Cold Case Christianity: Four Things We Won’t Need in Heaven

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Four Things We Won’t Need in Heaven 

(But Ought to Pursue Here on Earth)

Posted: 16 Nov 2018 01:31 AM PST

As a Christian, I have a reasonable expectation of Heaven, based on the clear teaching of Scripture and the logical consequence of God’s nature.

Which is about as meaningful as the Calvinist saying "As a Calvinist, I have a reasonable expectation that God causes people to sin, based on the clear teaching of Scripture and the logical consequence of God’s Sovereignty".

I also anticipate a particular experience in Heaven based on the teaching of the Old and New Testament.

 Do you anticipate that time will operate in Heaven the exact same way it does on earth.  Every biblical description of heaven depicts the events there are taking place one after the other with no less temporal chronological progression than we find events taking place on earth.

I’m looking forward to what each of us will become when we are united with God.

You should.  God could have caused Adam and Eve to have "incorruptible" bodies you think Christians will get at the resurrection, and presto, Adam and Eve would have been no more likely to sin than any saint who is now in heaven.  If God can do something to ensure that freewilled sinners never actually sin (which is supposed to be the case after you get to heaven), he could have done the same with the original creation of Adam and Eve, and then, like the saints who are now in heaven, they'd be "free", but they'd be guaranteed to never sin. If you try to refute this analogy by saying the people who have already died and gone to heaven no longer have freewill, that can be allowed as long as you remain consistent with that theory, and admit that because God turns people into righteous robots when they enter heaven, he actually doesn't respect human freewill...which means, contrary to most apologists, God does not have a problem with using the "righteous robot" solution to dissaude people from sinning.   So all of that boring apologetics talk about how God is required to all freewill humans to choose good or evil merely so they can also authentically love him, is total bullshit.  If you think the dead saints who are now in heaven authentically love and worship god despite being unable to sin, then apparently you do not have to be capable of choosing evil, in order to be capable of authentically loving God.  That is, the old worn out "God gave Adam and Eve freewill, if he didn't allow you to sin, you couldn't authentically love him either, and forced love is rape" excuse is total bullshit.

God knew there was a way to get creatures to authentically love him without also giving them the ability to sin...but he rejected that option.  You don't need to be a Calvinist to have biblical justification for saying all human sin on earth is nobody's fault but God's.

At the same time, I recognize there are some earthly pursuits I will abandon in the next life. While many of our cravings and desires will be satisfied once we are reunited with the One who has created us in His Image, some needs will simply vanish once we leave this world. As we think about the future with God, let’s remember what won’t be needed in Heaven so we can live differently while we are here on Earth:

The Need to Have Faith

Faith is the mechanism through which we are saved, and although the nature of faith (as it is described in Scripture) is not blind, it does require us to trust in the most reasonable inference from the evidence Jesus provided, even though we don’t have first-hand access to Jesus or the eyewitnesses who wrote the Gospels:

Hebrews 11:1-2

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

In this life, we are asked to trust in something often unseen (God), on the basis of something that was seen (Jesus as He was described in the Gospels) and for which there is sufficient evidence (as observed in our universe and world). God’s “hiddenness” requires us to draw conclusions and inferences from evidence, but a day is coming when we will see him directly. In that day, faith (as we understand and experience it here on earth) will no longer exist. We will simply know.

Sorry, but Hebrews 11:1 says that faith constitutes evidence (i.e., faith IS the substance of things hoped for, faith IS the evidence of things not seen.   And Paul was very clear that the hope which saves is blind, otherwise (he argues) it wouldn't be "hope":

 24 For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees?
 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it. (Rom. 8:24-25 NAU)

 Wallace continues:

The Need to Study

We won’t find ourselves cracking the books in Heaven to have knowledge about God. We won’t be in seminary classes, trying to understand the complexity of the Trinity or the nature of God. In Heaven, our direct contact with the God of the universe will open our eyes to the mysteries we’ve been struggling to understand:

 Which must mean that because God doesn't kill you right now and take you to heaven right now, he must want you to continue struggling....despite his own rules which say if you get any of this theological bullshit wrong, you go to hell.

1 Corinthians 13:11-12

Now we see but a poor 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.

Our desire to learn will be fully satisfied in Heaven. Much of what we spend hours trying to master here on earth will be available to us immediately once we are in God’s presence.

One has to wonder how much sin would be preempted if God put forth himself the same amount of effort that pastors, scholars and apologists do to "explain" biblical matters.  

The Need to Comfort

We also won’t find ourselves crying on each other’s shoulder in Heaven. In fact, we won’t find ourselves crying at all. We won’t need each other’s comfort in difficult times because there won’t be any difficult times:

Revelation 21:3

And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He shall dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be among them, and He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”

 But the souls under god's altar appear to notice an injustice in god's delay of justice, despite their formally admitting god is holy and true, no different than our sensing that an earthly judge has done wrong in delaying justice, while we nevertheless couch our complaint in the formal wording "Your honor...."

 9 When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained;
 10 and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" (Rev. 6:9-10 NAU)

 Not exactly the reaction you'd expect from anybody whose is honestly "content" with the way the boss is handling things.  They sound more like children who don't understand why Dad is taking so long to get ready to go to McDonalds.

Our current struggles with sin (and the consequences we often experience as a result of our poor choices) will vanish in the next life. Better yet, our search for mercy and justice will be fully realized in God’s presence.

