As our focus is rewards and not heaven, I will limit my words and choose them carefully. Scripture, it seems, does the same. The data is limited, intended as a sketch. The beauty of a sketch is in its lack of detail, the capture of significant features, the omission of others, and the mere suggestion of what is unseen. Filling in the details of a sketch turns it into a cartoon, something less real; our mind is drawn away from imagining what could be there, to notice what isn’t. But a sketch, viewed as a sketch, points to something greater, something uncontainable, something … more. Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10 ESV). Eternal life will be more—more logical, more beautiful, more personal, more relational, more fulfilling, more joyful, more interesting … more. Time will not give way to timelessness but to timefullness; work will not give way to indolence but to vibrant activity, and earthly bodies will not give way to no–bodies or dis–embodies but new, imperishable bodies.

Ironically, while there is little description of the heavenly state, the Bible, along with human history, is inexorably driven toward it and the eschatological events that herald its arrival. There is a rushing forward in the New Testament, epistles written on the run and the lam, with constant reminders of the transience of the age: “the time is near” (Revelation 1:3 ESV); “the end of all things is at hand” (1 Peter 4:7 ESV); “the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:16 ESV). There is urgency, a constant looking to the clock, as “night is coming, when no one can work” (John 9:4 ESV). That a person could be “too heavenly minded” is, as they say, “not a thing.”

It is, fittingly, in the final chapter of Revelation where we’re given the most visceral sketch in Scripture of the life to come. In chapter 21, the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven to take its place on the terrestrial sphere, but only following the epoch–ending series of events that “must soon take place” (Revelation 1:1 ESV)—most notably a time of “great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world” (Matthew 24:21 NIV) and the “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13 ESV). Chapter by chapter events unfold until finally, in Revelation 21, we behold a heavenly city standing upon a heavenly earth, and this—a heavenly earth—is not an oxymoron but ultimate integration (perfection): God dwelling with humans, Christ united to his Body, heaven bound to earth, home with habitat, architecture with nature, spirit and structure, body and soul, form and function.

The image is a perfect mooring for the imagination carrying a degree of continuity with the world we know, a world of cities and gates and streets and people. And yet there is also a radical disjuncture from human experience “for the first heaven and earth had passed away” (Revelation 21:1 ESV) This is a city that “has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (21:23 ESV). But lambs are not lamps, and so this too is more symbol than snapshot. But what it offers is enough to ground and guide as we press on to consider heaven’s reward.