The concept of life after death has been a perpetual source of fascination and trepidation for mankind since the dawn of recorded history. Most cultures have held a belief in an afterlife. For some, the spirits of the dead exist in a state of eternal bliss. While other ancient cultures viewed the realm of the dead as a treacherous place filled with darkness and monsters.
In the middle ages, Christianized Europeans were introduced to ideas of heaven, hell, and purgatory. Heaven was a place in the clouds where God reigned supreme and the righteous would live forever. Hell, on the other hand, was a place of fire and eternal torment ruled by Satan and his devils, where the wicked would be tortured for all time.
Unsurprisingly, this view of heaven and hell has persisted in our modern understanding of God's Word, which has of course led to some confusion. Anyone who has flown in an airplane before can attest to the fact that if you look out of the window at 30,000 feet, you will not see God, angels, or your deceased loved ones sitting on the clouds. Furthermore, even the most godly of Christians do not live forever. So what did Jesus mean when he said: "...I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never die. ..." (John 11:25-26 New Living Translation [NLT])
In order to answer the question of what eternal life is, we must first dispense with the myth of heaven. By which I mean that we must do away with the medieval iconography and mythology of what heaven is and establish what heaven is not.
First and foremost: Heaven is not literally in the clouds. Many ancient cultures saw the sky and clouds as God's realm and used such language metaphorically to emphasize the distinction between the spiritual, devine reality and the mortal, physical reality of man. Thus the word "heaven" is used literally to refer to the sky in the Bible, as well as a metaphor for God's transcendence over the physical creation and human understanding. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
That being said, the Christian who dies will not live forever with God as a disembodied spirit in the clouds. Nor will they become angels when they die. (Angels are a completely different order of being, entirely separate from humans, according to the Bible.) Instead, the hope of the Christian is that their physical body will be raised from the dead in glory, just as Jesus was himself raised. (1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 5, Colossians 3:1-4)
Additionally, the Bible does not teach that people who die will go to live in heaven for eternity. Rather, those who have turned away from the evil of sin and put their trust in Jesus Christ will live in God's presence forever in a new creation — a new heaven and earth. (Revelation 21:1-8) Therefore, in the Biblical sense, heaven is a merging of God's realm with the physical creation some time in the distant future when God's dwelling will be among his people for all eternity. (Ezekiel 37:15-28) In this regard, what we now think of as heaven is simply a temporary residence until God's redemptive plan is brought to fulfillment.
So then, what is eternal life? As it happens, Jesus himself already answered this question in John 17:
"Jesus spoke these things, looked up to heaven, and said: Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son so that the Son may glorify You, for You gave Him authority over all flesh; so He may give eternal life to all You have given Him.This is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and the One You have sent—Jesus Christ."
~ John 17:1-3 Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) [Emphases Added]
According to Jesus, eternal life means living your life in a restored relationship with God. For the Christian, this means that eternal life does not begin at the time of death. Instead, eternal life begins at the moment of salvation and continues on for eternity. Heaven, therefore, is not the ultimate reward for the Christian. Jesus Christ is. Christians don't want to go to heaven when we die. We want to be with God. Heaven is not a place. Rather, heaven is living life in a restored friendship with God for all eternity. (Ephesians 2-3, Romans 5:1-11, 8)
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