Imagine that it’s your wedding day. You’re cleaned up and dressed up in a dapper suit. Your friends and family are there to celebrate with you. There’s a shrimp and grits bar and a great reception band waiting. But there’s one thing missing: there’s no bride. You’re not actually engaged.
Would that be 80 percent of a great day? Do the clothes, the people, the food, the fun make four-fifths of a wedding?
Our men’s ministry took five weeks this summer to study the hope of heaven: the glories that God has laid up for us in eternity. We look forward to resurrected bodies that can never get sick or die. We look forward to re-created souls, that will never even be tempted to sin. We look forward to living on a renewed earth, eating and resting and enjoying life with our brothers and sisters in Christ in perfect peace. All of these blessings are amazing.
But as great as they are, they’re almost like the festivities of a wedding. They’re like the great food and the reception band and the dapper suits; but if we had all of those things and didn’t have a bride, we’d missing the element that makes the whole thing a wedding. A lifelong covenant relationship with the woman I love isn’t one of the things that makes the wedding fun; it is the wedding.
In the same way, what ultimately makes heaven heaven is that we will be eternally, completely filled with the perfectly good, holy, and satisfying presence of God. In other words:
God’s presence is what makes heaven into heaven.
6 Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. 7 Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready. – Revelation 19:6-7
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. – Revelation 21:1-4
In Revelation 19, John hears a voice exulting in God’s glory and calling everyone who hears to worship him; and then the voice says, “The marriage of the Lamb has come.” This voice is setting up the climax of Revelation, the final events that bring the story to a close; and it describes the end that’s coming as the marriage of the Lamb. The marriage of Christ.
Then, after Jesus’ final victory over evil and the final judgment, John sees
the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.’
The heavenly city is a symbol for God’s people; so the climactic hope of heaven, the event that ends the story, is a covenant relationship so intimate and deep and joyful that the best earthly image of it is a wedding. God will dwell with us; we will be his people, and God himself will be with us as our God.
The hope of heaven is that one day, we will come face-to-face with the infinite, all-powerful, completely holy, completely good Creator and King of the universe, and will be welcomed like a bride. That the God who is so glorious and perfect that the Bible says, he is light; who is so holy and righteous, it says, he is a consuming fire; who is so kind and good, it says, he is love, will be present to us like a husband is to a wife. We will see and feel God’s presence as completely as a small, finite human can know an infinite God, and that presence will be heaven. As Augustine put it, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
For God’s people, God’s presence is the source of comfort and joy and victory beyond anything we could imagine on this side of seeing him. There’s a promise from the prophet Zephaniah that summarizes the effects of God’s presence beautifully:
The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing. - Zephaniah 3:17
God is going to sing over his people. He’s going to rejoice over us. He’s going to fill us with his love in a way that satisfies the longing of our souls forever. God’s presence will be a source of endless delight in his endless goodness.
If that’s the hope of heaven, how do we enter it?
The Bible tells us that
We enter God’s presence through Jesus’ grace.
We saw in Revelation 19 that the marriage of heaven is the marriage of the Lamb. Of Jesus. In Revelation chapter 5, we see the Lamb being worshipped; and the host of heaven say,
Worthy are you … for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. (Revelation 5:9-10)
The Lamb is a sacrifice for sin; his death ransoms people for God. Before he does that, we can’t endure the presence of God. If he comes close to us in our sinful state, it’s like a fire coming close to a dry pine branch. God’s presence would destroy us.
But when Jesus’ sacrifice covers us, it makes us people who can now endure the presence of God. Jesus gives us his perfect holiness, and that covering makes us able to come close to God. It enables us to come into his presence.
We enter God’s presence only through Jesus’ grace. As Jesus said:
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. - John 14:6
“This is eternal life: that they know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” – John 17:3
“On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me.’” – Matthew 7:22-23
C. S. Lewis puts it starkly:
In the end that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised. … We are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words: “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. … On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged.
Those who have lived by Jesus’ grace on this side of things will be welcomed into God’s presence; those who haven’t will be cast out. If we want to experience God’s presence now and enjoy it forever in eternity, we find it through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection for us.
So if God’s presence is what makes heaven into heaven and we enter into that presence through Jesus’ grace, what does that mean for us here? How do we prepare for that?
We prepare for heaven by practicing God’s presence here.
In one sense, we’re waiting for God’s presence. It will come in eternity. But just like God sometimes gives us appetizers of heaven on earth, he sometimes gives us an experience of his presence here. When I was in the early stages of my autoimmune disease, to where we knew I was badly sick but hadn’t been able even to schedule with a specialist yet, one Sunday in worship we sang “Jesus Paid It All,” which opens with these lines:
I hear the Savior say, “Thy strength indeed is small;
Child of weakness, watch and pray; find in Me thine all in all.”
As we sang those lines, suddenly I felt the presence of God with me in a way that completely overwhelmed me emotionally. I basically cried through the rest of the service, which was roughly the total amount of time I’d spent crying in the 20 years before. I felt the holy, completely good, loving presence of God, and it melted me.
I would love to say there’s a way to manufacture or guarantee that experience; but on this side of things, it ain’t so. John Piper has a helpful analogy about sailing. A sailboat requires two things to work: a properly set sail, and the wind to blow. If my sail isn’t set when the wind is blowing, I’m not going nowhere; and no amount of sailing skills can force the wind blow.
In the same way, when God’s presence shows up, it just shows up; we can’t manipulate or force his presence. But we can prepare our souls to be more likely to receive and feel his presence when it comes. Brother Lawrence called this “the practice of the presence of God.”
There are three concrete ways that we can practice God’s presence here on Earth:
1. Worship
The main thing that happens in heaven right now is that God’s creations see his glory and his grace and respond in worship. So when we worship God, through singing and hearing his Word in church, or through praying to him with friends or on our own, we’re setting our hearts on him and practicing being present to him.
2. Obedience
Jesus said, “Why do you call me, Lord, Lord, and don’t do what I tell you?” Seeking God’s presence while living out of step with his Word is like cheating on our wives and wondering why our marriage sucks. Keeping God’s Word, and confessing and repenting when we fail, postures our hearts to be in his presence.
3. Love
If God is love, and Jesus said all the commands of Scripture can be summarized in “Love the Lord your God … and love your neighbor as yourself,” then serving and enjoying others, especially those in the greatest need, postures our hearts to practice the presence of God.