Heaven Is Not Your Final Home
VideoTranscript
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When you die, you are not going to spend eternity in heaven. I know how that sounds coming from a Christian. Trust me. Give me 60 seconds before you decide I've lost my mind. I didn't say you won't see heaven. I said you won't spend eternity there. And the reason I can say that is the last two chapters of the Bible.
Because when John is finally shown the end of the story, the actual ending after the judgment, after the resurrection, he does not see people going up. He sees heaven coming down. In the last video, I told you why you still sin after being saved. I described the process by which God restores you to be what he always intended, the best version of you, maybe the way you'd restore a priceless silver mirror. The silver's already there, but it takes a lifetime to polish. But polishing isn't the end of the story. Nobody restores a priceless mirror just to leave it wrapped in a cloth in the attic.
You restore it for something. Today, as we make the last climb up this mountain, I want to show you what all of it is for. Where the polishing is headed. What you were actually made for. And I'll warn you now, it's so much bigger than clouds and harps.
Let me start with something I'd only admit to friends. So, just us. You've been to the funerals. You've heard the words, she's in a better place. He's looking down on us. And you've seen the picture those words paint because it's the same picture on every sympathy card in the store. Clouds, soft light, a choir somewhere off to the side that never seems to take a break.
And if we're being really honest, honest the way you can only be with a friend, some part of you has looked at that picture and thought, forever? An eternal church service in a white weightless room? No good work to finish, no meal to share, no rain to smell, no mountain to climb? It sounds less like life and more like a permanent ghostly retirement. And then you feel guilty for thinking that. You wonder what's wrong with you that heaven sounds boring. I felt that guilt for years.
Here's what I want to show you today. Nothing is wrong with you. Your heart is not too worldly for that picture. That picture is too small for your heart. Because the ghostly retirement heaven just isn't the hope the Bible actually holds out. It's a sympathy card sketch of something the scriptures paint in oil on a canvas the size of the cosmos.
I know what shrunken hope does to people because I've lived inside two versions of it. You know by now that I was born into a cult and spent 40 years in it. And here's the strange part. That group talked about a paradise earth constantly. Green fields, tamed lions, the whole brochure. But it came packaged as a waiting room. The world around us, the cultures, the cities, the people, all of it was just scenery scheduled for demolition.
Our job was to keep our heads down, knock on doors, and watch the clock until God wiped the slate clean. I treated my one life like a dress rehearsal that didn't count. And when I finally walked away, the churches I found had mostly swapped the waiting room for a departure lounge. Same posture, different furniture. Sit tight, stay clean, and one day you fly out of here for good. An escape hatch or a waiting room. Those are the two small hopes.
Both of them tell you the same lie, that this world is disposable and that you're a passenger. But, I'm going to give you a third option and it's the one the Bible actually teaches. I'm going to show you the verse where the whole direction of eternity flips down instead of up. We'll tackle exactly the verses you're thinking of when I say that. You know those I go to prepare a place for you, we're going to be caught up in the clouds, the elements will melt with fervent heat. And I'm going to enlist my aid a man who stood two handshakes away from the Apostle John. And then I'm going to give you a single word out of the mouth of Jesus that describes what's actually coming at the end of the world.
He only used the word once and it's not destruction. Turn with me to the end of the story, Revelation 21. At this point, the Apostle John has just watched the old order pass away. Now, watch the direction of the traffic.
I saw a new heaven and a new earth 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, God's dwelling is with mankind and he will dwell with them and they will be his people." Listen to it again slowly. The holy city comes down. The voice does not say that people have finally made it up to God's neighborhood. He says that God has moved into ours permanently. And the word translated dwelling is really interesting.
It means a tent, a tabernacle. That's the very word John used on the first page of his gospel to say that the word became flesh and tabernacled among us. Christmas was the preview. Revelation 21 is the permanent address. So, instead of an evacuation, the Bible ends with a wedding and a move-in. Earth is not the place God's people finally escape. Earth is the place God's presence finally fills.
And what do theologians call this surprising conclusion? The new creation. Once you get familiar with it, you'll see it everywhere in your Bible. It's the renewal of this world, not the deletion of it. The same God who refused to throw you away and chose to restore you, won't throw his world away, either. Here's the sentence I want you to take a picture of. God's plan is not to get you out of the world.
