When we doubt God’s promises heaven loses its appeal.

“Then they despised the pleasant land, having no faith in his promise. (Psalm 106:24)”

“Pie in the sky when you die.”

How many times have you heard that kind of thing? This contemptuous view of Christianity goes something like this: ‘What has your Christianity given you? All you have is something in the future called ‘heaven’. You have nothing to show for your faith. You suffer like the rest of us but you just keep believing that one day heaven will be worth it.’ As Bruce Springsteen sang, ‘You can wait on your blessings darlin’ but I got a deal for you right here.’

Because the world doubts God and His word it has no choice but to live for the present – you only live once! Make the most of this life because the rest is pie in the sky when you die.

Even Christians sometimes think like this. I saw a sign on a church in London that said, ‘We believe in life before death’. The church was saying something like, ‘We’re not as focused on heaven as much as we’re focused on here and now’. Which ‘this-worldly’ person wouldn’t say ‘Amen’ to that!

God’s people in the Bible did the same thing. When they saw the hardships that they had to face in order to get into the land that God had promised, they lost heart. The future God promised didn’t look so good anymore.

Besides, where they came from wasn’t that bad was it? Sure, we were immigrants in Egypt and we did all the menial jobs the locals hated, but hey, we had garlic, cucumbers and excellent surf. Who wouldn’t rather be an immigrant and do menial work in a first world country than… well, you can’t eat a promise can you?

The harder the journey was the more unpleasant the promised land looked. ‘Milk and honey’? More like thorns and thistles. The occupants were big and scary. How can I go in there and tell them I live for an invisible God? As the verse says, they despised the pleasant land having no faith in the promise.

Here’s the thing: when we doubt God’s promises we tend to downplay the rewards He offers too. Heaven starts to lose its appeal. Who wants to face a life of fighting only to enter a place where we listen to harps all day? We downplay heaven because we doubt God’s promise. If we really believed God’s promise, that He will get us there one day, we will also believe what He promises about heaven: that heaven is better than all we could imagine or hope for, a place filled with love and joy because God’s rule is unchallenged. How happily we’d be prepared to live, not for this life, but for that life!