stunted pursuits—you begin to realize that loving God is the ultimate human activity. It is the highest bliss. Our ideas about loving God seem less-than only because of our current limitations.

And what are those limitations? Let’s review a few of them.

We have true but imperfect knowledge of God.
We have a fallen nature by which we have faulty attempts at love. The fallenness or brokenness of humanity affects our intellects, our wills, and our bodies. And all of these contribute to faulty and competing views of what is good. Your will is that aspect of you that tends toward what is good. But in that tendency, your intellect sometimes jumps up and says, “Hey, what about these other alternatives?” Then, we begin to get confused about what is good. And then the appetites of the body begin to make suggestions, and they have their say as well. Thus, in our attempts to love—and our attempts to desire or will what is good—we sometimes do it well, but we also frequently fail to love correctly, consistently, or completely.

The goal in this sermon is to get you to consider whether Scripture bears out the related ideas of knowing and loving God. If so, let us then build upon our hope in this life that knowing and loving God is indeed the key to bliss, the key to happiness. I hope you will make the next jump to the application: align your life with that goal. (How silly would it be to know what ultimate happiness is and not pursue it?)

Where to Begin: 1 Corinthians 13

What would we search for in Scripture, or begin to observe, to explore these questions? If our limitations now include imperfect knowledge of God and faulty attempts at love, and if eternal bliss is characterized as loving God with all of your heart, soul, and mind, then we need to ask whether the Scriptures teach:

This idea of the supremacy and persistence of love
The idea that knowledge will increase in perfected form
That these two ideas are somehow related

There’s a chapter in Scripture that speaks to love. You probably know it—or have heard it read at a wedding. It’s 1 Corinthians 13. I’ve said multiple times in past sermons that in this Corinthian correspondence from Paul, he says more about resurrection and the next life than anywhere outside of the book of Revelation (which is written by John, not Paul).

But here in this Corinthian correspondence, we learn something of Heaven, I think, in this chapter focused on love. Here are the last two verses of the chapter:

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I have also been fully known. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:12–13)

What do we learn from these two verses? Well, we learn that our vision of God is currently mediated. It’s like seeing in a mirror indirectly. It’s like we’re not looking directly at the thing, but seeing it through another.

My family recently spent our last week of summer (before school started) at the beach. When we take these vacations, we try to see the sunrise at least once. You can’t look at it directly, though. We talk about seeing the sun rise, and how we’re there for the experience, but unless you’re willing to take on blindness, you can’t actually see it—not directly, not for a sustained time.

This past time that we did this, I also set up my phone camera on the deck and put it on the time lapse setting while the sun rose. So I watched the sunrise, from start to finish, but still mediated, not directly.

Now we see God as in a mirror—mediated, not directly; “dimly” as some translations say. But the day is coming when the vision will be face to face. The knowledge of God will increase to the saturation point. I will know all that it is possible for me to know about God. I will “know fully” as Paul says.

In 1 Corinthians 13:13, we have this curious statement, which is often quoted: “Faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.” I used to feel more confident in speaking on this verse, but the more I contemplate it, the less sure I am. What’s clear, however, is that love is the greatest—greater than faith and hope. And we rightly speculate why this is so. What I used to confidently say is that love is the greatest because the other two (faith and hope) will pass away. And that might be correct. There’s a sense in which that is true, because faith will become sight or knowledge (we will no longer be exercising faith in the same sense, and hope will finally be realized. Yet, love will persist. And this explanation may be why love is greater.

But someone might also make the alternative argument that the text says that faith, hope, and love all abide; all three remain, they last, going on into eternity. So the debate becomes whether this is a logical expression or an eschatological⁴ expression. Is he making a statement about what lasts into eternity? Or is he making a logical statement regarding the things he’s been discussing? If they all three continue, it’s possible that faith persists in the idea that trust never ceases; even when I will have attained all the promises that I hoped for, it wouldn’t be proper to say that trust was done away with. And Scripture speaks of hope as an object, not just a longing, so there’s a sense in which hope will always be with us.

It’s possible, then, as one commentator writes, “Love is not greatest because it outlasts faith and hope but because it outranks these two.”⁵ And it’s possible that love outranks faith and hope because love is the undercurrent of faith and hope. We see in 1 Corinthians 13:7: “[Love] bears all things, believes [trusts] all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Trust exists because of love; hope exists because of love.

