Here are five cool facts about heaven that you may or may not have known about.
Heaven is a real Place
Most people have the unbiblical idea about heaven that we’ll go there and sit on the clouds playing harps for the rest of eternity but nothing could be further from the truth. Before Jesus went to the cross to die for our sins and then returned to heaven, He said “I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3). The Greek word for “place” is “topos” and is the same word used elsewhere in Scripture where it means “an inhabited place, a city, village,” or “a district” so heaven is more than real. It is a real place and a real location but I think what really makes heaven so awesome is that God is there for heaven is as much a place as it is a Person but it’s a real, tangible, physical place, not some dreamy imagination that we’ve come up with.
Heaven is a City
The Apostle John “saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2) and wrote that now “the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Rev 21:3). God will dwell in a literal, physical city with His people among Him. This city had “the river of the water of life” (Rev 22:1) and “the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month” (Rev 22:3). In this city of God, “night will be no more” because we “will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light” (Rev 22:5). This city “had a great, high wall, with twelve gates” (Rev 21:12) and was thousands of square miles large (Rev 21:16-17) and was embellished “with every kind of jewel” you can imagine (Rev 21:19-21) with streets paved with real gold. There will be no more need for a temple “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there” (Rev 21:22-25) so don’t think this is some writer’s imagination. It is as real as it gets.
Heaven and our Jobs
There is no retirement in the Bible. Only the Levites retired at a certain age due to their extremely demanding duties and there will be no retirement in heaven. There’ll also be no night and no weekends but the good news is that we’ll never get tired and God has prepared for us a position or job that is exactly what He created us for. Some day we who are born again will hear Jesus say “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master’” (Matt 25:21) and “he will put him in charge of all his possessions” (Matt 24:47). Some of us will be entrusted with much while others will be entrusted with very little. How will we know how much we’ll be entrusted with in the kingdom? It’s whether we’ll be trustworthy in little today as Jesus showed by saying “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much” (Luke 16:10). The righteous know that God has “made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever” (Rev 1:6) and He says “I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne” (Rev 3:21). Jesus will reward our faithfulness in this life and for some, this reward will come from Jesus’ own lips, “Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities” (Luke 19:17). Rulers rule…some over five cities (Luke 19:19), some over ten, but it all depends on how faithful we are in this life.
No Doctors, No Co-Pay
Heaven is a worthy enough of a goal in itself for we shall finally see Jesus face to face but one of the perks of living in the kingdom will be that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:4). That’s because Jesus declared “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5). The old days of pain, suffering, heartbreak, mourning, and even death will be gone forever. That’ means that the doctor’s offices will all have to close and all of the funeral homes will go out of business. This is why Paul wrote “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18). In eternity, we’ll all look back on our earthly suffering and say that nothing can compare with the glorious place we are at now!
The Death of Sin
One of the things that I look forward to the most is that the struggle over sin will finally be over. I hate the sin that I do because the Spirit convicts me of it when I do it. I am like you; I struggle every single day with temptation and caving into the temptation by sinning. We know that in the kingdom of heaven “nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life” (Rev 21:27). This is only possible because of Jesus. In 2nd Corinthians 5:21 it says that it was “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” We have no fear of being judged for our sin because it was already judged and taken away at the cross by Christ. Even now we who are born again can say “sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Rom 6:14) but until that time, we have a daily battle with our flesh. Paul wrote “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Rom 7:19). We must hate the sin as Paul did and we sometimes grow exasperated with our own natures declaring “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24) but then Paul answers his own question, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 7:25a)!
Conclusion
Heaven is something that we all look forward too. The Bible tells us that heaven is a real, physical location; that heaven is a city, the New Jerusalem, that is beyond description; that we will have jobs to do in the kingdom for Christ’s glory; that all of the suffering we endure now will be gone forever; and that the sin we battle with today will be history someday. I hope you look forward in eager expectation for that coming kingdom and more so, looking for the coming King of kings and Lord of lords.
Article by Pastor Jack Wellman
