Looking for paradise

Everyone believes in a heaven.

The next time you are standing in line at a store, take a moment to look at the covers of the magazines on the rack. Each cover presents a picture of some sort of heavenly life. There is vacation heaven, fishing heaven, hunting heaven, pet heaven, entertainment heaven, sex heaven, bridal heaven, nicely organized home heaven, baby heaven, and so on. The articles in the magazines speak of life in hellish terms but offer functional saviors to take us from our hellish life to our heavenly one if we just obey the steps and buy the products.

The question persists, however, why? Why do we live for the endless pursuit of heavenly perfection on earth, and spend our hard-earned money relentlessly pursuing that perfect place, perfect thing, perfect person, or that perfect day? Perhaps all of our toys, hobbies, home improvement projects, festivals, parties, toys, joys, and vacations are simply our way of looking for paradise and practicing for heaven.

In the Bible we are told that God made creation as a paradise with sunshine, fresh air, clean water, feasting, song, and friendship. God then made our first parents and gave them paradise as a gift to enjoy and share with the generations to follow them.

Tragically, however, our first parents sinned against God; they wrongly thought that they could live life on their own, in effect functioning as their own gods. Because of our separation from the living God, death entered paradise, and with it arrived such things as murder, war, oppression, and telemarketing.

According to the Bible, God kicked us out of paradise because of our rebellion, much like we would do to a roommate who declared war on us in our own home. Subsequently, ever since then we have all been booking airline flights, gassing up our cars, hiking in the woods, buying junk, logging on, and walking on the beach searching for paradise. Deep down we all feel homeless and restless.

Our pernicious problem is that paradise is lost. No matter how close we get to that perfect day in that perfect place, we are continually disappointed because sin is there too and things are not as perfect as we had hoped. Subsequently, we get sunburned, food poisoning, seasick, or bumped off our flight home from the search for paradise and are left to wander through the airport, which is perhaps the best illustration of hell that earth has to offer.

Curiously, this passionate pursuit of heaven does not often lead to interest in the Christian version of heaven. This is likely because whoever is in charge of the Christian marketing department for heaven has done a very bad job. The thought of being a chubby baby who sits on a cloud in a diaper strumming a harp with wings far to small to transport one's girth to anywhere interesting is anything but a compelling marketing campaign.

However, the Bible offers a very different and rarely understood picture of heaven. To be fair, heaven is not really the aim of the Bible. Heaven is a place between this fallen and broken world, and the new one that will come with Jesus at the end of time when God makes all things new. Heaven is the time between the times when our bodies lie in the ground and our souls go to be with God for a season. On the day of our resurrection, our bodies and souls will reunite and God's people will live forever in God's kingdom with the resurrected, ruling, and reigning Jesus as their King.

Perhaps most shocking, the new kingdom will not be the idyllic rural lifestyle that has dominated so much American vision of faithful Christianity. Rather, at the center of the new creation will be a grand metropolis from which Jesus will rule over the earth (Revelation 21:1-2). The entire storyline of the Bible is not from garden to garden, but rather from garden to city. The Bible opens in its first few pages with a beautiful garden paradise. But the Bible closes in its final few pages with the vision of heaven as a dense city filled with people--the ultimate goal of creation is an urban kingdom paradise.

The practical question remains, how should we live until Jesus returns? President Jimmy Carter once said, "We should live our lives as though Christ was coming this afternoon." Paul wrestled with this same question in Philippians 1:20-25; he was torn between his desire to exchange this sinful, cursed, fallen world for the kingdom, and the work that God had given him to do on the earth. Paul's solution was to live as a kingdom citizen while on the earth, bringing some of the joy and healing of the kingdom to the earth (Philippians 3:20). In this way, Paul was not just awaiting his eternal life, but rather celebrating that eternal life is both a quality and a duration of life that begins the moment Jesus saves us here on earth and continues forever in his kingdom.

By Mark Driscoll | March 30, 2010; 12:11 PM ET Save & Share:
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