Of course, we know that love is the greatest because love is what is needed to fulfill the Great Commands, and so we would be aware of its supremacy on those grounds alone.

I think additionally, if we look to God as our example, we can see a theological reason for the supremacy of love: Love exists in the relationship that is God. God is Trinity, and in that Trinity is love. The love of the Persons of the Trinity is the love that comes from them, and it’s the love directed toward one another, that is, shared between the Persons.

And we would have to say that God exists in perfect happiness. He needs nothing else. He does not long for something that He lacks. And so the relationship of the Trinity is evidence that nothing else is needed for pleasure outside of love. Love exists there, in the Trinity, but faith and hope do not. The eternal Trinity can’t be said to believe in each other or hope in each other. But the Trinity does love. The Trinity is love.

The simple statement “God is love” is in 1 John 4:8. We know that part of the verse well, but it’s preceded by these words: “The one who does not love does not know God.” Interestingly, in that context, love and knowledge go hand in hand. Let’s consider this idea of knowing God more deeply.

Knowing God

In Philippians 3:7–8, Paul (speaking of his life) says this:

Whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.

Heaven, even if you know nothing about it, conceptually you’d say it is the place for which you would trade everything in the world. And Paul says there is something he’d give up everything else for: the value of knowing God.

Let me give you some of the scholarly expertise to help you understand this concept. In the chief lexicon used by all scholars regarding biblical Greek, it says this of Paul’s comparison regarding the rubbish things: “to convey the crudity of the Greek, ‘It’s all crap.’”⁶ That’s what it says!

The context here is beneficial. I’ve said before that when we finish this Oracles of God series, it will be hard to not see the elementary principles of the oracles of God on every page of Scripture.⁷ So the context of this idea is pursued knowledge and the ultimate knowledge of God as attained in the resurrection.

In order that I might attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which I also was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brothers and sisters, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:11–14)

Paul closes the chapter this way:

For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself. (Philippians 3:20–21)

When we talk about eternity as loving the Father completely, we have to ask the question, How? How am I going to love the Father completely?

As we’ve been saying, knowledge is key here. You will love Him completely when you know Him perfectly. Or, swap those words: you will love Him perfectly when you know Him completely.

Here’s another verse to help us understand: John 14:21. Jesus is speaking to His disciples on His last evening with them prior to the cross, and He says:

He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.⁸ (John 14:21)

So here, on this last night with them, Jesus teaches His followers of the relationship between commandment keeping and love. In the next life, it comes full circle: the fulfillment of the Great Command and thus the ultimate love; participating in the ultimate love as the fulfillment of the Great Command. What will be the result? Perpetual, mutual, shared love that perfects knowledge.

John 14:21 (above) is a promise on earth of unity for the disciples, but it will have its ultimate fulfillment in Heaven—or, as Jesus calls it at the beginning of this chapter, in “the Father’s house.” Here were his opening words:

Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also. (John 14:1–3)

The love of God will be capable, because we will be with Him in a sense that we haven’t been before. We will live with Him—or, better said, He will live with us. We will behold Him. We will see Him, and our lives will forever be changed. You will see and have that which you most desire. What you most desire is God, whether you know it yet or not.

[In Heaven] you will see and have that which you most desire. What you most desire is God, whether you know it yet or not.

The beauty of Heaven will be so overwhelming that it would kill you if you were to experience it in your current condition. As God has revealed Himself to man across time, the ability to see God has come in various stages. Let’s remind ourselves of one of those earlier encounters.

Moses and Seeing the Invisible God

If you find yourself wondering about your state of desire to love God, your state of proper thought when it comes to the things of Heaven, it is good to look in the Scriptures to the men and women of God whom you admire and respect, and to see what it is that they desired.

