To be filled with love, joy, peace, and every other desirable attitude, trait, and emotion

For your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion: therefore in their land they shall possess the double: everlasting joy shall be unto them. (Isaiah 61:7)

Being filled with joy forever is our instinctive concept of "Heaven." Going to Heaven to live forever is the traditional goal of the Christian preaching and teaching of salvation. Some aspects have been added, such as the idea of a splendid mansion. "Heaven" in our thinking is a place of love, joy, peace, and everything else that is desirable.

There has been no need for God to further refine our thinking, because it is true that the righteous will inherit a "heaven" of love, joy, and peace that will endure forever. After our sojourn in the present world, the thought of living in love, joy, and peace forever strains our credulity. But we Christians know one day such joy will be our never-ending portion.

The Kingdom of God is at hand. Now God desires that we understand the goal of salvation is not to go to the spirit Paradise to live forever. Our home is the earth. Mankind was created on the earth and mankind will inherit the earth forever. The nations and the farthest reaches of the earth are the inheritance of Christ and of those who are coheirs with Him.

The sixty-first chapter of the Book of Isaiah tells us of the time when the inhabitants of Zion will be built into "trees of righteousness." Then they will repair what was destroyed during the terrible tribulation that soon is to come.

The righteous will inherit the earth, and everlasting joy will be theirs.

Although we may not realize it, the desire of our heart is neither the heavens nor the earth. The desire of our heart is to be in the Presence of God, to be filled with the love, joy, and peace of His Personality and Glory. Anyone who has been visited by the Lord Jesus Christ knows well that wherever Jesus is, there is "heaven."

The Christian salvation is a program of restoration—the restoration of all that was lost through the disobedience of Adam and Eve.

In the beginning God gave to Adam and Eve a marvelous paradise in which to enjoy the company of God and of one another. This is all that is really important in life—to be rightly related to God and to one another. Right relationships are the source, and the only source, of love, joy, and peace. Everything else is secondary in value.

Satan entered and turned the hearts of the first people away from God, as God knew would happen. The resulting agony of mankind is the object lesson that God planned from the creation of the world. The world that God actually had in mind from the beginning is the new heaven and earth reign of the Lord Jesus Christ. The first world with its sin and death was necessary so when God gives us the paradise that He has in mind we will not lose it through spiritual ignorance and lack of faith in God.

The Hebrew Prophets have portrayed the glory that soon is to come to the earth. All that was lost through sin, everything of value, is to be restored, centered on Christ, and permeated with the eternal Life of God in Christ.

Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution [restoration] of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. (Acts 3:21)

Speaking of life on the new earth, God promises:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. (Revelation 21:4)

How would you like to return to earth in a glorified body? How would you like to be with King Jesus in Jerusalem, and then go from there to rule the nations of the earth? How would you like to dwell in love, joy, and peace in the fullness of the Glory of God?

How would you like to live on an earth in which all the animals dwell together in peace?—in which little children can play anywhere safely?—in which all nature praises the Lord and nothing is destructive or hurtful?—in which all people live together in peace and harmony?

This is the salvation that is coming to the earth with the return of Jesus Christ. First will come the Lord and His army of warriors to destroy the sinners out of the earth. Then there will be a thousand years during which the saints will rule and teach the nations of the saved. By the end of this period the Body of Christ, the new Jerusalem, will have been brought to Divine perfection.

After the thousand years the nations will rebel, under the leadership of Satan, and will mount one last attack on Jerusalem. The end of the present world will be marked by this final attempt of fallen mankind to destroy the Lord’s witnesses, His saints.

The history of mankind on the earth began with one man and one woman in a paradise of love, joy, and peace. The history of mankind on the earth will end with one last effort by the nations of the earth to rid themselves of the Presence of God—and this after a thousand years of rulership by the saints!

Truly the heart of man is desperately wicked. Truly the Lord God is justified in all He does.

Then will come the judgment of all people (except the firstfruits of the Bride, who will be raised at the beginning of the thousand-year Kingdom Age—Revelation 20:4-6).

After the judgment there will appear the heaven and the earth that the Lord God had planned from the beginning—now populated with the people whom God had marked out from the beginning for eternal life.

Love, joy, and peace will multiply forever in the new world, for it will be guarded and ruled by the saints in whom has been established the throne of God and of the Lamb. Sin and death will be conditions of the past. The memory of sinners will have been banished from the earth.

Those who have need to remind themselves of the consequences of sin and rebellion may, at that time, go and view the spiritual prison in which are confined wicked angels and wicked people. The wicked will not experience love, or joy, or peace forever—ages without end.

Were one of the wicked to be released he would set out immediately, as Satan will do at the end of the thousand-year period, to express his discordant nature in God’s creation. Soon it would become necessary for God to repeat the cycle of wrath and restoration that mankind has had to undergo throughout the course of history. We all are familiar with the pain and dread of living in the valley of the shadow of death and desire no more of it.

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