"But I don't wanna go to Heaven yet!"

An older woman is having a conversation with a younger woman, perhaps her granddaughter. The older woman has had a hard life. She has endured loss, suffered pain and hardship, and lately her thoughts have turned to Heaven. She talks to her granddaughter often about how she can't wait to see Jesus and her loved ones who've gone before. Her voice always gets a little quaver in it when she talks about Heaven and streets of gold. She can't understand why her granddaughter does not share her enthusiasm. From her granddaughter's perspective, there is still so much life to be lived. The future is bright. She has plans to go to college, have a career, get married and have babies. Sure, she wants to go to Heaven someday when she dies, but why should she want to go to Heaven just yet, when life is waiting to be lived?

You've probably heard variations of this conversation. You may have been on one or even both sides of this dialogue and made similar arguments, depending on how long your life has been and how many hardships you have suffered.

Kenny Chesney writes the following lyrcis in his song, "Everybody Wants to Go To Heaven,"

Everybody wants to go to heaven

Get their wings and fly around

Everybody want to go to heaven

But nobody wants to go now

Someday I want to see those streets of gold in my halo

But I wouldn't mind waiting at least a hundred years or so

Our level of satisfaction with this life will influence our level of desire for the next life. Tough times forge Christians into soldiers for the Kingdom. Aware that their life is but a breath, they direct their focus into eternity. Easy times make for Christians who plan for vacations and retirement. The eternity-focused Christian sees their earthly-focused brother as carnal, where the earthly-focused Christian accuses their eternity-focused brother as an escapist, too heavenly-minded to be any earthly good.

What is heaven? It's where God lives and where the angels live. John 14:1-3 says, "“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also."

Jesus promised that He is preparing a place for us in Heaven. Some versions translate "rooms" as "mansions." The Book of Revelation describes a great city with gates made of a single pearl and streets of gold. Artists have painted glorious pictures of Heaven, full of white light and glistening gold which have decorated chapels and cathedrals for centuries.

Jesus said He is coming to take His people, those who believe in Him, to be with Him. If we die before He comes to get us, our spirits will go to be with the Lord right away, but at the Rapture, before Jesus comes to judge the world, all the rest of the Christians who are still alive will be taken away to safety in Heaven until the end of the seven year Great Tribulation. So all of us will live in Heaven for at least seven years, and longer if we die before the Rapture.

Mansions.

Pearly gates

Streets of gold.

Angels singing songs of glory.

Why doesn't everyone want to go there?

Warren Zeiders writes in "Outskirts of Heaven,"

Lord, when I die I wanna live

On the outskirts of Heaven

Where there's dirt roads for miles

Hay in the fields and fish in the river

Where there's dogwood trees and honey bees

And blue skies and green grass forever

Lord, when I die, I wanna live in the outskirts of Heaven.

Zeiders hits a nerve in his song. The ambivalence many people feel towards streets of gold is not because we don't want to see Jesus, it's simply because we were made for earth.

When God created mankind, He didn't put Adam and Eve in a golden mansion. He put them in a garden, with trees and animals. Eden was a paradise. Did you know that a paradise simply means a garden, usually a walled-in place with lots of trees and animals? When Jesus said to the thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise," did you catch that He didn't say, "Today you will walk on streets of gold and play a harp on a cloud?"

The original paradise was Eden, and it was made as a place where God could be with us. This was the place where Heaven met Earth. It was on the Holy Mountain of God, and a place where God and the the angels could intermingle with humans. Eden contained the Tree of Life and was the perfect habitation for mankind until their disobedience brought sickness, sin, and death into the picture and separated us from God.

We don't have the privilege of knowing what the world was like before sin. Walking outside, away from the glare of computers and the manufactured climate of the indoors brings back the wonder of God and creation to my mind. I watch the ladybug larvae on the picnic tables outside my workplace and wonder at the miracle of how those funny looking bugs turn into bright red spotted beetles. I look at the towering oak trees and I am amazed at how they got their start from an acorn, and how their magnificent trunks and limbs and leaves were fed and grown into existence on sun and rain. My soul connects with God in that moment, even as I am reminded that creation still groans, longing for redemption, as I smack the bugs and wipe away the sweat from my forehead.

