On earth as it is in Heaven?
Where this is all going and why it matters
If you have been a Christian (or have spent significant time around Christians) for long enough, you may be aware that exactly when and how the world will end has always been a topic of much debate and, at times, dispute. You may have heard of terms such as ‘dispensationalism,’ ‘premillennialism’ or ‘replacement theology.’ In general, you probably have an aversion to discussing these topics because they always seem to lead us to circular arguments, to confusion and some very strange ideas. Perhaps you try not to think about these things because you believe you aren’t academic enough, and this is just the job of more advanced Christians than you, or perhaps you have had bad experiences in the past when discussing such topics.
There are many questions regarding the events displayed in the book of Revelation that, as I see it, remain open for legitimate debate. For example, I do not intend to put forward a view here on what exactly the millennial reign of Christ is (see Revelation 20:1-6), nor on the exact nature of the tribulation period (see Revelation 7:14). But there are certain things about the end of the world around which the Bible leaves no doubt, and on which we must be dogmatic. What God has made clear, we cannot blur. To the end of clarifying what these things are, and why it matters so much that we know them and hold them tightly, I will deal with three separate points:
Are Israel and the church totally separate?
Will we be in heaven or on earth forever?
Why should we care about all this anyway?
Are Israel and the Church totally separate?
If you are familiar with the biblical story, you will know that, before we get to Jesus, the majority of the Bible we now have consists of what we call the ‘Old Testament’ or sometimes the ‘Hebrew Scriptures.’ These writings tell how God at first created the world, and then, after the human race he created was alienated from him through their sin, God began to put a plan of salvation for the whole world into action through a man called Abraham, promising at the same time that this man’s descendents would bear the hope of the human race for all time (Genesis 12:1-3, 22:17-18). We should note at first here that, even as God calls Abraham, the intention from day 1 is that he and his family line will not only be blessed but will also be a means of blessing for the whole world.
And so the story of Abraham’s family line progresses through his son Isaac to Isaac's son Jacob, whose name is changed by God to Israel (Genesis 32:28). Israel has many sons who eventually travel down to Egypt, where they and their descendents live for over 400 years, until God comes to liberate the now numerous ‘children of Israel’ from Egypt famously, through Moses. This group of people are established as God’s own nation, his own people, and they are called to be a light to the rest of the world, to show God to them (Exodus 19:3-6). Eventually God brings this nation into the land of Canaan, which he had promised to their ancestors (Genesis 15:18-20). God gives the nation his law, or teaching, on how they are to live in relationship with him. He eventually gives them kings to rule over them, and to one of these kings, David, he promises that he will one day have a son or descendent who will rule forever (2 Samuel 7:12-16). As time goes by, this descendent seems to be slow in coming, and the inability of God’s people to live and represent him as they ought to becomes clearer and clearer.
In time, the nation decays to such an extent that God is forced to drive them out of their homeland in judgment for their sin. It seems as though God’s plans are in tatters, and his promise of an eternal kingdom through a descendent of David seems to have been a false hope. To begin with, God had established relationships with his people through covenants, which were like a binding agreement between God and man. He made covenants with Abraham, as we see in Genesis 15, 17 and 22, and later, he made covenants with the nation of Israel, made up of Abraham’s descendents, in Exodus 24 and 34. Covenants are God’s way of establishing relationships with human beings - if there is no covenant between you and God, according to Scripture, you have no relationship with him, you don’t know him and you and he have nothing to do with one another.
But, as the people of Israel are forced to leave their land because of their sin (see 2 Kings 17 and 25), the covenant between God and them is done for, it is broken, they aren’t bound to him anymore. But God’s promises to Abraham (Genesis 12, 15, 22) and David (2 Samuel 7) were unconditional. They had tied God into doing things that were in no way dependent on the actions of others, even his own people. God had promised to give Abraham numerous descendents and to give David a king from his line who would rule forever, so how would he do this? The answer is that God would create a new covenant between him and his people, one that, unlike the covenant made with Israel at Sinai in Exodus 24, would no longer be conditional on his people’s obedience, but would lay all the requirements squarely at God’s feet. This covenant is laid out for us most clearly in Jeremiah 31:31-37. In this covenant, God gives a promise of hope for his people who have now been cast out of their homeland into exile in Babylon. I will bring you back, I will give you a new heart to love and obey me and you and I will live in relationship together forever.