God's plan is to get heaven into the world, starting with you. If that sentence sounds familiar, it should. It's the same shape as the sentence this whole channel is built upon. Jesus didn't die to get you into heaven. He died to get heaven into you. Today, you find out that sentence was never just about your heart. Your heart was the beachhead.
The target is everything. Now, if that's true, if the plan is renewal and not removal, then somewhere the Bible should tell us what this broken world is waiting for. And it does. Paul lays it out in one of the most hauntingly beautiful sentences he ever wrote. Romans 8:19. For the creation waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. I want us to slow down on two things in that verse.
First, eager expectation. In Paul's Greek, that's one long, wonderful word, apokaradokia. The old commentators loved the picture built into its roots. Buried in the middle of it is cara, the head. Somebody stretching their head forward, up on their tiptoes, neck craned, straining to see around the corner because somebody is coming. A kid at the airport stretching his head forward to see who's arriving. That's the posture.
Second, look at who is standing on tiptoe. Not the angels, not the church, the creation. The trees, the oceans, the soil under your feet. Paul says the whole natural order is craning its neck waiting. Waiting for what? For the children of God to be revealed. It's waiting for you.
Now, why would the earth care about you? Paul explains in the next verses. Creation was subjected to frustration and is in bondage to decay. And it's groaning, he says, like a woman in labor. Here's the connection, and you already have the categories from the last two videos. Humanity was created to be the mirror, the appointed caretakers who catch the light of God and reflect it into the world. When the mirror shattered in the garden, the light stopped flowing to everything the mirror was supposed to serve.
The caretakers went dark, so the garden went wild. Creation didn't fall because it sinned. It fell because its rulers did. It got dragged down with us. You've felt this, even if you never had words for it. You stand in a forest and there's majesty, and underneath the majesty, an ache. Something in the world that feels like a house whose owners went missing.
Paul says that ache is real. Creation is groaning. But listen. Paul doesn't say that creation is groaning like something dying. He says it's groaning like something being born. And the birth it's waiting for is the unveiling of the restored mirrors when the children of God are all revealed, resurrected, standing in their proper place. Then Paul says, "Creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay."
Your transformation is not a private matter. Every bit of polishing we talked about in the last video, every temple scan in traffic, every grabbed cloth, every quiet morning of turning your face to him is part of the rescue plan for the cosmos. The mirror gets restored so that the light can flow again to everything.
Let me say that again. The world isn't waiting to be thrown away. It's waiting, on tiptoe, for you to be finished. If you've got that, you've got this verse. Now widen the shot because there's a detail in this plan most of us miss. God is not restoring a mirror. He's restoring millions of them.
And that's not inefficiency. That's design. Picture a vast dark ballroom, light one candle in the middle, and put a single mirror in the corner, and you get a little light, just a glow, better than darkness.
But now line the walls with mirrors, hundreds of them. And here's the secret. Angle them so that each one catches not only the candle but each other's light. Now watch what happens. The light doesn't add, it multiplies.
It bounces wall-to-wall, fills every shadow, until the room is blazing with one flame. That is the church, not a warehouse of individually stored believers, a hall of mirrors. That's what Paul means when he says we are one body with many members. That's 1 Corinthians 12. No single mirror can catch all of God. That was never asked of you. Hear that, perfectionists?
That pressure you feel to reflect everything is a weight God never handed you. Maybe your life is angled to catch his mercy, and the believer next to you is angled to catch his justice. Somebody else catches his creativity, his patience, his laughter. Alone, each of us reflects a sliver. Together, angled toward the same flame and toward each other, we display a composite image of God that no single individual, no pastor, no saint, no hero of the faith could ever show the world alone. Which means the person in your church who annoys you is carrying an angle of God's face that you cannot reflect without him. Sit with that.
Shine on me so I can shine on you. That's not a greeting card line, it's the architecture. Hey, real quick, if this series has meant something to you, would you hit subscribe? It really makes a difference in spreading these videos to people who've given up on a hope this size. And I want to know something for the comments. On a healed earth and a body that doesn't wear out, what's the first thing you'd want to do? Anything, no matter how unspiritual it might sound.
