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Transcript 206A — Is Heaven a Physical Place?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum
CALLER: The Bible describes Heaven as a place where there is a river and there is a tree that gives a different kind of fruit every month, and Jesus said, "I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there ye may be also." Isn't this a physical place?
HC: The question is raised, what is the nature of Heaven? Is it a physical place?
Well, let me assure you, it is a physical place. It is a place where people go to when they have died, if they have placed their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the place where the Lord Jesus Christ is, and where the angels come from.
But if we're going to speak about material things, we've got another problem. It can be a literal place, but it's not necessarily something that is connected with material. When we think of material, we're thinking of that which we can take hold of, that which we can see, that which we can feel. We're thinking of rocks and iron and wood and trees, and all of these things. This is what we have in mind.
Actually, the Bible says, "God is Spirit and they who worship Him worship Him in spirit and truth." The inhabitants of Heaven are either angels, who are spirit beings, or they are people who are there in their souls. Or if they are there in a body, as Enoch is or Elijah or Moses, then it's in their spiritual body, their resurrected spiritual body, whatever that is. The Bible simply speaks of it as a spiritual body, and I don't really know what it is.
But I think the important thing we have to realize is that it is not a material kind of a place such as we have on this earth. It's outside of our dimension of thinking. Our minds can't really take hold of it.
Now let's go one step further and look at the New Heaven and the New Earth. Our caller made reference to the Tree of Life, and water flowing, and so on. And we do have language in the Bible of the New Heaven and the New Earth. Now again we have to be very careful. We're talking of course about a place. God very clearly indicates that this universe will be burned by fire, and it will be recreated New Heavens and a New Earth, where righteousness dwells. That is in the Bible, and there are no verses that modify this statement in any way.
Now what this New Heaven and New Earth really consists of, that's another question. We can't really know. We know, for example, that the Tree of Life is a figure of Christ Himself. He is the Tree of Life. We eat of Him in order that we might live eternally. The water that flows from the Tree of Life is the water of the Gospel. It is the Word of God. It's not necessarily material water of some kind. Now I'm not saying that the New Heaven and the New Earth won't have water. Maybe it will. I don't know. The Bible is silent about that.
The caller made reference to the Gospel of John, where Jesus said, "I go to prepare a place for you. In My Father's house are many mansions." Now let's be a little careful as to how we understand this. Jesus is speaking a year or two before He went to the cross. And He is telling His disciples, "I go to prepare a place for you." Well, where is the place that we eventually are going? The Bible says that we're going to Heaven, and Heaven is the abode of God. We will dwell forever in Him, in His presence.
Now how are we going to get into Heaven? Well, we have to have a place prepared for us. We can't just go into Heaven. It has to be prepared for us. Now did Jesus go into Heaven and build some houses there? That's what a lot of people have the idea of, of course, that He's up in Heaven and He's building mansions He's building rooms, He's building a city. And then they carry it one step further and they say that Revelation 21 teaches that after that city has been built, it's going to come down out of Heaven and it's going to be 1,500 miles by 1,500 miles by 1,500 miles. And speculation is made that it's going to have so many floors, and it's going to have so much area, and it's going to have so much room for all the believers in this . . . totally a materialistic, earth-bound idea of this whole thing.
But let's think about it. When Jesus said, "I go to prepare a place for you," where did He go? He went to the cross. That's where He went to prepare a place for us. Unless He died for our sins, unless He paid God's penalty for our sins, we couldn't go to Heaven. And once our sins had been paid for, then we can go to Heaven.
Now where we go into Heaven? Do we go into a building of some kind? No. Our abode is in God Himself. In Psalm 90:1 we read, "Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations." Christ Himself is the temple in which we dwell. We are in Christ. We are not going to some materialistic place that is related to this earth.
I might also say (and maybe we talked about this another time) that when it speaks about the New Heaven and the New Earth it says that there's no sun there, because Christ is the Sun. It's an entirely different kind of universe. I don't know what it is. I don't think any man can describe it. I think it's far beyond our human abilities to describe. We still are earth-bound. We still think in terms of rocks and soil and all the things that we see around us.