Novelist John Updike tells the story of a fourteen-year-old boy named David. When it’s time for questions in his catechism class, David looks to his pastor for answers:

“I asked Reverend Dobson about Heaven, and he said it was like Abraham Lincoln’s goodness living after him.”

“And why didn’t you like it?”

“Well, don’t you see? It amounts to saying there isn’t any Heaven at all.”

“I don’t see that it amounts to that. What do you want Heaven to be?”

“Well, I don’t know. I want it to be something. I thought he’d tell me what it was.”

We all want Heaven to be something. The Bible teaches it is something. Yet when it’s spoken of so vaguely by Christian leaders, who speak so clearly about other aspects of life, it appears to us—as it did to Updike’s David—that Heaven amounts to nothing at all.

How many ministers have said at funerals, “she will live on in our memories”? That sentiment suggests that though we might remember her, she will not live on. The Bible teaches that when Christians die, we will live on in Christ’s presence, awaiting the greatest day in the history of the universe—the Resurrection—all Creation renewed and living on forever, real people on a real earth.

Few, however, really seem to believe this. “Scientific, philosophical, and theological skepticism has nullified the modern Heaven and replaced it with teachings that are minimalist, meager, and dry.”

Heaven was once an elementary teaching in which believers were solidly trained. This is no longer the case. Vagueness and dimness characterize our modern view of Heaven. We, our children, our churches, and our culture are thereby impoverished.

Paul, in 2 Corinthians, wrote, “We groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling. . . . As long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. . . . We . . . would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (5:2,6,8)

Paul wasn’t alone in his longing, then, and we’re not alone in ours now. Following are some of my favorite quotes written by people who also anticipate the coming happiness of Heaven:

To speak of “imagining heaven” does not imply or entail that heaven is a fictional notion, constructed by deliberately disregarding the harsher realities of the everyday world… We are able to inhabit the mental images we create, and thence anticipate the delight of finally entering the greater reality to which they correspond. 

Alister McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven

One of the most disconcerting experiences which can come our way is to make a long journey, perhaps even to the other side of the world, and to discover on arrival that we have not been expected. … Heaven, however, is guaranteed not to disappoint. . . . We are expected.

Bruce Milne, The Message of Heaven and Hell

Our deepest instinct is heaven. Heaven is the ache in our bones, the splinter in our heart…

Homesickness—this perpetual experience of missing something— usually gets misdiagnosed and so wrongly treated. . . . All our lives we take hold of the wrong thing, go to the wrong place, eat the wrong food. We drink too much, sleep too much, work too long, take too many vacations or too few—all in the faint hope that this will finally satisfy us and so silence the hunger within.

. . . We are metaphysically handicapped. This is not so much a design flaw as a designed flaw, a glitch wired into the system, a planned obsolescence.

. . . This shaking, unslaked desire in me is a divining rod for streams of Living Water. . . . He put in me, in you, a homing device for heaven. We just won’t settle for anything less.

Mark Buchanan, Things Unseen

O my Lord Jesus Christ, if I could be in heaven without You, it would be a hell; and if I could be in hell, and have You still, it would be a heaven to me, for You are all the heaven I need.

Samuel Rutherford, quoted in Morning and Evening

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. …I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Can you hear the sighing in the wind? Can you feel the heavy silence in the mountains? Can you sense the restless longing in the sea? Can you see it in the woeful eyes of an animal? Something’s coming . . . something better.

Joni Eareckson Tada, Heaven: Your Real Home

What can this incessant craving, and this impotence of attainment mean, unless there was once a happiness belonging to man, of which only the faintest traces remain, in that void which he attempts to fill with everything within his reach?

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. . . . Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Nothing is more often misdiagnosed than our homesickness for Heaven. We think that what we want is sex, drugs, alcohol, a new job, a raise, a doctorate, a spouse, a large-screen television, a new car, a cabin in the woods, a condo in Hawaii. What we really want is the person we were made for, Jesus, and the place we were made for, Heaven. Nothing less can satisfy us.

When I see ocean fish in an aquarium, I enjoy watching them, but I feel as if something’s wrong. They don’t belong there. It’s not their home. The fish weren’t made for that little glass box; they were made for a great ocean.

I suppose the fish don’t know any better, but I wonder if their instincts tell them that their true home is elsewhere. I know our instincts tell us that this fallen world isn’t our home—we were made for someplace better.

I’ve never been to Heaven, yet I miss it. Eden’s in my blood. The best things of life are souvenirs from Eden, appetizers of the New Earth. There are just enough of them to keep us going but never enough to make us satisfied with the world as it is or ourselves as we are. We live between Eden and the New Earth, pulled toward what we once were and what we yet will be.

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