What Is Heaven Like? — Edwards on the World of Love
⏱ 14 min read
You have been asking the question quietly, perhaps without quite admitting you are asking it. Someone you loved is gone — or someone you love is dying — and the place they have gone, or the place they are going, has become more than a doctrine to you. It has become a real question, asked by a real heart, in the actual evenings. What is heaven like? Not as a Sunday-school slot. As a thing your soul needs the answer to before next week.
This is the slow version. Not the bright postcard version, not the streets-of-gold version that the tea-towels have flattened, but the version Jonathan Edwards preached in 1738 in a sermon afterwards titled Heaven, A World of Love — a sermon you have probably never heard, because nobody preaches it anymore. Read in the company of someone who has lost something, his vocabulary becomes very quiet and very precise, and the question of what heaven is like begins to receive the kind of answer that does not insult the loss. The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion for the woman holding grief in the small hours, if you would like a place to take the practice afterwards. For now — read slowly. The hand on this page is gentle.
What Edwards understood — and what very few modern accounts of heaven understand — is that the place you have been picturing is not a place. It is a world of love. The word world is doing real work in his title. He means a whole atmosphere, the medium in which everything else happens. Not a destination with love inside it. A place which is, all the way down, made of love. The sun of it is love. The air of it is love. The ground walked on is love. The exchange between the saints and one another, the saints and the angels, the saints and the Father, is love — uninterrupted, uncomplicated, untired. You have never breathed an air like that. The closest you have come is the rare half-hour in your own life when nothing was bracing — and Edwards would tell you, gently, that the half-hour was a foretaste. Heaven is the half-hour without ever ending and without ever thinning.
That is the answer to the question of what heaven is like, in one sentence. The rest of this article is the slow unfolding of why that sentence is more substantial than it sounds, with three of Edwards’s own passages held next to it, because the famous outline of the sermon was never meant to travel alone. (If grief itself is the ground you are walking on while reading this — if the loss is recent enough that the calendar has not caught up to it — the slow companion Christian journal prompts for women — healing after a hard year was written for the same season. The quieter weekly devotional a devotional for the woman healing after loss is its evening cousin, and if the only prayer you have left this week is please, the prayer for healing — seven honest prayers with Bible verses holds that one for you.)
Edwards preached the sermon in his thirty-fourth year, in Northampton, Massachusetts, to a congregation that knew what loss was. The colonial winters were hard. Infant mortality was ordinary. Half the women in his pews had buried at least one child. He did not preach to people who needed the theology of heaven to be decorative. He preached to people who needed it to be load-bearing — to be the thing that held the night up when the night was too long. The slow attention he gives the doctrine is the attention of a pastor who knows his sermon has to carry his hearers, not merely interest them. You can feel the carrying in the prose.
The first passage — the soul’s ardency
Edwards copied into his own journal a line he prayed back to God, a line that surfaces in his published writings on heaven as a foretaste of what the saints in the world of love will be:
“I felt an ardency of soul to be what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to love Him with a holy and pure love; to serve and follow Him; to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with a divine and heavenly purity.”
— Jonathan Edwards
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what he is asking for. He is not asking for a feeling. He is not asking for an experience he can take notes on afterwards. He is asking to be emptied and annihilated — the old Augustinian language of self-effacement — so that the love inside him would no longer be his own slightly-impure love but a love that flowed through him from God without him being in the way of it. The word ardency in his sentence is not the modern enthusiasm. It is the older word — burning, the heat of a soul standing close enough to God that the soul itself begins to glow. He is asking, in plain prose, to become transparent to the love that heaven is made of. To stop blocking it.
This is what heaven is like, in Edwards’s account, before it is anything else. It is the soul finally being what it has wanted to be its whole life — emptied of the small obstructions that the body and the mind and the daily life kept putting between it and God — and being made pure with a divine and heavenly purity. Not pure in the sense of good behaviour. Pure in the sense of unmixed — the love arriving and not being diluted by the small jealousies, the small fatigues, the small selfishnesses, the small distractions of a soul still wearing its mortal grain.
