A reflection on heaven, the New Jerusalem, and the questions behind Craig Bushon’s book Whose Messiah?
By Craig Bushon with The Craig Bushon Show Media Team
A few days ago I came across an article by Jennifer Waddle, published on iBelieve.com, titled 10 Beautiful Biblical Descriptions of What Heaven Looks Like. It walks through the images most of us grew up with: the mansions Jesus promised in John 14, streets of gold, gates of pearl, angels gathered around the throne of God, and a place where suffering and death no longer exist. Like many Christians, I have heard those descriptions all my life, and they carry real comfort when we are dealing with illness, burying someone we love, or simply trying to make sense of a world that so often seems overwhelmed by suffering.
As I read, though, my mind kept moving past what heaven might look like toward what heaven actually represents, and how that connects to the questions I explored in my book, Whose Messiah? Zionism, the Third Temple, and the Stone Three Faiths Will Kill For. The book examines how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam understand the Messiah, Jerusalem, and the future God has promised. These three faiths share deep historical roots, but they disagree on some of the most fundamental questions about God’s plan for humanity, and nowhere is that disagreement more concentrated than on a single hilltop in Jerusalem.
For thousands of years Jerusalem has stood for the hope of God’s presence among His people. Temples have been built, destroyed, mourned, and anticipated, and entire religious traditions have grown up around the belief that events in that city will play a decisive role in the final chapters of human history. That is why a detail in Revelation 21 deserves far more attention than it usually gets. When John describes the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, he says in verse 22 that he saw no temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. After centuries of conflict over sacred ground, the Christian Scriptures close with an eternal city in which a physical temple is no longer needed, because God’s presence is no longer separated from His people. That detail raises serious questions about the heaven we imagine, the Messiah we await, and what we believe God’s ultimate promise really means.
Have We Been Focusing on the Wrong Parts of Heaven?
When people describe heaven, they usually start with its appearance, picturing beautiful homes, golden streets, and landscapes unlike anything on earth. Some of that imagery has a biblical basis. In John 14:2–3, Jesus tells His disciples that His Father’s house has many dwelling places and that He is going to prepare a place for them. The King James Version renders the word as “mansions,” which is why generations of Christians have imagined individual estates waiting in eternity, while most modern translations use “rooms” or “dwelling places.” The Greek word, monē, comes from a verb meaning to remain or abide, and the passage offers no architectural plans for heavenly residences.
What matters more is why Jesus made the promise. He was preparing His disciples for His departure, and they were troubled and uncertain about a future they did not understand. His answer was an assurance that their relationship with Him would continue, with no description of how large their homes would be, because He promised to come back and receive them to Himself. I believe that is where our understanding of heaven should begin, with the presence of God and the restoration of the relationship between the Creator and His creation rather than with the quality of the accommodations.
So much of our earthly life revolves around acquiring things. We measure success by our houses, careers, possessions, financial security, and the recognition we get from others, yet Revelation 21:21 describes the main street of the New Jerusalem as pure gold, the very material humanity has spent millennia hoarding and fighting over. Whether we read that image literally or symbolically, the point is hard to miss, because what we spend a lifetime pursuing may carry little weight next to what God is offering. Perhaps that is why Scripture spends so much time describing what will no longer exist in the world to come.
The Most Important Things About Heaven May Be What Is Missing
Revelation 21:4 describes a future in which God wipes away every tear and in which death, mourning, crying, and pain are gone. There are no hospital rooms where families face devastating diagnoses, no funerals, and no parents standing beside the graves of their children. For anyone who has watched a loved one suffer, that promise means more than any street of gold ever could.
There is another detail in the same chapter that is easy to overlook. John does not describe human beings leaving the earth for some distant realm; he describes a new heaven and a new earth, with the New Jerusalem coming down from God to dwell with humanity. Many of us grew up picturing eternity as a place somewhere beyond the clouds where souls eventually go, and the New Testament does speak of being with Christ after death. Its final vision is larger than that, however, and it includes resurrection, the renewal of creation, and God living among His people.
