Tag Archives: heaven

Bored in Heaven?

“Rosa Celeste,” by Gustav Dore. Public domain.

[This is an irregular, unscheduled Saturday blog post. I got the idea this morning during my prayers, and I liked it too well to keep to myself.]

I caught a short video clip where a guy was ridiculing the idea of Heaven.

“Isn’t perfection kind of boring?” he asked. “I mean, if everything’s perfect, what’s left for anybody to do?”

The answer to that, I think, starts with C. S. Lewis’ response to those who laugh at images of wings and harps in Heaven – “People who can’t understand books written for grownups shouldn’t read them.”

Is there a more common truism than the statement, “I began to grow wise when I began to understand how little I knew”?

As we grow and learn in this life, we never reach a point where we can say, “Now I’ve got it all. Now there’s nothing left for me to learn.”

On the contrary. The more we learn, the more we grow aware of all that’s left to learn. Sometimes the material is just not available at the moment – unrecorded history, scientific discoveries not yet made, mathematical formulae that haven’t been worked out yet.

It never ends.

And that’s just in this world.

Suppose you were suddenly transported into the Infinite. Do you think you’d run out of things to discover? Do you think you’d run out of truth and beauty, when you’re face to face at last with the very Source of truth and beauty, who is infinite?

It sounds more like an everlasting Quest to me.

This might be why Pride is the greatest sin. If we approach the Ultimate Truth with a prideful, know-it-all attitude, we won’t be capable of enjoying Heaven at all. We might think it dull.

Maybe that’s what Hell is.

A Christian’s Final Rest

Today rebroadcast of Renewing Your Mind asks, “What is the blessed hope? Today, R.C. Sproul explains what we can expect when we reach our ultimate destination.”

UntitledFrom Ligonier’s Flickr Photostream (2010)

BTW, several short books by Dr. Sproul are still available for free for Kindle and audio. They are his Critical Question series, great tools for sound teaching that won’t overwhelm you. Titles include What is Repentance?, What is the Trinity?, How Can I Develop a Christian Conscience?, and Does Prayer Change Things?

Boy Wakes from Near-Death Experience

An eight-year-old boy emerged from a medically induced coma with a remarkable story of visiting heaven and meeting a wide variety of people, including a literary agent who encouraged him to sell his story to a major publisher. Seems legit.

Can Anyone Return from Heaven?

Very Steep Cliffs in Heaven's Gate MountainsPhil Johnson has an article on the recent rash of supposedly eyewitness accounts of heaven. He says it’s nothing new:

Various survivors of near-death experiences have been publishing gnostic insights about the afterlife for at least two decades. Betty Eadie’s Embraced by the Light was number one on the New York Times Bestseller List exactly 20 years ago. The success of that book unleashed an onslaught of similar tales, nearly all of them with strong New Age and occult overtones. So psychics and new-agers have been making hay with stories like these for at least two decades.

Johnson points to an upcoming book by John MacArthur on heaven and these books. He argues that the Bible forbids the possibility that anyone can return from beyond the grave. “All the accounts of heaven in Scripture are visions, not journeys taken by dead people,” MacArthur writes. “And even visions of heaven are very, very rare in Scripture. You can count them all on one hand.” Moreover, the biblical accounts focus on God’s overwhelming glory, not all the fun junk we might do in heaven.

In his excellent book Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Jesus, Jared Wilson touches on this in a paragraph near the end.

Can I tell you one of the problems with books like Heaven Is for Real? Aside from the obvious honesty issues, they very often demote Jesus to a Character in heaven like one of the costumed players at Disney World. He is Santa Claus, an attraction of some kind. Continue reading Can Anyone Return from Heaven?