Is heaven a warehouse?
February 16th, 2009 by Ben Rae Posted in Books, TheologyI’m still chewing over stuff after reading The Resurrection of the Son of God by NT Wright (see some of my previous posts).
In Wright’s opinion—which I suspect is correct—many Christians have unthinkingly accepted our culture’s hope of dying and going to heaven as a disembodied spirit, instead of realising that our final hope is to be resurrected on the last day to worship God forever in the new creation.
Wright points out that when our final hope is to die and go to heaven we start misinterpreting parts of the Bible like Philippians 3:20a and Ephesians 2:6. We read these verses (and lots of others) as saying that our hope is to go to heaven. But for Paul ‘heaven’ isn’t so much the place people go when they die as “the place where the divinely intended future for the world is kept safely in store” until the new creation when they will be a visible reality. In Wright’s words, “If I assure my guests that there is champagne for them in the fridge I am not suggesting that we all need to get into the fridge if we are to have the party.”
Can anyone think of any other verses that talk about heaven as the warehouse for things that will become visible realities in the new creation?
