Chapter 16

A Material Heaven

Heaven as a planet, and an age to come in which natural people never change

There are two ways to get heaven wrong. The first is the cloud. In that picture heaven is thin and vague, a place where people float, harps play, and nothing much happens. Many believers will admit, if you ask them quietly, that they cannot make themselves look forward to it. The second way is the subdivision. In that picture heaven is this life over again with the trouble taken out: the same meals, the same work and the same family life, going on without end.

Finis Dake saw the first error clearly and attacked it. Then, in his course God’s Plan for Man, he built the second picture in careful detail. He opens his lesson on heaven with these words.¹

IT IS A REAL PLANET LIKE THE EARTH (Gen. 1:1; 11:8-16). In this last passage it is called a “better country” than the Earth. Heaven, therefore, is not an invisible nothing or a cloud floating around in space where saints sit and play a Jew’s harp forever. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Forty-Two, p. 834²

The rest of the lesson fills the planet in. It has a location, cities, rivers, furniture and food, and two men from the Old Testament have been eating there for thousands of years. Later lessons take the picture into eternity. After the Millennium, Dake teaches, people who were never glorified will live on the new earth forever, farming, marrying and having children without end.

That teaching is an error. Jesus said that in the resurrection people “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30). Paul taught that the body is sown a natural body and raised a spiritual one, and that “we shall all be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:44, 51). Dake’s eternal state sets both passages aside. It also grows out of what he taught about God. A God with a body of ordinary size, who lives in one place, needs a place to live, and Chapter 8 showed that this is the God of Dake’s course. The same literal rule that gave God a body (Chapter 4) furnished His home.

A literal thousand-year reign of Christ, with natural people living on the earth under Him, is a view held within historic orthodoxy, and I am not arguing against it (Chapter 1). My argument is with what Dake does after the thousand years are over.

Why the shape of our hope matters

Picture a woman standing beside her husband’s grave after forty years of marriage. The pastor reads that the dead in Christ will rise, and she wants to know what that promise means for him and for her. On Dake’s account the honest answer is mostly more of the same: more years, more meals and more of the life they already had, on better ground. Scripture offers her something larger. It promises that her husband will be raised changed, that she will be changed with him, and that both of them will see the Lord.

Dake knew the verse that speaks of this. In the same lesson that measures the new earth, he quotes 1 Corinthians 2:9, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man,” and applies it to the new eternal state.³ Then he goes on to describe that state down to the acre. Measured that closely, it becomes a smaller hope than the one Paul could not put into words.

The chapter also shows a method at work. Chapter 15 followed Dake’s literal rule as it built a civilization before Genesis 1:2. Here the same rule builds one after Revelation 22, and prints it with the same confidence.

What Dake taught about heaven

A planet with an address

Lesson Forty-Two gives eight numbered points about heaven. Heaven is a created place and a planet. Scripture speaks of three heavens. The planet lies “IN THE NORTHERN PART OF THE UNIVERSE,” a location Dake takes from Isaiah 14 and Psalm 75.⁴ The eighth point is an inventory. Verse by verse, it lists what is found on the planet: cities, mansions, trees, rivers, fountains, food, animals, furniture, altars, tongs, coals, incense, musical instruments, clothes, books, crowns, palm leaves, trumpets, hail, mountains, keys, chains, measuring sticks, doors and doorposts, walls, gates, streets and fruit. Then Dake states the rule that produced the list.

If the invisible things in the heavenlies are clearly seen by the things on Earth, as Paul taught in Rom. 1:20, then we have a right to believe that there are in Heaven the same kind of things that we have on Earth. We have no right to make an exception of any good thing that God created and intended for man to have before the fall. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Forty-Two, p. 835⁵

Dake reads Romans 1:20 as a rule of transfer. Paul wrote that the created world shows God’s eternal power and divine nature, so that people are without excuse. Dake turns the verse into permission to assume that every good thing on earth has a copy in heaven. Under that rule the burden of proof moves to the reader, who now has to explain why anything is missing from the list.

The planet is in his Study Bible as well. His note on 1 Kings 8:27 says that God will dwell on the earth in all eternity, “as He now dwells on the planet heaven.”⁶ In the course he returns to the subject when he reaches the New Jerusalem. Some readers, he says, take the “mansions” of John 14 as a picture of the saints themselves, and he has no patience with them.

