This World Is Not Our Home

For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory

Last night, a friend was over and while playing video games, an unrelated topic erupted, “If Jesus truly saved, then why do we still need this (fallen) world?”. I would not dive into into the topic in entirety, but just remind you that this world not our home, and why we ought to have more hope because of that.

There is a certain silliness in the way we live, if we are honestly reflecting at the big picture. We aim to build wealth meant to outlast us. We plant trees we shall never sit beneath. We labour for companies and nations that will forget our names. We sacrifice for loved ones thinking (or not thinking) that it may be reciprocated. And all the while, if we are Christians, we profess to believe that this world is not our home. We are, as the old hymn says, “just a-passing through.”

Why does the Almighty not simply extract us from this temporary dwelling the moment we confess His name. Why the delay? Why this peculiar arrangement whereby we are born from above yet remain below, eternal beings existentially stuck to chasing fleeting objects, citizens of Heaven compelled to pay taxes to Caesar, aliens in a foreign land who must nevertheless learn its language and customs and suffer in its harsh terrain?

No Home in Pharaoh’s Land

Consider Joseph, second only to Pharaoh in the mightiest empire of his age. He had every reason to call Egypt home. Yet in his dying breath he gave a curious command: “Do not bury me in Egypt.” Here was a man with Egyptian power, Egyptian fame, Egyptian honor, yet his bones rejected the soil. Perhaps he knew, as only the dying know, that Pharaoh’s court was not his true resting place.

So here we have this paradox, of how can we live fully in a world we must not love ultimately? We are to be in it but not of it, to use it without abusing it, to inhabit it without being inhabited by it. The difficulty is not in seeing that Heaven is better than Earth. That requires no great spiritual insight. The difficulty is in living an earthly life well with that knowledge in our bones.

Paul put it this way in 1 Corinthians 15:19: “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Christianity, if false, is not simply a neutral error. It is a catastrophic misdirection of the soul’s deepest longings. It teaches us to hunger for a country we shall never see, to invest in a currency that does not exist, to train for a race that will never be run, considering that the race was already won.

But Paul knew it was true, and therefore he could endure what he endured. Here we see the answer: God leaves us here because this world, with all its grit and grief, is the workshop in which eternal beings are forged. “Our momentary light affliction,” Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:17, “is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory.”

Mark that phrase: a weight of glory. Not a whisper or a hint, but a weight. Something solid, heavy, and substantial. And it is being achieved, even now, through the very things that make us groan. The cancer ward, the betrayal, the financial ruin, the loneliness that gnaws: these are not interruptions to our journey heavenward. They are the journey. They are doing something in us and to us that could not be done in any other way.

Imagine trying to build muscle without resistance, or to learn courage without danger, or to develop patience without frustration, or to develop faith and hope without uncertainty and fear, or to develop love without sacrifice. It cannot be done. And so God, in His severe mercy, does not remove us to Paradise the moment we cry, “Lord, save me!” Instead, He leaves us in the gymnasium, not because He enjoys our suffering, but because He knows what manner of metaphysical build is expected in creatures created for the life to come.

We are not to be mere spectators of Heaven, sitting in eternal pews singing endless hymns. (Though I suspect the hymns will be better than we imagine and our desire to sing them less forced.) We are to be active participants in a reality so substantial, so utterly real; that this present world will seem by comparison like a pencil sketch next to the landscape it represents. But such participation requires preparation. The soul must be enlarged to contain such joy. The heart must be strengthened to bear such glory. And this world, for all its pain, is where that preparation occurs.

Our Home Calls Us

Now we come to the uncomfortable bit. There is much talk in our day about Hell. Some of it is meant to frighten, some of it meant to dismiss. But I suggest that for the true Christian, Hell ought not to be the primary terror. Not because it is not terrible. (It is.) And not because we should be indifferent to the fate of souls. (We should not.) But because fear, by itself, produces only slaves, not sons.

What should move us, what should wake us at midnight with a cry we cannot name, is the thought of Heaven. Not the Sunday school version with golden streets. (Though why should we object to gold underfoot if God thinks it suitable?) But Heaven as the place where every good desire finds its consummation, where every noble longing is at last satisfied, where the ache and traumas that haunt us since childhood finally, very finally resolves into recognition: “This is where I was made for. This is Home.”

The prospect of Heaven should create in us a desire so intense, that by its light we see our earthly pursuits for what they are. Not evil, necessarily, but makeshift. Not forbidden, but far too small for the creatures we are becoming. That promotion, that pleasure, that romance, that recognition we crave: they are not wrong, but as C. S. Lewis put it": “they are to the true thing as a child’s mud pies are to a feast at the Savoy. We are far too easily pleased.”.

And here is the liberating truth: if Heaven is real, then our present toils take on a different character entirely. The weariness, the sting of criticism, the slow erosion of the body, the warfare against our filthy desires: all of it is temporary. Not in the sense that we merely endure until it ends, but in the sense that it is working toward an end we can barely imagine.

Our struggles with sin will one day not merely be suppressed but replaced. We shall desire God as the hart desires the waterbrook, not because we have disciplined ourselves into it, but because we shall finally see Him as He is.

The Homesickness That Heals

We are homesick, and there is no cure in Egypt, or Dubai, or Amsterdam, or Lagos, or any other Pharaoh’s land. Joseph knew it. Paul knew it. And in our better moments, when the distractions are away and we are left with the raw ache of existence, we know it too.

So let us not be frightened by threats of Hell or our momentary afflictions. Let us instead be allured by the promise of Heaven into becoming the sort of creatures who could enjoy such a place. We must become those who could stand in the unshielded presence of Perfect Love and not disintegrate, but finally, wonderfully, become fully ourselves.

All the toil will end. All the suffering will be seen to have had a purpose. All our mistakes will have been inconsequential. All the pain and brokenness will be healed. Even our filthy desires, those shameful things we can barely confess to ourselves, let alone our closest allies. All will be replaced by desires so pure, so powerful, that by them we shall fly to God as a few grams of metal would fly to one giant magnet.

This world is not our home. Thank God for that. For our true country is better than we dare imagine, and we are being prepared for it even now. In the waiting, in the working, in the warfare, and yes, even in the wounds.

We are going Home. This delay is not punishment, but preparation. And when at last we arrive, we shall see that every moment of the journey was worth it, not in spite of the difficulty, but because of what it made of us.

Until then, we are pilgrims. I pray we journey with hope as those who know where the road leads. Because we do.

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References

• Book: “The Weight of Glory” by C. S. Lewis

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