Life: The Sequel

The film 90 Minutes in Heaven has hit theaters. It’s based on the story of Pastor Don Piper who was pronounced dead after an auto accident. Piper lay under a tarp at the scene of the accident for an hour-and-a-half. During that time, Piper says, his soul was in Heaven experiencing the greatest peace and joy he has ever known. As the movie title makes clear, however, he didn’t stay there. You can read the book or see the movie and draw your own conclusions. Having done neither, I can’t really comment on the quality of the film (I hope it isn’t as cheesy as some other Christian films have been), or whether I agree with its depiction of heaven. But I am intrigued by our interest in the subject.

Talk to ten Christians and you’ll likely get ten different opinions about what Heaven will be like. Before we can even begin to talk about a place or a realm or a state of existence called heaven, however, we have to believe that there actually is life after death. It makes no sense to have a heaven if there is no one to populate it. So when we talk about heaven, we are making a larger statement about life itself. We are saying that physical death is not the end. It may be a period at the end of the sentence or even the chapter; but it is not the end of the story. The page will turn and there will be more. A sequel.

Even that isn’t a unique or new, though. Our Hindu friends believe that the soul or life force continues after biological death, albeit in another physical form. Reincarnation was a concept familiar to people as far back as the Iron Age. Three centuries before Jesus, a Taoist holy man named Chuang Tzu said, “Birth is not the beginning; death is not the end.”

But we Christians are still saying something very, very different. We are saying that our identity is portable between this dimension and that one. We believe we will retain our essence, our personality beyond the grave. We will know who we were. We will remember then and there what it was like to live here and now. That is one of the things that makes the Christian concept of heaven unique.

And it is one of the reasons we can have such inexplicable hope in the face of what is often indescribable struggle. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a dozen people who are experiencing some awful, awful things – loved ones lost to dementia, broken marriages, vice-like addictions, diseases that baffle the most gifted physicians. How do people endure through such pain, under such pressure?

One reason they endure is because they believe that this is not all there is. That there is a sequel. They are not in denial about the valleys and the shadows and the death we face here. They’re just convinced that in that time or place or dimension, the valleys will be filled, the shadows will flee from the light, and death will give way to life.

The idea of a place where there are no tears, no death or mourning or crying or pain, is compelling. It’s why the slaves sang about Heaven in pre-civil war America. It’s why the impoverished sang about it during the Great Depression. A lot of our heaven songs were written in seasons of struggle. Living in hard times makes you want to be there when the roll is called up yonder.

But there is more to the concept than just escaping the common struggles of life on a planet straining under the weight of sin’s curse. We aren’t just shedding this veil of tears. When we talk about heaven, we’re talking about a time or a place or a realm where we will be freed from the constant pull of sin. Here, we wake up every morning to temptation. And some days, we are strong. We find the way of escape. We run like Joseph or pray like Daniel or stand defiant like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. We forgive those who sin against us. We pillow our heads knowing we kept our hearts pure. We remembered to pray, we opened the Word, we witnessed about Jesus.

But other days we are weak. Like Paul, we don’t understand what we do, because the good we want to do, we don’t. And the evil we don’t want to do, we do and do and do. When temptation comes, we fold like Peter or fall like David. Some days, it seems, the more you want to live like Jesus, the less like Jesus you live. So when we read passages that promise deliverance from sin as well as pain, heaven sounds all the better.

So far, I haven’t physically suffered enough to yearn for the painlessness of Heaven. I know some of you have. I’ve already been to too many funerals for people I loved. I look forward to seeing them again. But maybe more than anything, I look forward to being done with sin. Done with waking up every morning knowing that it is crouching at my door, knowing that it desires to have me, remembering that it has had me before and, before it’s over, will have me again. Some glad morning, I’m going to wake up in a different place. And I’ll never again have to ask to be forgiven.