Thoughts on Heaven: It will be more awesome than we can imagine

This blog post is a preface to a preface to some thoughts I have been praying and wrestling with God about. What will life in the New Heaven and Earth be like? As a child I remember being a little scared with the concept of Heaven because, to be honest, the idea of us floating around clouds with harps for an endless eternity sounded...boring. But God is not boring, and the more I learn about Him the more I am convinced of this. I remember finding comfort in the thought (perhaps this was God speaking) there will be baseball in Heaven (which is funny because I now think baseball is boring).

Our cultural image of Heaven, this place somewhere in the sky, all of us with halos and harps, is a gross underestimation of how awesome the New Heaven and New Earth will be. Heaven will be so much better than this feeble image. As best we can describe it, Heaven is the place where God (who is omnipresent) is; it  is the where He dwells. By place, I do mean Heaven will have the same three spatial dimensions we know here; Jesus in his resurrection body (a foreshadow of our own bodies to come 1 Cor 15:20) inhabited these spatial dimensions. This of course does not mean Heaven is restricted to those three dimensions.

An issue we finite creatures encounter when discussing Heaven is our ideas and descriptions are limited by our words; how can we define the infinite glory of Heaven with finite human words? This is why so much of theology is metaphorical. Now before you dismiss me as a heretic, hear me out. 

The metaphorical nature of theological concepts does not make them not true, what I mean is that such concepts as the truth of who God is, the Son's relationship to the Father, etc. are more true than what our limited words can express or our finite minds can comprehend. The Son and the Father are not only in a deep familial relationship with each other like a father and son, but they are one, and the metaphor of father and son is actually an understatement of their deep relationship, love, and unity. Jesus used the words "father" and "son" not because it perfectly describes Him and the Father, but because we can wrap our finite minds around these ideas; I understand what it is to have a father and to be a son. God and His awesome nature is too big for us to fully understand, this is just an aspect of our creature nature; God is God and we are not. 

This is why I think a reoccurring image used to depict Heaven is music (Rev 4:8-11). Have you ever listened to a piece of music which stirred up emotions or captivated you with its beauty and for a time, perhaps only a moment, you were transfixed by the experience? This, I think, is a better descriptions of what Heaven will be like than human words can say, which is why Scripture often uses music when describing Heaven. These passages do not mean Heaven will be one endless church service. Heaven will be more awesome than we can say or imagine because God is more awesome than we can understand.