By praying to our Father “in heaven,” wrote
the Puritan divine Thomas Watson, we learn that “we are
to raise our minds in prayer above the earth.”
That remains an important lesson, for modern understandings
of prayer are as diverse as modern understandings of God.
Those who believe themselves to be divine will consider prayer
nothing more than internal dialogue. Those who worship the
earth will pray to rivers, trees and mountains, earth, wind
and fire.
But those who accept the Biblical revelation that God fills
and yet transcends the cosmos will, when we pray, raise our
minds above internal obsessions and idolatrous devotion to
creation to the very throne of God. Drawing his disciples out
of themselves and away from idolatry may well have been what
Jesus had in mind when he taught us to pray to “Our
Father, who art
in heaven.”
Heaven is a place
When we pray to God “in heaven” we acknowledge that
heaven is a place, not just a symbol, myth or metaphor.
Moments before he was stoned by a furious mob, Stephen, “full
of the Holy Spirit, looked
into heaven and saw the
glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God”
(Acts 7:55). As Wayne Grudem notes, “He did not see mere
symbols of a state of existence. It seems rather that his eyes
were opened to see a spiritual dimension of reality which God
has hidden from us in this present age, a dimension which
nonetheless really does exist in our space/time universe, and
within which Jesus now lives in his physical resurrection
body.”
That heaven is a place also underlies both Jesus’
promise to his disciples, “In my Father’s house are
many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am
going there to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2) and
his ascension (Acts 1:9-11).
Of course, to recognize heaven as a “place” is not
to confine it within material or spatial limitations. Instead,
heaven is perhaps better conceived as a spiritual place, a
reality not immediately accessible to human perception or
investigation yet no less real because of our incapacity.
Heaven is instead the realm where reality is most real, where
God is most fully present.
Descriptions of
heaven
“Heaven itself is ineffable, beyond words,” writes
Jeffery Burton Russell, “Yet we have no way of discussing
heaven except in the only speech we know, human language.”
He notes that to express heaven’s reality we use “the
language of earthly delight: sound (melody, silence,
conversation); sight (light, proportion); taste and smell
(banquet, sweetness); touch (embracing the beloved).”
Ultimately, however, heaven cannot be defined both because it
is unique and because it lies beyond our experience. “No
eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God
has prepared for those who love him” (I Cor. 2:9).
Other Biblical references similarly describe heaven by
way of negation: Heaven will have no temple, for God himself
will be its temple (Rev. 21:22). There will be no marriage in
heaven (Matt. 22:30). Heaven will have no night or day, since
God himself will be its light (Rev. 22:5). There will be no
suffering in heaven (Rev. 21:4).
Yet Scripture does include tantalizing glimpses into the
reality of heaven. Heaven includes a multitude that no one can
number (Rev. 7:9). Those in heaven feast on spiritual food and
drink the water of eternal life (Luke 14:14; Matt. 26:29; Rev.
21:6; 22:1-2). There will be treasures and rewards in heaven
(Matt. 6:6, 18-20; I Cor. 3:8). Of these rewards Donald
Bloesch observes, “We are accepted into heaven on the
basis of faith alone, but we are adorned in heaven on the
basis of the fruits of our faith. … there will be
distinctions in heaven, though no unlawful discrimination.”
Coexistence
But perhaps the most important lesson to learn about heaven,
certainly the lesson that has the most impact on our prayers,
is that heaven is not merely a future reward but a present
reality, a spiritual sphere coexisting with the world of space
and time.
At the outset of Revelation, John passed through a “door
standing open in heaven” (Rev. 1:1) into God’s
presence, where the “prayers of the saints” rise up
before God’s throne, an assurance of the vital connection
between our earthly activities and the realm of God (Rev.
8:3-6).
We have this assurance because as Christians we are united
with Christ, we are “in Christ,” and as such we
already belong to heaven. Indeed, God has already “raised
us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly
realms in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6).
Our lives even now are “hidden with Christ in God”
and therefore “the things above” are to be the focus
of our attention, the goal of our lives while on earth (Col.
3:1-3). Although we live on earth, we are citizens of heaven
(Phil. 3:20). As we fix our gaze on Christ above, the life of
heaven becomes an increasing reality as we are “being
transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory”
(II Cor. 3:18).
In heaven, we are seated with the ascended Christ, who himself
is at right hand of the one he taught his disciples to call “Our
Father in heaven.”
Christian prayer
From heaven, God the Father oversees all creation (Psalm
33:13-14). Thus, to be instructed to pray to our Father in
heaven is to be invited to adopt God’s heavenly
perspective.
“When we look at things,” write William Willimon and
Stanley Hauerwas, “our vision tends to be myopic. Most of
the time it is difficult to see much beyond ourselves. God
tends to take a larger view.” Or, as the writer of
Ecclesiastes puts it, “God is in heaven and you are on
earth” (Ecc. 5:2), a not-so-subtle reminder of the
meaninglessness of life lived “under heaven,” that
is, lived from a purely material perspective, apart from the
spiritual realities of heaven.
In contrast, those holding citizenship in heaven are charged
to bring the earthly and heavenly spheres into alignment in
our own lives, especially in our prayers. Either we conform
ourselves to the world’s pattern (“let the world
squeeze us into its mold” in J.B. Phillips’
paraphrase of Romans 12:2) or we allow God to transform us by
renewing our minds, in part by “rais[ing] our minds in
prayer above the earth.”
Praying to God who is “in heaven” also leads us away
from the temptation to capture and confine God within the
realm of our own experience. That God is in heaven means that
he cannot be contained in structures made with human hands.
God is with us – presently through his Holy Spirit,
supremely in Jesus Christ – yet he is wholly other. God
is intimately involved with his creation, yet not identical
with it. We do not pray to creation but to our Creator.
Extravagant gifts
Finally, Willimon and Hauerwas remind us that “The God
whom we have been taught by Jesus to address as ‘Our
Father’ is the one who rules the whole cosmos …
Because we call God the Father who is ‘in heaven,’
we are bold to pray for such absurdly extravagant gifts as
bread for the world, peace among the nations, healed
marriages, cured cancer, rain.”
Our prayers can be strangled by a narrow view of God. When God
is squeezed into the mold of science or modern liberal
theology, the Christian’s legitimate desire boldly to
approach the throne of God slowly asphyxiates.
We pray for extravagant gifts only when we remember that we to
pray “Our Father, who art in heaven.”
For
Discussion
1.
Do you spend much time thinking about heaven?
If so, is there a longing in your heart for heaven? If
not, why do you think this longing is absent?
2. What are ways
of storing up treasure in heaven rather than on earth?
3. What positive
effects on your prayer life could result from thinking
more about heaven?
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Additional Resources
Donald Bloesch, Evangelical
Essentials, Vol. 2 (Peabody Mass.: Prince Press,
1998); Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1994); Jeffrey Burton Russell, A
History of Heaven (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999); Thomas Watson, The Lord’s Prayer
(Carlisle, Pa.: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993 [orig.
1692]); William H. Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, Lord
Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and Christian Life
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1996).
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