As far as the secular world is concerned, we are now definitely in the Christmas season, but for Christians who still follow the Church's traditional liturgical calendar we are still in the season of Advent. The term 'advent' means 'coming' and from the sixth century onwards Christians have observed Advent in the weeks leading up to Christmas not only as a time when they prepare to celebrate the coming of Christ in humility at Christmas, but also as a time when they look forward to the coming of Christ in glory at the end of time to bring about the resurrection of the dead, the final judgement, and the new heaven and earth promised in Revelation 21-22.

Since New Testament times Christians have looked forward in hope to Christ's coming in glory, but many people today, including many Christians, are unsure about the nature of this hope. In the light of this uncertainty, the purpose of this article is to briefly explore the hope that Christians have as this is set out for us in the New Testament.

The first thing to note is that the Christian's hope is not simply a hope that there is life after physical death in this world. Now, orthodox Christians do believe in what is known as the 'general resurrection.' That is to say, they believe in the truth of the words spoken by Jesus in John 5:25-29:

"Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself, and has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of man. Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment."

If we look carefully at these words, we see that all the dead will be raised by Jesus at the end of time. However, this is not something to which everyone can look forward to in hope. This is because 'those who have done evil' (which in John means those who have refused to put their faith in Jesus and live accordingly) will face the 'resurrection of judgement.' In other words, they will be judged by Jesus and condemned to everlasting damnation. This will be a form of life after death, but it is not one that any rational person would desire.

As JI Packer explains, in describing the fate of the damned:

"Jesus uses His own solemn imagery – 'Gehenna' (hell in Mark 9:47 and then other gospel texts), the valley outside Jerusalem where rubbish was burned; the 'worm' that 'dieth not' (Mark 9:48), an image, it seems for the endless dissolution of the personality by a condemning conscience; 'fire' for the agonising awareness of God's displeasure; 'outer darkness' for knowledge of the loss, not merely of God, but of all good, and everything that made life seem worth living; 'gnashing of teeth' for self-condemnation and self-loathing. These things are, no doubt, unimaginably dreadful, though those who have been convicted of sin know a little of their nature. But they are not arbitrary inflictions; they represent, rather, a conscious growing into the state in which one has chosen to be. The unbeliever has preferred to be by himself, without God, defying God, having God against him, and he shall have his choice."

To put it simply, according to Jesus and the Christian tradition following Jesus, the damned will experience eternally the life that they have chosen for themselves, and it will be dreadful.

However, in John 5 Jesus also tells us that those 'who have done good' (that is, those who have put their faith in Jesus and lived accordingly) will receive the 'resurrection of life.' According to the New Testament, this means they will experience eternally a new and infinitely better kind of life which it describes in terms of 'glory'. As Paul explains to the Christians in Corinth, the 'slight momentary affliction ' which they have to undergo in this life will lead to 'an eternal weight of glory beyond comparison' (2 Corinthians 4:17).

If we ask what this 'glory' will involve, two helpful answers are provided by the Christian apologist CS Lewis and the New Testament scholar Tom Wright.

In his sermon 'The weight of glory,' which he preached in 1942, Lewis declares that the notion of heavenly glory:

"... makes no immediate appeal to me at all, and in that respect, I fancy I am a typical modern. Glory suggests two ideas to me, of which one seems wicked and the other ridiculous. Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?"

However, he continues:

"When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures—fame with God, approval or (I might say) 'appreciation' by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant.' With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child—not in a conceited child, but in a good child—as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently, what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years. prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures—nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator."

Once we understand this point, we can then begin to imagine what will happen:

".... when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex for ever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero's book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself; 'it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign.' ....It is written that we shall 'stand before' Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God...to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness...to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is."

What the New Testament also teaches us is that the blessed will not only enjoy God's approbation but will have a job to do. In Romans 8:29-30 Paul outlines the shape of the Christian life as follows:

"For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified."

To properly understand the point Paul is making here we need to understand that in Jewish thought the concepts of human beings possessing glory and their being appointed by God to rule over God's creation (Genesis 1:26-28) go together. We can see this in Psalm 8:5-6 where the Psalmist writes concerning humankind:

"... thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honour.
Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet."

According to the biblical witness the Fall has meant that human beings have been unable to exercise this dominion in the way God intended ('all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' - Romans 3:23). What Paul is saying in Romans 8 is that through the work of Christ the lost ability of human beings to exercise godly dominion will finally be restored. As a result "creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:21).

As Tom Wright explains in his commentary on Romans in his Paul for Everyone series:

"God's covenant faithfulness was always about his commitment that, through the promises to Abraham, he would one day put the whole world to rights. Now at last we see what this meant. The human race was put in charge of creation (as so often, Paul has Genesis 1-3 not far from his mind). When human beings rebelled and worshipped parts of creation instead of God himself (Romans 1:21-23) creation fell into disrepair. God allowed this state of slavery to continue, not because the creation wanted to be like that but because he was determined eventually to put the world back to rights according to the original plan (just as, when Israel let him down, he didn't change the plan, but sent at last a faithful Israelite). The plan had called for human beings to take their place under God and over the world, worshipping the creator and exercising glorious stewardship over the world. The creation isn't waiting to share the freedom of God's children as some translations imply. It is waiting to benefit wonderfully when God's children are glorified. It is waiting - on tiptoe with expectation in fact - for the particular freedom it will enjoy when God gives to his children that glory, that wise rule and stewardship, which was always intended for those who bear God's glorious image."

To put the same thing in the words of Isaiah 11:6-9, the Christian hope is that in the new world that is coming:

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea."

It is this hope Christians are called to remember and share with others in the season of Advent.

Martin Davie is a lay Anglican theologian and Associate Tutor in Doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.