What did Moses want? This man who had seen God in the burning bush, who had seen God in the miracles of the Exodus, who had seen God in some sense on Mount Sinai (where he received the Ten Commandments), says this in Exodus 33:

Then Moses said, “I pray You, show me Your glory!” And [God] said, “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.” But He said, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!” Then the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen.” (vv. 18–23)

God reminded the Israelites of Moses’s special status as one who met with God, one who in some sense saw God, but not completely. We are reminded, and have been reminded over the past few sermons as we’ve looked at Revelation 22, that in Heaven “His bondservants will serve Him; they will see His face” (Revelation 22:3–4). This is the promise of eternity. We will have the desire of Moses fulfilled, for we “will see His face” (Revelation 22:4) and we will live.

Again, we read in the writings of John: “It has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is” (1 John 3:2). Here’s a theological term you need to know, because it’s a concept that needs a strong word: beatific vision. “Beatific” means ultimate happiness.

Theologians have a special gift for making the best things in life sound stale. In “beatific vision,” you may recognize the same root as in the word “beatitudes.” Those are the statements by Jesus like “Blessed are the …” Some modern translations might say “Happy is the person …” instead of “Blessed is the person …” The idea is that of a happy vision of God—that is, a state of happiness or blessedness that results from seeing God.

Theologian Thomas Aquinas had the most to say, or perhaps I should say the most influential things to say, regarding the beatific vision. He also has some of the most difficult writings to understand (though occasionally they’re easier).

Aquinas was brave enough to write this simple sentence. “Happiness is another name for God.”⁹ And so if we take a Thomistic understanding of love, then when we love God, we unite to Him, and thus we could say then that eternity is about being united to Happiness itself (or, I should say, Himself).

Those who are of this world, and would balk at the idea of being born again or having a relationship with the God of the Bible, don’t have any problem with some sort of amorphous existence in which one melds with happiness. The truth is, that is what Christianity offers: to unite with Happiness itself. That is love. And this love is also the perfection of knowledge, so we aren’t merely lost in some nameless happiness but are able to declare what it is. We’re able to rejoice in who it is. We’re able to know it as intimately as a thing can be known, and through that unity, to gain all possible knowledge and experience the highest order of love.

You, believer in Christ, will see the invisible God.

And that’s where we realize that most writing on the beatific vision is bumbling compared to what will really take place. A lot of ink gets spilled over whether the beatific vision involves seeing with our eyes, for example. I would have to say it doesn’t not include seeing with our eyes because we’ll have bodies. I think it is safest to say it’s the sort of vision that will involve our eyes but that doesn’t require our eyes. Whatever it is that you’ll see with your eyes will be part of it, but think more broadly about the term “see.” Think of how we use the word when we’re trying to get someone to understand a concept. When we explain something and say, “Do you see what I’m getting at?” or “Do you see how this is true?” we’re talking about more than the physical eyes.

When we talk about seeing God, we are talking about knowing God. Jesus, again in that discourse on the last night with the disciples, says, “This is eternal life: that they may know … the only true God” (John 17:3). Perfect life, perfect knowledge.

This is not an easy concept. If you try to picture it, your limited mind will conjure something almost its opposite. If I say, “In eternity, you will have achieved ultimate happiness, the beholding within the soul of Love and Truth,” it could almost seem like we’re going to be frozen in time. Okay, we’ve seen ultimate Love—we’re united to it, and we’re united to ultimate Truth. There’s really nothing else to achieve now. Any deviation from this state would be less-than, right?

However, the opposite will be true, because this love will be more active than ever, more alive than ever, more dynamic than ever. You will love with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul. Loving God will fulfill every desire you’ve ever had, and you will have the satisfaction that comes with that fulfillment, and the satisfaction will be perpetual. Loving God will result in ongoing active enjoyment. It is what you were made for! It is:

The thrill of victory for the runner crossing the finish line in first place
The taste of the finest meal
The consummation of lovers
The surprise of novelty
The assurance of the familiar
The joy of generosity
The satisfaction of receiving

Loving God is all of these things, all at once, always persisting

These will be ours as we love God. Of course, the Bible teaches that we love Him because He first loved us.¹⁰ Scripture also teaches that it is this love that conquers all things.¹¹

This world is in a desperate attempt to separate us from the love of God. But our destiny is an eternity in the unity of the love of the Trinity.

The world will come against us for now, but as Paul notes in Romans,

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38–39)

Paul, the suffering apostle, expresses in his letter a vision of eternal unity set against the things that will not separate us. In the Psalms, David, the beloved king, expresses in song the way in which we will be filled for eternity by the love of God. No height or depth can separate, because the God of love will fill all of those spaces.

