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Every human person is in a process of becoming a noble being—noble beyond imagination—or else, alas, a vile being, evil beyond redemption—"a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare." So says C. S. Lewis in his beautiful and soul-searching sermon "The Weight of Glory."

You would think, then, that we Christians would long for heaven and would seek with determined zeal to draw near to God. But we don't. Why? On one level, we do not long for heaven because we do not really believe it exists. But on another level, we ignore the heavenly possibility because we fear death. Only when we are under extreme suffering or have lost all meaning and hope in life do we long to die and be with our God. Even then, it is not the attractiveness of heaven and the joy of being with God that motivates us, but the despair of soul and the longing to be released from pain and suffering.

For the most part, however, we do not yearn to be near God because we do not find sin utterly repugnant or goodness rapturously attractive. As Lewis noted in his sermon, "We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea." For me it was not mud pies but football. When my mother forced me to sit by the piano and pound away at scales, I found it impossible to dream of the joy of creating music that would thrill my soul. The thrill of the football game going on in the vacant lot next door erased all thought from my mind of the beauty of music. While Lewis's hypothetical child has never seen the sea, I indeed had heard the notes of the piano. But the scales I practiced were too distant from the beauty of, say, Schubert's Trout Quintet.

Thus, we practice our ethical scales, doing good as we know it, unable to envision the beauty of true holiness.

Those who obtain eternal life will know very well the infinite value and ultimate joy attending life in a perfect society in intimate fellowship with a holy God. But, now, for most of us, all of this is utterly alien to everything we know and experience. We cannot imagine it, we cannot anticipate it, and, therefore, we cannot long for it as the ultimately attractive lure to the truly good life.

We do better at visions of hell than of heaven. Even Dante could not make heaven exciting. Hell and purgatory are brilliantly fascinating, but not heaven. Milton could do no better. In Paradise Lost his meter grips us in a way that is emotionally inescapable and unforgettable, while Paradise Regained leaves us with an insipid taste. Heaven sounds boring. There is nothing to do—just "being holy and loving God" is not enough for most people. So the Bible accommodates itself to our insensitivity. Heaven is portrayed as essentially unlike earth—no sorrow, no sighing, no tears, no pain, no sin. Most of what we know about heaven from the Bible is the listing of things we do not like on earth. The one positive theme that runs throughout the Bible is that in heaven we will be with God; and the horror of hell is that it will be a place without God.

One of the most difficult truths about the hereafter, however, is that there will be a dividing of all humans into those who go to heaven and those who go to hell. And that God, as Supreme Judge, decides. Every soul will be weighed in the balance. Those who are found wanting receive their appropriate recompense and are segregated from God's goodly kingdom so they do not spoil its goodness. Those who have been justified by God will be rewarded with heaven, for, in fact, they are the only kind of people who could enjoy it.

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47