Mary Slessor, an English missionary residing in West Africa, received word of the death of her mother and sister. She then wrote to a friend, “Heaven is now nearer to me than Brittan.” When I used to think of heaven, I would think of the wonderful biblical descriptions: the streets of gold, the beautiful colors, the tree of life, the end of sadness, sickness, and disease. I would picture a perfect world with complete harmony and ultimate fulfillment of my desire to know more about God. When Kathy’s dad, Freddie, passed away in 1978, we began to think about heaven more often. When my dad died in 1979, I began to think of heaven a little differently. It was a great place to go before (and, of course, it still is), but now I knew someone who was there. I had someone there. Then, when my Mom died in 1985, it became an even more interesting place with a deeper value to me for reasons other than the joys and pleasures I would enjoy when I got there. When my sister died at 48 years of age in 1993, heaven started to look more like home for me. Kathy’s mom died in July of 2012, and it added to the population of people we knew in heaven. There were others there that I had never met. My great-grandfather, who was a Danish Lutheran Minister in Copenhagen, Denmark, had gone to heaven years ago. I’ve wondered about him a lot. I think I’m beginning to understand what Mary meant. Home is where my loved ones are. It’s not a place.
I like it when the Bible says that Abraham was gathered to his people. Moses was also gathered to his people. It uses the same phrase for others in the Old Testament as well. It was applied to the whole generation of Israelites who died with Joshua. Judges 2:8-10 says, “And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers.” Some have argued that it simply means he died and was buried. When we read the story of Abraham’s death, it says he died, then he was gathered with his people. His body, then, was buried by his sons in the cave at Machpelah. As Maclaren says, “It is then the equivalent neither of death nor of burial. It conveys dimly and veiledly that Abraham was buried, and yet that was not all that happened to him. He was buried, but also ‘he was gathered to his people.’”[1]
At 77, I think that I have more friends and relatives in heaven than I do on earth. It means more to me to think of heaven as my home now. In her book, Who Walk Alone, Margaret Evening tells of a dream that helped her understand the nature of heaven and hell. She writes, “In the dream, I visited Hell, where the sub-Warden showed me round. To my surprise, I was led along a labyrinth of dark, dank passages from which there were numerous doors leading into cells. It was not like Hell as I had pictured it at all. In fact, it was all rather religious and ‘churchy’! Each cell was identical. The central piece of furniture was an altar, and before each altar knelt (or, in some cases, were prostrated) green-grey spectral figures in attitudes of prayer and adoration. ‘But whom are they worshipping?’ I asked my guide. ‘Themselves,’ came the reply immediately. ‘This is pure self-worship. They are feeding on themselves and their own spiritual vitality in a kind of auto-spiritual-cannibalism. That is why they are so sickly looking and emaciated.’ I was appalled and saddened by the row upon row of cells with their non-communicating inmates, spending eternity in solitary confinement, themselves the first, last, and only object of worship. The dream continued . . . but the point germane to our discussion here has been made. According to the teaching of the New Testament, Heaven is community. My dream reminded me that Hell is isolation.”[2] Going to heaven is going home. Going to hell is going to be alone.
[1] Maclaren, Alexander. 2008. Expositions of Holy Scripture. Heritage Educational Systems.
[2] Green, Michael P., ed. 1989. Illustrations for Biblical Preaching: Over 1500 Sermon Illustrations Arranged by Topic and Indexed Exhaustively. Revised edition of: The expositor’s illustration file. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.