And if you want to go deeper on everything we touch on in this series, the mirror, the dust, the fire, where it's all going, check out my book, The Broken Mirror: Rediscovering Our True Nature in Christ. The final chapters walk through the new creation in way more depth than I can go into here. One reviewer said, "I predict it will become a classic for group Bible study or for the lone seeker of deeper truth." It's in paperback, hard cover, Kindle, and audiobook. Links in the pinned comment and the description. And stay with me because in a few minutes I'm going to show you the one word Jesus himself chose for the end of the world. He said it exactly once, and it is not the word you'd guess.
Now we got to talk about the elephant in the room and how gracious you are to let me talk for 10 minutes with three Bible verses sitting in your lap clearing their throats. Let's hear all three. They're good verses, and I promise they're better than you think. Verse one, "In my Father's house are many rooms. I go to prepare a place for you." Jesus said that. So, isn't the place he's preparing definitely up there?
To get a complete understanding of this promise, we need to look at the whole verse. In John 14:3, Jesus says, "I will come again and will receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also." Many of us read that last clause to mean, "So, you'll live in heaven." But the promise isn't tied to an address. It's tied to a person. "Where I am, there you may be." So, where does Jesus end up?
Where is where I am permanently? You've already read the answer. Revelation 21, the holy city comes down out of heaven, and the voice from the throne declares that God's dwelling is with mankind right down here. He's preparing a place for us the way a bridegroom prepared for his bride. And when everything was ready, the groom didn't mail her a key. He came and got her. And notice how John describes the finished city coming down out of heaven prepared as a bride.
It's the same picture. Jesus finishes the preparations and then brings the prepared place with him. He said it himself, "I will come again." Verse two. And this one runs deep in a lot of us. We will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. First Thessalonians 4.
Doesn't that settle it? Up, up, and away. Here's where a single Greek word rewards you for looking. The word translated to meet is apantesis. And in Paul's world, that was the natural word for a civic welcome, the ceremony staged when an emperor or an important dignitary approached a city.
Here's the thing about that ceremony. The citizens did not go out to the highway so the dignitary could turn around and take them back to Rome. They went out to meet him. Trumpets, robes, the works. As an honor guard. And then they escorted him into their city. The meeting happens outside the walls.
The destination is home. And you don't have to take my word for it because the Bible itself shows you the word in action. Look at Acts 28. Paul is finally approaching Rome and the believers there hear he's coming. Luke says they traveled out, miles out, as far as the Forum of Appius to meet him. Same word, apantesis.
And then what? Did Paul and the welcoming party settle down and live at the Forum of Appius? No. They turned around and walked Paul into Rome. The going out was the honor. The coming back was the point. First Thessalonians is not an evacuation notice.
It's the protocol for a royal arrival. Verse three, and it's the heavy one. Doesn't Peter say the heavens will pass away, the elements will melt, and the earth will be burned up? Two things, and the second one comes from Peter himself three verses later. First, even in that chapter, Peter's own comparison is the flood of Noah. The world, he says, was destroyed by water once before. Was it?
Vaporized, gone, replaced? No. It was scoured, and it came through cleansed. Judgement, not deletion. That's Peter's own template for the fire, not a furnace that annihilates, but the refiner's fire we've been talking about for three weeks. Fire that takes what's corrupt and leaves what's true. In fact, in the oldest manuscripts we have of that verse, the earth isn't burned up at all.
The word there is that the earth and everything done in it will be found, laid bare, exposed before God, every hidden thing brought into the light. Which is why your newer Bible probably says laid bare where your grandmother said burned up. The fire is not the end of the world, it's the end of everything wrong with the world.
Now, the second thing. Three verses down in the fire passage, Peter says, "But in keeping with his promise, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where righteousness dwells." Who's talking? The fisherman, the man by the charcoal fire from the last video. The very same letter that opens with the sentence I built my biggest video on, "that you may become partakers of the divine nature," closes by telling you where all those partakers are headed. Not away. A new heaven and a new earth.
Three videos in a row, Peter has opened, closed, and anchored, and I promise you I didn't plan that. His letter just keeps being about this. If you've got this, you've got it. All three of those verses describe the king arriving, not the family evacuating.
