Traditional belief in heaven is actually contradictory to scripture

Grant Piper

5 days ago (grantpiperwriting.medium.com)

There are millions of Christians in the world today whose entire worldview revolves around the idea of heaven and hell. Christians go to heaven. Non-believers go to hell. Therefore, it is the duty of the believer to convert non-believers to save them from hell. Fear of hell is used to keep members in line and to drive people to fervent evangelicalism. Everything is about getting into heaven and avoiding going to the bad place. However, these beliefs do not appear anywhere in the Bible. In fact, an unhealthy obsession with the afterlife is rotting Christianity from the inside out.

If heaven were so important to Jesus, you would think he would have spent most of his time preaching about it. But he didn’t. In fact, Jesus says little about heaven at all. Most of Jesus’s teachings are about the nature and intention of the law, how to treat other people, how to see people the way God sees them, and how to pray and grow near to God — in this life. All of Jesus’s teachings are about how people should act in their physical lives and not about how to get to heaven.

Jesus’s belief in heaven was not at all what people think today. In Judaism, the body and soul are inextricably linked. One cannot live without the other. In order for the soul to reach immortality, the body also has to reach immortality. That is why Jesus’s body is raised from the dead and why there is still a belief that Christians’ bodies will be raised at the end of time.

The idea that the soul is severed from the body and hidden away in heaven is a new idea and one that invalidates large swaths of the same Bible that heaven adherents claim to believe in. Believing that the supernatural realm is more important than the physical realm is contradictory to what the Bible actually says. In fact, the dichotomy between the Bible’s focus on the physical and Christian emphasis on the metaphysical gave rise to Gnosticism. Because at the end of the day, obsessing over heaven and making your life’s work about the afterlife runs counter to what God actually says and actually wants from us.

God Loves The Physical

Focusing on heaven as the final goal of our physical lives is a slap to God’s face. God created the physical world, and he created it for a reason. Genesis says that God created everything, and he said that it was good. All of it was good.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning — the sixth day. — Genesis 1:31

This lays out some very basic truths that most people gloss over. God made the physical world, and he likes the physical world. Otherwise, why make it? Why focus so much of his time and attention on it? Not only did God create the physical world, but he put man into it. He created man in his own image, breathed his breath of life into him, and set him above his physical creation. So clearly, there is a plan, a purpose, and a love for the physical world. Saying things like “I’m living for heaven” or “this is just a temporary stop before I get to heaven” completely passes over the value that God puts on our physical world.

If the physical world is completely worthless, God would have put no worth on it. But we don’t see any evidence of that. God gives numerous commands about how to treat our bodies, how to eat, and how to treat one another in a physical sense. Sex is physical. Marriage is physical. Eating is physical. Violence is physical. The Bible speaks volumes (literally) about these types of things. If these things mattered not and heaven was the only thing that mattered, then the Bible would speak volumes about heaven and the spiritual realm. Instead, the inverse is true. The Bible speaks little about the spiritual realm and speaks volumes about the physical realm.

The Contradiction

The focus on heaven by supposed Christians flummoxed the Gnostics in early Christianity. Gnostics said that if God’s true design for humanity was metaphysical or spiritual, the physical world doesn’t make sense. And in a way, they were right. If God only cares about our souls, why stuff our souls into failable bodies and cause us pain if heaven is the true goal? To resolve this contradiction, the Gnostics claimed that the physical world was created by a pretender god who had basically stolen the worship of the real God who was hidden in the spiritual world. This is why Gnostics believed that Jesus was never physical, only spiritual, and why Gnostics said that “secret knowledge” of the spiritual world was the only way to sidestep the entrapment of the physical world.

Orthodox Christianity crushed Gnosticism without truly dealing with the contradiction that created the heresy in the first place. They put far too much emphasis on heaven. The truth is that heaven does not appear much in the Bible at all.

If we all go to heaven when we die, why would we want to be resurrected back into physical bodies? The resurrection of the body doesn’t make sense if the soul immediately goes to heaven upon death. Who would sign up to leave heaven? Only Jesus did, and it was a burden. If we are already in heaven when we die, why come back to face judgment in the end? It doesn’t make sense.

Heaven In The Old Testament

The Old Testament speaks very little about the idea of heaven. The word for heaven in ancient Hebrew is שמים or shamayim. This word refers to the skies and the stars and is often used in conjunction with the word for land. In this context, the word is used to describe all of God’s physical dominion (the skies and the land.) A derivative of this word can also be used to describe the place where God lives when his presence is not on Earth. God dwells in heaven, but it is not a place that the Jews believed that they could enter. The words “heaven” and “heavens” appear numerous times in the Old Testament but never describe where human souls go after they die.

Again, Jews believed that the soul must reside in the body, which is why the resurrection of the body is such an important part of Jewish and early Christian literature.

Many people like to point to the story in the Old Testament where the prophet Elijah is “taken up into heaven,” but this context only says that Elijah was brought up into the sky. Many believed that Elijah was simply moved to another place. They even went out and looked for him, and a letter from Elijah to a wicked king is recorded as having been written years after he was supposedly taken up into heaven. Elijah never went to the heavenly realms because they are not places that humans can go.

Bible Answers writes on this topic, saying:

As these passages show, a careful reading of the Scriptures shows that Elijah’s miraculous removal in a fiery chariot involved transporting him to another location in the area, not to eternal life in heaven.

