Heaven (or whatever that place is)

I had a request for more stuff on heaven.  I am hesitant to publish my "thoughts" on heaven because that's really what they are: "thoughts."  Most of the Biblical passages on end times, including our final place of dwelling, are full of symbolism and imagery.  As was pointed out by C.S. Lewis in a previous post, we should recognize these literary functions and not assume everything is meant to be taken literally.  Furthermore, I have not done much studying on end times and what follows.  My dad wrote his dissertation on Revelation and OT prophetic literature so I feel completely unequipped to really say anything meaningful on the subject.  But I'll do a couple of posts on some stuff I shared in a recent sermon.  For further compelling reading, check out Lewis' "The Great Divorce", N.T. Wright's "Surprised by Hope", or Michael Wittmer's "Heaven is a Place on Earth". 
 
Peter says in 2 Peter 3:13 that we are waiting for “new heavens and new earth.”  So even just calling this place heaven can be misleading.  We tend to think of heaven as a place where only souls, or spirits, go, not bodies.  We tend to think of it as less real, less physical than this earth.  But Peter says our home will be in a new heavens AND new earth.  The terms “heavens and earth”, when used together in the Bible, mean all of creation, everything that has been created.  When Genesis 1 talks about God creating the “heavens and the earth”, it simply means that God created everything.  So when Peter talks of the NEW heavens and new earth, he means that we will live in a new creation, not in some non-physical, heavenly place, but a new creation, a new earth.

Furthermore, the Bible says that we will have new, or renewed, bodies (there is much debate about how much continuity will exist between this current creation and the new creation.  Will it be a complete wipe-out and do-over or will it be more of a renewal and refining of what already exists?).  We won’t merely be souls floating around.  We will have bodies that will be, if anything, more real and more alive and more physical than our current bodies.  When Jesus rose from the dead, he had a body.  When we are raised from the dead, we will have a body.  God is not in the business of making us less real and alive, but more real and alive.  God created us with bodies and our bodies are a good part of his creation.  Going to heaven does not mean we lose our good bodies and becoming merely spiritual souls.  If God's original creation had physicality to it (which God called good), why would his new creation be anything less than physical?  I say this because so many false ideas have crept into our thinking of heaven from art and culture, specifically from medieval times, that we tend to separate the physical and the spiritual when we think of heaven.  I don't think this is the biblical picture.