Now, maybe you're thinking this renewed earth reading sounds suspiciously modern, like something recent authors developed because we all got attached to the planet. So, let's do what we always do on this channel. Let's ask someone standing close enough to the beginning to check. Irenaeus of Lyons. And if you've been here since the fire video, you know him. The man discipled by Polycarp, who was discipled by the Apostle John himself. Two handshakes from the man who wrote Revelation.
At least that's the chain Irenaeus himself gives us. When he writes about the end of all things, listen to how precisely he puts it. For neither is the substance nor the essence of the creation annihilated, but the fashion of this world passes away. The fashion passes, the substance remains. It's not that this world gets thrown away, it's that this world gets re-clothed.
And notice something. That answers one more verse you may have been holding back, because Jesus said it, too. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. Paul uses the very same shape when he writes that the present form of this world is passing away. The form, the fashion. What passes is the way the world currently is, the decay, the corruption, the shadows, not the world itself. Exactly the flood, exactly the refiner's fire, exactly the mirror.
Have you noticed that by now? It's the same move every single time all the way down this series. God does not respond to ruin by throwing away what he made. Not with you, not with Peter, not with the world. He restores it. The dust never gets the last word. Not on the mirror, not on the cosmos.
But the fathers aren't the ceiling on this channel. Every one of these videos climbs to the same place, to Jesus. So, here's the question that matters most. When Jesus talked about what's coming at the end, what word did he choose? I want to take you to Matthew 19 and a little word that comes from his lips. Verse 28. At the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on 12 thrones.
At the renewal of all things. In Matthew's Greek, renewal is one word, palingenesia. It comes from two words, palin, meaning again.
And genesis, meaning birth, beginning. Genesis again. It's stunning, isn't it? Jesus reaches for a word for the end of the world, and he doesn't reach for a word that means incineration or evacuation or the end credits. He reaches for a word that means the world born again. The same Lord who told Nicodemus, "You must be born again." reaches for a rebirth word when he describes the destiny of the universe.
And there's one other place that word appears in the whole New Testament. Not in the Gospels. This time it's Paul and not the cosmos. This time it's you. Look at Titus 3:5.
God saved us, Paul says, through the washing of palingenesia, your genesis again. The Bible uses the very same word for what God already did in you and what God's going to do to everything. So, you're not an exception to the plan, you're the preview of it. Every believer walking around today is a little patch of genesis again in the middle of this old world, which is why Paul can say, "If anyone is in Christ, new creation." And notice what Jesus attaches to the renewal, thrones for the 12 in that sentence. But Revelation throws the promise wide open. His servants will reign forever and ever.
Which brings us to the question I promised. What will we actually do there? This is where the sympathy card heaven really falls apart and the biblical hope stands up and stretches.
Start with your body. To be raised with a resurrection body like his is not to be a disembodied spirit. The risen Jesus had a real body. Remember Easter morning. He walked along a beach with his friends. He cooked them breakfast. He ate some broiled fish in front of them and that mattered because he was proving a point.
"Touch me and see," he said, "for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have." Notice where he puts the stress, flesh, bones. The firstfruits of the new creation got up out of the grave and made a meal. That's the prototype, a real body on real ground that death has no more claim on. Paul calls it imperishable.
Imagine it. Running without your knees giving out. Working without burning out. Laughing without a shadow anywhere in the room. And what does that body do? That body reigns. I know what that sounds like, reign, like a king, but it doesn't mean bossing anybody around.
It's the job description from Genesis page one. Rule and keep and cultivate. It's the caretakers back at their post, stewarding creation with the heart of Christ this time. We pick up the trial Adam dropped and cultivate the new earth. We build and we plant and we make art and we explore and we heal. The tree of life in that city, John says, has leaves for the healing of the nations. There is work in that world, friends.
Real, satisfying, unfrustrated work. And not one ounce of it will ever again be done in vain. Boring? You cannot design a hopeless boring if you tried. The choir in the clouds picture asks you to be excited about escaping everything you love. The new creation tells you that everything you love, work and beauty and food and friendship and this good green earth, gets to come through the fire made new. Heaven is not the alternative to all that.