Can you imagine how the world must have been before? A world without thorns and thistles, without parasites and allergies and sunburns? Sin messed up everything. Jesus came to die to break the curse of sin, but it's not been fully realized yet. Sin and death are still the way of the world, and will be until He returns again and makes all things new.

The Bible teaches that Jesus, or Yeshua (His Hebrew name) will fulfil His promises to Israel and that the Jewish people, halfway through the Great Tribulation (during which we raptured Christians will be safely in Heaven with God) will finally recognize that He is their Messiah. At the end of the tribulation, Jesus will return to earth with us, and He will set up an earthly Kingdom and we will rule with Him for a thousand years. He will rule with a "rod of iron," the Bible says.

Perfect justice. A perfect government. It's going to be a new golden age. Regardless of how you feel about Heaven, Scripture is very clear you've got a thousand years here on earth in the future. Will it look the same? Well, it's probably going to need some reconstruction. After seven years of plagues, I imagine Jesus is going to be putting a lot of people to work helping to fix the place up. Or maybe He'll do it miraculously. I don't really know. I do know it's the same earth, because the New Heaven and New Earth aren't created until after the thousand year reign. I really do hope that Jesus is going to do something about the mosquitoes during the Millennial reign, but I don't have any scriptural backing for that one. I just know He's in charge, Satan is locked up, and it's going to be pretty grand.

At the end of the thousand years, there's one last rebellion after Satan has been set loose for a time. Jesus will put that rebellion down, and then the New Heaven and New Earth are created. Notice that there's a new earth, too--not just a new heaven! The New Jerusalem--that heavenly, golden city with the pearly gates we read about in Revelation, will be lowered from Heaven onto the new earth! We aren't going up there--up there is coming down here! I picture it suspended between Heaven and Earth, like a bridge from one to another. It will be like a new Eden. The tree of life will be there. God will dwell with us just like He dwelt with Adam and Eve in the garden. It will be paradise restored, the way it was meant to be.

There will be some differences between the new Eden and the old. The Bible says that in the resurrected age, we won't be given in marriage. Marriage is good. It was part of the original creation. God said that it was not good that man should be alone, even though God Himself walked with Adam during the cool of the day. God created Eve as a suitable companion for Adam.

The command to be fruitful and multiply was also given before sin entered the world. Adam and Even were the only two people alive, and part of their job was to fill the earth with more people. Childbirth won't be needed on the new earth since there will already be lots of people and they will never die.

Of course there's so much more to marriage than childbirth. James and I don't have any children together, and since we are a little further along in life it's not likely we are going to, but we love being married. I enjoy having a life partner and companion. My life is so much richer with him in it. I like being married and I don't want to be alone.

Since God Himself said that it is not good for man to be alone, I have confidence that the New Heaven and New Earth is not going to relegate us all to a lonely existence. What will our relationships look like? We simply don't know. However, that's okay. I don't think Jesus spelled it out for us because we don't have the capacity to understand it yet. Like 8-track players, cordless phones, and PDAs (personal digital assistants), marriage as we know it will be obsolete, but that doesn't mean we will be alone. It just simply means that the way humans interact with each other will be better. That part we're just going to have to accept by faith.

Someday our current life will come to an end through death. Or, if we escape death through the rapture, we will be instantly changed. We will have new bodies that will never die or be in pain or get old. Someday, all that is wrong will be made right. Our life will be full of meaning. We will be engaged in work that is fulfilling and exciting and full of purpose, without the frustrations and brokenness we have gotten used to. Our relationship with God will be perfect. Our relationships with each other will be perfect.

The next time you hear someone say they don't want to go to Heaven, tell them not to worry. Life in the new world is going to seem a lot more familiar than that mural on the cathedral wall. Someday when we are enjoying life in the new age, sitting on the banks of a river on a beautiful, sunny day, with perfect white clouds in the blue, blue sky, maybe we'll think back to our old life. We'll remember what it was like to get sunburned and eaten up by chiggers, and we'll thank God for restoring creation. We'll watch the baby zebras and lions frolic together and we'll praise God for everything He has done for us to make us such a wonderful place that feels more like home than the old earth ever could have.