In this scene from The Good Place, the gang arrives at the Good Place and finds that it’s even better than they imagined it would be. Flying puppies, the energy you had when you were twelve, and the joy of meeting people you’ve always wanted to meet—I mean, who doesn’t want to end up in a place like that? But what’s the Good Place actually like?  Is it like this? Or is it different somehow? What do you think—tell me, when you think of heaven, what do you imagine it will be like?

There are lots and lots of ideas about what the Good Place will be like. Some people imagine it will be endless parties and food, with as much fondue and froyo as you can eat (and you never have to worry about calories ever again)! Other people think of the Good Place as an eternal church service, where people wear robes while singing hymns forever and ever. Some imagine the Good Place as a luminous realm of clouds where people just hang out forever. Maybe you imagine heaven as a place filled with endless dogs. Or maybe you—like me—tend to envision the Good Place as an everything-always-going-right, never ending vacation with your favorite people from earth.  There are lots of creative and exciting ways we try to describe heaven. But which of them is correct? What will the Good Place actually be like?

That’s a significant question, the question we’re continuing our current little series here at Conciliar Post—The Good Place—with today as we continue to explore ideas about heaven, hell, and the afterlife. So far in this series, we’ve talked about how we need to be prepared for what happens after death and we’ve explored the Bad Place and the Medium Place. And today, we finally get to Good Place, where puppies fly, and everyone is happy!

So, what is the Good Place like? Well, like the Bad Place, Scripture says relatively little about the Good Place. There’s no one clear explanation of, “hey, this is what heaven is going to be like and this is how you should think about it.” Unfortunately, we don’t get anything that clear. But there are some things that we can piece together from what Scripture does say about the good side of the afterlife. And fortunately for us, each of the characteristics of the Good Place that we’re going to talk about today begins with the letter R. (Actually, they all begin with RE-, so above and beyond any average attempts at artful alliteration.)

Relational

So, what is the Good Place like?  First, the Good Place is Relational. The center of being in the Good Place is being with God. Jesus points to this in His words to the thief on the cross in Luke 23.43: Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise. Being with Jesus is the chief reward for the thief who was crucified next to Jesus. This is also the hope that Revelation 21.3 focuses on: Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. Being with God in the Good Place will mark the restoration of our full relationship with God—if you’re following Jesus right now, you’re not separated from Him, but your relationship right now pales in comparison to what it will be in the Good Place. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see Him face to face. (1 Corinthians 13.12) In the Good Place, our relationship with God—and others—will be what it should have been from the beginning.

In a way, we’re like astronaut Mark Watney in The Martian. If you’re not familiar with the book by Andy Weir or the movie by the same name, let me get you up to speed: in the near future, NASA has manned missions to Mars. And on one of these missions, a crewmember named Mark is separated from his team and is presumed dead when they evacuate due to a weather emergency. But Mark survives—and then must fight for survival alone on Mars for the next year and half with only rudimentary equipment and limited communication with Earth. It’s a great story. And toward the end of the story, there’s a moment when Mark is about to be rescued. He’s been alone for 564 days and then he hears it: another human voice. And he just breaks down and cries. Mark knew he was millions of miles away from other people—but it became all the more real to him once he realized he wasn’t going to be alone anymore. That’s the power of relationship, that’s the power of being with other people: it brings us hope and comfort and sanity amidst our loneliness.

But even more powerful than the feeling of being reunited with other people after 18 months alone will be experiencing the presence of God in the Good Place. What could ever be better than the God of the universe knowing you and wanting to be with you? That’s the core idea at the center of the Good Place: no longer will we be distant from God—instead, we’ll be in full relationship with Him.

Reassuring

The second thing we can know about the Good Place is that it’s Reassuring. The Good Place is a place of reassurance and hope.  In this world, we face disease, disaster, and death. We deal with sickness, disappointment, painful memories, broken bodies, unfaithful friendships, frustrating jobs, crushing finances, uncertain futures, and exhausting lives. But despite those challenges, the Good Place can reassure us—it can remind us that things won’t always be this way and that no matter how bad things are right now, we can have hope for a future that is peaceful and whole.

In Philippians 1.21-24, the Apostle Paul points us toward this reassuring hope of heaven when he writes, For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.  To die is gain, Paul says—what a curious statement, as if death is somehow better than life. But for Paul—and for millions of other followers of Jesus throughout history—the hope of experiencing God’s presence was a far greater good than dealing with the mess of our world. Because Jesus has come as King and destroyed the power of disease, disaster, and death through His own death and resurrection, the promise of the Good Place is reassuring. Like Paul, we want to be with God and free from troubles of this life.

Now, just because the Good Place reassures us about our future does not mean that we should be escapists. We shouldn’t think or act as if everything on earth is terrible and everything in heaven is just wonderful. That’s sometimes how people talk about what Paul is saying in Philippians—as if making it to the Good Place is the only thing that matters. But that’s not what Paul is saying.  Staying on earth is both more fruitful and necessary for Paul—he’s not trying to escape life on earth (as hard as it may be), he’s simply trying to keep the difficulties of life in perspective.  Sometimes we lapse into thinking “this world isn’t our home, we were made for heaven.” But that’s antithetical to what Scripture tells us—about heaven and about earth. We’ll talk about that more next week, but for now, know that the Good Place should reassure us of our future, not serve as an escape hatch.

