What Does Heaven Feel Like?

Sin will occasion greater grace

I’m in the midst of a sermon series and an online class on the Book of Revelation; consequently, I have the Last Things on my mind.

Scripture most often sketches the Fulfillment with pictures, images that are as much riddles as they are illustrations.

Jesus, in Luke’s Gospel, compares heaven to an upside down wedding banquet to which all motley manner of people will come from east and west, north and south. There, Matthew’s Gospel adds, the Bridegroom’s guests will recline at the table with such A-list guests as Father Abraham, his son Laughter, and Laughter’s son Heel-Grabber. In the Apocalypse to John, the Spirit of Jesus gives the Seer to see the New Jerusalem as an impossibly proportioned Holy of Holies— a City with permanently idle gates through which pagan kings come to and fro in a commerce that the kingdom come has somehow not concluded. Before breaking the news of his cruciform departure, Jesus promises his disciples that he goes to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, an everlasting domicile with mansions many enough to accommodate the entire multitude of those who make up his risen body.

An Almighty McMansion.

And if scripture is coy about what heaven’s appearance, then it is nevertheless consistent on its aurality.

The End, the Bible attests again and again, is music:

Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness. Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

— Psalm 150

The company of heaven, the Seer hears, sing a perpetual profession:

“Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and because of your will they existed and they were created.”

— Revelation 4

Just so—

Scripture lets us glimpse what heaven looks like.

And the Bible shows us what heaven sounds like.

But the partial and puzzling impressions the Bible offers of the Fulfillment often fail to fulfill even our most modest hopes. They provoke not joyous anticipation or insatiable desire but dread and disquietude. It’s one thing to lean into poetry like, “The End is music,” but it’s quite another matter to contemplate an eternity of unending— if perfected— choir practice. I recoil even at the recorded sound of my preaching voice. And if the coming Kingdom is bereft of carnal pleasures— why else is the Song of Songs in there— then count me out. Harp music doesn’t rate high on this aeon’s Spotify so why should the life to come conscript us all into an ethereal garage band of nothing but lyres? Surely the Lord does not require all the saints, their robes washed white in the blood of the Lamb, to darn the wings of his angels. Surely the world to come has a better business model.

Heaven, as sheer duration, is the very definition of Hell.