Plato's Republic and More's Utopia are only earthly adumbrations of St. John's City of God. The representation of heaven as a city seems intended to suggest security from every foe, provision for every want, intensity of life, variety of occupation, and closeness of relation to others; or, as Hastings' Bible Dictionary, 1:446, puts it: “Safety, Security, Service.” Here, the greatest degradation and sin are found in the great cities. There, the life of the city will help holiness, as the life of the city here helps wickedness. Brotherly love in the next world implies knowing those we love, and loving those we know. We certainly shall not know less there than here. If we know our friends here, we shall know them there. And, as love to Christ here draws us nearer to each other, so there we shall love friends, not less but more, because of our greater nearness to Christ.
Zech. 8:5—“And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.” Newman Smyth, Through Science to Faith, 125—“As of the higher animals, so even more of men and women it may be true, that those who play best may succeed best and thrive best.” Horace Bushnell, in his essay, Work and Play, holds that ideal work is work performed so heartily and joyfully, and with such a surplus of energy, that it becomes play. This is the activity of heaven: John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” We enter into the life of God: John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” A nurse who had been ill for sixteen years, said: “If I were well, I would be at the small-pox hospital. I'm not going to heaven to do nothing.” Savage, Life after Death, 129, 292—“In Dante's universe, the only reason for any one's wanting to get to heaven is for the sake of getting out of the other place. There is nothing in heaven for him to do, nothing human for him to engage in.... A good deacon in his depression thought he was going to hell; but when asked what he would do there, he replied that he would try to start a prayer meeting.”
With regard to heaven, two questions present themselves, namely:
(a) Is heaven a place, as well as a state?
We answer that this is probable, for the reason that the presence of Christ's human body is essential to heaven, and that this body must be confined to place. Since deity and humanity are indissolubly united in Christ's single person, we cannot regard Christ's human soul as limited to place without vacating his person of its divinity. But we cannot conceive of his human body as thus omnipresent. As the new bodies of the saints are confined to place, so, it would seem, must be the body of their Lord. But, though heaven be the place where Christ manifests his glory through the human body which he assumed in the incarnation, our ruling conception of heaven must be something higher even than this, namely, that of a state of holy communion with God.
John 14:2, 3—“In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”; Heb. 12:14—“follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord.”
Although heaven is probably a place, we are by no means to allow this conception to become the preponderant one in our minds. Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” As he goes through the gates of death, every Christian can say, as Cæsar said when he crossed the Rubicon: “Omnia mea mecum porto.” The hymn “O sing to me of heaven, when I am called to die” is not true to Christian experience. In that hour the soul sings, not of heaven, but of Jesus and his cross. As houses on river-flats, accessible in time of flood by boats, keep safe only goods in the upper story, so only the treasure laid up above escapes the destroying floods of the last day. Dorner: “The soul will possess true freedom, in that it can no more become unfree; and that through the indestructible love-energy springing from union with God.”
Milton: “What if earth be But the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to the other like, more than on earth is thought?” Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát, stanzas 66, 67—“I sent my soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my soul returned to me, And answered ‘I myself am Heaven and Hell’ ... Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, And Hell the shadow of a soul on fire.” In other words, not the kind of place, but the kind of people in it, makes Heaven or Hell. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 341—“The earth is but a breeding-ground from which God intends to populate the whole universe. After death, the soul goes to that place which God has prepared as its home. In the resurrection they ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage’ (Mat. 22:30) = ours is the only generative planet. There is no reproduction hereafter. To incorporate himself into the race, the Father must come to the reproductive planet.”
Dean Stanley: “Till death us part! So speaks the heart When each repeats to each the words of doom; Through blessing and through curse, For better and for worse, We will be one till that dread hour shall come. Life, with its myriad grasp, Our yearning souls shall clasp, By ceaseless love and still expectant wonder, In bonds that shall endure, Indissolubly sure, Till God in death shall part our paths asunder. Till death us join! O voice yet more divine, That to the broken heart breathes hope sublime; Through lonely hours and shattered powers, We still are one despite of change or time. Death, with his healing hand, Shall once more knit the band, Which needs but that one link which none may sever; Till through the only Good, Heard, felt and understood, Our life in God shall make us one forever.”