Hundreds of years go by, and this covenant remains only a promise, it has not been signed or enacted yet because, as we read in Jeremiah 33:14-26, all this will come about when God raises up a king from David’s descendents. This is what the start of the New Testament gives us. From page 1 of Matthew’s Gospel we are told that this is the story of “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” That is to say that this Jesus is the one who will be the fulfillment of all the promises God had made to his people in the Old Testament, through Abraham and David. As Jesus begins his public life in Israel, he begins to speak of the ‘Kingdom of God,’ which reminds us again of Jeremiah 33. As he sits with his disciples to enjoy an intimate meal in Jerusalem for the passover, he goes even further, saying, as he passes a cup of wine, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant (“new covenant”, Luke 22:20), which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:27-28). Jesus is claiming that this new covenant is about to be signed and sealed by him.
As the story progresses, this Jesus is then brutally tortured and murdered, before rising again from the dead and declaring that he has now received all power and authority from God himself (Matthew 28:5-10, 16-20). Jesus is claiming to be the King promised by God to David, and, in the signing of the new covenant in his own blood, he is claiming to be God, because God was the one who promised in advance to enact the covenant.
So this is all great news, but we have hit a bit of a roadblock. In Jeremiah 31 and 33, not to mention in Genesis, all the good that God wants to do to the world is only relevant if you are part of Israel, Abraham’s descendents. God’s promises were only made to his own people, Israel, so what do they have to do with us, if anything, and isn’t the Church now a totally new thing? As the book of Acts, which charts the events that occurred after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, teaches us, it becomes clear very quickly after Jesus returns to heaven that the centrepoint of God’s work on earth is no longer the geographical nation of Israel. People from all over the Meditarranean are now becoming believers in God’s King, and God is giving them his Spirit to demonstrate that this is his doing (see Acts 15).
So, we know that God had promised in Genesis 12 and 22 to use Abraham’s offspring to bless all the nations, but God only made the promise of a relationship with him to Israel and Judah, so what is going on? The apostle Paul explains this in several of his letters to the young churches which are recorded for us in the New Testament. In Galatians 3:29, he states his explanation most clearly: “if you are Christ’s (ie. if you are a Christian), then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.” What Paul is saying is this: if you have believed in Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham and the one through whom God fulfilled all the promises he made to Abraham, then God counts you as belonging to him and being ‘in him’ (see Ephesians 1), which means that you are now an equal part of the promises God made to Israel. Jesus was a literal, physical descendent of both Abraham and David, and so he was able to be the fulfillment of what God had promised to Israel. By believing in him, anyone who is a Christian today is considered by God to be inside him, to be part of the covenant he established. As Christians, we are part of the new covenant, through the blood of Jesus, and Paul describes the Church as being “the Israel of God” in Galatians 6:15-16. If all this were not true of us, we would have no relationship with God and would be under his wrath forever (Romans 1:18).
Paul makes this point again in his letter to the Ephesians, a church made up entirely of people with no biological connection to Abraham or Israel. He says to them:
“Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision'' by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone ... The Gentiles (nations other than Israel) are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. (Ephesians 2:11-20, 3:6)
If you are a Christian, no matter what country you are from, you are part of all God’s promises to his people through Jesus Christ. This was only fully revealed in the New Testament, but it had been foreseen in the Old Testament, as God promised Abraham that all the nations on earth would be blessed through him (Genesis 12:1-3), as a prostitute from Canaan (Joshua 2, 6) and a Moabite girl (Ruth 1-4) were able to join God’s people, and even as far back as Exodus 12:38, where we are told that a ‘mixed multitude’ of (non-Hebrew) people left Egypt with the Hebrew slaves, and constituted the nation of Israel. God’s plan was always to bring all the nations into relationship with him through Israel and, eventually, through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Will we be in heaven or on earth forever?
And all this brings me to my next point. It is sometimes suggested that there are two groups within God’s people; the nation of Israel made up of Abraham’s physical descendents, who have gone away from God but who will eventually be brought back to him, to inherit the blessings promised in the covenants, and the Church, which was always meant to be a spiritual people, with no connection to Israel but also blessed by God, though only in a spiritual sense. It is sometimes proposed that, when the end comes, Israel will receive the world while the Church goes to heaven to be with Christ forever there.
