Is There Any Suffering in Heaven?
No! Heaven will likely be so dramatically different from the current world that to explain it requires using negatives and positives. Describing what’s beyond human understanding also requires declaring the way it differs from present experience.
The first change from their earthly life believers in heaven will experience is that God will wipe away every tear from their eyes (cf. Rev. 7:17, Isa. 25:8). That doesn’t mean that individuals who arrive in heaven will likely be crying and God will comfort them. They won’t, as some imagine, be weeping as they face the record of their sins. There isn’t any such record, because “there may be due to this fact now no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1) since Christ “bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed” (1 Pet. 2:24).
What it declares is the absence of anything to be sorry about—no sadness, no disappointment, no pain. There will likely be no tears of misfortune, tears over lost love, tears of remorse, tears of regret, tears over the death of family members, or tears for some other reason.
Another dramatic difference from the current world will likely be that in heaven there’ll now not be any death (cf. Isa. 25:8). The biggest curse of human existence will likely be no more. “Death,” as Paul promised, “is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:54). Both Satan, who had the ability of death (Heb. 2:14), and death itself could have been forged into the lake of fireside (20:10, 14).
Nor will there be any mourning or crying in heaven. The grief, sorrow, and distress that produce mourning and its outward manifestation, crying, won’t exist in heaven. This glorious reality will fulfill Isaiah 53:3-4: “He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, because it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, And we didn’t esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.” When Christ bore believers’ sins on the cross, He also bore their sorrows, since sin is the explanation for sorrow.
The perfect holiness and absence of sin that may characterize heaven can even mean that there will likely be no more pain. On the cross, Jesus wa s “wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we’re healed” (Isa. 53:5). While the healing in view in that verse is primarily spiritual healing, it also includes physical healing.
Commenting on Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, Matthew 8:17 says, “That it is perhaps fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying: ‘He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sickness.'” The healing ministry of Jesus was a preview of the well-being that may characterize the millennial kingdom and the everlasting state. The glorified sin-free bodies believers will possess in heaven won’t be subject to pain of any kind.
All those changes that may mark the brand new heaven and the brand new earth indicate that the primary things have passed away. Old human experience related to the unique, fallen creation is gone ceaselessly, and with it the mourning, suffering, sorrow, disease, pain, and death that has characterised it for the reason that Fall.
This article originally appeared here at Grace to You.
Adapted from John MacArthur, Revelation 12-22 in The MacArthur New Testament Commentary (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2000), 269-71. Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/bestdesigns
