Every so often in the city I come across a pile of used books someone has purposefully left out on the sidewalk for any takers.

The other week a woman on my block set out about 75-100 books along with her old, dusty bookshelf. You could tell she was once very interested in self-help stuff.

I culled from her piles several psychology-oriented titles, including a 1990 book by John Bradshaw called, "Homecoming; Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child."

Flipping through Bradshaw's book one day recently, my eyes landed on a passage in which he explained that "one way adult children avoid their legitimate suffering is by staying in their heads," which he noted was an "ego defense."

"This involves obsessing about things, analyzing, discussing, reading, and spending lots of energy on trying to figure things out," Bradshaw writes. "There is a story about a room with two doors. Each door has a sign on it. One says HEAVEN; the other says LECTURE ON HEAVEN. All the co-dependent adult children are lined up in front of the door that says LECTURE ON HEAVEN."

I immediately thought of my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church in Chicago (www.graceimpact.org), who actually does give a study examining the specifics of what heaven is like!

Jordan uses passages in Proverbs, Job, Isaiah, Psalms, Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible to demonstrate heaven shares many similarities with earth and earth is, in fact, the pattern or replica for what's in heaven.

Heaven, for example, has a real ecosystem with plant life, varied terrain, bodies of water, living creatures, weather fronts, etc. There are buildings, furniture, vehicles of transportation and government entities. Residents eat food, wear clothes, labor at real jobs and converse.

"It's going to be like going home was meant to be, and you're not going to be in strange surroundings," assures Jordan in a sermon I have on tape about heaven.

From the foundation of the earth and the heavens (there is a first, second and third heaven), God's intention was to build Himself a dwelling place. Heaven and earth were literally constructed in line with a master blueprint He drew up using wisdom. (Proverbs 3:19)

"Before God created anything, wisdom was brought forth," explains Jordan. "It was established, set up. When you set something up, you build it; you construct it. You put the blocks together and you set them up. He literally constructed wisdom. He put together this plan before He created anything so that when He created, He created according to the plan."

In Proverbs 8: 22-27, wisdom itself, as a personified attribute of God, affirms, "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was."

Psalms 104, representing a sort of synopsis of Genesis 1, informs the reader God stretched out the heavens "like a curtain," laid the "beams of his chambers in the waters," made the clouds "his chariot," and "walketh upon the wings of the wind."

"When He created the earth, He put some beams on the inhabitable parts and planned to put His house there," says Jordan. "The goal was to makes a place for Him to live and He created this planet for His house to come down and dwell in so He would feel at home. He wasn't just making some recreational equipment in the backyard to watch and see what would happen and say, 'Oh, look what they're doing.' "

What's going on then in Genesis 1, as Jordan explains, is God's recreating the physical characteristics of the third heaven, which is where God abides and where all Believers will go when their soul departs from their body.

"The material you see around you on earth is not unique to earth--it's in the third heaven too," says Jordan.

In II Cor. 12, when the Apostle Paul talks of a man who was "caught up into paradise," he's referring to him also as being "caught up to the third heaven." This paradise concept of heaven is the concept of a garden and that's what God plants in Genesis 2 with the Garden of Eden.

"The reason things are the way they are down here is because that's the way they're going to be up there, but without the bondage of corruption; the bondage of sin," explains Jordan. "When you live life now, you carry on life now as a child of God--as a member of the Body of Christ--and you learn to handle things. Your service to the Lord doesn't end at death, just as your life doesn't end at death."

Details about creation come from God Himself in Job 38 as "the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said":

* "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"
* "Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?"

* "Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof?"

In Job 26:7, we learn God "hangeth the earth upon nothing."

"Greek mythology said that the earth was sitting on the back of Atlas who stood upon a turtle swimming in a sea of cosmic nothingness—and that was the scholarship of the day," says Jordan. "Plato, Socrates, Euripides—they're the great wonders of Western thinking--but Job says God hung the earth on nothing! How's that for a scientific advancement 2,000 years before Christ?! Something NASA had to discover and take pictures of and say, 'Oh, wow.' "

Indeed, it was the Bible's information about creation that gave Christopher Columbus his conviction to sail to America despite the belief by the day's leading scientists that the earth was flat.

