In heaven there will be “degrees of happiness in a world of perfect joy.”[1] Think of that. Degrees of happiness in a world of perfect joy. How can this be? A comprehension of this profound mystery can help give us a deeper amazement of the majestic glory of God to be displayed in the world to come. This will in turn strengthen and motivate us to live lives pleasing to God.
Where does the Bible teach degrees of happiness?
According to the Bible, how we live for God on earth will result in a greater or lesser enjoyment of His glory in heaven. For example, Paul said “This light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen, for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18). John Piper comments on these verses: “Paul’s affliction is `preparing’ or `effecting’ or `bringing about’ a weight of glory beyond all comparison. We must take seriously Paul’s words here. He is not merely saying that he has a great hope in heaven that enables him to endure suffering. That is true. But here he says that the suffering has an effect on the weight of glory. There seems to be a connection between the suffering endured and the degree of glory enjoyed.”[2] In other words, our experience of God’s glory in heaven “seems to be more or less, depending in part on the affliction we have endured with patient faith.”[3]
In the same line of thought is Matthew 5:11-12: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven.” Again, “If a Christian who suffers much for Jesus and one who does not suffer much experience God’s final glory in exactly the same way and degree, it would seem strange to tell the suffering Christian to rejoice and be glad (in that very day, cf. Luke 6:23) because of the reward he would receive even if he did not suffer. The reward promised seems to be in response to the suffering and a specific recompense for it.”[4]
Suffering is not the only thing that brings about a greater reward in heaven. Our faithfulness to Christ in doing good works for His glory will also have a bearing on our degree of happiness (or, reward) in heaven. To the slave who made ten pounds it was said “Well done, good slave, because you have been faithful in a very little thing, be in authority over ten cities” whereas the slave who made five pounds was told “And you are to be over five cities” (Luke 19:17-19; cf. Revelation 22:5; 2:26, 27). And in 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 Paul explains that the quality of each Christian’s work will be revealed at the judgement. He concludes by saying “If any man’s work which he has built upon it [the foundation of Jesus Christ] remains, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as through fire” (vv. 14-15).
Motivation for holy living
Keeping the promise of heavenly rewards constantly before us enables us to joyfully endure suffering and encourages us to zealously obey God. By looking at specific rewards we can see more clearly how this works itself out in everyday life.
One specific kind of reward in heaven will be seeing the fruits of our labor in leading people to Christ and building Christians up in their faith. In a real sense, the actual people whom God has brought to Christ through us and whom God has built up through us will be one of our rewards. Paul said to the Thessalonian believers “who is our hope or joy or crown of exultation? Is it not even you, in the presence of our Lord Jesus at His coming? For you are our glory and joy” (1 Thessalonians 2:19, 20). He told the Philippian believers that they were his “joy and crown” (Philippians 4:1).
This particular reward motivates us to evangelize and work for building people up in their faith. For as we are used by God to bring people to Christ through our preaching of the gospel, our reward in heaven increases. Therefore we are motivated to evangelize so that we will have a greater reward–the joy of those whom we have labored over being in heaven with us.
There are many different heavenly crowns promised in the Bible. All those who long for and cherish the hope of Christ’s second coming will receive a crown of righteousness (2 Timothy 4:8). This longing should in fact be so great that it results in some sense of mourning over the fact that we are physically apart from Christ while on earth, for “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).
A crown of life will be given to those who endure under trial (James 1:12). In this same verse, James also says that the crown of life is promised to those who love the Lord. So enduring trial is somehow connected to our love for Christ–if you love Him, you will persevere under trial. “Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial, for once he has been approved he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love Him” (James 1:12; see also Revelation 2:10). This reward motivates us to endure temptation or persecution or martyrdom or any other vexing trial that may come our way. For we can press on through the trial knowing that our perseverance will not only result in a heavenly crown, but will prove our love for Christ.
Pastors who joyfully shepherd their congregation and serve as good examples to them will be rewarded with an unfading crown of glory when Christ, the Chief Shepherd, appears (1 Peter 5:2-4). This reward can provide strong encouragement for a pastor to serve his congregation with diligence and joy, knowing that his labor in the Lord is not in vain.
