‘The vision of heaven is not the promise of anything other than what we have already received by faith; it does, though, promise more, namely its completion.’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘Reversed Thunder’, P 172)
This quotation may well challenge our view of heaven, for we often think of earth as corrupted and stained by sin and dream of a perfection in heaven which seems unreal to us in so many respects because it is so unfamiliar to us. Nonetheless, we have all experienced the beauty of creation, gazing in awe at the perfectly formed flower or majestic mountain, marvelling at the vastness of space with all those stars or watching the swell of a mighty ocean. There is much to be thankful for in this world of ours.
C. S. Lewis captured something of what Eugene Peterson is referring to in the last of his Narnia chronicles, ‘The Last Battle.’ There, many of the characters familiar to us from previous books, are involved in a train accident and emerge into the afterlife, seeing something of the ‘new Narnia’ and ‘new earth’. Jewel, the unicorn, cries out, ‘I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!’
I believe there will be both a newness and a familiarity about heaven which we can only glimpse in this world. Ultimately, the presence of God will be familiar to us, but at the same time, there will be so much more to discover – further up, further in, far more than we have ever dreamed or imagined!
“And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” (C. S. Lewis, ‘The Last Battle’)
This is the promise we have, which will guide us through life and through death. We view death as an end and weep and mourn because of this, but actually, though there is grief at the separation which death causes us, nothing can separate us from God’s love and death becomes the gateway to the Chapter One of the Great Story. How we long to be in God’s presence.