Really Hard to Describe

Another characteristic of the Good Place is that it’s Really Hard to Describe. The little glimpses that we get of the Good Place in the Bible are often mysterious and confusing and challenging to make sense of. For example, consider the picture that John paints in Revelation 4.2-3, 5-8: There before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and ruby. [What, a person who looks like jasper and ruby?] A rainbow that shone like an emerald encircled the throne…. From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder. In front of the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits of God. [Who? What?] Also in front of the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal. [Okay, that I can imagine.] In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. [Nope, lost again.] The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying: “‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.”

Singing creatures with six wings? A God looks like red gemstones? Creatures covered in eyes all around? Is this a fever dream? Was John on drugs? What the heck is going on here? You’ll be pleased to know that this is one of the clearer pictures of heaven that the Bible describes for us!  What we’re seeing here aren’t John’s scientific field notes—they’re his struggle to put into human terms the wonder and transcendence of the Good Place. Whatever the Good Place is like, human imagination and language are stretched to their breaking point when people try to describe what it’s like there. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him. (Isaiah 64.4 LXX in 1 Corinthians 2.9 NLT)

Sometimes I hear people talk about the Good Place as if it’ll be boring—especially if you think of heaven as one big, long church service. Fortunately, nothing in Scripture even remotely gives that impression. In fact, the very opposite is true.  Have you ever had an experience so amazing that words just didn’t do it justice?  When I was younger, my family took a road trip out West. You know, your classic Family Vacation comedy plot: loading up the five kids in the big 15 passenger van and spending the better part of the month seeing the sights. One day, I was being particularly annoying about leaving our campsite in Yellowstone National Park to go to this not-at-all-as famous place nearby. Well, we pulled into this park and unloaded our bikes. And I started grumpily biking down the trail. And then I saw it: the Grand Tetons over a lake. It was incredible. Awe inspiring. This picture doesn’t remotely do it justice. Unless you’ve seen that kind of beauty, there are no words to fully capture the transcendence of that moment…. That is what the Good Place will be like. Not boring. Transcendently beautiful, unimaginably awesome in ways beyond our capacity to really explain!

What About NDEs?

Now, there’s an intriguing piece of evidence that supports Scripture’s difficulty in describing the Good Place: what we call Near Death Experiences. NDEs are experiences around what happens during or after death that are reported by people who are medically dead for a period before being resuscitated.  If you’ve seen the movie Soul, that’s a Near Death Experience: an out of body experience of part of the afterlife followed by a return to life. The Apostle Paul even records what seems like a NDE in 2 Corinthians 12.2-4. He writes, I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. That sounds like a pretty common account of a NDE, someone who got a little taste of the Good Place and then returned.

Now, Near Death Experiences don’t supplant what Scripture says—at best, they supplement it. But one of the consistent themes across NDE reports are awe-inspiring and powerful descriptions of a light-infused, loving, living God. To quickly share one of the many experiences that the John Burke collects in his fascinating book, Imagine Heaven, listen to how a man named Jeff describes what he experienced after he rolled his SUV while driving down the interstate: I was encircled with light, a bright-white light that seemed to be energized with pure, unconditional love. I was calm. Peace infused this almost tangible light. I realized that all the pain was gone. I was fine… Welcome. Everything is fine. That’s the Good Place.  To again be clear: you shouldn’t base your view of the Good Place on anecdotes (even well researched ones). But if you’re looking for some experiential evidence for what the Good Place might be like, I encourage you to look at the research on Near Death Experiences.

Restorative

Which leads to the fourth and final characteristic of the Good Place that I’m going to mention today: that the Good Place is Restorative. Whatever ills or evils befall us on earth, the Good Place will make them whole and right again. Hebrews 13 likens life on earth to camping—and life in the Good Place to being in a city. Now, I like camping as much as the next guy, but you cannot be living in St. Louis this week and tell me that you’d prefer to be outside camping in this heat instead of inside in your air conditioning. That’s the comparison that Hebrews makes between earth and the Good Place.

And I love what we hear about this restoration in Revelation 21.3-5: And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Don’t you want to experience that? Don’t you want a return to wholeness? Don’t you want to experience your life as you were created to be, without all the annoyances and pains and trauma and scars you bear? Don’t you want a life free of death and mourning and crying and pain? Don’t you want to be restored? That’s the promise of the Good Place!

And I want to be crystal clear here: to experience this—in order to experience the Good Place—you must follow King Jesus!  You only make it into the Good Place if you’re following Jesus. The restoration the Good Place offers is only possible if you’re following the King. If you haven’t made the decision to follow Jesus before—or if you need to renew your allegiance to the King—let me challenge you, let me plead with you to do that today. What are you waiting for?  When the give you allegiance to Jesus, you get the peace and the promise of a glorious future. You get freedom, you get a higher purpose, you get something to look forward to. And you get to experience the hope of the Good Place, where God will make all things new.

Is This the End?

This is the Good Place: a place that’s relational, reassuring, really hard to describe, and (ultimately) restorative. And this is all GREAT news! Even if we don’t know all the particulars (and even if there aren’t flying puppies), the Good Place sounds amazing!  But this isn’t the end of the story.  You might assume that this is the end; after all, we’ve talked about the Bad Place, the Medium Place, and now the Good Place. But this isn’t the end. No, no. We’ve covered the basics of life after death. But what if I told you, that’s not where the story ends? What if I told you that the Bible doesn’t just talk about the afterlife—but that it talks about the life after the afterlife? That’s what we’ll be exploring in our next post—I hope to see you then.

This post originally appeared as a message at Arise Church.

Image courtesy of NBC.