In Matthew 5:3-12 Jesus promises many specific blessings to those who have a certain condition of heart. He says “Blessed [which means `how very happy’] are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (v. 4). What a glorious paradox–Christ says that those who mourn should be happy! How can we make our mourning be compatible with happiness? By looking to the reward! Christians who mourn can be happy because of the promise that they will one day be comforted. Therefore, the promised reward of mourning gives us the strength to persevere through sadness and results in a source of deep joy that cannot be taken away. In verse 8 Jesus says “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Think about how this can motivate us to keep ourselves pure and “unstained by the world” (James 1:27).
Christ’s promise that the merciful shall receive mercy (v. 7) can be a strong guide throughout our everyday interaction with other people. For if we are not merciful to them, God will not be merciful to us (cf. James 2:13: “judgement will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgement”).
While there are many different kinds of rewards, behind every reward stands the same principle: to glorify God by somehow enhancing our enjoyment of Him in heaven. At the bottom line, being given a heavenly reward means being given greater delight in God, greater love for Him, and a greater experience of Him. The specific kinds of reward (such as those we have just examined) refer to the different ways we can be brought into this greater delight and happiness in God. And since “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him,”[5] God is not ceasing to glorify Himself by magnifying our enjoyment of Him. God is actually bringing greater glory to Himself by giving us greater satisfaction in that glory. For the more satisfaction and joy that His glory brings, the greater its value is exalted and proclaimed. Thus, the ultimate aim of God in giving heavenly rewards is to glorify Himself.
The ultimate joy
Perhaps one of the most astonishing promises of heaven is Revelation 22:4: “And they shall see His face.” In heaven we will see God face to face! As Jesus said, we will behold His glory (John 17:24). God’s glory is the brilliant shining forth of His moral perfections. Heaven will be basked and soaked in the glory of God: “The Lord God shall illumine them” (Revelation 22:5). Furthermore, the glory of God will reflect off of us and through us and in us to such an extent that we will shine brighter than the sun: “And those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever” (Daniel 12:3). Jesus puts it this way: “the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43).
The joy of seeing God and the joy of reflecting God’s glory are very closely related. C.S. Lewis explains how they relate: “We do not want merely to see beauty. …We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it.”[6] When you see something you love, you want to experience it as fully as you can in order to maximize your enjoyment of it. This means having a part in making it known and exalted; it means bathing in it and passing into it and “receiving it into ourselves,” as Lewis has said.
In heaven, our joy of seeing God’s glory will be made complete by our enjoyment of reflecting and bathing in and experiencing His glory. We will have a part in exalting God’s spectacular and majestic glory by reflecting it and mirroring it to such an extent that we shine like the sun. Our experience of God’s glory will climax in our white-hot enjoyment of it by being able to reflect it and be immersed in it. This will make our joy in His glory complete and God’s exaltation of His glory complete. And those who have greater reward will reflect God’s glory more and shine more brightly than those with lesser reward.
Degrees of individual happiness will contribute to the overall happiness of everyone
The differences of happiness among saints in heaven does not mean that those who are less happy will experience any sadness or envy. Nor does it mean that they will not be fully satisfied and perfectly joyful. How can this be? Someone once put it like this: “everyone’s cup will be overflowing, but not everyone will have the same size cup.” Jonathon Edwards gives amazing insight here: “It will be no damp to the happiness of those who have lower degrees of happiness and glory, that there are others advanced in glory above them: for all shall be perfectly happy, every one shall be perfectly satisfied. Every vessel that is cast into this ocean of happiness is full, though there are some vessels far larger than others; and there shall be no such thing as envy in heaven, but perfect love shall reign throughout the whole society.”[7]
Far from degrees of reward in heaven taking away from anyone’s happiness, it will actually add to everyone’s overall happiness. This is because everyone’s happiness will be interconnected. In other words, a smaller “vessel of happiness” will see the larger “vessel of happiness” and will himself rejoice that his brother in Christ has such great joy! Edwards helps us understand this: “Those who are not so high in glory as others, will not envy those that are higher, but they will have so great, and strong, and pure love to them, that they will rejoice in their superior happiness; their love to them will be such that they will rejoice that they are happier than themselves; so that instead of having a damp to their own happiness, it will add to it…”[8] First Corinthians 12:22 gives us the principle behind this: “If one of the members is honored, the others rejoice with it.”
