I recently read C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, a meditation on heaven, hell, and the choices of the human heart. The narrator finds himself on the outskirts of heaven, watching as others from his same limbo-like existence are invited to continue toward God Himself. Yet what strikes him is how many turn back. They want to carry their grudges, their pride, even their possessions into eternity. When told they must leave those behind, they choose instead to return to the “Grey Town,” a shadow of hell. One woman, in particular, demands to see her dead son before anything else. She argues fiercely with the radiant spirit sent to guide her, unable to understand why she cannot simply be reunited with him on her own terms. But heaven is not a place where we drag our earthly loves and desires unchanged into glory. It is the place where everything, even our deepest loves, must be reordered around God Himself.
And that is the heart of Lewis’ unsettling picture: Heaven is not a stage for the worship of loved ones, leisure, possessions, or, perhaps most dangerously, ourselves. It is where we can finally divorce the self and fully immerse ourselves in God’s love. Worship is the ordering of our devotion, the loyalty of our hearts, the affections we give ultimate weight. Augustine once observed that sin is not always loving the wrong things but loving good things in the wrong order. Even the best gifts like family, comfort, health become idols when they claim first place in our hearts over the God who gives them.
Yet how often do we imagine heaven primarily as a space for reunion rather than a place of meeting? We long to see our loved ones, to escape earthly pain, to finally rest. These longings are not wrong. Scripture itself promises comfort, resurrection, and the wiping away of every tear. But if our picture of heaven stops there, we risk mistaking the gifts for the Giver. Jesus Himself warned, “Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matt. 10:37). He was not condemning our love for family but revealing that only in loving Him first will every other love be made whole. If our picture of heaven stops with us, we risk mistaking the gifts for the Giver. Heaven is not valuable because it restores what we lost. Heaven is heaven because God is there; because it is the eternal dwelling of the Creator with His people, the meeting place of worshipper and Worshipped in unbroken union.
This does not mean God will strip us of love for those dear to us. Rather, He will so transform our hearts that we will love them rightly: through Him, in Him, and because of Him. Our earthly loves will not diminish in heaven; they will be perfected, freed from every fear, possessiveness, and grief that now weighs them down. Though here lies the questions we must ask ourselves as believers: Do we long for God Himself, or only for the good things He gives? When the veil is lifted, will we rush first toward our people and our pleasures, or will our eyes be fixed on the One through whom all things were made, in whom every love and every good gift has its source? If heaven was nothing but us and God alone and together, would it be enough? History warns us to hold our expectations loosely. The devout in Jesus’ day—those who read the Scriptures, prayed daily, and ordered their lives around the Law—were precisely the ones who missed Him. The Messiah they received looked nothing like the Messiah they had imagined. He came not to the spiritually elite but to the broken, the doubting, the sinful, the sick. Their conceptions of holiness blinded them to Holiness Himself.
Who is to say our visions of heaven are any less fragile, any less prone to error? If we are not careful, we may find that our idea of paradise being comfortable, familiar, self-centered shares little with the kingdom prepared for us from the foundation of the world. Perhaps the first surprise of heaven will be how small our expectations were compared to the reality of God’s own presence filling all in all.
Lord, teach me to long for You above all else. No longer will I lift my eyes only to the sky, waiting for the day I stand before You face to face. Instead, I turn inward and ask You to remake my heart, to burn away the distractions, the idols, the shallow desires that dim my vision of Your glory. Fix my gaze firmly upon You, here and now, that my worship might begin long before eternity. You dwell within me as Mediator and King. Purify this temple of my heart until it beats only for You. And when the day comes that faith becomes sight, may I run first not to gifts or glories, but to the Giver Himself, the One in whom every longing finds its rest.
