Question:
When a Christian dies where does he or she go right away? Does a Christian go to heaven right away and see Jesus, or does a Christian go to sleep for while and not go to heaven until the end, with everyone else who is a Christian?Answer:
Rather, he says, the real deal is the life AFTER life after death. That is, the resurrection of the death on the restored earth, AKA the new heavens and the new earth (Rev 21:1,2 – notice the city of God comes DOWN – the dwelling of God will be with men, literally heaven ON earth). The great hope for NT believers was not heaven, harps and clouds and all that. The great hope was Jesus appearing, his saints coming WITH him, TO EARTH to establish his reign and rule here and we, with new and resurrected bodies, as his coregents; not disembodied, not harps on clouds etc and NOT directly after death.
Now, those that die in Christ are assured to be WITH Christ (Phil 1:23,24; 2 Cor 5:8), but they “sleep” until they come with him in glory (1 Thess 4:14-17 ) resurrected, embodied, coregents with the Master over a restored earth where all the promises to the Prophets about Israel come to pass.
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Heaven Is Not Our Home
The bodily resurrection is the good news of the gospel—and thus our social and political mandate.
N. T. Wright | posted 3/24/2008 08:57AM
There
is no agreement in the church today about what happens to people when
they die. Yet the New Testament is crystal clear on the matter: In a
classic passage, Paul speaks of "the redemption of our bodies" (Rom.
8:23). There is no room for doubt as to what he means: God's people are
promised a new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption
of our present bodily life. The rest of the early Christian writings,
where they address the subject, are completely in tune with this.
The
traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a
one-stage, postmortem journey represents a serious distortion and
diminution of the Christian hope. Bodily resurrection is not just one
odd bit of that hope. It is the element that gives shape and meaning to
the rest of the story of God's ultimate purposes. If we squeeze it to
the margins, as many have done by implication, or indeed, if we leave it
out altogether, as some have done quite explicitly, we don't just lose
an extra feature, like buying a car that happens not to have
electrically operated mirrors. We lose the central engine, which drives
it and gives every other component its reason for working.
When we
talk with biblical precision about the resurrection, we discover an
excellent foundation for lively and creative Christian work in the
present world—not, as some suppose, for an escapist or quietist piety.
Bodily Resurrection
While
both Greco-Roman paganism and Second Temple Judaism held a wide variety
of beliefs about life beyond death, the early Christians, beginning with
Paul, were remarkably unanimous on the topic.
When
Paul speaks in Philippians 3 of being "citizens of heaven," he doesn't
mean that we shall retire there when we have finished our work here. He
says in the next line that Jesus will come from heaven in order to
transform the present humble body into a glorious body like his own.
Jesus will do this by the power through which he makes all things
subject to himself. This little statement contains in a nutshell more or
less all Paul's thought on the subject. The risen Jesus is both the
model for the Christian's future body and the means by which it comes.
Similarly,
in Colossians 3:1–4, Paul says that when the Messiah (the one "who is
your life") appears, then you too will appear with him in glory. Paul
does not say "one day you will go to be with him." No, you already
possess life in him. This new life, which the Christian possesses
secretly, invisible to the world, will burst forth into full bodily
reality and visibility.
The
clearest and strongest passage is Romans 8:9–11. If the Spirit of God,
the Spirit of Jesus the Messiah, dwells in you, says Paul, then the one
who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal
bodies as well, through his Spirit who dwells in you. God will give
life, not to a disembodied spirit, not to what many people have thought
of as a spiritual body in the sense of a nonphysical one, but "to your
mortal bodies also."
Other
New Testament writers support this view. The first letter of John
declares that when Jesus appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see
him as he is. The resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is
almost unimaginable to us in its glory and power, will be the model for
our own. And of course within John's gospel, despite the puzzlement of
those who want to read the book in a very different way, we have some of
the clearest statements of future bodily resurrection. Jesus reaffirms
the widespread Jewish expectation of resurrection in the last day, and
announces that the hour for this has already arrived. It is quite
explicit: "The hour is coming," he says, "indeed, it is already here,
when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of Man, and those who hear
will live; when all in the graves will come out, those who have done
good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the
resurrection of judgment."
Life After Life After Death
Here we
must discuss what Jesus means when he declares that there are "many
dwelling places" in his Father's house. This has regularly been taken,
not least when used in the context of bereavement, to mean that the dead
(or at least dead Christians) will simply go to heaven permanently
rather than being raised again subsequently to new bodily life. But the
word for "dwelling places" here, monai, is regularly used in
ancient Greek not for a final resting place, but for a temporary halt on
a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run.
This
fits closely with Jesus' words to the dying brigand in Luke: "Today you
will be with me in paradise." Despite a long tradition of misreading,
paradise here means not a final destination but the blissful garden, the
parkland of rest and tranquility, where the dead are refreshed as they
await the dawn of the new day. The main point of the sentence lies in
the apparent contrast between the brigand's request and Jesus' reply:
"Remember me," he says, "when you come in your kingdom," implying that
this will be at some far distant future. Jesus' answer brings this
future hope into the present, implying of course that with his death the
kingdom is indeed coming, even though it doesn't look like what anyone
had imagined: "Today you will be with me in paradise." There will, of
course, still be a future completion involving ultimate resurrection;
Luke's overall theological understanding leaves no doubt on that score.
Jesus, after all, didn't rise again "today," that is, on Good Friday.
Luke must have understood him to be referring to a state of
being-in-paradise. With Jesus, the future hope has come forward into the
present. For those who die in faith, before that final reawakening, the
central promise is of being "with Jesus" at once. "My desire is to
depart," wrote Paul, "and be with Christ, which is far better."
