MCLEODS, New Brunswick, April 5, 2024

There are no phones in Heaven.

No computers, either. (Not even quantum ones.)

There are also no TVs or video games or stereos or combustion engine vehicles. Now, there may well be vehicles in Heaven that sound and feel like they have combustion engines, but if you don’t like those, they’re not in your part of Heaven.

There’s no Internet in Heaven or any of the technology that supports the Internet. There’s no need for any of those things because we’ll communicate entirely differently in Heaven than we do on Earth, and we’ll get around entirely differently. Clumsy, clunky, dangerous, loud, intrusive, poisonous, addictive, obsessive, and landscape-blighting technology has no place in Heaven, though sadly it’s taken over most of Earth.

Here are a few more things that aren’t in Heaven: Sickness, pain, death, depression, good-byes, regret, mourning, theft, jealousy, rage, screaming, wrinkles, hatred, spandex, phoniness, lies, deceit, dirtiness, fatigue, bad smells, rent, jail, leaky roofs and flooded basements, toilet paper, police, medical interventions, mortgage, money, debt, credit, tape, glue, Bibles, pews, drugs, bugs that bite and sting, toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, plastic anything, food laced with chemicals, cigarettes, cigars, cigarillos, locks of any kind, bad hair days, windowpanes, and mirrors.

Nearly everything that most people on Earth spend their days using, thinking about, and obsessing over has no place in Heaven. Most people’s thoughts have no place in Heaven. It’s profoundly sad, the degree of unheavenliness that characterizes the lives of most people. As born-again believers, we need to be different than that. We need to be aware of what’s in Heaven (and what’s not in Heaven) and live our lives to reflect heavenly reality, not unheavenly reality. Now, some things we’ll still use, with God’s blessing while we’re still in the unheavenly realm, like windowpanes, soap, and toothbrushes. But the other things that have no place in Heaven – particularly unheavenly emotions and desires – we can weed out and banish from our lives now and in so doing create a little piece of pre-Heaven all our own.

That’s what God’s Kingdom is – a little piece of pre-Heaven made by God for his children who are still going through their trials. God made Zion for us as a shelter and retreat from the unheavenliness of the world. We can expand Zion by furnishing our little part of it with heavenly thoughts and words and deeds and wild blueberries and solid wood furniture.

The computer spellchecker scolds me that there’s no such word as “Unheaven”, but we know there is. Unheaven is the world that surrounds us outside of God’s Kingdom. Unheaven is the realm that we escaped when we were reborn, but we still have to associate with it for the time being, use its tools for our purposes for the time being, but that’s the extent of our involvement with it. It shouldn’t surprise us that a spellchecker doesn’t know Unheaven from Heaven, seeing that spellcheckers are very much a part of Unheaven and there are no spellcheckers in Heaven.

So, yes, Virginia, there is an Unheaven, but there’s oh so very much, much, much more a Heaven.