Hi I am Eldeah,
Through reading the scriptures I came to the conclusion that there is no Heaven after you die...
I think the ancients teach that heaven is to be made on earth rather than to be achieved after life (For G'd is a god of the living).
What is the current view on heaven?
"Heaven" doesn't really get used, in Scripture, to speak of the ultimate state, but there is a sense, as we see in St. John's Apocalypse where there is a kind of union between Heaven and Earth; in the sense we see the Heavenly Jerusalem come down from the heavens to the earth, with language speaking of God dwelling with His people in a special and specific kind of way.
I think this alone deserves way more consideration than this post alone is sufficient to allow.
More to the point about what happens after we die; while there really is no passage that says, "You go to heaven when you die", the Scriptures do, in fact, speak of our experiencing the presence of the Lord after we die. In 2 Corinthians the Apostle St. Paul when speaking of the "being away from the body" speaks of it as being "in the presence of the Lord"; the specific Greek words Paul uses can quite accurately be translated as "emigration" and "immigration", the "emigration" from our bodies means "immigration" to the Lord. So that in some way, that we don't really understand, even after the death of our mortal bodies, between mortal death and the resurrection of the body at Christ's coming, we are kept in and with Christ. And this can't merely be metaphorical or symbolic--it is a truly real experience, that even apart and naked without the body we are kept with Christ, in Christ, while the body sleeps. As Scripture speaks of death as "sleep" for the body (not "sleep" for the "soul" as some incorrectly teach in modern times).
We don't really know what this really looks like, Scripture only provides us with vague allusions and references to it. For example the Scriptures speak of those who have suffered and died a martyr's death as with God, before the altar of God. When they cry out for the judgment against the cruel tyrants who murdered them, they are provided a white robe to comfort them, to tell them to wait until the fullness of time, when all their brothers whose end is a martyr's crown shall be brought before God.
Scripture never says "going to heaven", but there is enough present to remind us that even after the death of the body, we are still experiencing something--death of the body is not the cessation of human existence, something of us, conscious and aware, remains. In the Old Testament, after the death of his infant son, David mourns--and accepts the guilt of his transgressions which have wrought judgment here--he realizes that he shall not see his son, not until death, when he shall be reunited with his son in the place of the dead--She'ol, or Hades in the New Testament.
When the Lord Jesus speaks of the outcome between the rich man and the poor man named Lazarus, both end up in the place of death, but the poor man is in the resting place of Abraham (and all God's saints), corresponding to what the Jews of Jesus' day would have referred to as Paradise or Gan-Eden, the experience of the righteous dead; whereas the rich man finds himself in Gehenna, the experience of the wicked dead--and between them is a chasm, an unbridgeable gulf.
In the common view of 2nd Temple Judaism, all of the dead went to the place of the dead; but the righteous and the wicked had very different experiences--the righteous were in a place of peace and rest, Paradise or Gan-Eden; but the wicked in a place of judgment, Gehenna. Jesus usually uses this framework in His Ministry. We get something new and exciting, though, when Jesus speaks in the Farewell Discourses of John's Gospel, such as encouraging His disciples by saying they have a home in God's many-roomed house, Jesus will bring them and welcome into His Father's House, "that where I am, you may be also". This is a new and exciting dimension, because the one who is in Christ is not merely left to exist in the place of death--even the righteous dead--but is in and with Christ, who is Lord, enthroned as King in the heavens, at the right hand of the Father--and where He is--enthroned in glory in the heavens--is where we shall be too, with Him. It's not about where we are so much as Who we are with--and
in.
This is after death of the body, and before the resurrection of the body.
This is what, historically, is what the Christian Church is trying to communicate with "going to heaven"--it is about the experience of being in and with Christ, enjoying Him in a state of rest and peace, until Christ returns, the dead are raised bodily, and God renews and restores all things, and God is all in all.
-CryptoLutheran
