No Place For Sin In Heaven

No Place for Sin in Heaven

Excerpted from “The Barrier”

Sermon #1590, March 27, 1881

Would Heaven still be Heaven if sin had a place there? According to Spurgeon, the answer is no! We will be entirely and forever free, not only from the consequences of sin, but from our sin natures that plague us now by pulling us away from God.

He who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” Revelation 21:5-8

Spurgeon • How holy the church will be. She shall have no temple within her walls, for this simple reason: she shall be the temple. She shall have no spot reserved for sacred uses because all shall be “holiness unto the LORD” (Zechariah 14:20, KJV). The divine presence shall be in all and over all. And this shall be her joy: “The glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:23).

Brothers and sisters, the glory of the church even here below is the presence of God in her midst. But what will that presence be when it shines forth in noonday brightness, when spirits strengthened for the vision shall behold the full splendor of Jehovah’s throne? Tongue cannot tell the glory, for thought cannot conceive it.

Write my name among the blessed who shall see Jehovah’s face. Oh, you living God, my soul thirsts after you. To dwell in your presence is the summit of the soul’s delight. To be with you where you are and to behold your glory is the Heaven of Heaven. To what beyond this can thoughts aspire?

It is not fitting that so royal and divine a body as the glorified church of God should be ruined by being defiled. God forbid that her light, which is “like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal” (Revelation 21:11, KJV) should ever be dimmed by the breath of sin.

How beautiful was this fair world in the early morning of her creation, when the dew of her youth glistened upon her, and the sunlight of God made her face to shine. Keep watch and stand guard, you shining ones, that this beauty be not marred! Sad was the hour when with dragon wing the fallen spirit descended into Eden, advanced to mother Eve, and whispered in her ear the fatal temptation.

Oh, you guardian angels, if only your fiery swords had kept out the arch deceiver, that this world might never have fallen, that we might have dwelled here amid sunny glades, by pure rivers rippling over golden sands. If only we had remained a holy and happy race, making every hill reverberate with the praise of God.

Now, oh Earth, you are a field of blood, but you might have been a garden of delights. Now are you one vast cemetery, where all the dust was once a part of the living fabric of mortal men. But you might have been as the heavens filled with stars, all shining to their Creator’s praise. Alas that Eden should now remain only as a name—gone as a vision of the night!

As much as we could heartily wish that evil had never entered into the original world, we earnestly reject the idea that it will ever contaminate the new. Shall those new heavens ever look down with amazement upon the flight of a rebellious spirit, flying, beneath their serene blue sky, on an errand of destruction? Shall the jeweled walls of the Holy City be betrayed by an enemy of the King who is there enthroned? Shall the serpent leave his horrid trail upon the heavenly Eden, twice made of the Lord? God forbid!

The purity of a world twice made, the perfection of the church of the regenerate, the majesty of the presence of God—all demand that every sinful thing should be excluded. All Heaven and heavenly things cry, “Write the decree and make it sure; there is no way anything that defiles shall enter into it.” It would be horrible indeed if a second time evil should destroy the work of God!

Into the church of the Jesus above the breath of iniquity must not enter. It cannot be that the work which cost the Redeemer’s blood should yet be defiled. The eternal purpose of the Father and the love of the Spirit forbid that the Lord’s own perfected church should be invaded by any unholy thing.

Brothers and sisters, there can be no entrance of evil into the Kingdom of God, for it is the very essence of the happiness of the glorified church that evil should be excluded. Imagine for a moment that the decree of our text were reversed or suspended and that it were allowed that a few unregenerate men and women should enter into the glorified church of God. Suppose, in addition, that those few should be of the gentler sort of sinners—not those who would profanely blaspheme the name of God, but a few who are indifferent to God’s glory and cold and formal in his praise. How could Heaven bear with these?

These, who are neither cold nor hot are sickening both to Christ and to his people. As in a living body, the existence of a dead piece of bone breeds worry and pain and disease, so would the presence of these few unholy ones cause I know not what trouble and sorrow. It must not be. Love to the saints demands that they be no more troubled by sin or sinners. Pity, mercy, even the partiality of kindred love, dare not ask that it may be. All Heaven is up in arms at the very thought.