That hope did not first appear in Revelation. Isaiah 65:17–25, written centuries before the birth of Christianity, speaks of new heavens and a new earth and describes a future marked by joy, long life, and the end of destruction on God’s holy mountain. Daniel 12:2 speaks of those who sleep in the dust awakening, some to everlasting life, and Paul picks up the same thread in Romans 8:19–22, writing that creation itself waits to be set free from its bondage to decay. In 1 Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul makes bodily resurrection central to the Christian understanding of redemption, describing mortal human existence transformed into something no longer subject to decay and death, which is a far cry from a soul merely escaping the physical world. Christian traditions disagree about the precise sequence of the final events, but the central Christian hope has always been resurrection and life in God’s restored creation, the conviction that everything broken by sin, suffering, corruption, and death will finally be confronted by God’s power to make it new. And that brings us directly back to Jerusalem.
The Third Temple and the City That Needs No Temple
One of the central questions in Whose Messiah? concerns the Temple Mount, and understanding why that particular place matters so deeply requires some history. The First Temple, built by King Solomon, was destroyed by the Babylonian army under Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BC (some scholars date it to 587 BC), and many of Judah’s people were carried into exile in Babylon, as recorded in 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52. After the exile, returning Jews rebuilt the Temple, completing it around 516 BC according to Ezra 6:15, and that Second Temple, later greatly expanded by Herod the Great, was destroyed by Roman forces in 70 AD. Both destructions are still mourned on Tisha B’Av, the fast day that Jewish tradition holds marks the loss of each Temple, and traditional Jewish hopes for restoration remain connected in various ways to the coming of the Messiah. For many observant Jews, a rebuilt Temple is part of that promised future. Christian views are more divided. Some Christians, particularly those who hold certain interpretations of end-times prophecy, believe a Third Temple must be rebuilt before Jesus returns, while others read those prophetic passages differently and see no need for another physical temple. Meanwhile, the same platform holds the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, among the holiest sites in Islam. That is the physical and religious collision at the center of my book.
Now set those competing expectations beside Revelation 21:22. Throughout much of biblical history, the Temple was the place where God’s presence was understood to dwell among His people, and access to it was tightly restricted. Under the law described in Leviticus 16, only the high priest could enter the innermost sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, and only once a year on the Day of Atonement. In John’s final vision that separation is gone, because God’s presence fills the entire city and no separate building is needed to house it.
We should be careful here, because this passage does not settle every debate about whether a Third Temple might stand at some earlier stage of prophecy. Revelation contains earlier visions involving a temple, including the measuring of the temple in Revelation 11:1–2 and the heavenly temple opened in Revelation 11:19, and Christians disagree about how those scenes relate to one another chronologically. Taking one verse and pretending it resolves every disputed prophecy would be dishonest. The final picture is nevertheless clear enough to make an important point: in the Christian vision of God’s completed kingdom, the sacred building that has occupied so much of humanity’s religious attention, and provoked so much of its bloodshed, is no longer necessary. The ultimate goal is the complete presence of God among His people rather than possession of a particular structure.
When I think about the generations of conflict over Jerusalem, I find that contrast deeply meaningful. Human beings have fought over the ground where they believe God should be worshipped, while Revelation describes a future in which God’s presence is no longer confined to a sanctuary at all. That does not erase the history or the sacred importance of Jerusalem, and it does not dissolve the real disagreements among the three faiths. It does invite us to ask whether we sometimes become so focused on the location of a sacred promise that we lose sight of its purpose.
Whose Messiah Will Lead Humanity Into That Future?
