What The Bible Says About HeavenSample

A Stopover Called Paradise

Jesus gave the dying thief a promise, a location and, by inference, a definition. Two thousand plus years later, and as you read this very sentence, the dying thief – I have no doubt – is still enjoying paradise. Paul, in describing what was probably a Near Death Experience (NDE) or an out of body experience, uses the same Greek word for paradise to describe his visit to present heaven. In Revelation 2:7, the apostle John uses the same word as he talks about ‘the paradise of God’, when he is clearly in present heaven.

‘Paradise’ and ‘at home with the Lord’ are both phrases used to describe the intermediate state of the Christian who dies. Paradise comes from the Persian (Iranian) word that the Greeks modified into paradeisos, meaning ‘enclosed park’: a pleasure garden, a walled garden, a place of design, a place of beauty, a place of peace and a place of joy. And this is why we typically use it of the Garden of Eden. A lush garden represents all that is most attractive to a people living in an arid landscape. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with their sophisticated systems of irrigation, were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. They were so magnificently beautiful that people would travel from all over the world just to catch a glimpse.

People reporting positive near-death experiences often describe the place they glimpsed as being like a beautiful garden. For the Christian, as soon as the spirit is released from the body by death, it has direct access to the presence of the Lord. It is a beautiful garden-like place, and Paul says it is better by far than the best we have here. Alister McGrath explains:

The idea of a walled garden, enclosing a carefully cultivated area of exquisite plants and animals, was the most powerful symbol of paradise available to the human imagination, mingling the images of the beauty of nature with the orderliness of human construction . . . The whole of human history is thus enfolded in the subtle interplay of sorrow over a lost paradise, and the hope of its final restoration.