Sinners Could Never Love Heaven
Sinners Could Never Love Heaven
Excerpted from “The Barrier”
Sermon #1590, March 27, 1881
Spurgeon argues convincingly that sin and unrepentant sinners will have no place in a holy Heaven. Those who have rejected Christ would never be able to love Heaven—and those who have accepted him would never be able to love anything else.
The wicked boasts of the desires of his soul, and the one greedy for gain curses and renounces the LORD. In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him; all his thoughts are, “There is no God.” . . . His mouth is filled with cursing and deceit and oppression; under his tongue are mischief and iniquity. . . . The helpless are crushed, sink down, and fall by his might. He says in his heart, “God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it.” Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up your hand; forget not the afflicted. Why does the wicked renounce God and say in his heart, “You will not call to account”? But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands. . . . O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.
Psalm 10:3-4, 7, 10-14, 17-18
It is impossible for any defiled, sinful, unrenewed person to enter into the body of the glorified church of God—an impossibility that resides within the persons themselves. The reason wicked men cannot be happy is not alone because God will not let rebellion and peace dwell together but because they will not let themselves be happy. The sea cannot rest because it is the sea; the sinner cannot rest because he is a sinner.
How could you, an unregenerate man, ever enter into the Kingdom of Heaven as you are? You are not capable of it; it is not possible. Holiness has in it no attractions for you, since you love sin. You do not know God, and cannot see him, for this is the privilege of the pure in heart and of them alone.
You live in a world where everything has been made by the great Lord and yet you do not perceive his hand, so great is your blindness. Shall blind men grope through the streets of the New Jerusalem? You are unacquainted with the simplest elements of spiritual things, for they can only be spiritually discerned and you have no spiritual faculty.
You are blind and deaf, dead to God and heavenly things. You know you are. Well, then, of what benefit would it be that you should enter the spiritual realm? For if you were admitted into the place called Heaven, you would not be a partaker of the state of Heaven. And it is the state of mind and character which is, after all, the essence of the joy. To be in a heavenly place and not in a heavenly condition would be worse than Hell, if anything can be. What are songs to a sad heart? Such would Heaven be to an unrenewed mind. The element of glory would destroy rather than bless an unrenewed mind. No place would be so dreadful to a sinner as the place where God is most openly manifest.
That holy habitat of the newborn soul would be for the unholy soul the grave, the everlasting prison house, if it could enter there. To the wicked the Day of the Lord is darkness, not light, and the glory of the Lord is terror, not bliss. Oh, unconverted hearer, they sing in Heaven, but in their songs your ear would find no delight. They worship God in Heaven, but if divine worship is irksome to you, even when it lasts for an hour here, what would it be to dwell forever and ever in the world to come in the midst of hallelujahs? Oh soul defiled with sin, you are incapable of Heaven.
Suppose I were infected today with a deadly fever—an incurable typhus, which would bring death to any that touched me. The blasting wind is pitiless, and the snow is falling, and I stand shivering at the door of one of your houses longing for shelter. I see inside the room your little children, sporting in full health. Shall I venture among them?
I long to escape from the cold outside, but if I should enter your room I should bring to you fever, and death to your innocent little ones and to yourselves, and thus turn your happiness into misery. I would turn away and brave the storm and sooner die than bring such desolation into a friend’s abode. And well might any honest spirit say at sight of the perfect family above, “Even if I might, I would not be admitted into a perfect Heaven while yet I might defile it and spread the deadly disease of moral evil.”
You know, brothers and sisters, how a few rags from the East have sometimes carried a plague into a city. If you were standing at the wharf when a plague-laden ship arrived, you would cry, “Burn those rags; do anything with them—but keep them away from the people. Bring not the plague into a vast city where it may slay its thousands!”
So we cry, “Great God, forbid that anything which defiles should enter into your perfected church! We cannot endure such a thought.” Draw your swords, you angels; stand in your closed, tight-formed ranks, you seraphim, and strike down every defiled one that would force a passage within Heaven’s gates. It must be so: “Nothing unclean will ever enter it” (Revelation 21:27).