That brings us to the question at the heart of my book. Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He died for humanity’s sins and rose from the dead, and that He will return to complete God’s redemptive work. Traditional Judaism does not accept Jesus as the Messiah or as divine, and its messianic expectation generally centers on a future human descendant of King David who will restore Israel, rebuild the Temple, gather the exiles, and usher in an age of peace and universal knowledge of God. Islam honors Jesus as a prophet and messenger of God, and the Quran refers to him by the title al-Masih, the Messiah, while explicitly rejecting the Christian claim that he is God’s divine Son (Quran 4:171). Islamic tradition also teaches that Jesus will return before the end of time, a belief drawn from the hadith collections rather than the Quran itself, though the role it assigns him differs sharply from the one Christians expect.
Those differences cannot be brushed aside by saying that all three religions believe in God and therefore expect the same ending, because they plainly do not. Their understandings of the Messiah, salvation, and the final destiny of humanity diverge in ways that matter profoundly to believers. That is one of the reasons I wrote Whose Messiah? I wanted to understand what these traditions actually teach instead of relying on assumptions I had carried for most of my life, and as a Christian I had to be willing to examine what my own Scriptures say, including passages that challenge the way I had always pictured the future.
In Revelation, the figure called the Lamb stands at the center of the heavenly vision, and Christians understand that Lamb to be Jesus Christ, whose death and resurrection are the heart of the faith. The same Jesus whom Christians believe was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem is portrayed as central to the final restoration of creation. That is why the identity of the Messiah matters so much in Christian theology, since if the hope of eternal life rests on Christ, questions about who Jesus is cannot be separated from questions about heaven.
Understanding those differences should never require contempt for people who believe otherwise. I can hold firmly to my Christian convictions while recognizing that my Jewish neighbor or Muslim friend has reached different conclusions through a tradition that deserves to be represented accurately. Honest religious discussion means understanding what is actually being claimed, where those claims differ, and why the differences matter. We do not have to pretend that conflicting beliefs are identical in order to treat one another with dignity, and I would argue that meaningful conversation across faiths becomes possible only when we stop pretending the disagreements are not there.
A Heaven Where the Nations Are Healed
There is another picture of eternity that deserves attention in a world divided by religion, nationality, race, and politics. In Revelation 7:9, John sees a great multitude that no one could count, drawn from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, and human diversity remains part of that scene rather than being erased by it. Revelation 22:1–2 then describes the river of the water of life flowing from the throne and the tree of life growing on either side of it, with leaves that are for the healing of the nations.
The implication of that image is that the nations need healing, and human history bears that out. Nations have fought wars, conquered territory, persecuted minorities, and justified violence through claims of political, cultural, and religious superiority, and we still see how quickly disputes over land, identity, and sacred history can turn deadly. The final biblical vision is a restored creation in which the nations themselves are healed, rather than one nation triumphing over the rest. We should not misread this, because Revelation also speaks of judgment, accountability, and the exclusion of evil, and its open gates are not a declaration that every action is acceptable or that every theological distinction disappears. Still, it offers a vision of peace that humanity has repeatedly failed to achieve on its own.
That vision places a demand on how we live while we wait for it. If our faith teaches that God will ultimately bring healing, we ought to take seriously His commands concerning mercy, justice, honesty, and how we treat our neighbors. Christians call Jesus the Prince of Peace, a title drawn from Isaiah 9:6, and that title carries a responsibility to reflect His character in our own conduct. And because Genesis 1:27 teaches that every human being is created in the image of God, we should be very careful about letting religious disagreement become an excuse for hatred or cruelty. None of this requires abandoning Christian doctrine. It requires remembering that the way we conduct ourselves is part of our witness, a point that matters all the more when religious language is used to justify actions that deserve serious moral scrutiny.
What Are We Really Waiting For?
As I kept thinking about the iBelieve article, I returned to the same conclusion. The most powerful descriptions of heaven are not necessarily the ones involving gemstones, golden streets, or enormous gates, but the promises that answer the deepest struggles of human existence, the end of death and suffering and the renewal of a creation no longer governed by fear, corruption, and loss. Above all of these stands the promise that God Himself will dwell with His people, which is the answer Christianity offers to the brokenness we experience every day.
