space, and dimension of God’s creation, where God’s will and only God’s will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be.
On earth, lots of wills are done.
Yours, mine, and many others.
And so, at present, heaven and earth are not one.
What Jesus taught,
what the prophets taught,
what all of Jewish tradition pointed to
and what Jesus lived in anticipation of,
was the day when earth and heaven would be one.
The day when God’s will would be done on earth
as it is now done in heaven.
The day when earth and heaven will be the same place.
This is the story of the Bible.
This is the story Jesus lived and told.
As it’s written at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21: “God’s dwelling place is now among the people.”
Life in the age to come.
This is why Jesus tells the man that if he sells his possessions, he’ll have rewards in heaven. Rewards are a dynamic rather than a static reality. Many people think of heaven, and they picture mansions (a word nowhere in the Bible’s descriptions of heaven) and Ferraris and literal streets of gold, as if the best God can come up with is Beverly Hills in the sky. Tax-free, of course, and without the smog.
But those are static images—fixed, flat, unchanging. A car is a car is a car; same with a mansion. They are the same, day after day after day, give or take a bit of wear and tear.
There’s even a phrase about doing a good deed. People will say that it earns you “another star in your crown.”
(By the way, when the writer John in the book of Revelation gets a current glimpse of the heavens, one detail he mentions about crowns is that people are taking them off [chap. 4]. Apparently, in the unvarnished presence of the divine a lot of things that we consider significant turn out to be, much like wearing a crown, quite absurd.)
But a crown, much like a mansion or a car, is a possession. There’s nothing wrong with possessions; it’s just that they have value to us only when we use them, engage them, and enjoy them. They’re nouns that mean something only in conjunction with verbs.
That’s why wealth is so dangerous: if you’re not careful you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.
In the Genesis poem that begins the Bible, life is a pulsing, progressing, evolving, dynamic reality in which tomorrow will not be a repeat of today, because things are, at the most fundamental level of existence, going somewhere.
When Jesus tells the man that there are rewards for him, he’s promising the man that receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.
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