“If Jesus Christ is what makes heaven heaven, and if Jesus has a body, then is not the enjoyment of Him terribly restricted?
If He is limited to a single ordinary body, then are not the millions of believers on the new earth limited in their access to Him?
Here we remember the picture given to us at the very end of the Bible of what it will be like to be with Jesus in the new earth:
“And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21:23).
What the sun is to the earth on a clear June day, apparently, Jesus Christ (the Lamb) is to the new earth. No one on a cloudless summer day is worried that there isn’t enough sun to go around.
The sun is casting its beautiful glory everywhere, and everyone is enjoying it. In some similar way, while Jesus does remain incarnate permanently and thus spatially finite, no one need worry that there won’t be enough Jesus to go around.
He will be casting His beautiful glory everywhere, and everyone will be enjoying it.
Sonlight is the new sunlight. There are no lines of people on the beach to enjoy the sun. There will be no lines of people in the new earth to enjoy Jesus Christ.
Throughout the rest of this book we consider the many joys of a Christian’s final future. But not only are these secondary, they are also derivative.
Subtract Christ from the new earth, and we do not have paradise minus one figure; we have summer without the sun.
Even the picture and frame illustration from earlier doesn’t quite capture the relationship between Christ and other joys, because a frame can exist apart from its picture, but no joys can exist in heaven apart from Christ.
He is not only the supreme joy of heaven; every joy of heaven is itself an extension of Christ and traceable back to Him alone.
This is why Jesus told us, “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2), yet in the very next sentence he said, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3).
He Himself is the place prepared for us.”
–Dane Ortlund, Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2026), 28-29.
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