I understand that not everyone reading this will accept that answer. Some readers belong to other faiths and some hold no religious belief at all, and I am not asking anyone to set aside the habit of questioning and examining, since that habit is exactly what led me to write Whose Messiah? But I do think these passages deserve serious consideration, because the question of heaven is bound up with the question of what kind of future we believe is possible, who has the authority to bring it about, and what happens after our earthly lives end. For Christians, that hope is inseparable from Jesus Christ, and for anyone approaching the Bible with an open mind, Revelation offers a vision worth examining carefully, one in which the Creator restores what humanity could not repair on its own.
It has always struck me that the Bible opens in a garden with the tree of life in Genesis 2, where humanity’s relationship with God is broken, and closes in Revelation 22 with a restored creation where that same tree of life grows again. Between those two scenes lie centuries of human failure, divine promises, covenants, prophets, kingdoms, exile, and redemption. Read that way, the biblical story is less a collection of predictions about how the world will end than an account of whether humanity’s broken relationship with God can be restored. That is the question running beneath the promise of heaven, and it is closely tied to the question running through my book. Whose Messiah? asks readers to examine the different figures Judaism, Christianity, and Islam expect to shape humanity’s future, and the biblical descriptions of heaven push that examination further, toward what redemption actually means and what the final restoration of creation reveals about the nature and purposes of God.
Those questions deserve more of our attention than arguments over what our heavenly homes will look like. When a person approaches the end of life, the size of a mansion is unlikely to be what matters most. What matters is the hope of seeing those we love again, of being free from suffering, and of knowing that death does not have the final word, and Christianity places that hope in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Scripture gives us remarkable images of the world to come without answering every question we might ask about eternity, and there is room for humility about the details without surrendering the central promise.
So the next time someone describes heaven’s streets of gold or its gates of pearl, it is worth remembering that Revelation also describes a city with no temple because God Himself is there, and a tree whose leaves bring healing to the nations in a creation where death no longer rules. Those images point toward something far greater than earthly wealth or magnificent architecture, toward the restoration of what was lost in the garden, and they leave each of us with a question that matters in this life as much as the next: are we so focused on what heaven will look like that we have neglected what God is telling us heaven is ultimately about?
That question deserves a longer conversation than one column can hold, and it is the reason I believe the one started in Whose Messiah? is far from over.
The truth is not hate speech.
Sources and Scripture
This commentary was inspired by Jennifer Waddle’s 10 Beautiful Biblical Descriptions of What Heaven Looks Like, published on iBelieve.com.
Primary biblical passages examined include Genesis 1:27, Genesis 2:9, Leviticus 16, 2 Kings 25, Ezra 6, Isaiah 9:6, Isaiah 65:17–25, Jeremiah 52, Daniel 12:1–3, John 14:1–6, Romans 8:18–25, 1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 7:9–17, Revelation 11:1–2, Revelation 11:19, Revelation 21, and Revelation 22. The comparative religious discussion also draws on Quran 4:171, the hadith accounts of Jesus’ return recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Laws of Kings, chapter 11) on traditional Jewish messianic expectation, and the themes examined in Craig Bushon’s Whose Messiah? Zionism, the Third Temple, and the Stone Three Faiths Will Kill For, available on Amazon Kindle.
Disclaimer
This opinion editorial presents a Christian perspective on biblical descriptions of heaven, prophecy, resurrection, and the Messiah. Interpretations of Revelation and other prophetic passages vary among Christian denominations and scholars. Descriptions of Jewish and Islamic beliefs are intended to explain significant theological differences, not to suggest that all followers of those traditions hold identical views. The commentary expresses religious convictions and interpretations rather than independently verifiable descriptions of the afterlife. Its purpose is to encourage thoughtful examination of Scripture, religious history, and differing faith traditions while respecting freedom of belief.
