Interview with

Founder & Teacher, Desiring God

Audio Transcript

You know that feeling when you’re waiting for a package to arrive — and then it does! — and that little hit of excitement you get when you see the box on your doorstep? You grab it and tear open the box and within, what, five minutes, the thrill is gone. New thrills wear off so very quickly. It’s a major failing of our fallen nature to be so easily bored. So, how do we know that heaven will not grow boring to us after a million years? That’s the question from a young man named Mason.

“Pastor John, I have been struggling with the concept of eternity lately,” Mason writes. “I started reading Randy Alcorn’s book about heaven” — a good start — “along with DG articles, videos, and listening to APJ. At first, I had difficulty imagining what heaven could be like, even for a short time. But after reading, I began to understand joy for thousands, millions, or even billions of years. However, even a hundred trillion years still seems nothing in light of eternity. I struggle to process something with no end. How will we not get bored? I know we won’t experience time like we do on earth, and we will be with God, who is the ultimate source of joy. But as I read, I see that we will be doing things, learning, creating, which means time in the sense of progress will pass. I already question what more we can do in our short time on Earth. TV shows that last twenty-plus years can become boring, and technology feels close to its max in many areas.

“In heaven, without sin or fear of death, there will be no need for doctors, police, or anything else that comes with imperfection. So, all our progress from earth would be perfected and accomplished faster. Even with infinite planets to explore, many would be similar, and it seems like there would be little distinction between exploring one planet or another. Eventually, we might know every skill, answer every question, or at least reach a vast understanding. Would we eventually experience everything, then repeat it? In this life, we do things again when something breaks or needs improvement, but if everything is perfect in heaven, why would we repeat it? I know much of this comes down to trust — trusting that God, in his infinite wisdom, has a plan beyond my understanding. Yet eternity is still so hard to grasp.”

Yes, it is. It is beyond question that eternity — whether we conceive of it as time without beginning or ending, or whether we conceive of it as a dimension beyond time, timelessness — is hard to grasp. I mean, I don’t even know what grasp means when it comes to something like that. So, let no one be discouraged by that fact. Everybody acknowledges it. You’re not unusual; you’re not in trouble because you see that and feel that.

Glimpses of Eternity

The Bible confirms it. It’s really a biblical truth, and it doesn’t mean to discourage us. For example, in Ecclesiastes 3:11, God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” It seems to me that the least that verse means is that God intends for us to be aware of a reality of a kind of eternal time or non-time that is not fully comprehensible. It seems to me that’s the least that verse means. He means for us to be aware of what we cannot fully grasp.

So, you’re in good company if you see something but you can’t quite grasp it. C.S. Lewis expressed something similar when he said that famous line, “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” (Mere Christianity, 136–37). In other words, there are pointers in our experience and in the Bible that there is a reality beyond this world that is so great and goes so far beyond the present ability to comprehend that we just can’t grasp it yet.

“God will, in sufficient measure, put his love for the Son in us so that we love the Son with the love of the Father.”

I think Mason is right when he says, “I know much of this comes down to trust — trusting . . . God, in his infinite wisdom.” Well, yes it does, but it’s not as though God simply says, “There’s an eternity coming; you’re going to live in it, so trust me” — but that’s all he says. That’s not all he says. There is that, right? “Trust me. It’s going to be good.” But there are so many places in the Bible where God seems bent on trying to help us trust him by giving us pointers so that we can stretch our imaginations as far as possible about the happiness of those eternal days. He doesn’t leave us and say, “Just wait. You’ll find out.” He’s giving these glimpses again and again.