But Christians still have a duty to praise God for the times when other people foist unjust evil upon them:

 40 They took his advice; and after calling the apostles in, they flogged them and ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and then released them.
 41 So they went on their way from the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for His name. (Acts 5:40-41 NAU)

 In other words, if a Christian woman is raped by a non-Christian man who got mad at her for shrugging off his sexual advances with a biblical quotation or two, it would be spiritual immaturity for her to cry and become depressed, and it would be spiritual maturity for her to rejoice that she was counted worthy to suffer shame for Christ's name. 

And yet something tells me you aren't quite as stupid as biblical theology requires, and thus you do not remind the recently raped emotionally distraught Christian woman that her confusion, anger and depression are a sign of spiritual immaturity.

The Need to Reach Others

We won’t be planning missions trips in Heaven. We won’t be trying to figure out the best way to witness to the lost or reach those who don’t yet know Jesus. Truth is, there is only one chance to place your faith in Christ, and that time will have expired by the time we get to Heaven:

Hebrews 9:27-28

Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

Under your fundamentalist interpretation, you leave yourself no rational or reasonable justification for telling non-Christians to purchase your books or do any amount of study whatsoever, because you seriously believe that they are always a mere heartbeat away from the gates of an irreversible eternal hell. 

Wallace continues:

We die just once, and then we are judged. There is no second chance in Heaven, even though there are so many chances for each of us here on earth. This is the place where we are asked to trust the most reasonable inference from the evidence; to place our faith in what cannot be seen. Once it has all been revealed to us, the opportunities to do this will be gone.

For you to tell the atheist to check out your books or view arguments on your website, is for you to say they can safely delay the day of their repentance if they use up that time in such bible study.  But you don't actually know whether an atheist will or won't be killed as he drives to the local library to check out a book you wrote.  If you seriously believe eternal conscious torment in hell for such people is THAT urgent of a danger (i.e., no second chances after death), then the only way you can preach consistent with this extremist view is for you to tell atheists, skeptics and non-Christians that because they could die and seal their horrible fate at any moment, they need to repent and believe the gospel, now, RIGHT now.

That would be more consistent with the fundies who deny the possibility of any second chances after death...but it comes at a high price...you'd be asking non-Christians to make a decision about a very controversial complex matter with a quickness that forbids the least bit of preparation or study.  After all, if you tell the atheist to take the next week to study one of your books, they might die before they actually repent, and if there's no second chances after death, then the fact that they weren't a Christian at death, means it doesn't matter how interested in the gospel they were at the point they were killed:   they weren't saved at that time, hence they go to hell.

If the stakes really are that high, you are only encouraging atheists to believe falsely they can safely delay the day of their repentance when you tell them to "check out" any of your apologetics crap.  Apologetics and theology are complex, it takes more than a few weeks for the biblically illiterate atheist to be able to know enough to say with any degree or reasonable confidence which specific Jesus-salesman is correct.  But in those few weeks of bible study, they could die, and under your current belief, it doesn't matter how interested they were becoming in repenting...if they weren't already born again at the point of physical death, they suffer in hell for the rest of eternity, there's no second chances for anybody, ever, period.

There is simply no way to reasonably reconcile the theory that it is good to study biblical theology comprehensively before salvation to make sure you don't align yourself with a false gospel...with the other theory that says the more you delay "getting saved", the more chance you take of dying and having your fate irreversibly sealed forever.

The more I understand about the nature of Heaven (what I can expect and what I cannot), the more committed I am to an intentional life here on earth.

 Then I'd live to hear you debate a Calvinist.  You know, those fools who say they should use God's absolute predestination as license to sin or be lazy...but if they do, they must have been predestined by God to be a lazy or sinful Christian.

Some activities and pursuits will be unnecessary or irrelevant in Heaven;

One wonders how much sin would have been avoided after Adam and Eve's original sin, if God had magically made us so that we don't require food to continue physical life.  How much sin would be preempted if the concern to grow and consume food completely disappeared from human history?

You think God created the sexual drive in people and sin perverted this?  How much sexual sin would have been preempted had God chosen to make erectile dysfunction and lack of sexual drive a result of the Fall?

For that matter, could God simply just create individual human beings from scratch the way he did Adam, and thereby achieve the goal of filling the earth, but without needing to involving sexual desire to do it?

I think this is where you start in with the old excuse that Mormons find so blessedly convenient when they get their ass kicked all over hell and back: "God's ways are mysterious".

they’re only important while we are living our daily, temporal lives. As I get older, I’ve learned to do the things today I won’t be able to do later. Now is the time to run a marathon; I won’t be as physically able in the years to come. All of us have a “bucket list”; a series of temporal goals we want to achieve before the opportunity is lost forever. It’s time to rethink our “bucket lists” and embrace heavenly goals before we pass from this life and the opportunity is lost forever.

 Yup, you are highly inconsistent to pretend to love unbelievers, and then tell them to go "check out" the bible and your apologetics arguments.  It takes days and weeks and months for the average person with a life, to be able to do this, and in that time of checking things out, they might die.  If you truly love them, and if you truly believe they cannot safely delay the day of their repentance, and if you truly believe there are no second chances after death, you won't be telling them to check out your arguments, you'll be telling them they need to repent and believe the gospel now, right now.

I don't give a shit if the apostles did preach that way.  If they believed everything you did, and yet still felt comfortable giving unbelievers reasons to delay repentance (i.e., by telling them to go study the scriptures or listen to sermons), then the apostles' actions were inconsistent with their theology.

Now is the time to reason from the evidence and trust, to learn and defend, to comfort those in need, and to share the Gospel.

I'm taking my chances with the philosophers on Mars' Hill, who responded to Paul with

"...What would this idle babbler wish to say?..." (Acts 17:18 NAU)