Understanding Heaven

This past week I had the joyous occasion to celebrate my Dad’s 78th birthday with my sister, Denise and her friend Lily. It was a great evening.

Lily is an avid questioner. She is always asking questions about our faith and what we believe. At our birthday celebration we talked about our understanding of heaven.

I have always felt I had a distorted view of heaven. In my understanding of what I read in the Bible I couldn’t accept the commonly held view and many Christians hold that heaven is one great meet up with all who believed in Jesus while here on earth.

I believed that yes we would be with Jesus. Our spirit (soul) would be at peace with him in Heaven, a spiritual realm not a physical location. I viewed it as peaceful sleep. The more important thing than getting to heaven is what happens when Jesus at his return renews the earth by joining it with heaven as the world comes what it was designed to be. There are spirits would be joined in our new resurrected bodies. A body like the resurrected Jesus displayed in the New Testament.

Here is another posting of NT Wright’s view of heaven that is posted at Time. Maybe you have a thought to share?