Will Heaven Be Boring? John Piper Weighs in on This Worry about the Afterlife
Theologian, author, and Desiring God founder John Piper addresses the question of how heaven won't be "boring," according to a recent episode of the “Ask Pastor John” podcast.
Piper had addressed a question from a listener, Mason, who shared he had been reading Christian author Randy Alcorn’s book, “Heaven,” because he “had difficulty imagining” what the afterlife would look like, Faithwire reported.
“After reading, I began to understand joy for thousands, millions, or even billions of years,” said Mason. “However, even a hundred trillion years still seems nothing in light of eternity. I struggle to process something with no end; how will we not get bored?”
In response, Piper said, “It is beyond question that eternity — whether we conceive of it as time without beginning or ending, or whether we conceive of it as a dimension beyond time, timelessness — is hard to grasp. I mean, I don’t even know what ‘grasp’ means when it comes to something like that.”
He also referenced Ecclesiastes 3:11, “Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”
When it comes to the meaning of the verse, it “means… God intends for us to be aware of a reality of a kind of eternal time or non-time that is not fully comprehensible.”
He also referred to C.S. Lewis’ book, Mere Christianity, in which he wrote,
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Despite the mysteries surrounding the afterlife, Piper told Mason about where Heaven is mentioned in the Bible. For instance, revelation 21:18 describes the new Jerusalem as “a city of pure gold, as clear as glass” and that Christians will experience a bodily resurrection, as Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:42-44:
“We are going to be embodied persons, and yet, embodied in a way that is… incomprehensibly unlike our present bodies,” Piper said. “You won’t ever run out of the ability to see glory, be amazed, be refreshed, be thrilled forever.”
He added that believers “will have [bodies] perfectly suited to eternal, supernatural, unimaginable pleasures — [bodies] so unfathomably more capable of enjoyment than you could ever imagine.”
Photo Courtesy: Micah Chiang/Wikimedia Commons
Originally published April 25, 2025.