The fabric of heaven in the happiness of the saints will be woven together such that the individual happiness of each saint will be at the perfect level necessary to bring about a maximization of the overall happiness. In other words, it seems that God will so structure heaven and each individual’s level of happiness (based on the rewards He decides to give) that the overall happiness of heaven will be maximized. Thus, God will receive maximum glory in heaven throughout eternity, and we will experience maximum enjoyment in that glory. For when the display of God’s glory is maximized, our enjoyment is maximized.
A very mind-boggling wonder of heaven is that the longer we are there, the more our happiness will increase. For the longer we are there, the more of God’s glory we will have experienced; and the more of God’s glory we experience, the happier we become! So, after being in heaven for a billion years, we will be exponentially happier than we were when we had been there 10,000 years. It seems as if the size of our “cups” will be continually increasing, on into infinity! And since it is impossible to come to the end of infinity, our cups will never lose the capacity to expand!
Sounds great, but isn’t it selfish?
Our pursuit of heavenly rewards while on earth will indeed have a significant part in contributing to the majestic glory and joys of heaven. But there may perhaps be one objection to this that is keeping you from applying such wonderful truths and being zealously motivated by the hope of heavenly rewards. The objection is probably this: “Isn’t is selfish for me to seek heavenly rewards?” Underlying this objection is the assumption that it is wrong and selfish to pursue your own happiness. Let’s quickly get this cleared up so that you can get on with applying what you have learned.
It is not selfish to seek happiness
Seeking your own delight in helping others does not ruin the moral value of your good deeds. In fact, a good deed is only moral to the extent that you are motivated by your own delight! John Piper has said it this way: “to the extent that we cease to pursue our own delight, we cannot love people or honor God.” The reason for this is simple: doing something out of delight (i.e., because it pleases you) honors the person you are helping more than doing it out of duty (i.e., just because you have to, not because you want to). Shouldn’t we help people because we want to, not because we have to? What would it say about a person if helping others was not a great joy to them? Thus, it is not unloving to other people to seek your own joy in helping them.
Seeking your own joy in God is not selfish either, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. Thus, the best way to honor God is to enjoy Him, and this requires seeking our own pleasure in Him. Selfishness is not seeking your own happiness. It is seeking your own happiness at that exclusion or expense of others. If your happiness is found in God, in the welfare of others, and in sharing your joy with others it is not selfish to seek. For more on how seeking our own delight is a necessary element of loving people and glorifying God, I suggest the books of John Piper.[9] I have also written much on this elsewhere (of course much influenced by Piper’s works) and refer you to those articles for a further probe into that issue.[10]
It is not selfish to seek the happiness of heavenly rewards
Clearly, the problem is not seeking our own happiness. It is finding happiness in the wrong things. Jesus reveals a significant principle here. “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven…for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:20-21). What you treasure reveals what you value, and thus it reveals the state of your heart. Henry Scougal put it this way: “The worth and excellency of a soul is measured by the object of its love.” The desire to lay up heavenly rewards reveals not a selfish heart, but a good heart! In fact, Jesus implies that the lack of desire for heavenly treasures reveals a self-centered, misdirected heart.
Now, if you delight in something that is truly honorable and valuable, how is it wrong to seek to experience more of it? It is a good thing to delight in God because it glorifies Him. So doesn’t it make sense that we should do whatever we can to increase our delight in God? Seeking heavenly rewards is simply a way to maximize our enjoyment of God in heaven. And seeking to maximize our enjoyment of God simply reveals that we love and value Him. Therefore it is right to seek heavenly rewards.
It is now clear that seeking our own happiness is a good thing, not a bad thing, and a major obstacle is thus out of the way. But a major question remains to be examined in greater detail. Is the specific happiness of heavenly rewards the right kind of happiness to seek in the good deeds that we do? For example, while it would be good to evangelize for the joy of leading people to Christ, would it be good to evangelize if an additional motive was the joy of a heavenly reward? Would it be right to endure temptation for a heavenly reward? For a pastor to gladly pastor his church for the heavenly reward?