For the woman holding a loss as she reads this, the line does something specific. The person you loved — if they are gone in Christ — is now what Edwards was asking to be. Emptied and annihilated, in the good sense. Made pure with a divine and heavenly purity. The version of them you knew was always wearing the grain. The version of them in the world of love is the version they were asked to be the whole time, finally without the wearing. That is not a consolation that erases the missing. The missing is its own sacrament. It is a consolation that runs underneath the missing, in a quieter register, and it can be there at the same time as the grief without competing with the grief.
Edwards is gentle about this. He does not say they are better off so you should be glad. He says, in effect, the soul they had on earth is the soul that has, at last, arrived at what it was always asking for. The grief and the gladness can live in the same chest. Both are honest. The slow walk of the next year is the slow learning of how to carry them together. (If the carrying has been the body’s part — if grief has been sitting in the chest or the throat for weeks now — a journal for healing women — 30 pages that hold the hardest things is the slow companion built for exactly that weight.)
The slow somatic for the chest that is holding it
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where Edwards’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a Tuesday afternoon.
Sit somewhere quiet. Not the bed; the bed is for sleep. A chair. Put both feet flat on the floor. Place one hand lightly on the breastbone, not over the heart — slightly higher, where the upper chest meets the base of the throat. That is the place most women carrying grief discover the holding. The chest there is small and tight, and the breath has not been able to reach it for some weeks.
Take one slow inhale, not deep — just slow. Let it travel upwards, behind the hand, until the upper chest receives a small inch of breath that it has not been receiving. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. Let the shoulders, on the exhale, drop by a single inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort of holding them up.
Repeat the slow inhale and the slower exhale, three times. Then take the hand away.
The body did not need to do anything with that. It simply needed to be acknowledged, gently, as the place the grief has been living. The world of love that Edwards described is the world in which the body and the soul are at last unbraced together. The slow exhale is a small piece of that unbracing, arriving early. The full unbracing is His to give. The minute on the chair is yours.
The second passage — the sweetness tasted
The second piece of Edwards’s vocabulary is harder for the modern reader, because the modern reader has been taught to be suspicious of the language of sweetness — to read it as sentimental, as Hallmark, as devotional excess. But Edwards used the word with great precision, and a slow reading restores it.
“The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.”
— Jonathan Edwards
He is making a small, exact claim. The knowledge of divine things — the slow study, the reading of scripture, the quiet sitting with the doctrines — is not opposed to the tasting of their sweetness. The knowledge is the substrate. The Spirit, breathed into a soul that has been quietly furnishing itself with the truth, awakens the taste. The two go together. The studying soul becomes the tasting soul, when the Spirit decides to breathe.
What is heaven like, by this passage? Heaven is the place where the tasting is the medium. The slow study you have been doing, the verses you have been carrying through the kitchen and the school run, the doctrines that have lived as a kind of quiet furniture in the back rooms of your mind — all of it becomes, in heaven, food. Not metaphor. The actual nutrient on which the soul is fed. The taste of the sweetness of these things. Heaven is the dinner table of which the studying life on earth has been the slow preparation.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal is built around this kind of slow preparation. One short passage each evening, a verse held next to the loss, room for the honest sentence. The journal is not the cure for the grief — Christ is — but the daily small showing-up to scripture is the substrate the Spirit later breathes upon. You are not producing the sweetness. You are setting the table at which He will, in His own time, seat you.
For the woman reading this who has been studying for years without feeling much — Edwards’s passage is a quiet kindness. The studying was not wasted. The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be — when He chooses to breathe — to taste the sweetness. The years of the journal that felt like nothing were not nothing. They were the patient furnishing of a soul whose tasting capacity is being prepared, by Him, for a meal you have not yet sat down to. Some of that meal arrives in this life. The full meal arrives in the world of love. The studying years are the table-laying for both.
The third passage — the plain way
The third Edwards passage is the most quiet, and the most consoling for the soul that has wondered whether the way home is going to require more strength than it currently has.
“There is no need of doing any great work to come at this rest; the way is plain to it; it is but going to it, it is but sitting down under Christ’s shadow.”
— Jonathan Edwards
Read it twice. Slowly.
