What Is Heaven?

Ask most Christians what heaven is and the answer will describe a destination somewhere above, immaterial and permanent, to which the soul departs at death and remains forever. Scripture does promise that believers who die are immediately with Christ, and that promise is precious. What Scripture does not do is treat that condition as the believer's final hope. The hope the prophets and apostles held out is larger, and it is emphatically physical.

It is also, and this is where most treatments go wrong, not a single event. Scripture describes a purged earth and it describes a brand new one, and the church has spent centuries arguing over which of the two it meant. The argument dissolves once the passages are allowed to sit in their own places on the timeline. Both are true. They are not the same event.

Where the Promise Comes From

The phrase enters Scripture through Isaiah. "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind."¹ Isaiah repeats it with an emphasis on permanence.² Every later biblical use depends on Isaiah. Peter cites it directly, looking for "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."³ John sees its fulfillment: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away."⁴

Alongside these run the dissolution texts. The present heavens and earth wax old like a garment and are changed as a vesture.⁵ They flee from the face of the Judge.⁶ They are reserved unto fire against the day of judgment.⁷

The historic dispute is over how to reconcile the two. Against the Gnostics, who despised matter itself, Irenaeus of Lyon answered around AD 180 that neither the substance nor the essence of the creation is annihilated, but the fashion of this world passes away.⁸ Augustine and later Thomas Aquinas both taught that the world's corruptible qualities are burned away while its substance endures. Seventeenth-century Lutheran orthodoxy took the opposite view and defended the total destruction and replacement of the world. Each side could point to real texts, which is usually the sign that a distinction has been missed rather than that one side simply misread.

The First Event: Purged, on the Pattern of Noah

Peter supplies his own interpretive key, and it is routinely overlooked. Before he speaks of fire, he speaks of water.

"For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished."⁹

The comparison is deliberate. The world that perished in the flood was not annihilated. Noah came out of the ark onto a planet profoundly changed, and life began again on it. That is the pattern Peter sets before he describes the elements melting with fervent heat. The fire does to the present order what the water did to the antediluvian one: it ends a world without ending the world.

This purging belongs at the close of the present age. Zechariah describes the great battle that precedes it, the nations gathered against Jerusalem and the LORD going forth to fight.¹⁰ Out the other side of it comes the long-promised peace, when men beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks, and learn war no more.¹¹ That is the doorway into the millennial reign: Christ reigning on this earth, Israel restored, and life on a scoured planet beginning again exactly as it began again for Noah.

So the renewal reading is correct, and it is correct about this event. The earth of the millennial reign is this earth, purged.

The Second Event: Everything Made New

The millennial reign is not the end. At the close of the thousand years Satan is loosed, the nations are gathered again under the names Gog and Magog, and fire comes down from God out of heaven and devours them.¹² The Great White Throne follows, and the first heaven and the first earth flee away.¹³

Only then does John see what Isaiah promised. "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away."¹⁴ And the announcement from the throne is not that the old has been repaired. "Behold, I make all things new."¹⁵

That is a new creation in the full sense: a new heavens, a new earth, everything brand new. The seven new things of the closing vision belong here, not to the millennial earth: the New Jerusalem descending, the tabernacle of God with men, a new temple which is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb, new light requiring neither sun nor moon, the river of life, and a restored paradise where there shall be no more curse.¹⁶

So the new-creation reading is also correct, and it is correct about this event. What the long dispute lacked was not evidence but sequence.

What Christ Is Doing Now

There is a further word that belongs here and is seldom connected to it. On the night He was betrayed Christ told His disciples, "I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."¹⁷

A place is being prepared. The language is of construction rather than of repair, and it sits comfortably with the promise of a creation made wholly new. Whatever else is said about the final state, Scripture presents it as something being made ready now, by Christ Himself, for people He intends to have with Him.

How the Earth Was Eclipsed Altogether

One more distortion needs naming, because it affects both events equally. Under the long influence of Platonic anthropology, which held the soul naturally immortal and the immaterial realm its true home, the church's practical hope migrated away from any earth at all, purged or new, toward the soul's departure elsewhere. The medieval period did not deny the doctrine. It stopped preaching it. Attention concentrated on the vision granted to disembodied souls, formally defined in 1336, and on the geography of the afterlife.

The Reformers recovered the material hope plainly. Luther expected the earth renewed and adorned with a new beauty.¹⁸ Calvin wrote that the whole machinery of the world will be renewed.¹⁹ Whatever is concluded about sequence, the direction of the biblical hope is not escape from creation but God dwelling with His people in one.

Where Believers Are Now

The question of what happens between death and resurrection is a different question with its own answer. Those who die in Christ are consciously with Him, which Paul calls far better than remaining here. That state is real and blessed, and it is not the end of the story. Scripture never treats it as the goal, which is why the creeds fix on the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come rather than on the soul's immediate destination.

The distinction matters, because when it blurs the resurrection is correspondingly diminished. A hope that terminates on souls in heaven has quietly dropped the article the church has always confessed.

The Doctrine Stated

Scripture describes two events and the church has often collapsed them into one. The first is a purging, on the pattern Peter draws from Noah, closing the present age after the great battle and opening the millennial reign on this earth, scoured and beginning again. The second comes after the thousand years, after Gog and Magog and the fire from heaven, when the first heaven and the first earth pass away and God makes all things new: a new creation in the fullest sense, not the old one repaired.

Heaven, in the sense Scripture finally means, is neither an escape from the world God made nor merely that world tidied. It is God dwelling with His people forever, in a creation He has made new, with the curse lifted, death abolished, and righteousness at home in it.

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Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.