The decree of God has gone forth, and the fiery sword is set at the gate of the new Eden. Into the first paradise there came the serpent. But into the second paradise the tempter shall never enter. Into the first paradise there came sin, and God was driven from it as well as man. But into the second paradise there shall never come anything close to sin or falsehood. Rather, the Lord God shall dwell there forever, and his people shall dwell there with him.
C. S. Lewis says that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside. Of course, we know from Christ’s account of the rich man and Lazarus that people in Hell do not want to stay there but would love to escape the punishment they endure (Luke 16:19-31). But Lewis’s primary point may be that wanting to be relieved of Hell’s fires is not the same as wanting to live in Heaven! And if there are no other options, what then?
In my novel Deadline I envision a character who has died:
This was his first hour of Hell. How could he endure even a day, much less an eternal night? But if he could escape, what was the alternative? Heaven? The thought of being there sickened him. To be under those rules, that constant self-righteous oppression, would be intolerable. More intolerable, even, than this place. He thirsted for help, but not redemption. He hungered for hope, but not righteousness. He longed for friendship, but not with God or those who followed him.a
It appears that a sin nature would continue in Hell since only in Christ could it be removed. Professor D. A. Carson argues that Hell is eternal because sinful rebellion is eternal. If this is the case, Hell is a place where “sinners go on sinning and receiving the recompense of their sin, refusing, always refusing, to bend the knee.”b Hell would be ever-ongoing punishment for ever-ongoing sins.
In contrast, those in Heaven will not sin because they will have been fully delivered from the old nature and granted a new and completely perfected one in Christ. But I am convinced we will never forget the ugliness of sin. People who have experienced severe burns aren’t tempted to walk into a bonfire. We’ll never be deceived into thinking God is withholding something good from us or that sin is in our best interest. Satan won’t have any access to us. But even if he did, we wouldn’t be tempted. We’ll know what righteousness is but also what sin is—or was. We’ll always know sin’s true cost. Every time we see the scarred hands of King Jesus, we’ll remember.
Because our hearts will be pure and we’ll see people as they truly are, every relationship in Heaven will be pure. We’ll all be faithful to the love of our lives: King Jesus. We couldn’t do anything behind his back even if we wanted to. But we’ll never want to.
We’ll love everyone, men and women, but we’ll be in love only with Jesus. We’ll never be tempted to degrade, use, or idolize one another. We’ll never believe the outrageous lie that our deepest needs can be met in any person but Jesus.
Often we act as if the universe revolves around us. We have to remind ourselves it’s all about Christ, not us. In Heaven we’ll never have to correct our thinking. What is true about God will be evident to all. Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards says, “Even the very best of men, are, on Earth, imperfect. But it is not so in heaven. There shall be no pollution or deformity or offensive defect of any kind, seen in any person or thing; but everyone shall be perfectly pure, and perfectly lovely in heaven.”c
In Heaven we’ll be perfectly human. Adam and Eve were perfectly human until they bent themselves into sinners. Then they lost something that was an original part of their humanity—moral perfection. Since then, under sin’s curse, we’ve been human but never perfectly human.
We can’t remember a time when we weren’t sinners. We’ve always carried sin’s baggage. What relief we’ll feel not to have to guard our eyes and our minds. We will not need to defend against pride and lust because there will be none.
Someone once asked me, “If we’re sinless, will we still be human?” Although sin is part of us now, it’s not essential to our humanity. In fact, it’s foreign to it. It’s what twists us and keeps us from being what we once were—and what we one day will be.
Our greatest deliverance in Heaven will be from ourselves. Our deceit, corruption, self-righteousness, self-sufficiency, hypocrisy—all will be gone forever. And we will never stop praising God for the miracle of his grace!
a Randy Alcorn, Deadline (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah, 1994), 341.
b D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 92.
c Edwards, Heaven: A World of Love, 16.
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