They cannot seem to be able to believe in a real material city with streets, homes, fountains, and other things that make real living for the heavenly inhabitants. ... As we have seen in Lesson Forty-Two, Heaven is a real place, a real country, a real planet, and a material land just like the Earth. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fifty-One, p. 988⁷

The detail keeps growing. The city is “a series of mountain peaks,” the floor of the throne room is “like a sea of glass, clear as crystal, and of unknown dimensions,” and the city holds “an immense banquet hall” for the marriage supper of the Lamb and other banquets throughout eternity.⁸ In Revelation Expounded Dake makes the same argument about the mansions, asking why they cannot be “material buildings in heaven which are to come down to the New Earth.”⁹

Two men eating in heaven

Food is on Dake’s list, and he means real food. His proof is a pair of Old Testament saints.

Several natural men have gone to Heaven and have come back or will later come back. They are Enoch, Elijah, Paul, and John. The first two of these men are still in Heaven living a natural life and will come back as the two witnesses of Zech. 4:11-14; Rev. 11:3-13. Enoch has been in Heaven over 5,142 years and Elijah has been there over 3,500 years and they are still eating, drinking, and enjoying life on the planet Heaven. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Forty-Two, p. 835¹⁰

On this account two men are alive in heaven now, in bodies that have never been glorified, and they have been eating and drinking there for thousands of years.¹¹ Dake extends the table to God Himself. In a supplement he writes that “God eats,” and in Lesson Four he says that Abraham “made a dinner for God and two angels and they actually ate food.”¹² God’s body is the subject of Chapter 8. The point here is narrower: in Dake’s heaven, eating always means literal eating.

Natural people forever

The center of the teaching comes in the course’s last lessons, under the heading “The New Peoples.” Dake states his thesis at the start.

The following arguments prove that there will be natural men on this Earth forever and that all natural life will continue in all eternity as God intended when He created such life on the Earth. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fifty-One, p. 992¹³

Dake divides Adam’s race into two classes that last forever. The saints of all ages before the Millennium are raised and glorified, and they rule. The people who live through the Millennium are not glorified. They pass into the new earth as natural people and become the subjects of the kingdom, along with all their descendants.¹⁴ He calls these people redeemed. “After the Millennium,” he writes, “natural man will be fully redeemed and will live on the New Earth just as Adam did before the fall, to carry out God’s original purpose of replenishing the Earth with natural people.”¹⁵ Redeemed, but never glorified, they go on living ordinary lives.

Dake grounds this in the world Adam lost, and then carries that world forward into eternity.

In other words, if man had not fallen there would have been natural life forever. Children would have been born forever. Animals would have been born for man and utilized by him for his own good. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fifty-One, p. 994¹⁷

His reasoning runs like this. God’s first plan for man was natural life on a good earth, going on forever. Sin interrupted the plan, but God cannot be defeated, so the plan resumes where it left off. Dake even finds a gain in the interruption. If Adam had never fallen, there would have been no glorified saints to help God rule the universe.¹⁸ He sees the practical problem this creates, and he raises it himself.

The obvious question in view of the perpetual multiplying of the race is how can the Earth hold so many coming generations? God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fifty-One, p. 996¹⁹

He answers in three parts. The first is modest: the working out of God’s plan belongs to God, and we are asked to believe what is written. The second suggests that redeemed man will rule other planets, so the overflow can be settled on other worlds. The third is arithmetic.

If one acre were given to one person there would be room for about 121,600,000,000 people on the Earth or about 119 billions of people more on the Earth than are on the Earth at present. There are about two billion people on Earth now. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fifty-One, p. 997²⁰

He reaches the figure by taking the water off the earth’s surface, setting aside two and a quarter million square miles for the New Jerusalem, and dividing what is left. He offers Japanese smallholdings as a model of how little land a family needs. He adds that births will slow in any case, because Genesis 3:16 makes the curse the reason conception was multiplied.²¹ God could sustain such a world if He chose. Scripture never says that He will, and a teacher who needs a land survey for eternity has gone well past anything the Bible says.

Dake knew how far this stood from what most Christians believe, and he said so. In his lesson on the renovation of the earth he lists the ideas he considers false, and much of the ordinary Christian hope is on the list.

The ideas that generally prevail, that the world is coming to an end, that the coming of Christ will end all things on the Earth, that the present Heaven and Earth will be annihilated and cease to exist, ... that all men are to be glorified and that none will exist in a natural state after the Millennium, that we will spend eternity in Heaven, that men and animals will not multiply and continue on Earth forever are all unscriptural. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fifty, p. 972²²

Two of those clauses carry the weight. The belief that all the redeemed will be glorified is called unscriptural, and so is the belief that we will spend eternity in heaven. Dake was telling his students that the hope most of them had been taught was wrong, and he was giving them another one. A supplement asks the student whether he knows “that both Jews and Gentiles will live on the Earth forever,” and answers that the final restoration puts all peoples back on the earth as natural subjects under the resurrected saints.²³

Bodies that are never changed

If natural people live forever without dying, something has to keep them alive. Dake’s answer is the tree of life. The natural peoples eat from it and go on living, while the glorified saints have no need of it.²⁴ No change waits for them, and Dake says so plainly.

