Getting older is something you never realize is happening as it happens. As author George Saunders once said, we live with “built-in confusions” that getting older and dying happen; they just happen for other people.
Heaven is something we read about, comfort others with, but don’t regularly appropriate for our own lives. I don’t think about it as often as I should, and apparently Dane Ortlund doesn’t either.
Near the beginning of “Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven” (Crossway, 2026), Ortlund makes a candid admission. As he has gone about “living and fathering and pastoring,” he has realized how little strength he actually draws from the world to come. “In the darkness of this brief life,” he writes, “heaven has been a distant star, not a blazing sun” (1). Christians need to close the gap from merely believing heaven exists to living as though heaven is coming.
Across 20 short chapters, Ortlund considers the fleeting nature of this life, being with Christ after death, the resurrection of our bodies, the restoration of Eden, the reversal of suffering, the righting of every wrong, perfect community, seeing Christ face to face, and the sheer foreverness of eternity. But this isn’t primarily a book answering speculative questions about heaven. Ortlund aims for something deeper: He wants heaven to become real to us again.
Here are three insights from Ortlund’s new volume that resonated with me.
1. Life is a mist, and heaven is the permanent breath.
Ortlund begins with a startling contrast: “For anyone not united to Jesus Christ, this life is the best it will ever get. For anyone united to Jesus Christ, this life is the worst it will ever get” (1). We know intellectually that our lives are short, but Ortlund observes that knowing we will die is very different from allowing the brevity of life to shape how we actually live.
We live like this life is substantial and permanent. Heaven remains vague and distant, an epilogue at best. Ortlund urges us to reverse those perspectives: “It is this life that is small. Heaven is not an endnote to the novel of this life. Heaven is the novel of which this life is page 1”(5). Our practical confusion explains so much of the pressure we put on this life. We want our careers to matter, our children to flourish, our bodies to remain healthy, our marriages to satisfy us, and our experiences to be meaningful. These are good desires, but the problem comes when “our heart tries to turn this life into the next one” (5). We keep asking temporary things to give us permanent happiness, but they can’t.
What can help relieve this pressure? Not just saying it, but living like a life is a mist.
2. The great hope of heaven is Jesus.
Chapter Three is simply titled “Him,” and its opening sentence may be the most important in the book: “What do we call heaven without Jesus? Hell” (21). Ortlund returns to Jesus’ promise to the thief on the cross: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). His emphasis is on two words: with me.
We naturally imagine heaven in terms of what we will receive there. No more cancer, no more anxiety, no aging, no more funerals. We imagine seeing people we have lost and living in renewed bodies in a renewed creation. And those are glorious promises. But if heaven included all of those wonderful things without Christ, it would not be heaven. It would be like being on a dream vacation without your parents, spouse, or best friend; the trip cannot be what it was supposed to be without them. This observation challenged me.
If I made a list of everything I look forward to about heaven, how long would it take before I got to Jesus? Paul does not say, “My desire is to depart and finally understand everything.” His desire is “to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). Revelation culminates with the astonishing promise, “They will see his face” (Revelation 22:4). The Jesus we have prayed to but never physically seen, trusted but never touched, and preached about but never heard with our ears will be directly before us. The great Christian hope is not ultimately that someday we get everything we have always wanted. The great hope is that someday we will get who we wanted, Christ himself.
3. God will not merely end our suffering. He will reverse it.
One of the most moving themes in “Finally Home” is Ortlund’s insistence that heaven does not merely mean suffering stops. Rather, pain will be reversed and we will see that the best things actually came out of the worst things. He writes, “In Christ, every earthly pain will eventually, inexorably be rewound into corresponding personal glory and radiance” (107).
Things will not just get better, they will be glorious. In his chapter “Reversal,” Ortlund notices how darkness gathers throughout Mark’s gospel until it literally covers the land at the crucifixion. But on Easter morning, the women approach Jesus’ tomb “when the sun had risen” (Mark 16:2). “When Jesus rose from the dead,” Ortlund writes, “the sun was rising on human history” (109). Jesus doesn’t merely survive the darkness, the darkness itself is thrown into reverse.
Death becomes resurrection, shame becomes glory, suffering becomes joy. And because Christians are united to Christ, his pattern becomes ours. That doesn’t mean Christians minimize suffering. Rather, it allows us to look directly at cancer, betrayal, abuse, injustice, grief, and death and call them what they are: enemies.
In this life, some wounds will never be fully healed, some injustices will never be acknowledged, and some people who hurt us will never apologize. And none of it has escaped God’s attention. The broken parts of our story should be called broken, but they are not the end of the story. One day we will get an ending that will not just explain what has happened to us, it will justify all that has happened. And we will see it all and sing.
Three Reasons You Should Read This Book
First, read this book because you probably think about heaven less than you realize. That was Ortlund’s realization, and it was mine, too. Heaven can become a doctrine we believe without becoming a hope we use. Yet the New Testament constantly pulls the future into the present. What is coming is supposed to change how Christians suffer, work, grieve, spend money, raise children, face aging, and even think about death. We don’t merely need to believe in heaven. We need heaven to become a “blazing sun” that throws light onto the life we are living on a random Wednesday afternoon.
Second, read this book if you are suffering. Some Christian books about suffering focus primarily on explaining why God permits it. Ortlund does something different: He asks us to look beyond suffering to what God intends to do with it. Your worst day is not meaningless, your deepest wound has not escaped God’s notice, your body will not always be broken, and the people of God will not always disappoint you. Death does not get to keep what it takes. The resurrection of Jesus means darkness has already begun running backward.
Finally, read this book because it will help you enjoy this life without needing this life to be heaven. This may have been the most freeing implication of the book for me. If this life is all we have, then everything becomes unbearably important because everything is disappearing. Our children have to turn out right, our careers have to matter, our marriages have to satisfy us, our churches have to succeed, our bodies have to cooperate, our vacations have to be epic.
But if this life is only page one of an endless story, we can loosen our grip. We can enjoy good things without demanding that they last forever. And we can endure terrible things without fearing that they will last forever. Toward the end of the book, Ortlund reflects on perhaps the most incomprehensible feature of heaven: it never ends. Every earthly pleasure contains a little sadness because we know the clock is running. Vacations end, our children grow up, the best evenings with friends eventually require someone to say, “We should probably get going.” But not heaven. Ortlund imagines the extraordinary realization that in heaven, “Each passing moment does not lessen what is left to enjoy” (219). There is no countdown, the word “goodbye” may no longer be in our vocabulary.
I began “Finally Home” realizing that I believe in heaven but rarely think about it. I finished it wondering whether those two things can remain separated without impoverishing the Christian life. Maybe heaven has become a distant star for many of us, but Ortlund wants it to become a blazing sun again. And what makes our final home truly home won’t merely be that the suffering has ended, the wrongs have been righted, our bodies have been restored, or the people we love are there. Jesus will be there. We will see his face. And we will finally be home.
Alex Watlington serves as senior pastor of Pacific Crossroads Church in Santa Monica, California.