Heaven is what all that looks like with God's presence filling it. Okay. The vision is staggering, but if it doesn't change how you live tomorrow, it's just poetry. So, let's land this thing. Your life right now is the early construction, not a dress rehearsal. Paul concludes his sweeping resurrection chapter, the one about imperishable bodies, with the most practical sentence imaginable. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
Not in vain. That's construction language. That's a foreman telling the crew the plans are already approved. And Paul says it even more vividly elsewhere, when the day comes every builder's work will be tested by fire. The wood and hay burn up, the gold and silver survive, and the builder is rewarded. Nothing you give to God will go missing.
So, your work matters, and I don't just mean your church work, framing houses, writing code, teaching 7-year-olds, wiping down a hospital bed at 2:00 in the morning. When you do it in the Lord with his heart, you're learning the trade of the new earth, bringing order out of chaos and light into dark rooms. And every act of mercy along the way, the repaired relationship, the meal on a grieving neighbor's porch, opens a little pocket of the new creation right in the middle of the old one. You're bringing the future into the present. And when people stumble into one of those pockets, a home, a friendship, a church where the light is bouncing wall to wall, they aren't just meeting nice people. They're getting a preview of the end of the world.
Now, I can hear somebody saying, "John, my life is small. I'm not building anything. I'm stuck in a job I hate or a body that's failing or a season where just getting up is the whole war. Does any of this apply to me?" Friend, especially you. Look one more time at who Romans 8 says creation is craning its neck for, not the impressive ones, the children of God.
That's a status, not a performance review. And the polishing that prepares you to reign, where did we say it happens? In traffic, at kitchen sinks, in the 2 seconds before you answer somebody sharply and don't. The training ground for ruling a renewed cosmos is hidden inside the smallest life on Earth. Because the family trade was never scale. It was faithfulness with what's in front of you. The one who is faithful with little, Jesus said, gets put over much.
Your little is the apprenticeship. So, here's your final practice. One last clause for the road, and it's the one I'd keep if I could only keep one. It's called the threshold prayer. This week, every time you walk through a doorway into your kitchen, your office, your car, the grocery store, pause at the threshold. Half a second. Nobody will even see it.
And say this in your heart, "I'm here to bring light." That's it. Five words. But watch what they do. You walk into your house after a long day, and instead of just a tired parent crossing a doorway, you're a carrier of the peace of heaven entering a room that needs it. You walk into the tense meeting. "I'm here to bring light."
And you've just reminded yourself that you're not primarily an employee in that room. You're a mirror angled at the chaos. Every doorway becomes a border crossing. You're not passing through space, you're bringing the kingdom into it, one room at a time. Which, if everything we've seen today is true, is exactly what you'll be doing forever. You may as well start now.
We started weeks ago in a dusty mansion, an heir wandering the halls of an inheritance he'd forgotten. We watched the mirror shatter and the perfect mirror arrive. We buried the false self. We found the treasure hidden in the field of view. We stood iron in the fire and silver under the cloth. And now the last door of the mansion is open, and look, it doesn't lead to another room, it leads outside into the world, into a creation standing on its tiptoes.
You are the mirror cleansed by the blood of Christ indwelt by the spirit of God. And you, yes, you personally, are destined for a healed and blazing world. So don't let the dust settle. Don't go digging up the grave. Turn your face to the sun. Catch the light. And shine for whoever's in the next room.
The cold is still losing, and one sunrise it loses for good. One more thing before we pray. There's still a video coming on this channel about an afternoon where Jesus said something so shocking about ordinary people that the men listening to him actually picked up stones to kill him. And his answer was to quote a psalm at them. I promise that video is still on its way, and after today, you're finally ready for it. If this helped you, send it to somebody who sat through a funeral this year and walked out with a hope too small to carry them, or somebody who's secretly afraid heaven sounds boring. And pray with me.
Let this be our prayer. Abba Father, thank you that you are not going to throw your world away, but that you are going to make it new the same way you are making us new. We confess that we have thought too small. Open our eyes this week to see every doorway as a threshold of your kingdom. Help us to shine on one another until our little lights become a symphony, and keep polishing us, Father, through every dusty day until the morning when heaven comes down and every shadow runs out of places to hide. We love you. We reflect you.
We are yours in Jesus' name. Amen.
