Heaven

I received this book as a Father's Day gift and I'm not quite sure what I was expecting when I looked at the title. I suppose maybe a moderately dry theological treatise that would appeal mostly to the intellect rather than the emotions. Perhaps something that poured over the pages of Revelations or Ezekiel dealing with arcane details like the dimensions of the New Jerusalem and the spiritual meanings thereof.

So when I read the liner notes that suggested "...this may well be the single most life-changing book you'll ever read," I was more than a little skeptical and figured this would go down as the all-time biggest example of over-promising and under-delivering.

While it might be a bit of a stretch to say it was the *most* life-changing book I've ever read, I readily admit - it WAS life-changing. I will never look at heaven, or even this life, the same way again.

Perhaps like many, I assumed that the Bible had relatively little to say about the details of heaven - even though I've read through the Old and New Testaments several times. Frankly, I found myself wondering how the author could fill nearly 500 pages on this topic without engaging in rampant speculation or page after page of minutiae.

I think most people, if they are quite honest, have turned heaven into a kind of cosmic retirement home - peaceful but not what you'd call "exhilarating". Another view of heaven I've often heard repeated is one long, never-ending worship service where we spend eternity engaged in a single activity. Now, nobody likes a rip-roaring worship service more than I do with good music, exhilaration, dancing, and all the other aspects of creative worship. But, let's face it. If that's ALL we're going to be doing in heaven, it would eventually get boring. A bit like sex - I like it as much as the next person, but a 24/7/365 diet would render even it boring at some point.

Alcorn challenges us to think about heaven more as a return to Eden...about what life would have been like had sin never entered the world. A place where people do the things they were created to do - run, sing, compete in athletics, paint, learn, sculpt, write, read, debate, build cities, develop new technologies, travel, explore, eat, tell jokes, love, study, compose and perform music, garden, and every other field of human endeavor. Alcorn also challenges to think of all these things for what they really are: a form of worship. And before you dismiss this view of the afterlife as almost blasphemous because its so - so *earthly*, let me just encourage you to give Alcorn the chance to make his case biblically. He'll do it. (Hint: if we are supposed to be disembodied spirits playing harps on fluffy clouds, why does the Bible say God is going to create a "new earth"? Is it just for show...or maybe...just maybe, is it supposed to be INHABITED?)

The more I thought about this, after getting over the initial auto-immune response that tends to reject this view in favor of an over-spiritualized heaven, the more it made perfect sense. It wasn't so much an "Aha!" moment as a "Well DUH!" moment. The analogy Alcorn uses is the "fish out of water" comparison. If you take a fish out of the environment he was created to live in, just how fulfilled do you think it would be? In the same way, if you take man - a physical being made to enjoy the physical world - out of this environment and tell him his eternity will be some kind of ethereal place of spiritual contemplation, wispy clouds, and wind chimes, it's pretty hard to get passionate about making it your final forwarding address.

Alcorn does an outstanding job of showing that heaven is a place we'll WANT to be. He dispels the myths by using the Bible - not just conjecture - to show us what it will really be like, so for those who are concerned that this can't possibly be a book with much more than speculation, rest assured that he'll buttress it all with a solid biblical foundation.

Some will no doubt relegate a book on heaven to the "by and by" category. "Yes," they'll reason, "it's probably a great read, but isn't focusing so much on heaven a form of escapism - living in the future rather than dealing with the present?" Or, like myself, they'll wonder if the liner notes aren't over-promising when they claim it will be "life- changing." After all, doesn't "life changing" have connotations of changing the here and now - not the hereafter?

To which I can only respond: read the book. You'll see for yourself that it doesn't under-deliver.