“This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through. My treasure lies laid up, somewhere beyond the blue. The saviour beckons me from Heaven’s open door, and I can’t feel at home in this world any more”
So goes the old song. But is it true? Is the Christian hope simply that we “go to heaven when we die”?
Today is Easter Sunday, and I like to wish people a Happy Resurrection Day. The historical event of Jesus rising from the dead shows us many things. It shows that Jesus is the divine Son of God as he claimed to be. It shows that Jesus’ self-sacrifice for sins on the Cross was accepted by the Father as bringing us forgiveness and reconciliation. But I want to focus on one particular aspect: Jesus resurrection shows us that we too will be raised from death at Christ’s return when he ushers in the New Creation.
In my conservative evangelical church background, the Resurrection can sometimes seem something of an afterthought – it’s an amazing miracle, of course, but you can get the impression that the real business of salvation took place solely in Jesus’ death on the Cross. For us, the Resurrection is a nice happy ending, but it doesn’t necessarily feature centrally in our understanding of salvation, the Christian life and our future hope.
Most Christians I know would affirm the importance of Resurrection hope if pushed on it, but the default, Sunday School answer about our future is “going to heaven when we die”. Even when a Bible passage is explicitly talking about resurrection rather than heaven, I’ve had several Christians say that they’d rather just talk about heaven “so as not to complicate things”.
But Resurrection – being raised to new physical life, as Jesus was – is not a particular complicated concept. And while people might nod knowingly when we talk about Heaven, we can’t assume that their concept of heaven in any way resembles the Biblical picture. Many people outside the church are completely unaware of the historic Christian teaching of bodily resurrection, and think Christians believe in a Fluffy Cloud Heaven of Pearly Gates and harps. Resurrection may be a less familiar concept, but that’s all the more reason to emphasise and explain it. And because it’s unfamiliar, it might help jolt people so they realise that their cultural baggage about Heaven isn’t what Christians really believe.
So what difference does the resurrection make? What does the Bible teach about our eternal destiny, and how does that affect our day to day lives now? In a coming few blog posts, I’ll be looking at various Bible passages examining just those questions…