Why We Don't Know More About Heaven

My mother, Helen Sullivan, died in August of 1994. She was only 72. About 9 months after she died, I had a most interesting dream.

In the dream, I walked up a flight of stairs to the second level of what seemed like a private club, very traditional looking, with carpeting and paneled walls. As I reached the top of the stairs, I saw many clusters of people and heard the tinkling of glass. The scene was like that of a cocktail party. I walked around a group of people chatting with one another, and all of a sudden there was my mom.

What words cannot describe is the sensation I experienced the moment I saw my mother. I felt the deepest peace, the deepest goodness and a euphoria that were beyond anything we can sense in this life. It was like the tiniest sliver of what heaven must be like. When I woke up, I had the thought that if you could bottle up what I experienced and offer it for sale, you'd be the wealthiest person on the face of the earth.

This experience made me wonder, "Why don't we know more about heaven? Why doesn't God give us more evidence of what heaven is like?" 

I came up with an answer. It's the same answer reached by Dr. Eben Alexander, the author of a book entitled Proof Of Heaven. Dr. Alexander, a skeptic about near death experiences, had a near death experience himself when an infection basically rendered his own brain non-functional. During his experience, he received the explanation as to why we don't know more about heaven.

Dr. Alexander writes: "...[M]aking the right decisions through our free will in the face of the evil and injustice on earth would mean far less if we remembered, while here, the full beauty and brilliance of what awaits us...That evil could occasionally have the upper hand was known and allowed by the Creator as a necessary consequence of giving the gift of free will to beings like us."

God does not give us more information about heaven because He wants us to be truly free to choose between good and evil. If we knew what heaven was really like, that knowledge would be too strong an influence on the exercise of our free will. So God withholds that information from the great majority of us.

I think most of us believe that we'll get to heaven if we don't do anything really bad. I think the test goes beyond that, however. If we drift through life, not really having an active faith, not experiencing at least the taste of the kingdom that is available to us down here, do we really deserve the bliss that awaits those given entry to heaven? I think the contrast between our lukewarm life on earth and the life in heaven would put us into a kind of shock.

I encourage our readers to get a copy of Proof of Heaven and give it a read. I found it very inspiring and I think you will, too. Heaven is beyond our comprehension. There are no words to adequately describe it. At the same time, our faith gives us the opportunity to experience the supernatural in authentic, powerful ways on earth. We need to be taking advantage of those opportunities.