Will There Be Cokes in Heaven?
Revelation 21:9-27
August 25, 2002
First Baptist Church, Wilson, NC


Little Bobby came into the kitchen one day and asked his mom a question: "Mom, will there be Cokes in Heaven?" Bobby meant, of course, Coca Cola, which was his all-time favorite thing in the world. "Will there be Cokes in Heaven? Because if there aren't, then I don't wanna go there." Bobby's mom realized that this was a serious theological question, on which the eternal destiny of her son was hanging. From the sink she turned to him, looked him in the eye, and said, "Why yes Bobby, I believe there will be Cokes in Heaven." Today Bob Clyde is the Baptist Campus Minister at East Carolina University. He still loves Coca Colas. And he still looks forward to Heaven.

What do you ask about Heaven? Will there be Cokes? Will there be music? Will there be memory? Will there be people I know and will I recognize them? Will there be me in Heaven, and will others recognize me? Who will be there, and who will not? What is Heaven like?


But we also wonder, are we just playing mind games? Is this all just a bunch of wishful thinking? Could Heaven itself just be a matter of wish fulfillment, just a projection? A German philosopher named Feuerbach once said so. So did Marx and Freud. And John Lennon once sang:

Imagine there's no Heaven. It's easy if you try.
No Hell below us. Above us only sky.

Is Heaven real, or does it exist only in our imagination? The debate has been going on since the time of Jesus and before. In Jesus' time, sincere believers disagreed on whether there was a Heaven or not, on whether there was any afterlife or not. A conservative group called Sadduccees pointed to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, in which there was little convincing mention of heaven or of life after death. They said the most a person can look forward to is a long life: if one is fortunate, maybe as long as threescore and ten years, as the psalmist said.

The Pharisees, who were liberals compared to the Sadduccees, pointed to later books like Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah and the Psalms to make their case. These books were written or completed during the terrible exile of the Jews in Babylon. Until that catastrophe, people had been content to believe that God's justice made sure that good people were rewarded in this life and bad people punished in this life. But during the exile, good people suffered and died while bad people murdered and prospered. If this were all there was to life, then God would be a sick God, an unjust God. They refused to believe that. There had to be something more after this cruel existence, there had to be a resurrection to new life in which God would set things right. So the Pharisees reasoned against the Sadduccees that there is resurrection and life after death and a heaven for the righteous.

Jesus was caught up in that debate, which you can read about in Mark 12. The Sadduccees posed a hypothetical situation to Jesus. Suppose a woman has lost seven husbands to death, and they all go to Heaven. Then she dies and goes to Heaven. Now, whose wife will she be? The Sadduccees thought this ridiculous story revealed the fallacy of believing in resurrection or Heaven.

But Jesus answered that life in Heaven would be different from life here and now, and therefore such questions would be irrelevant. Then Jesus pointed the Sadduccees to the very Torah that they thought rejected the resurrection. When Moses met God at the burning bush, did not God tell Moses, "I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?" "He is not God of the dead, but of the living…" (Mark 12.26-7)

Resurrection was a theme in one of Jesus' own stories: there was a rich man who dressed lavishly and feasted in his big house every day. And every day when he exited or entered his house, he passed by a sick and hungry man named Lazarus, who would have been thrilled to eat the rich man's table scraps. Lazarus died. But then, so did the rich man, who found himself in Hell. But looking out he was astonished to recognize Lazarus, resting in the bosom of Father Abraham…

To Jesus, Heaven was not just a helpful prop in his parables, it was where he was going. He believed in it even on his cross, when the life was dripping away from his body, and a thief nearby was taunting him to "Save yourself and us!" But the other thief spoke kindly to Jesus: "This man has done nothing wrong. … Jesus remember me when you come in your kingly power." Jesus told him, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:39-43)

Jesus believed in Paradise, in Heaven.


CAN WE BELIEVE? IS THERE A THOUGHTFUL BASIS FOR BELIEF IN HEAVEN THAT IS MORE THAN JUST WISHFUL THINKING? Some have tried to use science to prove there is an afterlife, but it is beyond the reach of science. Some have appealed to anecdotes of near death experiences in which people feel drawn to a comforting light, but you can get the same feeling with certain hallucinogenic drugs.

How can a thoughtful person believe with integrity? Of course there is an element of wishful thinking in our yearning for Heaven. How could there not be? But just because we wish for something does not mean that it does not actually exist.

Believing in Heaven does not go against logic, just beyond it. Heaven is after all a matter of faith.

This faith does not come out of the blue, nor out of wishful thinking, but out of a central conviction of the character of God. Remember what Jesus said: "He is not God of the dead, but of the living." We have come to trust in the resurrection because of what we know about the God we trust. And what we know of God is this: God's love is everlasting, eternal, and unfailing. God's love will never let go of us. After God has gone to all this trouble to create us, care for us, seek us out and forgive us. After God has gone through the terrible cost of his Son to set us free from sin, how nonsensical it would be to let this relationship come to an end?

The psalmist sings of how communion with God is so strong a reality it cannot be destroyed by death:

For thou dost not give me up to Sheol,
Or let thy godly one see the Pit.

