Quotes about Heaven

Though many Christians in the Western world have imagined that the aim or goal of being a Christian is simply "to go to heaven when you die," the New Testament holds out something much richer and more interesting.

thoroughly focused on heaven that anything to do with the present creation is regarded as worldly, dangerous, a distraction from the task of saving . . . but saving what? Well, often it is saving souls. But there's nothing about souls in Romans 8. No mention of heaven, either, if it comes to that. It is all about bodies: resurrection bodies, because that's what we will need in the new creation, which will be more physical than the present world, not less.

Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.

But if Luke and John were simply constructing narratives to combat Docetism, they surely shot themselves in the foot with both barrels when they spoke of the risen Jesus appearing through locked doors, disappearing again, sometimes being recognized, sometimes not, and finally ascending into heaven.

So for Jesus "going to heaven" isn't a matter of disappearing into the far distance. Jesus is like somebody who has two homes. The homes are right next door to each other, and there is a connecting door. One day the partition wall will be knocked down and there will be one, glorious, heaven-and-earth mixture.

reality. It is the resurrection that declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat. It therefore announces that God has indeed become king on earth as in heaven.

Our father in heaven, May your name be honoured 10May your kingdom come May your will be done As in heaven, so on earth. 11 Give us today the bread we need now; 12And forgive us the things we owe, As we too have forgiven what was owed to us. 13Don't bring us into the great Trial, But rescue us from evil. 14

What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life—God's dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21—22, we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.

heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God's good creation.

Genesis 1 and 2 are about the construction of a temple, namely, the heaven-and-earth creation in which God wants to dwell, with humans as the 'image' in the temple.

They named supernatural culprits, and traced their actions to enmities in heaven. Artemis was hostile to Pan, Earth to Apollo, virgin Athena to loving Aphrodite.... Because the gods were `present' and manifest, it was necessary to ask them about [things] which might concern them. Otherwise, they might be `unpropitious'.... The old compound of awe and intimacy was still alive. (Pagans and Christians, Penguin, 1988, pp. 236-37)