With a certainty beyond certitude, I know that if I died right now, I would go to Heaven. However, to ask someone the question is a lousy pick-up line for evangelism. It’s also one of the dominant methods of evangelism used in the world today. Even if they don’t use that line itself, you’ll hear it in the assumptions behind the things they say.
In the coming days of tribulation, we shall surely encounter a significant number of refugees fleeing the mainstream church. One of the biggest problems we will face is this crazy assumption that the stakes in religion are whether one can gain entrance into Heaven. There is darn little in Scripture that addresses that question. A Hebrew mind would not have dared to suggest we could even understand the concept of Heaven, much less how one passes over into it. The focus of the Law was ostensibly ritual purity, but it didn’t take much to see beyond that to a deeper moral purity of personal commitment.
This did not make the Hebrew people spiritually ignorant. Jesus didn’t say much about going to Heaven, either. Rather, He addressed what we can safely assume is a prerequisite: Pleasing the Father and bringing Him glory. Jesus spent a lot of time discussing how your conduct from day to day might help or hinder that glory, but it’s hard to find Him saying anything about going to Heaven. If you fail to pick up on Hebrew figures of speech, you might mistake some things He said for addressing that issue, but you’d be wrong. The reason you see mention of it in the New Testament at all is that the writers faced it as a Gentile obsession. If you pay attention and read between the lines, you see how they try to turn the focus to other things.
But apparently this is why so many Western Christians are obsessed with a question Jesus hardly mentioned. Their obsession bleeds over into their language to the point I have to pointedly avoid using a great many common terms from my theological education.
You and I will not be offering a religion with a better way to get to Heaven. We aren’t in that competition at all. This religion I teach is about reclaiming the vast treasures God said we could have while we are still here. If the only pertinent question was going to Heaven, we wouldn’t need a religion for that, according to Paul in Romans. He says point-blank there’s not a blessed thing you can do about your eternal destiny. Instead, there is a lot we can do to harvest the blessings of that destiny while we are here.
Nobody pretends we don’t care whether we go to Heaven. It’s that we don’t pretend to have any power over it. I can’t change anything but me, and that requires a divine miracle in the first place. My religion is not better, but I contend it is more accurate in that sense. So as you encounter church refugees, you’ll find yourself fighting that assumption unless, at some early point, you find a way to address it. There’s no harm in being subtle, but our focus is not fire insurance of validating our ticket, but making our Savior look good.
“Jesus didn’t say much about going to Heaven, either.”
Good point.. Matter of fact, he didn’t say anything about it at all.
So where exactly in the Scriptures do we read that one “goes to heaven when they die”?
Just wondering, Ed.. I have heard that much in “church”, but never read it anywhere in the Sciptures. So, have you?
No, this is nowhere directly stated in Scripture. I can see how folks got the impression, so I can’t denounce it as entirely unscriptural. The point I was making was that it’s the wrong emphasis either way. We do get verses saying Jesus came down from Heaven and returned there, and we do have Christ using the term “Paradise” regarding an afterlife with Him (spoken on the Cross to the Penitent Thief). However, the Hebrew use of terms translated as “heaven” is obviously parabolic, rather like saying “sky”. We have direct witness to Elijah rising into the sky as well as Jesus, but you could easily justify that is still just symbolism, as were many other miraculous events. The entire focus of Hebrew religion up through the rabbinical colleges arising in the Exile, and the broader Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, was on the ultimate test of faithfulness to one’s deity. Whatever rewards that might bring was never described in any literal sense, always in symbols. The focus remained on one’s duty while here.
However, I still insist that the Bible teaches the existence of a higher realm of life separate from this one, while avoiding any attempt to describe it. All that symbolism means there is no language to describe it; it does not mean there is no such thing. I reject the Aristotelian unitary universe as wholly inconsistent with Hebrew intellectual traditions.