Is Heaven Really Real?

Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. John 14:1–3

Home.

For most of us that word suggests a place where we belong, where we are safe and loved, peaceful and welcomed. For me, it also means endless shelves of books, a comfy sofa to sink into, a soft blanket, and a basket of toys by the fire for our Yorkie, Maggie. I love to sit outside on our balcony with that first cup of coffee every morning while Maggie barks at passing cars. But the peace of those quiet mornings changed in the winter of 2021.

Our balcony overlooks a lane that separates the homes on our street from the ones a street over. The house that is directly behind us had been empty for almost three years. I wasn’t sure who owned the house, so I tried to keep an eye on it, but it gradually fell deeper and deeper into disrepair. Then, one morning came a deafening noise. A bulldozer arrived to tear it all down. Our balcony became the resting place for layer upon layer of dust and dirt. Then came the rats. Yes, I said rats. Apparently they had been squatters since the previous owners moved out. One of the rats became a regular visitor to our yard. I called him Mr. Whiskers. He was the size of a small cat. Barry and our pest control guy came up with a plan to “relocate” our whiskered friends. As a lover of animals great and small, that’s all I want to say about that.

Then came the port-a-john. I didn’t know that one had arrived until I tried to back out of our garage one morning and almost knocked it over! I’m glad I didn’t, as it had an occupant inside at the time. When he came out, I wasn’t sure whether to wave or apologize so I did both. He waved back. As we still have towers of toilet tissue piled up in our garage from the we’re-in-a-worldwide-pandemic-so-buy-more-toilet-tissue situation that never quite made sense to me, I wondered if I should offer some, but decided against it. Barry called the number on the side of the port-a-john, and they moved it further into the now-vacant lot. I scrubbed our balcony down, washed the windows, and got rid of the layers of dirt, and for two blissful weeks the only noise to disturb the morning quiet was Maggie barking at the occasional squirrel.

It was so peaceful. But that’s not the end of this story.

Another crew arrived. This time it was a construction crew to begin the rebuild. I don’t know where they got a radio that can play at a volume heard two zip codes over, but they had one. By early spring, our poor Maggie was so worn out from barking that she just lay on her back in her basket, resigned to an apparently meaningless life. It gets unbearably hot in Texas in the summer months, so I understood why the workers would want to start earlier in the day, but we were now gifted with a daily blasting of country songs at 7:00 a.m. We had a reality show we could watch right from our balcony in our very own home.

But all the chaos got me thinking. These were all just earthly annoyances, but what about the questions that had been growing in my heart for more than this present life can deliver? I wanted to find out what this ache was all about. I first started to think about home, about Scotland, and how much I miss my family. I thought about how many of the people I knew as a child are no longer with us. Amid all my nostalgic reminiscing, the answer came. It had been staring me in the face all along. What I was longing for was the ultimate promise, our ultimate future, our ultimate hope: heaven.

What comes to your mind when you think of heaven? Some think of us floating around on clouds playing a harp, others of being greeted at the pearly gates by long-lost pets. (We will address the important “Do dogs go to heaven?” question later in the book.) As a teenager, my idea of heaven was very vague. I couldn’t imagine what we would do year after year. I had an idea that singing would be involved, but what would we sing and for how long, and wouldn’t that get old after a couple of thousand years? I wondered about flying. That was an idea that was very appealing to me, but where would we be going, and would we know when we got there, and would we be able to find our way back to our designated spot? I was most concerned by the thought that if everyone who has ever followed Jesus would be in heaven too, how would I ever get a glimpse of him as the crowd would be so huge?

Our ideas of what heaven will be like are usually colored by our own families and where we grew up, whether our family was a family of faith, just popped into church occasionally, or never gave faith a second thought. I grew up in Scotland, a country where many people get sentimental about the idea of heaven only when someone they love dies. They’ll raise a glass to them, assuming that heaven’s pub opened up and welcomed them in. In 2022 the Scottish government carried out a survey asking people if they identified as Christians. Thirty-three percent said that they did, but only a quarter of those said that they believed that Jesus was a real person, the Son of God.1 So what does it even mean to be a Christian within those parameters? There seems to be more fuzzy, wishful thinking involved than personal life-changing, relational faith. When it comes to heaven, the apparent assumption is that whatever their relatives or friends were doing on earth before they died, they would simply carry on in heaven. But that’s not what God’s Word teaches us. The truth about heaven is so much greater than this. It is life-changing. It’s what we were made for.

I believe that when we grasp a proper understanding of the reality of heaven, it will change every single day we have here on earth. For those of us who are in relationship with Christ, the reality of heaven as our forever home should be even more real than the things we see all around us every day. For many of us though, we’re not quite sure what that means or what it will look like. So it’s my passionate commitment in this book to share the only real truth about heaven: what the Bible says.

Heaven is a real place.

Heaven is for real people.

Heaven is where we’ll be with our real Savior forever.

Heaven is everywhere in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Did you know that there are at least six hundred references to the word heaven in the Bible? Jesus talks about heaven around seventy times just in Matthew’s Gospel. But let me ask you, how many sermons have you heard about what heaven will be like, what we’ll do, how we’ll live? I’ve not heard many. I’ve listened to lots of sermons on the sacrifice Christ paid to secure our place in heaven, but almost none about heaven and what we’ll do when we get there. So in this first chapter, I want us to look together at the assurance that Christ gave to his closest friends about the reality of heaven. On the night when he was about to be betrayed, he knew that in their eyes, everything was going to seem as if it had gone terribly wrong. He said to them,

Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. (John 14:1–3)

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Order your copy of The Hope of Heaven: How the Promise of Eternity Changes Everything by Sheila Walsh