Without this story, heaven is completely absent from the Old Testament. The same Old Testament Jesus taught and the same Old Testament that supposedly shows the original revelation of God. If God had nothing to say about heaven over multiple centuries and generations, why should we believe that it is an important cornerstone of our religion today?

Heaven In The New Testament

Jesus is the founder and perfector of the Christian faith. If heaven was such an important part of his plan, he would have spoken extensively on it. Instead, like the prophets before him, Jesus speaks little to none about heaven. Jesus speaks extensively about the Kingdom of God, but that kingdom is an earthly one. It is here. It is now. Living as followers of Jesus with hearts actively seeking God is the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus spells out exactly what eternal life is, and it is not heaven.

Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. — John 17:3

Jesus also says:

Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” — Luke 9:23

People must take up their cross daily in this life and follow Jesus now — not in heaven. Jesus was focused on the physical world, just as the Father is. Why ask people to take up their cross daily in this life if heaven is the real goal? If heaven is the real goal, people should only have to pick up their cross once like Jesus did. And indeed, many Christians erroneously believe that you only have to say something or do something once to be saved. But that isn’t what Jesus teaches. Jesus teaches us that following him and seeking God is a constant endeavor.

Jesus taught that there would be a final judgment in which the righteous would be allowed to dwell with God, and the unrighteous would be destroyed. Those with hearts for God, who accept the invitation, will be allowed to live in their resurrected bodies. The rest will face annihilation. (Not hell. Annihilation is being sent to oblivion, apart from God forever.)

Paul teaches the same thing.

Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. 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 15:49–52

Paul says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. The dead will rise to live with God, but that is not quite the same idea that most Christians hold of heaven.

Hebrews says the same thing:

Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment. — Hebrews 9:27

Humans die, then they sleep, and then, at the end, we will all be raised to face judgment. Jesus Christ, the perfect savior and sacrifice, will intercede on behalf of those who followed Him. The rest will stand on their own. The unrighteous will be sorted and perish, and the righteous will live on in new bodies.

Jesus says no one has ascended into heaven. No one.

No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven — the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. — John 3:13–15

Only Jesus has been to heaven. He is the only human who has experienced heaven. Jesus says that eternal life is in him and that knowing him is eternal life. Ironically, these verses immediately precede the verse that everyone knows by heart, John 3:16, but few people can recite John 3:13–15.

Christianity Is Not About Heaven

There are entire sects of Christianity devoted to the “sinner’s prayer.” The sinner’s prayer is a belief that a person can simply utter a few words in a moment of passion and suddenly be saved for all eternity. People who utter the sinner’s prayer are saved from hell, and they will go to heaven when they die. That is not what Christianity is about because Christianity is not about going to heaven. Christianity is about following Jesus with the goal of knowing God in this life. God wants to dwell with humanity in this creation, and sin prevents us from growing close to God. Jesus can remove the sin blocking us from God’s presence. In this life.

David and Jesus are held up as great examples of those that God loves. Both of them actively sought God and worked hard to find him in this life. Neither of them was obsessed with heaven, dying, or the afterlife. They were focused on finding God and seeking after him in their physical bodies. Jesus and David both wanted to dwell with God, know God, love God, and follow God. That is what we should strive to emulate.

Christianity is not about heaven. It has never been about heaven. It is not about saving an arbitrary number of souls to live in heaven. Making it about heaven cheapens the religion and simplifies a complex and ancient set of beliefs. The Bible is not focused on heaven, so why are we?

The only thing that would prevent this brand of heaven-centric Christianity from becoming a death cult is the belief that suicide is a sin. (Suicide is a sin because it unlawfully damages God’s physical creation. It is a violent act against a body that God created.) Without that barrier, what would prevent everyone from simply offing themselves to get to God?

Conclusion

Christianity is about following Jesus. Following Jesus allows us to grow close to God. God wants to grow close to us in this life. At the end of the age, God will resurrect everyone’s bodies, and those who have grown near him will be allowed to dwell with him, but not in the way that everyone thinks. Those people who get to dwell with God are the ones who are already dwelling with God in the present physical world (or are striving to). Heaven, in this context is a continuation of the ideal state of being, not a new state of being.

Everyone else will be destroyed and are thus denied access to God. But these people have already set themselves against God in this life and thus will continue to be denied access to God.

The idea that souls will go to heaven when you die and live eternally is a fabrication that switches focus from God to heaven. God wants us to know him in this life. Knowing God is eternal life. The privilege of knowing God is what we should all be striving for. The kingdom of God is here, and now it is not someplace far away that we can only go to when we die.

The modern idea of heaven invalidates much of the Bible. Why focus on the physical if heaven is the goal? Why would God torture us in a physical life if it ultimately doesn’t matter? Why is physical sin such a big deal if God can eliminate it all in heaven? Why did God send his son into the physical world if the physical world doesn’t matter?

The truth is that the idea of following Jesus in this life isn’t all that popular. Heaven is popular. The idea that humans can get an eternal reward for very little actual work on Earth is a tantalizing fabrication. Telling people that following Jesus allows us to get a glimpse of God the Father in this life is the ultimate reward, but it is not as enticing as promising them heaven.

Would it not be the most devious thing to twist God’s teachings to frame it about a fictional heaven in order to turn people away from God’s actual teaching and purpose?

Written by Grant Piper

Professional writer. Amateur historian. Husband, father, Christian.