Greg and Amy discuss why God doesn’t immediately perfect believers upon salvation, suggesting that spiritual maturity and godliness developed during our earthly life will impact our eternal experience.
Transcript
Amy: Okay, let’s go to a question from Max W: “I heard that God keeps us on this earth to improve our character. But if, after death, the thief on the cross will have the same sinless character as the Christian who lives until 100, why does God need to change us over time now instead of immediately like he does at death?”
Greg: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. I don’t know that it’s a—and I don’t know how the question is posed, but it doesn’t strike me as a challenge to the legitimacy of Christianity, but it’s a curiosity about the nature of the resurrection.
And, let me say, first of all, not everybody in Heaven enjoys the same quality of existence. Now, that seems like, “Huh? Are you kidding?” But I say that because of some things the Scripture says. I think of two different ones. One of them is in Hebrews 11, where they talk about the—the writer there talks about the great heroes of faith, and then he gives all of these people who, in a sense, through trusting in God, brought certain dramatic success in their life. All right? People raised from the dead, etc., etc. And then it says, “And others.” And others who similarly trusted in God—faith—yet it did not produce a favorable effect to them subjectively in this life. And what the writer says there is that they were going to have a better resurrection. A better resurrection.
What the heck is a better resurrection? Well, that’s a clue. I mean, it’s a fair question, and it’s hard to outline exactly what that looks like, but it does clearly indicate that some people are going to be, in a certain sense, a more favorable existence or position or quality of life—quality of eternal life—than others. That’s one passage.
The other passage is in 1 Timothy. And Paul says there, you know, he says physical exercise—okay, it profits a little. You know, pump iron, run marathons—okay, you get some benefit from that. But, by contrast, godliness is a means of great gain, for it holds a promise not just for this life. You know? Being physically fit holds a promise for this life—or at least a limited promise for this life—but also for the life to come.
So, if you are focusing principally on developing godliness, you will benefit in this life from that. But it also has a benefit for the future. Now, there are some Christians who are not as aggressively developing godliness in their lives. And so, because they’re not, that’s going to have an impact somehow in the quality of their existence in the afterlife. And I don’t even know what that looks like, because there is a sense of the resurrection. We get resurrected bodies that have a—probably “perfection” is a way of describing it, but I’m even faltering for words here myself because it’s hard to know in detail.
And so, we are going to be perfect. But as one person pointed out to me a long time ago—and he was a broadcaster at KBRT, my flagship station when I started radio back in 1990, and Tim Barrens, his name was—and he said maybe it’s kind of like a light bulb, where you could be a perfect 100-watt light bulb, or you could be a perfect 1,000-watt light bulb. Both are perfect, but their luminescence is different. And you know—
Amy: Their capacity, would you say? Is that what...?
Greg: Whatever, It’s just—it’s an illustration to show you can have perfection on different levels. And, actually, the luminescence is maybe an appropriate or an apt kind of a reference or metaphor because there’s glory to be had. You know, weight of glory—Lewis talks about this. And there’s glory to be had in the afterlife. And what that looks like is hard for us to quantify and imagine, but there can be greater glory—greater amounts of glory, manifestations of glory by different people. And so, I think that’s probably the best way to understand it.
In Hell, there are going to be different levels of experience. This is clear by things that Jesus said. There are greater sins; there are less sins; there is greater judgment; there’s lesser judgment. But, in Heaven, there’s also going to be greater and lesser glory. And that’s going to relate to a lot of different things. I gave two passages that—that seem to point to that, and other passages that talk about crowns that are given for people who accomplish particular things. And so, these are rewards. The Bema Seat judgment there in Corinthians that Paul talks about—that’s a judgment seat for rewards, and some people have wood, hay, stubble—that gets all burned up. But then others have gold and precious metal, and that survives the judgment that is meant to winnow out the good that we’ve done from the useless. Okay?
So, these all intimate varying degrees of—and again, here’s where I balk at the word—status, experience, quality of life. I don’t know how to characterize it. But if this is true—and to me this is obviously true in Scripture—what we don’t know how to do is cash it out in tangible terms, concrete concepts. What does that actually look like? I don’t know. And so, Tim Barren’s illustration of the light bulbs is the best that I could do.
But if this is true, then if a person becomes a Christian much later in life—as opposed to earlier in life—that means they are going to enter eternity with a lot less maturity than those who have been faithful Christians, productive Christians, all their life. All right? And my dad died when he was 70—just after his 72nd birthday. Is that right? Yeah. But he became a Christian a year before, and it was absolutely genuine. It was a radical transformation. But he had no period of time, really, to grow spiritually. So, the way I’ve, kind of, characterized it—he entered eternity, as it were, you know, naked and smelling of smoke because Paul describes the burning away of the wood, hay, stubble. So, man, maybe you end up going into eternity as spiritually immature.
I have no sense that we grow in spiritual maturity when we’re in Heaven. It looks like this is the place to do that growth. And that’s why soul care—godliness—is so important to attend to this side of the grave.
Amy: Yeah, it is hard to know how this will be cashed out. Because if we are no longer sinning, that’s not the aspect of our character that will be different in Heaven. Like, there won’t be different degrees of not sinning. So, it has to be some other—it would have to be some other kind of difference, whether it’s our appreciation of God or our knowledge of him or whatever it is. And, I mean, it could be we are increasing, but we’re starting from different points. So, I mean, I really don’t know.
But I do want to throw something out there that I don’t want you to miss, Max, and that is that this world is about more than just our character. So, even if none of this—even if all this speculation about how this goes down with our character is wrong, the truth is, God is doing a lot more in this world than just shaping our characters. I mean, it does say that his goal for us is to shape our characters to be like Christ. Yes, that’s true.
Greg: “Present every man complete in Christ.”
Amy: Right? So, that is—obviously, that is a very important goal that God has in this world. But he’s also doing something else. He’s revealing himself through what happens in this world. He’s actually enacting a story that reveals who he is, what he’s like, what he loves. And this is actually part of the reason why we will glorify him forever, because we will have all of these stories of all of these lives and how God interacted with people to see who he is forever. Because there won’t be any sin. There won’t be any examples of people repenting and being shown grace and seeing God work and all of these things that have happened. This is all happening now. If God were to end the world now, he would short-circuit all of that.
So, if his goal is to reveal himself—not only through our becoming more like Christ, but also through our sin. Like, our sin also has ways of revealing God. It reveals God’s—I don’t want to say judgment for Christians, because obviously Christians won’t face God’s wrath—but some people’s sin will reveal God’s wrath and his judgment. In fact, I was just reading in—I think it was Numbers, where Moses hits the rock, and he’s supposed to just say, you know, have the water come from the rock—and he hits it, and then God says, you know, you guys are all in trouble now because you didn’t show me holy. And here’s the punishment that I will give you, Moses. You’re not going to enter the Promised Land. And then the passage ends by saying, “And God showed himself to be holy through this situation.” So, the sin that happened there actually revealed God’s holiness. And it’s the aspects of God—like his holiness, his grace, his justice—that we will be enjoying for eternity, but it’s being revealed now in ways that it won’t be revealed then. So, God is doing all of this right now. And so, that’s why he doesn’t just end it—because his goal isn’t just to make us perfect and no longer sinners. His goal is to reveal himself.