A Heart Toward Heaven

Last spring, I sat in my grandfather’s living room in Western Maryland, seeing him for what we knew were his final days on this earth. The room was stuffy and crowded with family as I listened to my mom and her brothers discuss gardening.

Poppop was a farmer all his life. Fittingly, his sons and daughter passed some of his final hours with talk of raised beds, fertilizer, seeds, and the best time to plant potatoes. They were planning a summer he would not see.

The five-gallon buckets of the biggest Kennebec potatoes you’ve ever seen. Provider beans, waiting to be snapped and canned, lining the kitchen walls. Beefsteak tomatoes the size of small melons on the counter. He was supposed to be here for them. I wanted to visit that August and spot him in the field, hoe in hand, dirt filling the spaces beneath his nails and caking the calluses of his strong hands. I wanted him to see the harvest.

“I wish I could go with him.”

“I wish I could go with him,” my mom told me later that night, her voice so strained I hardly recognized it. Sinking back in her recliner, she looked small and weak—so unlike the strong, resilient mother I’d always known.

Seeing my mom grieve compacted my own grief. I wanted to take away her pain, our family’s pain, and my own.

I knew that things weren’t supposed to be this way. I knew that one day they won’t be. I even knew that where Poppop was going would relieve him of the cancer he’d endured. But I didn’t know how to long for heaven for him because I hadn’t learned how to long for heaven myself.

Paradise Lost

Humans have been longing for some idea of heaven since the fall. With eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), we know there is more to life than what we see, and nothing we see is as it should be.

Adam’s sin brought death and suffering into a previously perfect world. Now all creation groans for freedom from corruption (Romans 8:21–22). We yearn for more vacation days and save for destinations we call “paradise.” We describe chocolate mousse as “heavenly” and turn to music and art for transcendence. We don’t want our getaways and desserts to end. We can’t wait for our favorite performers to produce their next album.

When the last notes fade and the plane lands back home, tears rise and spill with the ache of paradise lost.

The Great Escapism

I had often perceived the longing for heaven as escapism. When another mass shooting, deadly storm, or vicious virus headlines the news, I often hear Christians lament, “I just wish the Lord would return.”

In our teens and twenties, my friends and I talked about heaven with thinly veiled dread that we would see it before we got the chance to drive, get married, have children, and travel the world. We said we loved Jesus, but the idea of heaven was kind of, well, boring.

As we’re now entering our forties, bearing the weight of heavy political strife and global violence, health crises, and economic strains, we don’t so much dread the escape. Turns out, adulthood wasn’t the near-heaven we’d imagined it to be.

Perhaps we long for escape when our earthly heavens don’t work out. A “boring” heaven is still better than a painful life.

Not a Place but a Person

“We are half-hearted creatures,” C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Perhaps we are too easily pleased because we don’t understand heaven—a place we’ve never seen to envision, and depicted in movies and art with clouds and harps. It’s quite possible that we don’t know how much we have to gain because we have no idea how much we've lost.

Adam lost a lot. Had he not sinned, he would have never worried about having enough food for the table, never needed a vacation or a doctor, never spent an afternoon with Eve picking out their burial plots. But sin took from him something much more significant than comfort and an immortal life: Adam lost relationship with God.

My mom loves the saying, “Home is where your mom is.” It sounds kitschy, but its meaning rings true. When I’m homesick, I’m not longing for the house I grew up in. I’m longing for the embrace of the parents who loved and raised me.

Sometimes when I visit them, I’ll arrive before they’re back from running errands. The house needs their words—I’m so glad you’re finally home!—their smells—brewing and pouring their evening coffee—their sounds—slipping off their sneakers and settling into their adjoining recliners. When the house is full of them, they make it home.

When I visited my Nana the summer after Poppop died, I didn’t want to go inside the house where I’d last seen him alive. In my mind, it’s still “Poppop’s house,” but Poppop isn’t there. Without the sight of him coming in from the garden, smelling of sun and sweat; without the bass tones of his voice calling, “Hey, darlin’!”; without his warm, engulfing hugs, the house is irreparably changed.

So was earth changed when Adam’s sin separated all creation from God. It’s God’s presence we’re longing for, his embrace we long to feel, his “I’m so glad you’re home!” we long to hear.

But when our hearts aren’t tuned to him, we’re quick to satisfy our own longings with temporal things, playing in slums because we can’t imagine more. We don’t long for the truly satisfying because we don’t long for the Satisfier.

Biblical Worldview of Death

Culture has many ideas about death. While some are grim, proposing that we simply cease to exist, others are romanticized.

Books, movies, and poems describe death as “part of life,” just the end of a chapter to start another, or the entrance to the “great beyond.”

Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism teach reincarnation. Greek philosophers proposed that death is liberation—the soul’s release from its mortal cage.

Only Scripture tells the truth about death: it is a consequence of sin, and it is not good. Death is devastating, and it should be.

The Bible describes two deaths: physical and eternal. Except for those alive when Christ returns, all people will die physically. Those who’ve repented and put their faith in Christ for salvation will experience the second resurrection when Christ returns to make all things new and gives them glorified bodies.

Those who reject Christ and die in sin will be judged with the second, eternal death, which Scripture describes as the “lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14). This death is the very death that Jesus came to save people from. His gift of salvation by grace through faith is salvation from the second death.

A Heavenly Hope

Last Christmas, my dad’s mom also passed away, making death a set of heartbreaking bookends to the year.

