What is heaven like?

Most people picture heaven as clouds, harps and a church service that never ends. That picture makes heaven sound like something to be endured politely rather than longed for, and it is not the one the Bible gives. Scripture describes a place — people in bodies, a city with gates, a river running through it and trees growing on the banks. What makes it heaven is not the scenery. It is that God is there, in the open, with His people.

In the beginning God created Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden and everything was good — until sin entered. Since then man has been separated from God’s gracious presence (Genesis 3:23–24).

Throughout the Old Testament God comes near His people in stages, and every stage has a barrier built into it. In the wilderness He pitches His tent in the middle of the camp — behind a curtain, with one man permitted through it one day a year. Solomon builds a temple, and the same curtain hangs inside it. God is with His people and fenced off from them at the same time.

Towards the end of the Bible, John hears a voice announcing that the fence has come down.

Revelation 21:3–4 (NKJV)

And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God.” And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.

The word John reaches for is tabernacle — the tent from the wilderness. He is telling readers who knew that arrangement that it has finally arrived where it was always pointing. But there is no curtain anywhere in his description, and a few verses later he says something stranger still: “But I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Revelation 21:22). No building is needed to house the presence of God when God Himself is standing in the middle of the city. That is why His presence is the answer to this question rather than one item on a list. John MacArthur summed it up in a sentence: “The presence of Christ is what makes heaven heaven.” Everything else that is good about heaven is good because He is there.

The second half of what John hears is the part people reach for at funerals. God does not promise to make pain easier to carry. He promises that what causes it is gone — death first, then the grief and the crying that follow death, then pain itself. “The former things” means the entire arrangement of the world you live in now.

Two things often get run together here. When a believer dies now, he goes at once to be with Christ. Paul describes a desire “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better” (Philippians 1:23). That is real, it is conscious, and it is better than this life. It is also not the end of the story. R. C. Sproul drew the line carefully. We are with the Lord from the moment we die, but we do not receive resurrected bodies until Jesus returns. Christians are not waiting to escape into a spirit-world. They are waiting for a resurrection, and for a new earth to stand on.

So heaven is not a spiritual state you dissolve into. The strongest evidence for that is the body of Jesus. When He rose, His disciples took Him for a ghost, and He answered them plainly:

Luke 24:39 (NKJV)

Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.

Then He asked whether they had any food, and ate a piece of broiled fish in front of them (Luke 24:41–43). Whatever a resurrection body is, it is a body. It can be handled and it can eat. And His body is the pattern for ours; Paul writes that Christ “will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). This is also why what John sees is “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1). The Christian hope has always been a physical one.

People assume all this adds up to an eternity of doing nothing. John’s closing description says the opposite.

Revelation 22:1–5 (NKJV)

And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. There shall be no night there: They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light. And they shall reign forever and ever.

“His servants shall serve Him.” There is work in that city. That should not surprise anyone who has read Genesis carefully, because Adam was put in the garden “to tend and keep it” (Genesis 2:15) before sin existed. Work belonged to the world God called good. Man was made in the image of a God who makes things, and being remade in Christ does not strip that out of him — it repairs it. What the curse did was make work exhausting and often pointless, and John says it is the curse that goes, not the work. “They shall reign forever and ever” — the charge God gave humanity over the earth at the beginning is handed back, and handed to people who can no longer misuse it.

Beyond this, Scripture is sparing, and the honest thing is to say so. You will not find a description of what an ordinary day is like there. A great deal of what circulates about heaven comes from people who say they died, went there, and came back to write about it. John MacArthur has been blunt about that whole trade, and his reason is the right one: “the Bible is our only reliable source of information about heaven.” A book that supplies details God chose not to give is not helping you see heaven more clearly. It is showing you someone’s imagination.

“They shall see His face.” Moses asked to see God’s glory and was told that no man could see His face and live (Exodus 33:20). What was refused to Moses is promised here, without qualification, to ordinary Christians. And John tells us whose face it is. The throne in that city belongs to God and to the Lamb together, and it is the Lamb who lights the place (Revelation 21:23).

People who want nothing to do with God still want something like this. Every generation builds its own version of paradise and calls it something else. Solomon accounts for the longing:

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NKJV)

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

God put that sense of eternity there. It is why a life bounded by seventy or eighty years and then nothing feels wrong to almost everybody, whatever they say they believe. But Solomon adds the second half in the same breath: the longing does not tell anyone where to go. No one works out the plan of God by feeling homesick. What people want is the garden without the Gardener — the peace of Eden, the safety of Eden, the endless afternoon of Eden, with the one Person who made it kept outside the fence. That is why every human paradise fails. What made Eden good was not the fruit or the river. It was that God walked there.

That city is real, and not everyone will be in it. John says plainly that nothing which defiles will enter, “but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life” (Revelation 21:27). But nobody inside walked in on merit. Earlier in the same chapter, the One seated on the throne makes the offer Himself: “I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts” (Revelation 21:6). Nothing to pay, and nothing to bring but thirst.

So turn from your sin and trust Jesus Christ, who died for sinners and rose again. Then what Moses asked for and was refused will be given to you. You will see His face.