C.S. Lewis makes a helpful distinction here. He differentiates between two kinds of rewards, natural and unnatural. An unnatural reward is one that is unrelated to the deeds that you do in pursuit of it. It is when there is no natural connection between the moral qualities of the reward and the moral qualities of the deeds you did in pursuit of the reward. For example, seeking money as a reward for love would be an unnatural reward. “That is why we call a man a mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money.”[11] Thus, it would be selfish to seek such a reward.
A natural reward is one that is related to the deeds you did in pursuit of it. There is a natural connection between the reward and deed because the moral qualities that attracted you to the reward are found in the deeds you did in pursuit of the reward. Here, the reward is actually the natural completion of the deeds done in pursuit of it; the reward is your good deed in its consummation–in its fulfillment–and not something just tacked on to it. For example, seeking marriage as a reward for love would be a natural reward. Likewise, “a general who fights for victory is not [a mercenary], victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love.”[12]
The rewards the New Testament promises are of this sort. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy” (Matt. 5:7). “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mat. 5:8). “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6). Leading people to Christ for the heavenly reward is also a clear example of seeking a natural reward, for the reward you seek is the joy of having brought others into the kingdom of God with you and being able to share your heavenly joy with them: “For you are our glory and joy…our crown of rejoicing” (1 Thess. 2:20, 19).
Our rewards in heaven will be the natural consummation of the earthly trials and deeds we went through to get them. The moral qualities of heavenly rewards will be naturally connected to the moral qualities of what we did in pursuit of the rewards. Therefore, it is proper for us to seek rewards in heaven. For example, the Christian does not seek the crown of life because he wants a piece of heavenly metal, but because he wants to show and prove His love for the Lord, of which the crown is a symbol. And we do not seek rewards to highlight ourselves, but because we delight in the greatness of God being highlighted.
Finally, since the Bible doesn’t just promise rewards, but commands us to seek them, we must reject the notion that it is selfish and wrong to pursue them. If we come to God, we must believe that He will reward us (Hebrews 11:6). Christ expressly says “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20). He also says that God will reward us for praying (Matthew 6:6), for giving alms (Matt. 6:4), and for fasting (Matt. 6:18). And in the context, He is expressly giving the promise of reward as motivation for doing what He commands. For example, at the beginning of His section on fasting, praying, and giving, Jesus says “beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven” (6:1).
The book of Hebrews tells us to obey like Moses who “chose rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin; considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward” (Hebrews 11:25-26).
C.S. Lewis summarizes everything well when he says “The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us…We are far too easily pleased.”[13]
A closing caution
In concluding, it is important to make one thing very clear. Heavenly rewards are not something we earn through our own efforts. And they are never a case of God being put in our debt and required to repay our “service.” Rather, as Augustine has said, it is a matter of “God crowning His own gifts.” That is, our obedience which God graciously decides to reward is itself graciously given and worked by God (Philippians 2:12-13; Hebrews 13:21). God’s promises of reward are not a job description where He makes us employees who, through our services, put Him in a debt to us which He must repay by giving us our rewards (or “paycheck”). On the contrary, His promises are like a doctor’s prescription. When you follow a doctor’s prescription you get well not because you earned it in a display of your own strength, but because the doctor’s wise guidelines were the path to your health. We pursue heavenly rewards not to exalt ourselves, but to exalt God.
Notes
1. John Piper, Let the Nations be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993), p. 89.
2. Piper, p. 89. Emphasis added.
3. Piper, p. 89.
4. Piper, p. 89. Emphasis added.
5. See Piper, p. 26.
6. C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York, NY: Touchstone Books, 1980), p. 37.
7. Jonathon Edwards, The Works of Jonathon Edwards, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), p. 902. From Piper, p. 90.
8. Ibid.
9. See John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, (Multnomah Press, 1996) and on the web you can check out Piper’s Notes.
10. See my articles Enjoyment is not an Option and Delighting in Doing Good.
11. Lewis, p. 26.
12. Lewis, p. 26.
13. Lewis, pp. 25-26.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1977, by the Lockman Foundation.