When We Meet Again in Heaven

Will we recognize lost loved ones when we’re reunited in heaven? Today, R.C. Sproul brings words of comfort to Christians in grief.

When we get to heaven, we’ll be able to recognize people who are there. Certainly, their outward appearances will have changed, and we’re accustomed to recognizing people strictly on the basis of outward appearances. And that whole idea of cognition, of being able to identify certain traits of people is an incredibly strange thing.

I’ve rejuvenated an interest in oil painting, how I like to play around with oil paints, I’m a rookie, I’m a novice at it. But I undertook a project recently to paint a portrait of Luther. And I had to do it in stages, where in the first stage, it’s a very rough outline where you just try to get the proportion of the head right and get the ear lined up with the nose, and so on, and before you work it down to the detail dimension. And I had spent this one night working on the easel, and just roughing in the basic proportions of the portrait of Luther.

And when I was finished and cleaned up my paints and walked away, I stood back and I looked at the painting from about thirty feet away. And I said to my wife, I said, “Vesta, look at that.” She said “What?” I said, “If I just came in here and somebody else was painting that portrait, and I saw it from here, in its raw and unfinished state, I would instantly know that that was a portrait of Martin Luther.” Now, that’s not a testimony to my artistic ability. What I’m saying was there was something already there on the canvas, even though it was so incomplete, and so unlike an exact replica of the face of Martin Luther, there was something I could recognize in that and say, “That’s Luther.”

Now Jesus’ body was different when He came out of the tomb. It was so different that people did not immediately recognize Him, but there were times with a second glance, they could see that it was Jesus.

Your departed friends and relatives, when you see them in heaven, will appear different from how they appear now. But what I’m going to say to you is this, when you see them, you will know them and they will know you. And so don’t worry about that at all.