The Present Heaven

The Present Heaven

Excerpted from “Justification and Glory”

Sermon #627

Delivered on Sunday morning, April 30, 1865, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington

Do you know what happens when you die? Have you ever wondered whether there’s a delay between Earth and Heaven, whether there is a preparation that needs to take place before your soul meets God? Spurgeon addresses these topics.

Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. Romans 8:30

Spurgeon • The moment that the believing soul leaves the body, that justified soul is in glory. We know that there is no preparatory process for it to pass through.

The case of the dying thief is to the point. He was no saint. He had not for many years performed works of moral superiority by which he reached perfection and could claim that the gates should be opened to him. He was a sinner up to the very last moment, and the only good deeds that we ever read of his doing were when he claimed Christ as Lord and rebuked his fellow thief for slandering the Savior. Yet hear the words: “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).

Nor is this the only instance. We find, when Lazarus died, according to the parable, that he was carried by angels into Abraham’s bosom, a place of unspeakable rest and delight which the rich man greatly envied (Luke 16:19-31). Stephen expected the Lord Jesus to receive his spirit (Acts 7:59), and the apostle Paul was torn between life and death, being willing “to depart and be with Christ” (Philippians 1:23). He evidently did not anticipate any delay between Earth and Heaven, for he says, “We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:6).

Perhaps that word Paradise, which Christ uses to describe the state of disembodied spirits, may be a help to us in judging of the condition of the blessed. Paradise is a place of perfect peace, of sinlessness, of rest, of enjoyment, and freedom from evil.

Eden! Oh, how shall we talk of its glories long since faded? Let us, however, remember its winding walks among trees loaded with luscious fruits. Let us remember the glory of its rising and its setting sun, the immortality, the peace, the joy, the love, the brightness which our first parents enjoyed in their naked innocence.

The glory of Paradise was that God walked there in the cool of the evening with his creatures. The glory of Heaven is that “they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light” (Revelation 22:5) and that the days of their mourning shall be ended when God wipes away all tears from their eyes (Revelation 21:4) and the Lamb leads them to the springs of living water (Revelation 7:17). God is with them to be their God, and they are with him to be his happy people at his right hand, where there are pleasures forevermore.

The day will come when the Lord Jesus will descend from Heaven with a shout, with the trump of the archangel and the voice of God. Some think that this descent of the Lord will be postmillennial—that is, after the thousand years of his reign. I cannot think so. I conceive that the advent will be premillennial—that he will come first and then will come the Millennium as the result of his personal reign upon Earth.

But this much is the fact: Christ will suddenly come, come to reign and to judge the Earth in righteousness. Now at that time, those of us who are alive and remain shall have no preference over them that sleep. It is true “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52).

Alcorn • What we usually think of when we hear the word Heaven is what theologians call the intermediate Heaven. I prefer the term present Heaven, but in any case, it means the place God’s children go when we die. It’s the place we’ll live until our bodily resurrection. As Spurgeon demonstrates from Scripture, our spirits go there immediately upon death. It is a conscious existence, even though it’s an unnatural condition in that we are without our earthly bodies.

Our Christian loved ones who have died are now in this present Heaven. This is not the same as purgatory—some believe there is such a place where people pay the price for their own sin to become ready for Heaven, but it’s not a biblical concept. The Bible teaches that Christ paid the complete price for our atonement, and thus we can do nothing to add to it.

Often we think of going to Heaven as departing from our earthly realm into an angelic realm to live with God where he is. But the Bible says that one day God will bring us down from his place to live with him in our place, the New Earth (Revelation 21:3).

In the present Heaven, God’s people are with Christ and full of joy, and their lives there are “better by far” (Philippians 1:23, NIV). But still it is not their permanent home. They’re looking forward to what Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 15 is vitally important to all of us: bodily resurrection.