In Psalm 36, we read these words of David:

Your lovingkindness, O Lord, extends to the heavens,

Your faithfulness reaches to the skies.
Your righteousness is like the mountains of God;
Your judgments are like a great deep.
O Lord, You preserve man and beast.
How precious is Your lovingkindness, O God!
And the children of men take refuge in the shadow of Your wings.
They drink their fill of the abundance of Your house;
And You give them to drink of the river of Your delights.
For with You is the fountain of life;
In Your light we see light. (vv. 5–9)

Those last words speak to the seeing of God: “In Your light we see light.”

Love and Happiness

Let’s return to thinking on this idea of loving God. Usually, if you were to think of happiness or bliss or enjoyment, you would think of it as being loved.

Well, you have that. God loves you. In eternity, you will finally have bliss not only in being loved, but in the act of loving, the mutual giving, the perfect reciprocity. Few have experienced it in this life.

It’s hard for us to imagine loving as the ultimate happiness because the world shows us forms of it that are twisted by selfishness and shame.

But what if you were able to give yourself so completely to someone in a way that you were fully understood? … and in a way that validated your entire being? … and in a way that gave ultimate pleasure? … and in a way that never exhausted your strength or your mind or your senses? … and in a way that fulfilled your desire and was desired by another, with no fear of rejection and full confidence that the love itself and the contemplation of that love was yours without a limit?

Welcome to Heaven. Welcome to beholding God.

An Exercise to Conclude

Take a moment now to think through the last two passages we looked at—(1) Romans 8:38–39 (especially the idea of not being separated from His love), and (2) Psalm 36:5–9, which talks about how God fills these spaces.

As we think about Heaven and about God, it is an exercise in purifying and expanding the imagination to dwell on good things, noble things, true things, right things. Scripture commands us to do that.

Consider the Negatives/Limitations

So, first think about what it would be like to love God and do so in a way that we have to do so often here on earth. Think about what it won’t be—or about how this world has prevented us from loving the way we want to:

Death: This is first on Paul’s list of things that can’t separate us from God’s love. Has there been a way in which death has caused you to not love God like you want to? (Maybe you’re bitter about the loss of a loved one, “God, you took that person from my life. You didn’t have to do that.”)
Life: Are there ways in which the circumstances of life cause you to love incompletely, inconsistently, or incorrectly?
Spiritual forces: In what ways have “principalities” caused you to not love well? Since this one may be difficult (most of us can’t “see” these forces), broaden the category and ask how unknown things hinder your love.
The present: What about current circumstances—the present, the now? You may feel it’s hard to love because of all the things you have going on.
Future worries: Paul adds the future to the list; oh how many of us allow worries about things to come to separate us from loving God! We want to love Him, but the other two aspects of that triad—faith and hope—fall short as we worry.
Power: Those with power, and the desire for our own power, can prevent you from loving God well.
The highest high or the lowest low: Both of these can be detrimental to love.

All of that passes away. Scripture teaches that nothing will separate us from the love of God.

So as you encounter those seven limitations this week, remind yourself through the power of the Holy Spirit that you still have the power to love.

Consider the Positives

And now let’s shift to those positive things that we see in the psalm. Consider what it will be like to:

View God as lovingkindness (as mercy, as grace); sometimes we just have to tell ourselves, “I don’t feel like He is. It’s okay, He is.”
Believe God—to love Him in full faith and in full trust, never fearing or wondering if He’s going to “teach me another lesson that hurts.”
View righteousness as strength and the highest goal
Long for the day in which righteousness rises above all things like the mountains
Celebrate the deep wisdom of God’s justice (reveling in the fact that we’ve been judged)
Love God because he has preserved humankind and the animals (or beasts)
Appreciate and possess the value of the lovingkindness
Take refuge (there is no more danger)
Drink your fill and then drink again.
Have running through your very being the fountain of life
See the light of God, see with the light of God, bathe in the warmth of its comfort; know according to its clarity; glory in all that the light exposes; and welcome its eternal unveiling.

It is the day in which you will love with everything you have. You will love correctly because you will love the proper object. You will love God.

You love consistently. You love completely.

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