Matthew 20

What will heaven be like? We know that those who have turned to Christ as a safe haven from the judgment to come and are living as a part of His church community throughout the world experience something of the heavenly life even now. We do so by faith and not by sight. Our sins have already been forgiven, but we do not yet live in the complete freedom of holiness that is ours in Christ. We have been called to worship by the Lord of the kingdom. We work in His vineyard, but we are sometimes unaware of the great blessings that belong to us. We return to our question: What is heaven like?

Of course this is a very big question, but the Lord continually sheds light on this through His miracles and parables. As He speaks to His disciples at the opening of Matthew 20, He teaches them in greater detail what He had said at the end of the previous chapter: “[The] first will be last, and the last first.” Everyone serves the Lord with a hope of heavenly blessings, yet some may come to the life of the kingdom earlier and others later. Is the life of heavenly reward like receiving wages, so that those who work longer are owed more?

The parable of the vineyard teaches us that the Lord is the sovereign Distributor of all the blessings of heavenly life. The arrangement that He has made with us is simply this: All who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. We are to believe in Christ and the resurrection and confess this before God and man as a part of the church. Any work that the Lord has for us and any reward that He determines is solely a matter of His own great generosity. We are counted as righteous by faith, and our service of our King is a privilege. We cannot complain against the Lord for the way He treats us, or for the richness of His blessing to others.

It may seem to us that the most obviously faithful servants of God are not fairly treated when we consider the greatness of heavenly blessings that will be given to others who may come to exercise faith in ways that make us wonder if they have served the Lord at all. We do not understand the system of gracious rewards that is such an important part of the kingdom of heaven. If we demand to be treated as workers who should be given the wages that we deserve, then we are insisting that we receive the Lord’s eternal judgment against us, since this is what we deserve. That wage was paid by Christ on the cross. We need to understand that anything we receive beyond hell is all an expression of the tremendous generosity of God. In heaven, we will not complain about the Lord’s gracious blessing of those who seem to be among the last. We will rejoice with God in the wisdom of His bountiful displays of mercy. We will count our own lives as ransomed from a pit of unbelief and hypocrisy. We will be happy just to be doorkeepers in the Lord’s house. We will marvel that we who have been unworthy servants are now counted as sons of God. What is heaven like? It is a place where the citizens will be eternally delighted to see the most wonderful mercy of God to the most unlikely and unworthy sinners.

There is one Worker who has won for us all the blessings of heaven. He is the one that went to His death in Jerusalem. He was delivered over to hostile religious authorities, leaders of both temple and synagogue life. He was condemned to death. He was turned over to the Gentiles, mocked, flogged, and crucified. He did this for us. But He also rose again on the third day.

The lessons of the cross and the Lord’s sovereign mercy in the kingdom of heaven are not easy to embrace. They bother our flesh. The sons of Zebedee, John and James, wanted to be the greatest in a place where being the greatest is under God’s control alone, and where the cross is the way to the crown. Though they claimed to understand the workings of the kingdom, they did not yet understand the kind of sacrifices that were ahead of them in the years that would follow.

The other disciples were the same. They showed their confusion by being indignant about the requests of their compatriots for special glories. The example for us was clearly presented to the apostles in their day. This kingdom of heaven would not be like the places of normal power struggles in the existing worlds of politics or commerce. The greatest in heaven was the one who served. The one who gave His life as a ransom for many was surely the greatest of all. There is not normally a long line of people waiting for the privilege of dying a death that takes away the sins of others. In any case, there was only one man who could rightly stand in that line, since only one man had what was necessary to accomplish our redemption. He is the only man of merit in the kingdom of heaven. Everyone else lives off of His generosity.

The humble are brought to understand this. They cry out for mercy, not for what they deserve. At the end of Matthew 20, two blind men show forth the zeal of heaven’s people for the grace of God. Though everyone around them might like them to abandon their pleas for the kindness of Jesus, they continue to cry out to the descendant of David who is heaven’s eternal King. They are granted sight by our compassionate Lord. Passages like this one persuade us that God will have mercy on the unworthy. May we see the kingdom of heaven rightly, and may we rejoice with those who live in heaven now at the greatness of our King’s favor upon the unworthy.