For heaven's sake. My mother used to blurt that out when exasperated. Her object of exasperation was as often as not me, some mess or prank or failure of mine. A particular thrill of gloating and vindication would race through me when the outburst was aimed at my brother. Either way, to my childhood ears her epithet was not much different from the far more colourful ones my father used when he was exasperated: a verbal form of spitting.
It wasn't until I was well into my adult years, well-established in my Christian conversion, already serving in pastoral ministry, and rarely exasperating my mother anymore, that I actually sat down and pondered that phrase. For heaven's sake. My mother said it glibly, mindlessly, meaninglessly. But what about it?
Biblically, what's done for heaven's sake is anything but an empty idea. What motivated the apostles and early disciples was the conviction that their lives were lived under eternal and transcendent purpose, witnessed by angels and demons, implicated in huge and cosmic forces. They believed what mattered most were things unseen.
They lived for heaven's sake.
And us?
"You don't want to be so heavenly minded you're of no earthly good." This tends to be our credo and alibi now. I suppose what lies behind this is some vague sentiment that too much pining for the hereafter incapacitates us for the here and now.
Tell that to Stephen, the first deacon and martyr in the Christian church. If you read his story in Acts 6 and 7, the inescapable conclusion is that Stephen did much earthly good—heading up the first soup kitchen for widows, standing down religious bullies to his own mortal peril—precisely because he was so heavenly minded: he saw "heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56).
Likewise, the writer of Hebrews exhorts us to run the race with perseverance down here, not losing heart, not giving up, but only provides one discipline to sustain us in that running: look up and fix your eyes on Jesus (Heb. 12:1-2). Be heavenly minded. Paul rings this theme so often the references are too numerous to mention here in full. Let one suffice: "Therefore, we do not lose heart…for our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all" (2 Cor. 4:16,17). We keep going, he says, because of where we're going.
I got so worked up about this a few years ago that I wrote my second book about it (Things Unseen: Living in Light of Forever Multnomah, 2002). But one issue I never addressed there was this: is heaven a physical place? Or is it only a spiritual reality, a state of being, whatever that means? And what difference does it make?
The short answer to the first question—is heaven an actual place?—is that I don't know. But I don't get paid the whopping writer's commissions for giving short answers. So here's my longer one.
The Bible assumes that heaven is an actual place whose location is somewhere "above." Of course, this made good sense to pre-scientific minds for whom the architecture of the universe was distinctly hierarchical, with hell below, earth in the middle and heaven above. That view is hard to sustain in light of modern cosmology. The first Russian cosmonauts, upon orbiting the moon, taunted the West saying they had been up to the heavens and had not seen God.
Until the modern era, with the advent of telescopes and then rocket ships and space probes, the idea that heaven was other than a physical place wasn't in question. But now it is, and the simple way to dodge the issue has been to posit heaven as a state of being, a spiritual existence, a kind of Christian version of the Hindu's Nirvana.
But what stumps me is the Bible's explicitly physical and sensual descriptions of heaven. Not all of this can be blamed on the naiveté of pre-scientific minds. If we believe that Scripture is God's revelation, communicated in time and place but transcending both, then we must wrestle with the Bible's irreducible concreteness in its depictions of the heavenly realms.
I don't think, for the record, we'll finally launch a space probe that goes far enough into the ether to bring back photos of some celestial city where winged and translucent entities cavort in unceasing bliss, singing their hearts out, while God sits in a big chair in the middle of it all and beams approval. At the same time, I believe that something like this actually takes place somewhere.
But where?
Two factors have shaped my thinking on the question of heaven's actuality and physicality, one scientific, the other scriptural.
The scientific factor is the recent theory, embraced by most physicists, that the universe is not merely four-dimensional but multi-dimensioned. The dimensions we can see, measure, touch—three in space, one in time—are simply the obvious ones, at least to us. This is the "reality" constantly verified by the testimony of our senses. The coffee cup in front of me has width, height, depth, and keeps existing through each circuit of my clock on the wall. Its existence is within earth's space-time continuum.
But what if, unseen to me, there are more than these four dimensions? What if time has, say, three dimensions of its own? And space, say, four, or eight, or 26? Then all manner of new possibilities open up.
To get a sense of these new possibilities, imagine that we were able to observe only two of the three space dimensions. Depth and width, let's say, but not height. Anything standing, such as my coffee cup, would then be invisible. It would exist, but its vertical dimension would eclipse it, not reveal it. Or imagine that time's dimension was intermittent, a random strobe. Then my coffee cup would appear to me one moment, not the next, and then again the next.
If time and space have more dimensions than we have the wherewithal to observe, then whole other realms might exist-heaven!-that as yet "no eye has seen, no ear has heard" (1 Cor. 2:9). We see now through a glass darkly. One day we will see face-to-face (1 Cor. 13:12). Ironically, the very advances in science that at first pushed heaven off the map have now redrawn the map itself.
The second major influence on my thinking about this is the Bible, specifically the book of Revelation. That book opens with a glimpse of "things above," the heavenly realms where Jesus is seated and angels and elders and saints and a vast company of living creatures worship him (see Rev. 5 and 6).
This is the conventional picture of heaven with which we're familiar. What we less often notice is how Revelation ends: heaven comes to earth. Rather than earth's inhabitants evacuated "up there," heaven descends. "I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God….And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Now the dwelling of God is with men…' (Rev. 21:2,3).
Your backyard
In other words, heaven—wherever it is—takes up location in your backyard. It's a massive version of the incarnation-first Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us, and now heaven becomes clothed in earth's dimensions and dwells among us.
In several of his writings (The Eternal Weight of Glory, The Last Battle, The Great Divorce, hints in Mere Christianity), C.S. Lewis portrayed heaven as intensified reality. Things there are not less real but more: whatever has substance in our world has greater substance in the next, such that our present reality will—in comparison—seem intangible, ephemeral, empty.
This rings true both intuitively and biblically. Referring to the kingdom of heaven, Jesus often used the phrase, "How much more." Take anything you treasure on earth, and heaven will be so much more. One simple way to understand this is that if what we see now is actually, physically there, how much more what awaits us.
So what difference does it make? I suppose if I'm wrong—if heaven after all is a "state of being"—God is powerful and creative enough that physicality would add nothing to it. But that answer smacks of the ancient heresy of dualism. God likes things, stuff, bodies, matter.
I can't imagine Him making heaven without some.
And, frankly, believing heaven is a place, I find it easier to run there with perseverance, and keep my mind and heart set on it. The thought of its realness nurtures my heavenly mindedness. I even think I'm becoming of greater earthly use.
For heaven's sake.
Mark Buchanan is an author and pastor living on Vancouver Island. He is the author of four books and numerous articles. His fifth book, Hidden in Plain Sight: The Secret of More, is being released this month.
