Question from a reader:
You say that God DID create a perfect world, and humanity messed it up. So what’s going to stop humanity from messing up version 2, which is Heaven?
Answer from Doreen Button, EPM staff:
Heaven 2.0, or the New Earth, is different from the original Garden in some very important ways. Adam and Eve were innocents who, when given a choice, chose their own path with the help of the sneaky snake.
We are no longer innocent, yet we also face a choice: our kingdom or God’s? And we must make this choice before we die. Death ends our choices about whom we’ll serve.
“For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:3-4, ESV).
When Jesus died and we became His by believing the truth of His resurrection and submitting to His sovereignty, the part of our “flesh”—our old nature—inherited from our original parents was replaced by Jesus’ righteousness. We became, once and for all, His. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Corinthians 5:17, NIV).
But…we’re still stuck in that old flesh and bones body: “The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions” (Galatians 5:17, NLT).
…that is, until we believers are freed by death and reunited in the Resurrection. At that point, our new creation souls are joined by our new creation bodies fit for undying life in the new creation.
“’He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’ and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4, ESV). Since the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), no more death means no more sin. Those “former things” will be gone forever.
In The Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell, Paul Helm wrote, “The freedom of heaven, then is the freedom from sin; not that the believer just happens to be free from sin, but that he is so constituted or reconstituted that he cannot sin. He does not want to sin, and he does not want to want to sin. In this respect, he is like Christ, Who, though tempted, yet could not sin. If to have such a moral character is to be less than free, as many hold, then of course Christ is not free nor is God the Father. But it is a miserable delusion to suppose that only if God could sin, only if He could succumb to temptation, would He then be free.”
In this article, Randy explains much better than I can how sanctification finds its perfection in us once we’re resurrected and living on the New Earth: “Once we become what the sovereign God has made us to be in Christ and once we see him as he is, then we’ll see all things—including sin—for what they are. God won’t need to restrain us from it. Sin will have absolutely no appeal. It will be, literally, unthinkable. The inability to sin doesn’t inherently violate free will. My inability to be God, an angel, a rabbit, or a flower is not a violation of my free will. It’s the simple reality of my nature. The new nature that’ll be ours in Heaven—the righteousness of Christ—is a nature that cannot sin, any more than a diamond can be soft or blue can be red. God cannot sin, yet no being has greater free choice than God does.”
Keep seeking Him and His truth!
