Read Revelation chapters 21 and 22, and you’ll see that at the heart of heaven is a wedding. The love story that began in Genesis chapter 1 reaches its climax. The promise God made to Abraham, that He would draw to Himself a multiethnic group from every different social class and background, from across every era of history—this is where we see it finally fulfilled.
In 2014, a group of artists and musicians in the United Kingdom asked thousands of people one question and based a live show on the answers. The question was, What is your happiest memory?
As you might imagine, there were lots of first dates, first dances, first loves, first houses. Memories of weddings. Memories of births—lots of births, apparently. Then there were memories of glorious holidays, and memories of precious faces—the faces of loved ones now lost.
And as they collected these memories of happiness, the creators of the show noticed three things.
The first was that less than 1 percent of these happy memories had anything to do with material things.
Secondly, the memories were nearly always about relationships of one kind or another. Family or friends or lovers.
They discovered the third thing when they fed all the happy memories into a database and looked for recurring words and phrases. The word that came up most often was the word “home.”
So anyway, they put the show on; they toured it all round the U.K. And when the director was interviewed afterwards, he said that the performances were extraordinary—like a cross between a wedding and a wake. It was a celebration, but it was mixed with sadness—sadness, because of course these were memories of happiness. The happiness had gone; it had faded into nostalgia.
What was left was a longing for relationship, and a longing for home.
Why do we have these desires? Could it be that we were made for another world, one in which these longings are fully and finally satisfied?
We were. Open up Revelation chapters 21 and 22, and you’ll catch a stunning glimpse of the world you were made for.
