What Will We Do in Heaven

What Will We Do in Heaven?

Dr. John Ankerberg: Erwin, another question that people oftentimes ask is, “What are we going to be doing in heaven? What is our occupation going to be?” What would you tell them?

Dr. Erwin Lutzer: Well, it’s not going to be like that Sunday School child who thought that heaven was going to be like sitting in a church service where you begin in the hymnal with number one, you sing all the way through, and when you’re finished, you start over again and sing the same songs.

Heaven is not going to be boring. God is going to have work for us to do. For example, it says, first of all, that we’re going to worship God. Fifth chapter of Revelation places God right in the midst of the throne and then it talks about the elders worshiping Him and it talks about all of us joining together to worship Him. What a wonderful experience that is going to be!

You know, I think of the Church—and I’m interested in Church History and maybe you are, too. You read it and what do you find? Doctrinal heresies. You find moral failures. You wonder how in the world the Church survived all these centuries. Well, it wouldn’t have unless Jesus Christ were behind it and building His Church. Won’t it be wonderful to finally be all together, believe the same thing, united with one mind? And what you have when the Church is finally in the presence of God, one Church all worshiping together, all praising the same Lord, united in one faith. I look forward to that. It’s going to be a wonderful occasion.

But also, keep in mind that we are going to serve Him. Heaven is going to be a place of activity. In fact, the text says here, “And they shall see His face; His name shall be on their foreheads and there shall no longer be any night and they shall not have need of the light of the lamp nor of the light of the sun because the Lord God shall illumine them and they shall reign forever and ever.” [Rev. 22:4-5]

You say “Well, what is it that we’re going to reign over?” The Bible says that we’re going to judge angels. It means that we’re going to rule over the angels.

By the way, John, I think this is what makes the devil so angry is to think that sinners like us who fell, just as he fell, that we who were plunged into sin, God redeemed us, lifted us up, made us heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ, and we shall be above the heavenly hosts, a position which he once occupied. We’ll be above that. And we shall rule over angels.

I tend to think, too, that the universe is a big place. Hundreds of trillions of stars. The experts tell us there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on the sea­shores of the world. I don’t know about you, John, but I can’t believe that God would create all of these without each one of them giving Him glory. Who knows? I don’t know. Maybe we are going to be ruling over galaxies and have huge responsibilities in the universe. Travel is going to be effortless. We’ll be able to travel from one place to another even as Jesus did, and therefore God is going to have responsibilities for us and we shall serve Him. We shall serve Him. And that’s the kind of service that is going to be free of care. We are not going to have to work.

Of course, we have to combine all of these wonders with the fact that we will have an indestructible, eternal body, as we’ve already learned. And no one will comment on our age, John. Nobody is going to say, “John, you don’t look as youthful as you used to,” be­cause we will be eternally young.

I love the poem that Dr. Henson wrote. “The stars shall live for a million years and million years and a day, but God and I shall live and love when the stars have passed away.” Wow. All of that awaits us.

But if you do not know Jesus Christ as your Savior, what you must do is believe that when He died on the cross—listen carefully—He did all that ever will be necessary to reconcile you to God. If you give up trusting yourself and believe in Him, you’ll belong to Him forever. “For as many as believed on Him, to them He gave the power to be the sons of God, even to those who believe on His name.”