Edwards and Gold-Like Glass

This struck me really powerfully. It was a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a sermon by Jonathan Edwards based on Revelation 21:18. This is the title of the sermon: “Nothing Upon Earth Can Represent the Glories of Heaven.” Now, Revelation 21:18 is describing the new Jerusalem, which represents the condition of the people of God in the eternal state. Here’s the way Edwards puts this picture of the new Jerusalem:

Here is the end of all the labors of the Christian; here is our Father’s house; here is the end of the race. Here is what Christianity aims at; here is the consummation of all God’s wondrous dealings with men, of all those great things which Christ did and suffered. Here is the end of it all. (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 14:137)

(Wouldn’t you just love to have heard Edwards say that? I mean, you heard me say it, but I would’ve loved to hear him. I mean, that’s written so clearly with rhetorical force: “Here, here, here, here.” I wonder how he said it — but that’s a parenthesis. Sorry.)

Then Edwards focuses on this sentence from Revelation 21:18. Here’s the sentence: “The wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, like clear glass.” And you stop and say, Clear glass? Gold-like glass? And here’s how Edwards reasons from that perplexing image. He says,

We may observe a transcendent property of this gold, that is, transparency, that it is as clear as glass, such gold as there is none of in the world. There is pure gold, and bright gold, but no transparent or clear gold. Pure gold, although it is the most precious of all metals, was not sufficient to shadow forth the glory of that city. There was nothing upon earth that would do as a similitude here. Therefore, the simile made use of, is such a thing as is not to be found on the earth — clear gold. (139)

And here’s the doctrine that he draws out of that observation. “There is nothing upon earth that will suffice to represent to us the glories of heaven” (139). In other words, by the very strangeness of its language, the Bible is trying to help us adjust our minds to the inconceivability of the glories and the happiness of eternity.

Paul and the Spiritual Body

Another example of how the Bible helps us adjust our minds to handle the unimaginable glory of our future condition of happiness is in 1 Corinthians 15:42–44. It goes like this: “So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown” — that is, the body that dies — “is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” That’s like clear gold: a spiritual body.

The point here is to emphasize that in the resurrection we are going to be embodied persons, and yet embodied in a way that is like yet incomprehensibly unlike our present bodies. He describes it as imperishable, glorious, powerful, and spiritual.

And the reason that matters is that sometimes we are frightened that our present capacities in this mind and body are so weak we would never be able to feel the kind of supernatural, eternal joys that would satisfy us for eternity. And Paul is saying, “You won’t have the same body. Don’t panic. You’re right. You can’t feel it now the way you should or the way you should then too. You won’t have the same body; you won’t have the same limitations. You will have a body perfectly suited to eternal, supernatural, unimaginable pleasures — a body so unfathomably more capable of enjoyment than you could ever imagine. You won’t ever run out of the ability to see glory, be amazed, be refreshed, be thrilled forever.”

Jesus and the Love of the Trinity

I think Jesus is getting at the very same thing in the high-priestly prayer of John 17:24, when he prays, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me” — the people you’ve given me, my disciples in every generation — “where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.”

Now, to which we might respond, “Well, yes, that would probably be eternally amazing, but I don’t have the ability to see and enjoy that kind of glory. I’m a dud when it comes to seeing glory and feeling it with the kind of admiration that I should.” Which is why I think Jesus goes on in John 17:26 and prays like this: “[Father], I will continue to make [your name] known [to them], [so] that the love with which you have loved me may be in them.” Think about that. “The love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

Is that not a prayer that God the Father will give to us, in our resurrected bodies, the capacity to love and enjoy God the Son with the very capacity that the Father has to love the Son, which is infinite? He will, in some sufficient measure, put his love for the Son in us so that we love the Son with the love of the Father.

The capacity that has kept the Trinity in infinite happiness for eternity will be shared with us. Let me say it again so that you can hear it for yourselves and not take my word for it: “That the love with which you[, Father,] have loved [the Son] may be in them” (John 17:26). We will be able to love the Son, enjoy the Son, be satisfied in the Son, Jesus Christ, in his glory, with the very love of the Father, which has existed from all eternity and has never been bored.

So yes, Mason, it does come down to trust now, but God has given us many helps in the Bible to feed that trust with expectation. He helps us again and again to adjust our thinking and our expectations concerning the never-ending glory of eternal joy in his presence.