Even if man had remained true to God and had not fallen He did not plan to resurrect men and give them heavenly bodies. Neither is God going to resurrect, change from natural to spiritual bodies, and make the future natural men spiritual and heavenly in body. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Fifty-One, p. 994²⁵

A careful reader will think at once of 1 Corinthians 15:50, and Dake meets that verse in a supplement.

The old theory that flesh and blood cannot enter Heaven is not biblical, for while it says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” it does not say man cannot enter it. God’s Plan for Man, Supplement One, p. 35²⁶

His reading rests on a distinction between entering the kingdom and inheriting it. Flesh and blood cannot inherit, he grants, but Enoch and Elijah went into heaven in the bodies they had. On that reading Paul’s barrier says nothing about what a body is made of. Earlier in the course Dake had already said what a spiritual body is.

Even resurrected bodies of flesh-and-bone saints are called “spiritual” (1 Cor. 15:44), so spiritual bodies are of materialized, spiritualized substance—something we know nothing about, as far as experience is concerned, at the present time. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 60²⁷

In Dake’s usage, then, “spiritual” names a kind of material. A spiritual body is a body made of finer stuff, and an earthly body of flesh and bone can be carried into eternity unchanged. Much of his doctrine of the age to come turns on that definition.

What Dake gets right

Dake was right to tear down the cloud. The resurrection is bodily. The risen Jesus showed His disciples His hands and feet and told them to touch Him.

Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have. Luke 24:39 (NKJV)²⁸

Then He ate a piece of broiled fish in front of them. The Bible also ends with a new heaven and a new earth, with God dwelling among His people and a marriage supper for the Lamb (Revelation 19:9).

Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. Revelation 21:3 (NKJV)

The church’s creeds confess the same hope. They speak of the resurrection of the body, and not only of the soul’s survival.²⁹ On all of this Dake and I agree, and nothing that follows takes it back.

Sown natural, raised spiritual

Paul’s great chapter on the resurrection keeps the body and changes it.

The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. 1 Corinthians 15:42–44 (NKJV)

Two things are true at once in these lines. The body that is buried is the body that is raised, so there is continuity. What comes up is also different from what went down, because corruption becomes incorruption and weakness becomes power. Dake accepts the first half. He uses Paul’s own picture of the grain of wheat to prove that the resurrection is real.³⁰ But anyone who has planted a seed knows that what comes up looks nothing like what went into the ground, and that is the point of Paul’s picture.

Paul’s word for the raised body is “spiritual” (Greek pneumatikos). It can sound like a word about substance, but Paul uses the same word for a person a few chapters earlier: “he who is spiritual judges all things” (1 Corinthians 2:15). No one thinks that man is made of spirit. He is a man ruled by the Spirit of God.³¹ In the same way, a spiritual body is a body wholly ruled and given life by the Spirit. It is the same body we have now, made incorruptible and deathless, and it is more solid than before.

That is why 1 Corinthians 15:50 says what it says.

Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption. 1 Corinthians 15:50 (NKJV)

The second half of the verse explains the first. “Flesh and blood” stands beside “corruption,” and the phrase is the Bible’s ordinary way of speaking about frail, mortal human nature as it is now.³² Paul is saying that our mortal nature cannot be carried into the kingdom unchanged, and that is exactly what Dake’s eternal natural order requires. Paul then says who will be changed.

Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 1 Corinthians 15:51–52 (NKJV)

The change belongs to all who are Christ’s. Paul draws no line between a changed class of rulers and an unchanged class of subjects.³³ Dake’s natural peoples are told they will never receive the very change Paul promises to everyone who belongs to Christ.

Neither marry nor are given in marriage

The Sadducees once brought Jesus a question about a woman who had been married to seven brothers in turn, and they asked whose wife she would be in the resurrection. His answer is short.

For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels of God in heaven. Matthew 22:30 (NKJV)

Luke’s account gives the reason.

The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are counted worthy to attain that age, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; nor can they die anymore, for they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. Luke 20:34–36 (NKJV)

Marriage ends in that age because death ends.³⁴ In this age the human race marries and bears children in part because each generation dies and another must take its place. When death is gone, the order built around it is gone too. Dake’s eternity needs that order to keep running, with marriage, birth and new generations forever, and Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees closes the door on it.

Dake could reply that Jesus was speaking only of the glorified saints, and that the natural peoples are a second group the Sadducees did not ask about. His system needs that reply, but the text does not give it. The Sadducees asked about the resurrection, and Jesus described the age of the resurrection. Paul’s long chapter on the resurrection body never mentions a permanent class of unchanged people, and neither does John’s vision of the new earth, the passage Dake relies on most. A teaching this large ought to appear somewhere in the New Testament, and it does not.