Holy people are alarmed at the idea that they should be again tempted by the presence of evil. Speedily bar the gates of pearl and never open them again rather than that there should come upon that pure street of transparent gold a foot that will not walk in the ways of God’s commandments. God forbid that the halls of Zion be disgraced by a single spirit that shall refuse to love the holy and exalted name.

Heaven would not be Heaven if it were possible for evil of any sort to enter there. Therefore, stand firm, God’s decree, for it would be cruelty to saints and destruction to Heaven if anything unholy would ever enter it.

Alcorn • I’m convinced that the Bible is clear on the exact point Spurgeon is making: though we will have freedom to choose in Heaven, we will have no ability to sin. Consider Revelation 21:4-5: “Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new’” (emphasis added).

What follows the word for explains why the evil that causes death, mourning, crying, and pain will no longer exist. It’s because the old order will have once and for all passed away, and God will replace it with a new order—one that is fundamentally transformed. Deception, sin, and rebellion against God will be things of the past. Those in Heaven need never fear another Fall.

Since “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23, NIV), the promise of no more death on the New Earth is synonymous with a promise of no more sin. Since sinners always die, those who are promised they will never die are being promised they will not sin anymore.

Sin causes mourning, crying, and pain. If those will never occur again, then sin, their cause, can never occur again either.

But, some argue, “Adam and Eve were sinless, yet they fell into sin. Why shouldn’t the same thing happen again?”

Adam and Eve’s situation was very different from that of God’s resurrected saints. The first man and woman were innocent, but not righteous. That is, they had not been made righteous by the atoning work of Christ. All people who will be in Heaven, on the other hand, have been made righteous through Christ: “As by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).

To suggest we could have Christ’s righteousness yet one day sin in Heaven is to say Christ could one day sin. God completely delivers us from sin and vulnerability to sin. Scripture emphasizes that Christ died once to deal with sin and will never again need to die (Hebrews 9:26-28; 10:10; 1 Peter 3:18). We’ll have the full experience of our new nature, so we will in Christ “become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Possessing God’s own righteousness, we won’t sin in Heaven for the same reason God doesn’t: he cannot. Christ purchased with his blood our eternal inability to sin: “By a single offering [himself] he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).

Consider Spurgeon’s text: “Nothing unclean will ever enter it [the New Jerusalem], nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Revelation 21:27). The passage doesn’t say, “If someone becomes impure or shameful or deceitful, they will be evicted.” No eviction will be necessary, because nothing impure can ever enter in the first place.

The fact that evil will have no footing in Heaven and no leverage to affect us is further indicated by Jesus when he says, “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. . . . Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:41-43, emphasis added).

Even in the present Heaven, prior to the Resurrection, people cannot sin, for they are “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). Ultimately, we’ll be raised “incorruptible” (1 Corinthians 15:52, NKJV). Incorruptible is a stronger word than uncorrupted. Our risen bodies, and by implication all that we are, will be immune to corruption.

We will have true freedom in Heaven, but a righteous freedom that never sins.

Heaven will harbor no evil desires and no corruption, and we will fully participate in the sinless perfection of Christ. What does this mean in terms of human freedom? Remember, though God can’t sin, no being has greater free choice than he does. That we won’t be able to sin does not mean we won’t have free choice.

Once we become what the sovereign God has made us to be in Christ, and once we see him as he is, we’ll see all things—including sin—for what they are. God won’t need to take away our ability to choose; he won’t need to restrain us from evil. Sin will have absolutely no appeal to us. It will be, literally, unthinkable. The memory of evil and suffering in this life will serve as an eternal reminder of sin’s horrors and emptiness. Sin? Been there, done that. And have seen how ugly and disastrous it was.

Theologian Paul Helm writes, “The freedom of heaven, then, is the freedom from sin; not that the believer just happens to be free from sin, but that he is so constituted or reconstituted that he cannot sin. He doesn’t want to sin, and he does not want to want to sin.”^a

^a Paul Helm, The Last Things (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1989), 92.