Resurrection
itself then appears as what the word always meant in the ancient world.
It wasn't a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of
talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one
might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death.
What
then about such passages as 1 Peter 1, which speaks of a salvation that
is "kept in heaven for you" so that in your present believing you are
receiving "the salvation of your souls"? Here, I suggest, the automatic
assumption of Western Christianity leads us badly astray. Most
Christians today, reading a passage like this, assume that it means that
heaven is where you go to receive this salvation—or even that salvation
consists in "going to heaven when you die." The way we now understand
that language in the Western world is totally different from what Jesus
and his hearers meant and understood.
For a
start, heaven is actually a reverent way of speaking about God, so that
"riches in heaven" simply means "riches in God's presence." But then, by
derivation from this primary meaning, heaven is the place where God's
purposes for the future are stored up. It isn't where they are meant to
stay so that one would need to go to heaven to enjoy them. It is where
they are kept safe against the day when they will become a reality on
earth. God's future inheritance, the incorruptible new world and the new
bodies that are to inhabit that world, are already kept safe, waiting
for us, so that they can be brought to birth in the new heavens and new
earth.
From Worship to Mission
The
mission of the church is nothing more or less than the outworking, in
the power of the Spirit, of Jesus' bodily resurrection. It is the
anticipation of the time when God will fill the earth with his glory,
transform the old heavens and earth into the new, and raise his children
from the dead to populate and rule over the redeemed world he has made.
If that
is so, mission must urgently recover from its long-term schizophrenia.
The split between saving souls and doing good in the world is not a
product of the Bible or the gospel, but of the cultural captivity of
both. The world of space, time, and matter is where real people live,
where real communities happen, where difficult decisions are made, where
schools and hospitals bear witness to the "now, already" of the gospel
while police and prisons bear witness to the "not yet." The world of
space, time, and matter is where parliaments, city councils,
neighborhood watch groups, and everything in between are set up and run
for the benefit of the wider community, the community where anarchy
means that bullies (economic and social as well as physical) will always
win, where the weak and vulnerable will always need protecting, and
where the social and political structures of society are part of the
Creator's design.
And the
church that is renewed by the message of Jesus' resurrection must be
the church that goes to work precisely in that space, time, and matter.
The church claims this world in advance as the place of God's kingdom,
of Jesus' lordship, and of the Spirit's power. Councils and parliaments
can and often do act wisely, though they will always need scrutiny and
accountability, because they in turn may become agents of bullying and
corruption.
Thus
the church that takes sacred space seriously (not as a retreat from the
world but as a bridgehead into it) will go straight from worshiping in
the sanctuary to debating in the council chamber; to discussing matters
of town planning, of harmonizing and humanizing beauty in architecture,
green spaces, and road traffic schemes; and to environmental work,
creative and healthy farming methods, and proper use of resources. If it
is true, as I have argued, that the whole world is now God's holy land,
we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced. This is
not an extra to the church's mission. It is central.
The
church that takes seriously the fact that Jesus is Lord of all will not
just celebrate quietly every time we write the date on a letter or
document, will not just set aside Sunday as far as humanly and socially
possible as a celebration of God's new creation, will not just seek to
order its own life in an appropriate rhythm of worship and work. Such a
church will also seek to bring wisdom to the rhythms of work in offices
and shops, in local government, in civic holidays, and in the shaping of
public life. These things cannot be taken for granted. The enormous
shifts during my lifetime, from the whole town observing Good Friday and
Easter, to those great days being simply more occasions for football
matches and yet more televised reruns of old movies, are indices of what
happens when a society loses its roots and drifts with prevailing
social currents. The reclaiming of time as God's good gift (as opposed
to time as simply a commodity to be spent for one's own benefit, which
often means fresh forms of slavery for others) is not an extra to the
church's mission. It is central.
Whatever is Holy
One of
the things I most enjoy about being a bishop is watching ordinary
Christians (not that there are any "ordinary" Christians, but you know
what I mean) going straight from worshiping Jesus in church to making a
radical difference in the material lives of people down the street by
running playgroups for children of single working moms; by organizing
credit unions to help people at the bottom of the financial ladder find
their way to responsible solvency; by campaigning for better housing,
against dangerous roads, for drug rehab centers, for wise laws relating
to alcohol, for decent library and sporting facilities, for a thousand
other things in which God's sovereign rule extends to hard, concrete
reality. Once again, all this is not an extra to the mission of the
church. It is central.
This
way of coming at the tasks of the church in terms of space, time, and
matter leads directly to evangelism. When the church is seen to move
straight from worship of God to affecting much-needed change in the
world; when it becomes clear that the people who feast at Jesus' table
are the ones at the forefront of work to eliminate hunger and famine;
when people realize that those who pray for the Spirit to work in and
through them are the people who seem to have extra resources of love and
patience in caring for those whose lives are damaged, bruised, and
shamed—then it is natural for people to recognize that something is
going on that they want to be part of.
No
single individual can attempt more than a fraction of this mission.
That's why mission is the work of the whole church, the whole time.
Paul's advice to the Philippians—even though he and they knew they were
suffering for their faith and might be tempted to retreat from the world
into a dualistic, sectarian mentality—was upbeat. "These are the things
you should think through," he wrote: "whatever is true, whatever is
holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive,
whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything
praiseworthy." And in thinking through these things, we will discover
more and more about the same Creator God whom we know in and through
Jesus Christ and will be better equipped to work effectively not over
against the world, but with the grain of all goodwill, of all that seeks
to bring and enhance life.
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