With the loss of two beloved grandparents, I felt the sharpest emotional pain of my life. I hated the finality of their earthly goodbyes.

I’d been spoiled with life until then. Apart from some great-grandparents and distant relatives, I’d lost no one else who’d left such canyons of emptiness in their departures.

Their deaths woke a deeper awareness that more loss was coming. My remaining grandparents, my parents, my aunts and uncles—barring early tragedy, I would one day see everyone I loved die. My heart would be nothing but canyons echoing memories.

The thought of living the rest of my life with so much heartache in the line-up had me suddenly desperate for heaven.

“I’m not suicidal,” I told my friend Sarah over dinner one night. “But I wish I could die, too. I’m so tired of this life. It’s too hard.”

She reached across the table and took my hand. “We aren’t supposed to want to die,” she said. “It’s okay to grieve, but as a Christian, you can’t grieve without hope.”

“It’s ok to grieve.”

She was referencing 1 Thessalonians, in which Paul encourages believers who’ve lost loved ones not to grieve as those “who have no hope” (4:13). That hope is our salvation through faith in Jesus.

All who die in him—in faith to him as Lord and Savior—will live with him forever. The souls of saints who die will enter into his presence (2 Corinthians 5:8). This hope assures me that I will see my grandparents again and that right now they are in the presence of Jesus, their faith made sight.

Longing for heaven isn’t escapist after all. It’s hopeful.

Grief Points Us to Heaven

This hope doesn’t negate our grief, but it can teach us how to long for heaven. The ache of loss drove me to prayer, and in his loving-kindness, God answered: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4).

My—our—grief is the very reason Jesus left the comfort and glory of heaven. He knew that grief of death is the grief of sin itself, for our sin is the cause of death and all its accompanying sorrow.

Because of death, we live with constant threat of fear, loss, and pain. Attempting to escape them, we make petty heavens out of wealth, sex, family, vacations—all good things in their proper contexts, but things that can never satisfy a soul that knows it’s doomed to die.

Only Jesus “satisfies the longing soul” (Psalm 107:9).

Death, pain, suffering—these horrors remind us of what Jesus saves us from when we put our faith in him. When they affect us, we can draw close to the God of all comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3), who shares our griefs and understands our weakness (Hebrews 4:15).

I still feel the grief of losing two grandparents I loved so dearly, but my grief reminds me that this life is temporal. It is broken. We can’t find heaven here, for “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20).

A Rightly Ordered Longing

In several of his works and letters, C. S. Lewis explains the need for Christians to “rightly order” their affections.

“To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”

In other words, we can’t rightly love the good things we have now until we first love God and seek him above all other people and things. Only then can we long for him. And only then will we understand that our rightly ordered loves on this earth—family, rest, church, careers—are but glimpses of the true heaven to come.

This truth is why Christians shouldn’t grieve as others grieve. We have the hope of the second resurrection and an eternity where we will live in perfect union with our Savior and his church. In that blissful foreverness, I will love my grandparents more perfectly than I ever loved them here.

The New Heaven and Earth

I am not alone in my grief. Jesus bore it on the cross, his heart is touched with it today, and one day he will destroy it forever and restore all things.

The souls of believers go to heaven when they die, but that heaven is not our final home. One day, Jesus will return to earth a second time. Then he will judge the unrepentant and unbelieving, and he will destroy sin and death forever (Hebrews 9:27–28; Revelation 20:11–15).

He will give his saints new glorified bodies and create a new heaven and earth (Revelation 21:1). There, we will dwell with God for all eternity (Revelation 21:3).

It will be anything but boring. Isaiah 65 describes God’s people in the new earth building houses and planting vineyards (v. 21). As God placed Adam in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it (Genesis 2:15), we will have work to do in the new earth—work that will never break our backs or our hearts.

A Heavenly Lesson

The goodness of this life—love, joy, peace, togetherness—are blessings from God. They are tastes of heaven and evidence of God’s grace and presence in the world. We should praise him for them and enjoy them fully.

But we can’t expect to feel the fullness of heaven on this earth today. We can expect to feel the weight of sin that still causes all creation to groan. Yet we walk in faith, knowing that while we may weep today, eternal joy is coming (Psalm 30:5).

I miss my grandparents more than I thought imaginable, but their deaths taught me that the object of my grief—separated love—isn’t so different from my longing for heaven, my yearning to be with my Savior forever.

Grieving the Death of an Unsaved Loved One

Grieving a loved one who dies without Christ is truly a Christian’s greatest sorrow. How do we approach such deaths? Here are a few thoughts to consider.

1. As the thief on the cross and parable of the vineyard show us, some come to Christ in their final hour.
2. No one spends eternity apart from God unjustly. Humans chose self over God in the beginning (Genesis 3) and brought sin into the world. God is holy and just and must judge sin. He took that judgment on himself when he, God the Son, died on the cross. Those who reject his salvation must receive their own judgment.
3. You might be tempted to be angry at God for his holy justice. Take that anger to God in prayer and search his Word. Remember that all people are in violation of his holiness, and he is accountable to his own standard of holiness and justice. The very justice that ensures believers of salvation is the justice that ensures judgment of sinners.
4. Take time to grieve and pray through your grief. Consider seeing a pastor or biblical counselor We should grieve any soul who rejects salvation. God feels the same grief you feel for those who reject his love (Matthew 23:37).