For believers in Jesus Christ the idea of heaven occupies a large chunk of our everyday life this side of eternity. We understand it on some superficial level because we use finite means imagining infinite things. We’re like fish that try to imagine what it must be like to fly. It’s not an easy thing trying to imagine it. So, is it any wonder that we sound like naïve children trying to visualise the North Pole where Santa makes all his toys? At least we seem that way in the ears of unbelievers. Still, we insist that what is written in The Scriptures is true, so much so that we rearrange our whole perceived existence around that fact. We sound ridiculous when trying to articulate it, but that doesn’t stop us from expressing it, as inadequately as we do, just because we want everybody to know our joy and have hope as we do. We’re like the 4 lepers in 2 Kings chapter 7, that have found food and drink and after feasting they went and told the rest that there is a place where they can find food also.
In ‘The weight of glory’, by C. S. Lewis, in one of his essays there is an image that I find useful. As all images, parables, visions, it cannot possibly convey the whole, but it helps to give a glimpse of the true meaning.
“Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her, she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance, she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy, and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally, it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. ‘But’ she gasps, ‘you didn’t think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?’ ‘What?’ says the boy. ‘No pencil marks there?’ And instantly, his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition—the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.
So with us. ‘We know not what we shall be;’ but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape; not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun. (…) If flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom, that is not because they are too solid, too gross, too distinct, too illustrious with being – they are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal.” C. S. Lewis, The weight of glory
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Don’t let the so called ‘lights’ of this world dim your hope. Just because we don’t know how to imagine it aptly, it doesn’t make it less real. We follow One, His name is Truth, and He promised us that where He is we will be there also (John 12:26). So, take heart, “For, “Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay.” (Hebrews 10:37)
By Cristina Pop
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