Is there sorrow in heaven?

Watch the complete sermon here: https://www.bridges.church/messages/joy-2-corinthians-4-7-18-6-4-10/

Hey, thanks for your questions related to our recent sermons. This last week we talked about joy. So joy is not the absence of sorrow, but joy is deeper than sorrow. And ultimately our joy can be rooted unshakably in the resurrection of Jesus and what it means for our resurrection to come and the world to come, that God will remake this place in a way that fixes all the wrongs and fixes them in a way that is better than if they had never been broken in the first place. And so the question comes in this week, since joy is not the absence of sorrow, is there sorrow in heaven?

We picture heaven as this very joyous place. But if we can have joy and sorrow at the same time, is there sorrow in heaven? And really it depends on what you mean by heaven. There is, of course, a sense, we believe, that absent from the body, present from the Lord. 2 Corinthians 5, when we, the moment we die, we are in God’s presence in some kind of spiritual existence.

We don’t, I would not teach that we go to some kind of soul sleep where we’re unconscious until Jesus comes back. Because, you know, not only are we absent from the body, present from the Lord. Hebrews 12 talks about that, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, right? So there’s somebody watching us.

There’s an awareness of what’s going on at the earth. Mark 12 Jesus says, God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. There is a sense in which Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, who he mentions in that passage, they are still living. They are conscious. So after death, there is this conscious existence with God in a spiritual plane.

We are living in heaven the moment that we die, but that heaven is not the end of the story. The end of the story is new heavens, new earth, talked about in Isaiah, Revelation 21, right? We have, our eternal state is an embodied existence. And so that’s a new world to come and so if you’re talking about the heaven that we experience, right, when we die before Jesus comes back, there does seem to be mourning in that heaven.

Revelation 6:9,10, there’s these martyrs who have been slain, and they’re under the altar of heaven, and they are crying out, saying, when is all this going to get fixed? They’re upset, they’re looking at the world and they’re not happy about it. Again, here we are. That’s more evidence. Revelation 6, that there is at the moment of death, we are absent from the body presence with the Lord.

So we’re pretty certain that the moment we die, we’re with the Lord, but because they’re still looking at what’s happening in the earth, they’re still mourning at that point. But then later, new heaven’s new earth, Revelation 21:4. It says, God will wipe every tear from every eye. So, okay, it means there’s tears in heaven at that point, but right after that, right after he wipes every tear from every eye, it says there will be no more crying or mourning or pain before the old order of things has passed away the new order has come.

And so at that point, Revelation 24, onward into infinity, there is no more crying or mourning or pain or sorrow, for the old order of things has gone. And at that point, when everything is fixed, that these martyrs under the altar we’re crying out about, in Revelation 6, it’s now fixed. And it’s fixed in such a way that we rejoice over its mending, in a way that we would not rejoice if it had never been broken in the first place. And I imagine we will still have memory of how it was broken. But that memory will actually bring us joy, not sorrow, because of how it was fixed.

And we will laugh and we will celebrate forever. So is there sorrow in heaven, in the temporary spiritual heaven before Jesus comes back? Yes, Revelation 6, but in the eternal new heavens and new earth, no, no mourning or crying or pain for the old order has gone. Thanks for the question.

We’ll see you next time.