The Wide Arms of God (a Question about Heaven)
Do all people go to heaven? I got this question (and probably fifty like it) from a group of hundreds of brilliant teens I spent time with over the summer. But it isn’t a question unique to adolescence.
Behind this question, there’s usually a person. “Is my dad who just passed going to heaven?” “Is my uncle going to heaven?” “What about my mom, is she going to heaven?”
We’ll leave figuring out exactly what the Bible means when it says “heaven” for another day. But, let me start by saying that I don’t get to decide who goes to heaven. (That’s probably for the best because there would be WAY fewer people there.)
The Bible doesn’t approach eternity as some sort of trick question where if you don’t say a specific set of magic words you might accidentally fail the test.
For many of the people that ask this question, I find that they view God as a sort of divine bean counter that is doing his best to keep all the bad people out of eternity (usually the same people they wouldn’t let in if they got to choose). This kind of perspective sees God as someone who is trying to keep people out, trying to increasingly limit the population of heaven. But when you look at the Bible, that’s simply not the God you see.
Ok, yes, God does eject Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden after they sin. But from that point forward, we see a God who is on the move to reconnect. We see a God who keeps pursuing humanity over and over even after they let God down time after time. We go from covenants with a person to a family to a nation. God keeps drawing the circle wider and wider and wider. God keeps including more and more people.
Then, Jesus blows up the whole Jew/Gentile separation and flings the gates of heaven wide open to everyone regardless of their lineage! All people. Everyone. Regardless of who their family was or what they did in their past or how much money they have. Jesus opens up the family of God to the whole earth!
What we see in the Bible is a God who is constantly trying to include more and more people, not exclude them. That is important when we face these huge questions. We don’t get to decide. God does. And God isn’t trying to keep people out. God is trying to let people in.
With that in mind we look at the life of Jesus and try to see what Jesus asks of us. We could make a list a mile long, but it can be boiled down to an invitation that Jesus makes over and over to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways: follow me.
Jesus is inviting us wherever we find ourselves at the current moment to move our lives closer to the way of Jesus. Closer to healing the sick, closer to proclaiming the truth, closer to standing up for justice, closer to accepting God’s forgiveness, closer to forgiving others, closer to loving everyone.
The call to follow Jesus is at the same time easy to understand and difficult to accomplish. But that’s why it’s important to begin where we did. God isn’t trying to exclude us, God is trying to include us. God is trying to invite us into a life of holiness and communion with God that stretches from today into eternity.
I get it. It’s a complicated answer, but don’t the overly simplistic answers seem too simple to be true? For me, I look for an answer that recognizes the complexity of the world and approaches that complexity with love and grace. I hope this is that.