The Bible does not appear to support this argument. Of course, the New Testament distinguishes between the contemporary nation of Israel and the Church on many occasions, but also, as we have already seen, points out that every member of the Church has become an heir of all the blessings promised to Israel in the Old Testament. The people of God were never defined purely by their ethnicity. We see this in Exodus 12:38 and in the two parallel stories of Rahab and Achan in Joshua 2, 6 and 7. Rahab has no ethnic connection to Israel but becomes a part of God’s people because of her fear of the Lord, while Achan is born into Israel but is eventually excluded from God’s people because of his sin and rebellion. God’s people were never defined by ethnicity as much as by faith, so the Church in the New Testament is only an expansion of something that had already been happening in the Old Testament, and there was only ever one people of God, no matter where they had been born.
What is important to mention here is that to be in God’s people is to be in covenant with God, and the promise of a relationship through covenant was always tied to the promise of a land. We see this in Jeremiah 31, where the new covenant is laid out in tandem with the description of a new Kingdom for God’s people, and we see it in Genesis and Exodus, as God’s people are told from the start that to be one of his people is to be an heir of the ‘promised land.’ As heirs of the promise to Abraham by faith, God goes even further, telling us that we, with him, have become heirs of the world itself (Romans 4:13, 16).
If you grew up in a church where you were always told that you would be in Heaven forever with God, I would bet that at some point you found yourself a little perplexed at the thought that, after death, you would always inhabit this place that you imagined to be made up of clouds and floating spirits. You may have wondered what you would look like, if you would recognise other people, or if you would be able to do the same fun things you like now in heaven. This is why it is so important to bear in mind that the core hope the Bible gives from start to end is not of a floating, ghost-like existence forever, but one of a resurrection. Even as far back as Genesis 22:5, we are told that the hope was that God would raise up his people from the dead (see Hebrews 11:19). The New Testament leaves it abundantly clear that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was intended as the first sign of a promised resurrection for all who have trusted in him (see 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 4, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). So your hope, as a Christian, is a very concrete one; namely, that after death you will be raised again by God with a new, perfected, physical body, able to eat and drink just as Jesus’ body was (see John 21).
Ever since God created human beings from the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7), man has always been inextricably tied to matter, to solid things. Our personhood is tied to us having bodies, which is why harm and suffering to those bodies is not like having harm done to our sofa, because we ourselves have been harmed in the damage done to our bodies. Likewise, all human beings were never formed to be alienated from the world into which God placed us. He gave the first ever human beings the command to rule the world alongside him (Genesis 1:28). Alienation from the created world is a result of the fall (see Genesis 3), and the ultimate aim of God’s plan of salvation was always not only to give us new bodies and new hearts to love and obey God, but also to bring us back into right relationship with the world itself, which now resists us (Genesis 3:17-19). The climax of our salvation is the redemption of the whole creation which will come about when all God’s people are finally revealed in their perfected state (Romans 8:19-22).
The end of the whole Bible is not all God’s people with him in heaven as spirits, living happily ever after. It is heaven itself descending to be on earth, so that God’s presence will dwell fully with his people on his world forever. If you are a Christian, this world will be yours. God created you from the earth and to live and reign on the earth, to rule it with him. You will not be eternally alienated from the planet, you will rule it with God forever in a perfected state. You will be able to eat, drink and play football forever, to your heart’s content. The only people who won’t be able to enjoy this resurrection and renewed earth will be those who have rejected God and are not in relationship with him; if we are not heirs of the world and not part of the new covenant, then we will be under God’s wrath forever, the Bible doesn’t give any other option.
Why should we care about all this anyway?
So this is all very interesting, but why does it really matter, and what would we lose if we didn’t know this? Firstly, if we take a view that says that there are, in fact, two different groups among God’s people, with two different roles and final destinations, we are finding ourselves in direct conflict with what scripture says. God’s people are one, and always have been. Even now that literal descendents of Israel and other nations are both offered salvation in Jesus Christ, Paul is at pains to describe that there is ‘one body’ (see Ephesians 2, quoted above). If we, therefore, insist that this isn’t the case, we find ourselves in conflict with what God’s word plainly says.
