Book review: The Glory of Heaven. John MacArthur

Here's the headline; if you've been allured, led astray, by the recent vogue for heaven tourism books, this is the necessary antidote. And i'm sorry.

Let's deal with those two statements backwards. I'm sorry because if you've read such books as 'Heaven is for real,' or  'To Heaven and Back' two cite to popular books, then, at some level you've been let down by the church. No one who is even familiar with the Bible should need books like these to help their faith, no one who is even familiar with the Bible would accept these books as compatible with Christianity. The fact that these books sell so well points to a systemic failure in the church. And it stinks. And i'm sorry.

This book, The Glory of Heaven, is the antidote. This book will fill you with longing for Heaven, actual heaven, the Heaven we find in the Bible, not in the, at best, dreams, or, at worst, demon inspired accounts of the near dead.

The Glory of Heaven was originally published in 1996, and the recent republished work is much the same, save for a new introduction, a new chapter at the beginning, and appendices at the end which deal, idea by idea, with three of the best selling Heaven tourism books. This lack of editing is an undoubted strength of the book. Why? Because MacArthur, with his typical faithful and probing exegesis focuses this book on what Heaven is like, and that never changes. The best way to deal with error is not neccesarily to refute it, but to tell the truth. Don't just sit there and tell me that Big Macs are bad for me, feed me steak. The reasons why heaven tourism books simply can not paint a real picture of Heaven are as long as your arm, but much better to focus on truth than error. The appendices are helpful for dealing with the errors in those books, but i'm thankful, for the sake of my heart, that the majority of the book retells the Biblical visions of heaven.

MacArthur writes chapters on what Heaven will be like, what we'll be like when we're there, the new Jerusalem, and angels. Reading it made me hungry for Heaven, hungry for Jesus, and hungry for the Word. It made sin seem foolish and Jesus seem glorious. It reminded me that Heaven is glorious in the most terrifying sense of the world, and that no one who has really been to Heaven and back could come back speaking of anything other than Jesus' glory. That, after all, is the theme of Revelation.

It's a fairly short book, only 215 pages including the appendices, but, if you want a beautiful, Biblical portrait of Heaven, there's nothing i've read like it. If you're not interested in Heaven tourism books, you should read this anyway, for the sake of your faith, for the sake of your heart. And if you've been drawn away from the Bible by what those books have to say, run, don't walk to imbibe the antidote, which makes Jesus look big and us look small. Truly the theme of Heaven itself.