Notice what he is saying. The way to the rest — the rest that is heaven, the rest that is the world of love, the rest that scripture calls the saints’ everlasting rest — is not a great work. It is plain. It is but going to it. It is but sitting down under Christ’s shadow. The verbs are small. Going. Sitting. Not striving. Not earning. Not building. The way to the world of love is the way of a tired child finding the shade their Father has prepared for them at the edge of the field.
This is the line that breaks the modern fear that the dying loved one — or you, on the day of your own dying — will not have managed enough faith for heaven. Edwards is saying, in the plainest prose available to him: the way is plain. The Christ who is the door has made the door so plain that the going through it does not require the kind of strength the grieving soul thinks it has lost. It requires the going. It requires the sitting down. The shadow is His. The shade is already prepared. The work of preparing it was His, in the cross and the resurrection. Your part is the small turning toward it.
For the woman who has been wondering whether her loved one — whose faith was quiet, or interrupted, or full of doubt — made it, Edwards is gentle. The Christ who built the door built it for the soul that goes to it and sits down under His shadow. The going can be small. The sitting can be feeble. The door is His. The shadow is already there. The judgment of who has come through the door is not yours, and the Lord who built the door has been more merciful to the small and the feeble than any modern doctrine of faith has tended to imagine.
What is heaven like, by this third passage? It is the shade at the end of the field, prepared by Christ, large enough to seat every soul that turned its small face toward Him. The going is not a great work. The way is plain. The world of love is not a reward for the strong. It is a gift for the small and the tired and the doubting, who turned, and sat, and were received.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at what happens when you die as a Christian — Baxter on the saints’ rest and what does the Bible say about death — Spurgeon on dying well. The slow walks are companions to one another, written for the same season.)
What the world of love is, taken together
Hold the three passages in the mind for a moment. The ardency of soul — the becoming transparent to the love that heaven is made of. The tasting of the sweetness — the slow study made into food, the studying soul become the tasting soul. The plain way — the going, the sitting under Christ’s shadow, the door that does not require the great work.
Heaven, in Edwards’s account, is the place where these three things become the steady weather. The transparency of the soul to God’s love. The tasting of His goodness as the medium of the day. The shade of Christ as the resting-place from which everything else proceeds. Not a destination with these things in it. A world whose air is all three.
For the woman carrying loss as she reads this — that is what your loved one is breathing now. The ardency without the wearing. The sweetness without the dilution. The shade without the heat ever returning. They are, in Edwards’s vocabulary, home. Not in the sentimental sense. In the structural sense. The world they are in is the world the soul was always being shaped for, and the small foretastes you knew of them in this life — the half-hour when they laughed without bracing, the quiet evening when they were simply themselves — were rehearsals for the steady country they have now entered.
The grief at their going is real. The world of love does not erase the grief. It does, slowly, change what the grief is of. The grief is no longer the grief of a soul lost. It is the grief of a soul gone home before you, while you continue the slow walk home yourself. That is a different grief. It is still grief. But it has a door at the end of it, and the door is shaded, and the shade is Christ.
What this slow reading will do over a year
If you sit with the three Edwards passages — one a month, for three months, and then the world-of-love idea as a whole for the remainder of the year — what happens is not dramatic. The grief does not stop. The missing does not lift. What happens is that the centre of gravity of the grief moves. The soul of the one you have lost becomes, in your imagination, less lost and more arrived. The arriving is not in a place you can picture cleanly. It is in a world of love whose furnishings Edwards refused to over-describe, because the over-describing would have flattened what is essentially atmospheric.
The slow reading lets the doctrine become load-bearing. The line what is heaven like stops being a question you ask in panic at three in the morning, and becomes a question you ask in quietness, with Edwards’s vocabulary already in the room, and the answer — a world of love, a plain way, the shade prepared by Christ — already half-formed in you before the question finishes asking itself. The answer does not erase the loss. It companions the loss. The companioning is what the slow reading is for.
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A daily home for the slow reading
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal. Each evening, a short passage and a verse — a small daily place to hold the loss next to the doctrine that Edwards preached for exactly the soul carrying it.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries Edwards’s slow vocabulary — the world of love, the plain way, the shade of Christ — into a daily companion for the woman walking out of a hard year of loss, without peppy hope and without rushing.