But there are more practical concerns here too. Apart from anything else, a hope that centers on heaven forever (a place that we struggle to imagine), and a life as spirits, seems strange to us because it is never what we were created for. God created all physical matter in the universe, and he did it for a purpose. The whole of God’s plan of salvation is built around the redemption and reconciliation of the whole creation with its Creator, so to say that, somehow, a (significant) section of God’s people will not enjoy this is to do serious damage to the picture the Bible paints of salvation in a holistic sense. The world is God’s, and he isn’t about to leave it to anyone else, or withhold it from any of his children, or click ‘delete’ when all is said and done - he plans to save it, and make it new, in the same way he does for our bodies in resurrection.
To remove the concept of a new earth and God with us on it is to tear the heart out of what has been the hope of God’s people all throughout the ages. God’s salvation both for Israel and for the Church was always about giving us himself and a land where we could dwell with him. We don’t just get his presence, we get his presence with us on his planet. The plan has always been for God to save the world and give it to his redeemed people, salvation was never detached from a literal, physical inheritance (NB: Ephesians 1 speaks of spiritual blessings for the Church, which some have taken as a contrast with the physical blessings promised to Israel, but the word for inheritance comes up later in this chapter, a word which, every time it is used in the New Testament, refers to a future hope for God’s people, one not yet realised, and one which we, as God’s children, inherit from him, that is, his world. Ephesians 1 verse 10 underlines this, by pointing to the fact that the spiritual (heaven, see verse 3) will be brought together with the physical ultimately in Christ - heaven and earth will meet, as we see in Revelation 21).
On a side note, if Israel and the Church were entirely separate, and the world was to go to Israel, then Revelation is inaccurate (or at least very confusing), and the entire Old Testament, effectively, has nothing to do with the Church, which makes no sense, when Paul tells Timothy that the (Old Testament) Scriptures are of vital importance to him in his service to an entirely Gentile church (2 Timothy 3:16).
Sometimes the idea of a future hope whereby we are taken away from this planet forever has appealed to Christians, when the world around them seemed excessively bleak, and so they began to experience a growing desire to be done with it altogether. However, this way of thinking is rooted in escapism, whereby we do not want to honestly face the problems in the world and consider how much fixing they will take, and so we imagine that God will simply remove us from it, pour down fire from on high and leave us in heaven forever. But no, God is not about to give up his planet to sin and destruction; rather he will reclaim it from these things, so that his Son and his people can reign on it (Revelation 5:9-10, note that those reigning on the earth are from every tribe, tongue and nation).
Escapism, whereby we create models where God will take his people from the earth before any pain comes and transport them permanently to heaven, and which reduces the entire book of Revelation to a description of events occurring during a 7-year tribulation in the future, creates serious problems. Revelation was written to Christians undergoing the first great persecution under the Roman empire, and it was written to them to enable them to make sense of their current circumstances and see their future hope. It is a book written using many images and metaphors, and it is an example of apocalyptic literature. Almost every image in the book is a repetition of imagery from the Old Testament, centrally the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Like these prophetic books, it speaks to us not simply of the past or the future, but of the present as well. It does this because, like these Old Testament prophets, it is written to give understanding and hope to the suffering people of God. When we take away this part of it, we take away the tools God has given his people to aid them in their inevitable suffering this side of the full realisation of his Kingdom. We will suffer, there is no avoiding it; God promises us that we will suffer (see Acts 14:22 for an example, there are too many other examples of this to list here), we are exiles, we aren’t home yet. God does not promise to keep us from any suffering but rather to be sovereign in it, never to leave us (Isaiah 43:2), and to use it all for our good (Romans 8:28). A great deal of scripture is devoted to this end, and so to take away this side of the Bible, by saying that our real hope is to be whisked away before anything bad happens, is to gut much of God’s Word.
Fundamentally, the problem with our current world is not that we are here, it is that God isn’t fully here yet in the way he has promised. But one day he will be. In the mess and pain that life on this earth can bring, what will keep us from escapism and ideas about the end that conflict with the Bible is the glory and concreteness of the much better picture painted by Scripture. In reality, the end of all things is not vague, or blurry, and it certainly shouldn’t be confusing or controversial for God’s people - it is God dwelling fully on a perfect earth with his perfected people, in love, forever. In Revelation 21, God tells us exactly what the new earth (not heaven) will be like; this was an image that was enough for Christians dying at the hands of Romans 2,000 years ago, and so it should be enough for us today, in whatever suffering we still endure. Come, Lord Jesus.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son …
Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.” And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel were inscribed— on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb...
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever… Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates… The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.
(Revelation 21:1-8, 9-14, 22-27, 22:1-5, 14, 17)
