Making Sense Of God - Timothy KellerНамуна

“Heaven Is A World of Love”

Eighteenth-century philosopher and preacher Jonathan Edwards wrote a famous sermon titled “Heaven Is a World of Love,” which conveys the Christian hope with power.

We will never again fear separation from those we love. Disrupted love, the greatest sadness that earthly life contains, will be gone forever. In heaven “they shall know that they shall forever be continued in the perfect enjoyment of each other’s love.” All things there “shall flourish in an eternal youth. Age will not diminish anyone’s beauty or vigor, and there love shall flourish... as a living spring perpetually springing... as a river which ever runs and is always clear and full.”

Most important of all, “then Christ will open to their view the great fountain of love in his heart far beyond what they ever before saw... and they shall know that he has loved them with dying love.” There is nothing more transforming than when someone makes a powerful declaration and expression of love toward us. So what will this be like?

In response to this ultimate experience of divine love every person in heaven will become “a note in a concert of music which sweetly harmonizes with every other note... and so all helping one another to their utmost to express their love and... to pour back love into the fountain of love, whence they are supplied and filled with love and with glory. And thus they will live and thus reign in love, and in that godlike joy which is the blessed fruit of it, such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath ever entered into the heart of any in this world to conceive” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

None of this is possible if when we die we simply become part of the earth, or even an impersonal part of the impersonal All-Soul of the world, as in many Eastern religions. Love is possible only between persons, and Christianity promises that through Christ you can (in Updike’s phrase) “be a Self forever.” The Gospel accounts relate that the risen Christ was both the same and yet different, so that his disciples did not at first recognize him yet did so eventually (Luke 24:16,31; John 20:14,16).

An analogy would be knowing a ten-year-old girl and then not meeting her again until she was a beautiful, intelligent woman of twenty-five. You would not likely recognize her at first, but it would become clear that it was still her. Our future, glorified selves will be continuous with who we are now, but the growth into wisdom, goodness, and power will be infinitely greater.

Excerpt from Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical by Timothy Keller

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © 2016 by Timothy Keller