Here’s another thing I’ve missed living out in the boonies of northern Alabama—Starbucks. They’re practically non-existent in the state and the few you do see are only found in the big cities.

So, I celebrated finishing my move yesterday (which officially ended with me carting up four flights of stairs more than 300 old vinyl albums, ranging from Mel Torme and Mario Lanza to Mahalia Jackson and the Muppets Movie soundtrack—and that’s just the Ms!) with a Venti-skim-decaf-two-pump-no-whip-extra-hot Mocha.

The paper cup had this embossed quote on the back from Joel Stein, columnist for the Los Angeles Times:

“Heaven is totally over-rated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can’t wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17^th century, but Heaven has to step up a bit. They’re basically getting by because they only have to be better than Hell.”

Obviously Stein thinks he’s being cute but I don’t see anything clever at all about his statement that it should adorn $4-$5 cups of coffee used daily by tens of thousands across the country.

Anybody who knows anything about heaven knows it’s luxurious and pleasurable far beyond human comprehension—certainly eons ahead of any Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton.

More importantly, as any Bible student knows, there’s an elaborate government and civilization infrastructure for Believers to busily work and live in, being given jobs by God Himself that we are guaranteed to love.

Nobody’s going to be aimlessly floating around in their clean white underwear, strumming harps in a vast sea of clouds and patches of blue.

As we know from Col. 1:16, “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.”

Jordan explains, “There are things in heaven and in earth—visible and invisible—and they are thrones, dominions, principalities and powers. He says they’re in the earth and in the heavens, but He uses just one term to describe both of them. Now, what that tells me is if I can see the visible one, and the same terms are used for the invisible one, the ‘invisible things of God are known from the visible things.’ So I can make a correspondence.”

Sprinkled throughout the Bible are hundreds of clues as to what will be found in heaven. For one example, we know angels wear fine linen. Linen comes from a plant that is cultivated and harvested.

“You see how you make these correspondences?” says Jordan. “The Bible doesn’t set itself out and say, ‘Okay, here’s the way it’s going to be—1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It puts it all through the Scripture like that.

“It always fascinates me—here’s this great collection of doctrinal data you need to know but God doesn’t say, ‘This is Christology 101.’ He writes it in a book where the (writers) are talking about problems, and life, and it’s just stuck in here and there.

“People argue, ‘Why didn’t He just write it out here where it’s easy to figure?’ and the answer is, ‘Because it isn’t designed to be written on a wall in a lecture treatise form—it’s designed to be something that lives; it comes through your life.’

“So the way you discover the truth in the Bible is you find it here and make an extrapolation over there. But it has to become sort of your life. And when it does—

your thinking process and so forth—you think on it and meditate on it and it begins to work itself out through you.

“That’s what makes studying the Scripture exciting; it makes beginning to understand these things the doorway to a lot of wonderful kinds of things.”