Readers who hold to a literal Millennium may wonder whether this argument touches them, and it does not. In the usual premillennial view, the thousand years are a stage that ends with the last enemy destroyed and the final judgment, and the age that follows is new. In Dake’s view the natural order of the Millennium rolls on into eternity with only death removed. Once that order is made permanent, Matthew 22:30 is no longer a verse about a passing stage. It speaks directly to the age Dake is describing.

Reading Revelation the way it asks to be read

Most of Dake’s inventory comes from Revelation, so it matters how that book wants to be read. Revelation answers that question itself. In chapter 1 John sees seven stars and seven lampstands, and the Lord explains at once that the stars are the angels of the seven churches and the lampstands are the churches. In chapter 5 John sees this.

And I looked, and behold, in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as though it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent out into all the earth. Revelation 5:6 (NKJV)

The Lamb stands at the center of the throne room, and no reader takes Him to be a literal animal with seven horns and seven eyes. Everyone understands the picture as a sign, and the verse explains part of it.³⁵ A rule that takes the furniture of heaven literally has to take the Lamb literally too, and Dake’s rule cannot do that. Chapter 4 examines the rule itself. A method that will not let Revelation speak in its own way will bring back an inventory where John gave a vision.

None of this makes the new creation less real. When John reaches for gold, pearl and a river clear as crystal, he is describing something real that is greater than his words, and reading his vision as a surveyor’s report makes it smaller.

The center of heaven is a Person

Ask Dake’s lessons what makes heaven heaven, and they answer with its contents. Ask John, and he answers with God.

But I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light. Revelation 21:22–23 (NKJV)

Two of the greatest fixtures of any city are missing on purpose. There is no temple and no sun, and the city lacks nothing, because God is there. His presence takes the place of both. John’s description of the holy city ends by taking things away, and what remains is God Himself. He says the same in his first letter.

Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. 1 John 3:2 (NKJV)

John had seen more of the age to come than anyone, and he still wrote, “it has not yet been revealed what we shall be.” The one thing he does say is about a change in us, and the change comes from seeing Christ. Dake’s method could not leave that silence alone. His rule required him to fill it, and he filled it with furnishings, so the promise he taught came out smaller than the one John could not describe.

Didn’t Jesus eat fish after He rose?

Some readers will say that Dake’s realism is simply the Bible’s, since the risen Jesus ate in front of His disciples. That is true, and this chapter has already granted it. The glorified body can eat, and Luke 24 settles that. But a risen body that is free to share a meal is a different thing from an eternal order that must keep running on farming, marriage and childbirth. The first is the risen Lord eating with His friends. The second is a permanent biology of birth and growth, and Matthew 22:30 speaks against it directly.

Isn’t the new earth physical?

Others will say that the new earth is a real, physical place, and that this chapter takes back what Dake rightly defended. I agree that the new earth is physical. Paul writes that “the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).³⁶ That is a promise about matter set free. What I deny is that the coming world is this world stretched out without change. A transformed creation is still a creation, and a raised body is still a body. What Paul describes is more solid than what we have now.

Doesn’t Dake’s picture comfort the grieving?

A third objection is the most personal. Dake’s picture, people say, comforts the grieving with shared tables, children raised and families together again, and a critic should leave that comfort alone. Reunion is promised in plain words. Paul tells the Thessalonians that the dead in Christ will rise, that the living will be caught up together with them, and “thus we shall always be with the Lord.” Then he adds, “Therefore comfort one another with these words.”³⁷ What I doubt is that the comfort grows stronger when we add detail God did not give. Detail we invent can be taken from us. The comfort that holds at a graveside is the promise that the person we love will be raised, that we will know each other, and that we will see the Lord together.

We shall see Him as He is

Dake’s course makes heaven a planet like the earth, filled with everything good the earth contains. It makes the age to come an endless natural order in which people who are never glorified marry and have children forever, and it calls the ordinary Christian hope of being changed unscriptural. That teaching is an error. It runs against Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:30 and Paul’s in 1 Corinthians 15, and it comes from the same literal rule and the same embodied God that the earlier chapters examined. Dake saw that the cloud takes away the body, and he was right. He did not see that his subdivision takes away the glory. A rule that fills every silence will always produce a crowded eternity and a smaller God.

Keep the solid things Scripture gives: the risen body, the new earth and the supper of the Lamb. Then let the Bible be silent where it chooses to be silent. When John wrote that what we shall be “has not yet been revealed,” he left something out on purpose and kept the one thing that matters. Every believer will be changed, and the change will come from seeing Christ. “We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”