“If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie” by Hank Williams, Jr.
— Friday, February 24th, 2012 —
This week on “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we’ll take a look at a song by Hank Williams, Jr., called “If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie.” In this song, Williams expresses his love for the place where he grew up, and insists that “if Heaven ain’t a lot like Dixie,” then God can “send me to Hell or New York City, it’d be about the same to me.”
At first, this sounds like simple defiance. But I wonder if many Christians don’t have a similar dread of heaven, imaging it to be an essentially lonely and even boring place, some combination of a family reunion and a spiritual choir practice, that goes on and on… and on and on and on, for all eternity.
If that were what heaven were about, I might be with Bocephus. But it’s not, and I’m not.
Instead, the New Testament paints a completely different picture of the life to come—one of life, of labor, of relationship, of culture, and all this freed from the pangs of sin and death.
Join us in this episode, then, where we’ll talk about the gospel’s call away from carnality, about an age to come where God will bring everything good about this life to fulfillment and perfection in Christ, and about how what we experience in Christ is not an afterlife, but life, in abundance.
I have enjoyed each of the items so far in the cross and the jukebox. I would like for you to add one by Tom T. Hall-The Homecoming. thanks