IF UNITED IN HEAVEN...

There are no divisions in the grave, nor in that world which lies beyond it! There our divisions must come to an end! We must all unite there! Would to God that we could find it in our hearts to put an end to our short-lived divisions here. —Thomas Campbell in Declaration and Address

We’ve all heard that joke about a new arrival being escorted about heaven. When he sees a group of redeemed ones huddled together in a comer of heaven, he asked his attending angel who they might be. “Quiet,” the angel cautions. “They are Church of Christ folk and they think they are the only ones here.”

The joke has the advantage of being accommodating, for it can be adapted to other sincere but strait-laced souls beside the Church of Christ, whether Southern Baptists, Missouri Synod Lutherans, or Roman Catholics. But it is really a bad joke, for no one who goes to heaven is going to suppose that he and his are the only ones there. Heaven is a matter of the church on earth at last assembling with the church in heaven and becoming that “great multitude” that serves and praises God throughout eternity.

Yet the joke has an important redeeming quality. We laugh at it because we know that it is going to be different in heaven from the way it is on earth. We will not be divided into sects there. There will be no divisions there. Indeed, we shall be the united assembly of Jesus Christ, preserved for his eternal kingdom. The above quote from Thomas Campbell is appropriate. If we shall be united there, why do we have to be divided here?

Campbell’s plea for unity in this quotation is persuasive. He begins at an unlikely place, the grave. That is where altercations, confrontations, and factious disputes all end. A short time before his own death, my friend Carl Ketcherside wrote to me about the passing of Reuel Lemmons, a fellow editor with whom he had had sharp exchanges through the years. He recalled the disagreements they threshed out in their respective journals and then said, “All that means nothing now.” I have often thought that when poring over the endless and weary controversies that have beset the church through the centuries. While no doubt some good has come from them, we can wonder how much importance the participants would ascribe to those controversies now that they are among the company of “just people made perfect.”

Yes, Campbell says it well. There are no divisions in the grave! Death is the great leveler and equalizer —and can we add unifier? And there is a sense in which the grave is also the minimizer, for in death we will realize that some things were not as important as we made them. And in death we may come to see that other things were far more important than we had supposed, such as the oneness of all God’s people.

Campbell’s point that since we will be united in heaven we must endeavor to be united on earth seems incontrovertible. It prompts me to raise a question that he does not deal with: On what basis will we be one in heaven?

It will not be because in heaven we will have attained uniformity. We will not be carbon copies of each other. The few windows we have in Scripture into the nature of heaven indicate that we will still be our personal, individual selves and different from each other. One such scene in Rev. 7:9f describes the great multitude as made up of those from “all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues.” While there will be a heavenly language (1 Cor. 13:1) that we will have in common, we will still be who we were on earth in terms of language, culture, and personal identity. So in our heavenly unity we will be different. Heaven would have little meaning if this were not the case.

Nor will we be united in heaven because we will all be perfect, fully mature, and so knowledgeable that we have no more to learn. We will not be gods, in spite of Mormon claims. We will still be human beings, and imperfect ones at that, still growing and still learning. It is true that Heb. 12:23 refers to “the spirits of just people made perfect” in heaven, but this cannot be interpreted in absolute terms. As 1 Cor. 13:12 promises, we now see through a mirror dimly while in heaven we will see “face to face,” but the contrast here is between earthly and heavenly knowledge.. Once in heaven we start from a new perspective, and while we are far in advance of where we were on earth, we continue to grow, to learn, and to grow closer and closer to God.

It follows, therefore, that we will be at different stages in our growth, just as we are on earth. There is a fallacy in supposing that death changes things all that much. We will still be different from each other, and I suspect we will still be working on our imperfections. We will share different levels of glory. If our good works follow us into heaven (the only thing we can take with us!), as Rev. 14:13 indicates, then we are going to be different upon arrival.

What then makes us one in heaven? It can only be the same thing that makes us one on earth —a common relationship to Jesus Christ and a mutual fellowship with God. All the heavenly scenes in Scripture are focused upon Christ or upon God who sits upon the throne. One scene pictures John weeping profusely because there is no one to open the seals of the scroll that will reveal the future, at which point an elder points him to the Lamb who is Christ, who is able to open the book (chapter 5). The same scene describes multitudes worshiping Christ:

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain

To receive power and riches and wisdom.

And strength and honor and glory and blessing!

In another scene the multitudes are praising both God and Christ with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to our God.”

This is what unity is all about whether in heaven or on earth, fellowship with each other by means of fellowship with God and Christ. That is what 1 John 1:3 means when it says, ‘That which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you may also have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.”

The question of unity is therefore not all that complicated. We are in fellowship with each other when we share the common life in Christ. We are united as one when together we are in fellowship with God the Father. That is the only unity there ever was and the only kind there ever will be, whether in heaven or on earth, whether for now or for eternity.

The only real difference in all this is an alarming truth. Those who will be one in heaven are those who have been one on earth, though it is a unity we may not always be conscience of, partly because we are separated by circumstances, continents, and even centuries. The others simply will not be there. —the Editor