Will we miss unsaved loved ones in heaven?

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him; it is "faith seeking understanding." I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's question: 
An MCCer-submitted question:

I believe heaven is a wonderful place with no tears. What if when you die and you enter heaven, someone you thought you would see is not there? Are you sad not to see them?...Do you think our memories of people we had hoped would be in heaven but are not there are taken away from us so we're not heartbroken? 

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
This question presents us with the sobering reality that while the hope (thumbs up, not fingers crossed!) of heaven is the promise for all faithful Christians, not everyone we love will accept Christ and be thus be welcomed into his kingdom. Heaven will contain many surprises for us, in more ways than one.

I don’t think we need to imagine heaven as a place where God erases our memories in order to keep us happy. Scripture gives us a better image of eternal glory than that. God needn’t diminish our knowledge or our love in order to remove our sorrow. He makes all things right.

The Bible says that in the new creation, God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Revelation 21:4). That promise is not merely that heaven will distract us from the things that once hurt us, it is that God Himself will completely overcome the brokenness that produced our sorrow. We will be so overwhelmed by the glorious presence of God it will be unlike anything we experience in this life. Joy everlasting will fill our hearts - there won’t be room for anything else!

That said, we should be careful about assuming that we know exactly what heaven will feel like. Scripture does not explicitly tell us what happens to our memories of particular people who are absent from the kingdom, or even what our heavenly reunions will look like with those who join us in salvation. Therefore I would be hesitant to suggest that God will erase those people from our memories. The Bible doesn't teach that.

In fact, there are reasons to think our personal identities and memories are not simply erased. The people who enter God's kingdom are still themselves. We’ll recognize one another. The resurrection is not God replacing us with different people; it is God redeeming us completely. The Christian hope is not amnesia but resurrection.

So what happens if someone we love is not there?

Here I think we have to trust the character of God. In this life, our understanding of God's justice is partial and often clouded by grief, sin, and limited knowledge. In heaven, we will see God as he truly is. We will know his justice perfectly, his mercy perfectly, and his goodness perfectly. Paul says that now we know only “in part,” but in eternity we will know more fully (1st Corinthians 13:12).

That means that whatever we experience in God's presence, we will never look at God and conclude that He has done something unjust, cruel, or wrong. The God who is infinitely more loving than we are will not need to convince his redeemed children that he has acted rightly.

This may be difficult for us to imagine because currently we love people with imperfect knowledge. We may desperately want someone to be saved, and we should. Scripture itself gives us every reason to desire the salvation of others. We grieve over those who reject God. We pray for them. We plead with God for them. We should never treat another person's eternal destiny casually.

But heaven will not be a place where God's children spend eternity looking over their shoulders and thinking, “Someone is missing, and I can never be truly happy again.” That would mean that sin, death, and loss had ultimately retained some victory over God's redemption. Revelation presents precisely the opposite picture.

The final chapters of scripture portray God's people dwelling with him in a restored creation. There is no death, mourning, crying, or pain. God's purposes have reached their fulfillment. The curse is gone, and nothing remains that can ultimately fracture their joy in Him.

There is another important point here: our deepest joy in heaven will not ultimately be found in other people—even wonderful people we love—but in God himself. We rightly love our families and friends, and I believe the joy of fellowship with them will be part of the glory of the age to come. But every good earthly relationship is ultimately a reflection of the goodness of God. In heaven, we will possess the reality toward which every earthly love was pointing.

Perhaps the best way to put it is this:

God will not make heaven painless by making us less human. He will make heaven painless by making us whole.

We don't know precisely what that will mean for our memories. Perhaps we will remember things differently because we will finally understand them in the light of God's complete truth. Perhaps some things that now seem unbearably tragic will be understood in ways we cannot presently comprehend. Perhaps there are aspects of our present knowledge that will simply no longer have the same emotional character. Scripture doesn't tell us exactly.

But we can know this: nothing in heaven will make us wish that God were more merciful, more just, or more loving than He is. We will be completely satisfied in Him. And there is something especially comforting about this for someone grieving a loved one whose eternal destiny they don't know. We don't have to solve that mystery now. We can entrust that person to the judge of all the earth, whose character is infinitely better than ours (Genesis 18:25), and continue to hope and pray while you have opportunity.

We should also remember that, as long as someone is alive, we don't know their ultimate decision and destination. We should be extraordinarily cautious about declaring that a particular person is certainly lost. God alone sees the heart, and God's judgments are perfect.

So I would not say, “Don't worry—God will erase your memories of them.” I would say something much more hopeful: “You will still be you. God will still be God. His love and justice will be perfectly clear. And when he has finally made all things new, there will be nothing left that can rob his children of their joy.” Amen and amen.

The Christian hope isn't that someday we will forget everything that hurt, it is that someday God will redeem everything so completely that sorrow will have no place to enter our hearts, no place to take hold.

I invite you to meditate on Revelation 21:1–5, 21:22–27, and 22:1–5. Those passages show that the ultimate hope of eternity isn't merely getting to a better place, it is God himself dwelling with his people. His glory illuminates everything. His presence is immediate. His faithful see his face. Death, mourning, crying, and pain are gone.

The glory of eternity is ultimately the glory of God himself, fully known and joyfully enjoyed forever.

“They will see his face.”

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN!
- Pastor Brady

Have a question for Theology Thursday? Send an email to office@minierchristian.org and we'll respond, or we'll include in a future Theology Thursday Buffet.