Is Heaven boring?

Question 10109.

The fear of eternal boredom is one of the most common reasons people quietly decide they do not want heaven, and I have some sympathy with them, because the version of heaven they are rejecting would indeed be tedious. An endless church service on a cloud, with harps, is not what Scripture promises and I would not want it either.

The honest answer is that heaven is not boring, and the reason has two parts. The picture most people carry around is not the biblical one, and the God most people imagine is not the biblical one. Correct both and the fear of eternal boredom evaporates.

Where the cloud and harp picture came from

Not from the Bible. It comes from a mixture of mediaeval art, Greek ideas about the immaterial being superior to the material, Victorian sentimentality and a great many cartoons. Once you have absorbed it, eternal boredom looks like a reasonable prediction.

Scripture gives us something entirely different. A new heaven and a new earth. A city with streets and gates. A river and trees bearing fruit. Nations walking in the light, kings bringing their glory in, and resurrected people with bodies that eat and drink and work.

That is a world, not a waiting room. I have set out what Scripture describes in my answer on the new heaven and new earth, and the sheer solidity of it is the first cure for the fear of eternal boredom.

We will have work to do

Work is not a result of the fall. God gave Adam a garden to tend before there was any sin in the world, and the curse fell on the conditions of work rather than on work itself. Thorns and sweat are the curse; cultivation is the calling.

Revelation says his servants will worship him, and the word carries the sense of service as well as reverence. We are told we will reign with him. Reigning is an activity. It implies responsibility, decisions, stewardship and, presumably, something to steward.

So the new creation is not a permanent retirement. It is the first time in human history that anyone will do good work without frustration, fatigue, office politics or the nagging sense that it will all be undone. I have written more in my answer on what we will do in heaven.

Boredom is a symptom of sin, not of eternity

Here is a thought worth sitting with. Why do we get bored at all? Partly because our attention is disordered, partly because we exhaust things quickly, and partly because we are restless creatures looking for something that created things cannot supply.

Augustine had it right. Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Boredom is one of the forms that restlessness takes, and it is a symptom of the very condition that will be healed.

So projecting eternal boredom into the new creation is like a man with a raging fever predicting that he will always find blankets unbearable. The fever is the problem, and the fever is going.

The inexhaustible God

The deepest answer is theological rather than practical. We will be in the presence of an infinite God, and an infinite God cannot be exhausted. There will always be more of him to know, and each new discovery will be better than the last.

Psalm 16:11 says that in his presence there is fullness of joy and at his right hand are pleasures for evermore. The Greek word the New Testament uses for that settled gladness is chara, and it is never described as thinning out over time.

Think of the best conversation you have ever had, or the piece of music you cannot stop returning to, or the view you did not want to leave. Now remove the fatigue, the diminishing returns and the awareness that it must end. That is the answer to eternal boredom, and it is a person rather than a programme.

Eternal boredom assumes we stay the same

Every prediction of eternal boredom smuggles in an assumption: that the person doing the getting bored will be the same person, with the same appetites, the same attention span and the same capacity for delight.

We will not be. The resurrection changes us. Our capacity for joy is currently rather feeble, worn down by disappointment and dulled by overuse. Glorified people will be able to enjoy things at a depth we cannot presently imagine.

A toddler finds a symphony boring. That tells you about the toddler and nothing at all about the symphony. Most of our worries about eternity are toddler worries, and I say that as a fellow toddler.

There is a further point here that I think does most of the work. Sin has not made us want too much; it has made us want too little, and settle far too quickly. C. S. Lewis put it memorably about the child making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine a holiday at the sea. Fear of eternal boredom is exactly that failure of imagination, applied to God.

Worship is not what you think it is

When people picture endless worship they usually picture endless singing in a building, and they think of the last verse of a long hymn on a warm evening. It is not an unfair picture of some of our services.

Biblical worship is wider than that. It includes work, service, rule, feasting, community and the ordinary delight of created things received with thanks. In the new creation there will be no division between sacred and secular, so everything will be worship and nothing will be religious in the narrow sense.

There will be singing too, and I suspect it will be the sort that you do not want to end. But the objection about eternal boredom usually assumes that worship is a duty being performed. In the new creation it is a response being provoked.

What about the people?

The new creation is populated. Nations, kings, a countless multitude from every tribe and tongue, and every one of them delivered from the things that make human company difficult. No pride, no envy, no awkwardness, no need to manage anyone.

Add to that the reunion with those we have loved and lost, and the prospect of getting to know people we have only read about. There is a case for saying that heaven would be interesting even if God were not there, which of course he is.

Boredom is often loneliness in disguise. That particular fuel will be entirely absent.

Revelation 21:24 is one of the most intriguing verses in the Bible on this point. The nations walk by the light of the city and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it. Whatever that means in detail, it means culture, achievement and variety carried forward rather than erased, which is about as far from an empty eternity as you can get.

A word about time

Some of the anxiety about eternal boredom is really an anxiety about duration. Forever sounds like a very long corridor, and corridors are dull.

But duration is only oppressive when the present moment is thin. Nobody in the middle of a wonderful hour is troubled by the thought that there are more hours coming. It is when the hour is empty that we start counting them.

So the biblical answer is not to make eternity shorter but to make the moment fuller, and it will be full of God. That is why the language of Scripture about the age to come is consistently the language of feasting, harvest, homecoming and wedding, and never once the language of endurance.

I would add that we have no idea how time will work there, and I would not press the question. Scripture says there is no night, which at the least suggests that the rhythms we know will be changed. What it never suggests is that the redeemed will be watching the clock. Nobody at a wedding reception in full swing asks how much longer this is going on for.

So, now what?

If the fear of eternal boredom has kept you at arm’s length from the Christian hope, I would ask you to check whether you have been rejecting the Bible’s heaven or a cartoon of it. They are not the same, and only one of them is worth arguing about.

If you are a believer whose hope has gone thin, feed it. Read Revelation 21 and 22, Isaiah 60 and 65, Romans 8. Let the pictures do their work. A vague hope produces a vague Christian.

And if you cannot imagine enjoying God for ever, might the honest problem be that you are not enjoying him much now? That is worth taking to him today rather than filing away. He is not offended by the question, and in my experience he answers it.

You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Psalm 16:11, ESV