"Columbus kept a journal and you know why he said the earth was a sphere?" informs Jordan. "He quoted Isaiah 40:22 ("It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth"). He quoted Luke 17:24 ("For as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the one part under heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven; so shall also the Son of man be in his day"). He quoted Ecclesiastes 1:6 ("The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits").

"There are some things you can find in your Bible that will help you."

Juicy gems on heaven are sprinkled throughout God's Book for the analyzing reader earnestly wanting to figure things out.

As Jordan points out in his LECTURE ON HEAVEN, Rev. 4: 4-7, for example, reveals there are chairs in heaven, along with clothing, crowns of gold, lightnings, thunderings, voices, lamps, crystal glass and cherubs with the faces of different animals.

The passage reads:

"And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.
"And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.
"And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.
"And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle."

"The pattern is when you’re up there with God and He’s going to have a meeting with you, and you sit down, you don’t sit on the floor, you sit on a seat," says Jordan, adding, "You know whose idea it is to wear clothes? That’s what they do in heaven. Who in the world got the idea of putting clothes on anyway? I mean, wouldn’t it just be more au naturel to run around in the buff in your Birthday Suit? No! You know where that idea came from? When God made Adam and Eve, He clothed them. He clothed them long before they 'fell'-- they weren’t running around in the garden naked. That’s the way people are in heaven."

From a reference in Rev. 15:6 about angels being "clothed in pure and white linen," it can be deduced there's plant life in heaven, reasons Jordan.

"Linen is material that's made from the fiber of a cotton plant, so what does that tell you? There must be some plants there," he says. " If you don’t get anything else out of this, understand that heaven’s a real place. It has a real ecosystem. It has a real environment. It has real living creatures there and they take the things that are made in the environment in heaven and they produce linen. That means there’s somebody running the loom, getting the material, sewing it together, cutting the patterns, putting it together. It’s not like Samantha wiggles her nose or Jeanie winks and, 'Boom!' it appears. That’s a whole lot of nothing. It isn’t that. It’s life.

"Now what does that tell you? When you get to heaven, folks, there’s going to be a wonderful life to carry on."

In heaven, it will be a life without the bondage of corruption that comes from our sin nature. As Jesus Christ taught his disciples to pray, "Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven." In heaven, everyone does God's will alone.

A classic illustration of why God designed our lives the way they are, having us first live on earth to become accustomed to our permanent home in heaven, comes from the late Bob Jones Sr., an internationally known evangelist who founded Bob Jones University.

The anecdote was related to Jordan as a young boy when he attended a Bible class Jones gave. Here's how Jordan recalls it:

"There was a mythological kingdom in which the king sent his son, the prince, down into the lower part of the city to live in what was literally a very humble abode. He sent him there on an assignment because, in that humble home, the king had found one of their relatives that had been lost. The prince lived in this home, with his relatives taking over as mom and dad, for three months.

Finally, the king sent his royal entourage to tell the family, 'It’s time for you all to leave and come and live with me in the palace.' When they got to the palace, the dad asked the king, who he now knew was a relative, 'I don’t understand, if we were to come live with you, why did you send your son to come and live with us to start with?' And the king answered, 'I sent him to live with you first to get you accustomed to royalty.' "

"God the Holy Ghost left heaven’s moon day and came down and took up His abode in the heart of men—you and me—to get us accustomed to royalty," explains Jordan. "And your walk, day by day, as a member of the Body of Christ--as a child of God--is little more than a walk in time on Planet Earth serving God, being who God has made you, living like who He's made you to live in the details of your life.

"I don’t care how humble, how tedious, how small those details might be. You're living, dealing with it, handling life right here on Planet Earth for His glory--living in the identity He gave you to get you accustomed to being who you are and to where you’re going to go and to what you’re going to do perfectly one day.

"When we get to heaven, the earnest desire to have it be Christ living in us is going to be a happy reality. We will be minus the veiled flesh that hems us, holds us back and so easily besets us.

"And there we’ll have nothing but His life be the reality in our life. What a day that’s going to be. Your life is designed to be a life that gets you accustomed for that kind of royal living.

"Now you can live your life just bound by the limits of time, looking at the things that are seen and not the things that aren't seen--focusing on the temporal, not the eternal--and miss the preparation.

"Or you can live by faith in God’s grace and love for you in Christ and enjoy now what will be a reality then."