Thou dost show me the path of life;
In thy presence there is fulness of joy,
In thy right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psalm 16:10-11)

Paul the apostle repeated the same in his own words:

I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of god in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

Nearly two thousand years later, John Greenleaf Whittier expressed the same hope:

Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust
(Since He who knows our need is just)
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must.
Alas for him who never sees
…
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever Lord of Death,
And Love can never lose its own.

Yes, there is no empirical evidence, no logical proof, but neither is there a logical disproof. Yes, this is wishful thinking, but this is not just wishful thinking. This is a leap of faith based on what we know of the love of God, the character of God. This is a God who has moved heaven and earth to know us personally, to love us personally. We trust that this God will not let us go off to oblivion. We trust that this God will never let us go.


SO WE BELIEVE IN HEAVEN. BUT WHAT DO WE THINK IT WILL BE LIKE? Will there be Cokes in Heaven? Forget Cokes, will there be memory, recognition, will there be me?! When Eric Clapton's son died in an accidental fall, Eric and Will Jennings wrote this song:

Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?
Would it be the same if I saw you in heaven?
I must be strong and carry on,
'Cause I know I don't belong here in heaven.

Would you hold my hand if I saw you in heaven?
Would you help me stand if I saw you in heaven?
I'll find my way through night and day,
'Cause I know I just can't stay here in heaven.

If I saw you in heaven, would you know my name? One thing we know about Heaven: it will certainly be different, but how different? Will we exist in such a different form that we will be unrecognizable to each other?

I find some clues to this in Paul's most thorough statement of his view of life after death, 1 Corinthians 15. Paul asks what we have been asking: "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" (1 Cor. 15:35) He answers with a simple illustration from the field:

What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. … So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised in imperishable. (1 Cor. 15:36-38, 42)

In resurrection there is transformation, and yet there is continuity. Our image in heaven will be different, imperishable instead of perishable. Yet there will be in our new image a kernel of continuity with the old. Think of a grain of corn that is planted into the field. After a few months, it will be transformed into a tall leafy cornstalk that looks nothing like the original kernel of corn. And yet we call them both corn; we know they are the same. I think our spiritual bodies will be as different from our earthly bodies as a stalk of corn is different from the original little grain. And yet we will be the same. Transformation, and continuity.

Leslie Weatherhead wrote a book called After Death, in which he was determined to describe heaven in a way that did not insult the intelligence of a modern person. He knew that "Traditional pictures of hell seem morally revolting; while the heaven of Sunday-school teaching or popular hymnology is a place which the plain man does not believe to exist, and which he would not want to go to if it did." (p. 13) In that book, Weatherhead pondered the problem of recognition in Heaven, and spoke a word to people who "fear that the loved ones will so have progressed and developed that it will be almost impossible to know them again." To all of us who have wondered this, he gave a simple assurance: "After many years face and form may alter, but one word and the gulf is bridged."

Weatherhead also pondered what would happen to marriages in heaven. What about what Jesus said, "In heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God?"

These words do not mean that a husband or wife will be no dearer than any other personality. They do mean that in the life after death no tie will be binding except ties of the spirit.

This is a dual comfort. On the one hand, "'Marriages made in hell will not [to] sic be remade in heaven.'" On the other hand, "Love alone is stronger than death, and love will meet the loved one again in a companionship of spirit more close and intimate than any earthly relationship--a relationship that need never fear the pang of separation, and a bond that shall never be broken." (p. 53)


Time is fleeing away now, and I have not even gotten to the question of whom may we find in heaven, a question someone passed on to me in these pithy words, "Other sheep--who are they?" I have preached on that before and if you would like me to do so again, let me know. I will give you the short answer: when I read that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, that no one comes to the Father but by Jesus, and when I read that Jesus is the gate -- to me that means that Jesus is the one who decides who enters heaven, not me or any fallible human authority or church authority. Time is fleeing and I have not even gotten to discuss the meaning of the great images of the New Jerusalem in our text today from Revelation 21.

I will conclude by answering a question you did not ask me, WHERE CAN WE GET A PEEK INTO HEAVEN? My answer is right here. The church is a colony of Heaven. The church is like an embassy of Heaven set in the midst of this foreign land that worships death and sin. And when we, the church, gather for worship, it is like a preview of heaven. That is what makes worship so unique: it is a preview of where we're headed--it is the hour when heaven is liable to break in right amongst us. For what is heaven if it is not that moment when time stands still as you realize you really are in the presence of God?

Some of the most powerful, most moving moments I have experienced have happened right here: your care for me after my father's death, your care for us now after our daughter has gone to college. I remember one time when Katie was playing the flute and Alyson was playing the piano, so simple and so right for that moment that time stood still for me. I heard of the Sunday when I was away and Tyrone stood before you and thanked you for everything you have meant to him, and then you affirmed him so graciously.

What is heaven like? I'm beginning to see it. Every so often I get a peek of it right here.

- Douglas E. Murray


For more reading:

Page, Allen F. Life After Death. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987.

Schillebeeckx, Edward and Bas van Iersel, editors. Heaven. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979.

Weatherhead, Leslie. After Death. New York: Abingdon Press.

All titles are available in the Barton College Library.