The Beauty of Heaven

Excerpt taken from Heaven Awaits: Anticipate Your Future Hope, Your Eternal Home, Your Daily Reality by Michael Youssef

Chapter 2
The Beauty of Heaven

An author whose name I can’t recall recently appeared on a show to promote his book and discuss his views on life and meaning. The author was an atheist. He didn’t believe in life after death, and he talked about how the ancient Greek Stoics didn’t believe in life after death either. Instead, they tried to live a satisfying life in the moment.

The interviewer asked, “Do you ever think about your own mortality?”

The author, who was in his sixties, replied, “I try not to think about death. I’m older now, and my death is much closer than it used to be. Somewhere in my thirties or forties, I discovered that my time horizon flipped. In my younger years, I was living from my birth. Now that I’m older, I’m living toward my death. So I try not to dwell on my mortality.”

Maybe you identify with those words. There may have been a time in your life, possibly in your thirties or forties, when you realized your “time horizon” had changed. It gradually dawned on you that you were no longer looking backward to your childhood and the family you were raised in. Instead, you realized you are living toward your death.

When you are living toward your death, you start asking questions such as, “When I die, what will my life have meant? What have I been living for? Have I spent my limited allotment of years on what truly matters? How will God judge my life?”

Thank God, we don’t have to live as the Stoics lived, lacking any hope for the afterlife. And we don’t have to live as that atheist author lived, avoiding the subject of our own mortality and the swift approach of death.

As believers and followers of Jesus Christ, we are assured of eternity in Heaven. We are free to think about and dwell on our own mortality because we know that death is not the end of the story. A beautiful home awaits us in Heaven.

Let’s take some time together now to dwell on the majesty, glory, and beauty that awaits us in our eternal home.

Eight Beautiful Facets of Heaven
A facet is a geometrically arranged flat surface on a gemstone that reflects the light and reveals the inner beauty of the stone. Faceted gemstones, such as cut diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, are stones of exquisite color, sparkle, and beauty.

I think of Heaven as very much like a faceted gemstone. In fact, the description of Heaven in Revelation 21 describes the foundations of the heavenly city in terms of precious stones—sapphire, agate, emerald, onyx, ruby, and more. John describes Heaven as having a wall made of jasper (a cryptocrystalline quartz found in a variety of colors) and city structures made of pure gold, “as pure as glass” (Revelation 21:18).

These are beautiful images, and they all suggest that Heaven is a place of color, sparkle, and beauty, like a brilliantly faceted gemstone. Yet these striking physical descriptions of Heaven don’t excite me nearly as much as the deeper realities of Heaven—realities that I call the eight beautiful facets of Heaven. Let’s take a close look at each one.

Facet #1: Uninterrupted Fellowship
Every other facet of Heaven pales in comparison to this one: We will look upon the face of Jesus. We will be in his presence continually. We will have unending, unbroken fellowship with him throughout eternity. We will be in the everlasting presence of the one who loved us and saved us through his death on the cross.

In 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul tells us that “now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” In Paul’s day, you couldn’t buy the kind of mirrors we have today—a sheet of glass with a coating of silver on the back to provide a perfect and clear reflection. In those days, mirrors were made out of polished metal or a very imperfect and impure glass. The reflection they provided was not very clear or bright. So, Paul spoke of this present life as seeing a reflection in a mirror—or as the King James Version renders his words, “We see through a glass, darkly.”

But in Heaven, Paul proclaims, “we shall see face to face.” We shall see Jesus face-to-face. We shall see God the Father face-to-face. We shall see reality—transcendent, eternal reality—as it truly is. There will be no barriers or limits to our understanding.

“Someone once asked a Christian what he expected to do when he got to heaven,” writes Dwight L. Moody in his book titled Heaven. “He said he expected to spend the first thousand years looking at Jesus Christ, and after that he would look for Peter, and then for James, and for John. … But it seems to me that one look at Jesus Christ will more than reward us for all we have ever done for Him down here, for all the sacrifices we can possibly make for Him, just to see Him; only to see Him.”

What makes Heaven heavenly is that Jesus lives there. If Jesus were not there, it would not be Heaven. Praise God, Jesus is in Heaven, preparing a place for us—our eternal home where we will enjoy uninterrupted fellowship with him.

We will also experience uninterrupted fellowship with all our loved ones who have died in the Lord. Later in this book, we will look at what the Bible calls the New Heaven and the New Earth. But for now I want to talk about the present Heaven (or Paradise), where Christians go the moment they die. When we say that a loved one “has gone to Heaven,” we are referring to Paradise, the present Heaven.

It is important that we distinguish between the present Heaven—where our saved and deceased loved ones are right now as we all await the return of Jesus Christ and the resurrection of the dead—and the future New Heaven, where we are destined to live forever in the presence of Jesus. All the great promises of redemption will be fulfilled in the New Heaven, where we will live forever in our resurrection bodies. In the meantime, we look forward to the joys and glories of the present Heaven.

The present Heaven is a beautiful and awe-inspiring place, which is why Jesus, Paul, and John call it Paradise (Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 12:4; Revelation 2:7). This is the Heaven Ezekiel saw when he said, “The heavens were opened and I saw visions of God” (Ezekiel 1:1). This is the Heaven the martyr Stephen saw moments before his death, when he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56). This is the Heaven that Paul visited, where he “heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell” (2 Corinthians 12:4).

Please don’t fall for the unfounded, unbiblical claim that your loved ones are in an unconscious state of “soul sleep.” That’s a false doctrine. You won’t find it anywhere in the Bible. (When the Bible speaks of those who have “fallen asleep,” it is merely using a metaphor for physical death.) Throughout Scripture, we consistently find descriptions of the present Heaven as a wonderful place where there is communion, fellowship, consciousness, and joy. All those who have died in Jesus are enjoying the blessings of the present Heaven. Because being in the present Heaven means being with Jesus, it is “better by far” than being on earth (Philippians 1:23).

Until the New Heaven appears, the present Heaven will be a place of reunions, communion, and rejoicing. There will be laughter and singing—and it will all take place in the presence of our Lord Jesus. The moment our eyes close in death, we will awaken to a heavenly welcome, fully conscious, fully aware, in a place Jesus calls Paradise. Our loved ones in the faith are there now, experiencing vibrant relationships with Jesus and with one another as they await the resurrection and the arrival of the New Heaven and New Earth.

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Some content taken from Heaven Awaits by Michael Youssef. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. All rights reserved.

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