My Father's House

My Father’s House
By Dr. John H. Roller


The junior campers (ages 8 to 13) who attended the Bible classes at an Advent Christian camp I used to go to every summer really got excited when we sang a song whose chorus goes:

Come and go with me to my Father’s house!
Come and go with me to my Father’s house!
It’s a big, big house with lots and lots of room.
There’s a big, big table with lots and lots of food,
And a big, big yard where we can play football.
It’s a big, big house. It’s my Father’s house!

“What kind of house did you grow up in?”

I’ve asked that question of many of my Advent Christian friends. Not counting the ones who joined the Advent Christian church later in life (though, indeed, many of those gave the same answer), nearly all of the born-and-raised Advent Christians that I’ve talked to gave the same answer! It was a single-family house. Coming in the front door, you would enter a front room where casual visiting might take place. Further in, there would be a kitchen, a dining room, a large living room, two or three (or maybe even four or five) bedrooms, perhaps a den, one or two (or maybe several) bathrooms, a garage for parking the car and an attic (or basement) for storing stuff. This house would comprise about 1,000 to 3,000 square feet (depending on the family’s income level) and sit on a property between ¼ of an acre and a few acres (or more) of land. It would be occupied by the person I was talking to, their brother(s) and sister(s) – if they had any – and their parents, possibly also a grandparent or two, maybe even one or two other relatives or non-relatives.

On either side of the house, and up and down the street, there would be other similar houses sitting on similar-sized properties and occupied by similar families. In over 95% of the cases, this neighborhood would be located in a suburban community, in a small town (demographers define that as a community with fewer than 25,000 residents) or in a rural area. For those Advent Christians who grew up in farming families – and there are thousands of you out there! – such a house is now referred to as “the old home place.” Some of you still live there.

My story is quite different. You see, I’m a city kid.

From the time I was born until a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday, I lived in a series of apartment buildings. The one I remember best was built during the year I was in kindergarten. When I first saw it, it was a very large hole in the ground, surrounded by a construction fence. Gradually it grew to a height of six stories (about 120 feet), then it opened to occupants and we were among the first families to move in.

Our apartment (called 1P) was on the ground floor. You would enter the building either by having a key or by pressing a buzzer with the number of the apartment you wanted to visit, conversing briefly with the people in the apartment, then waiting for them to press a button that would unlock the door for a few seconds (or you could cheat, and just wait for someone to exit the building, then grab the door from them before it closed). You would walk up the hall, passing several other apartments, till you came to 1P. You could then enter our apartment just as anyone else might enter a single-family house.

Once you were inside, you would find a small foyer area, a large living room, one bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom and a small room my father used as his study (it was really not much bigger than a walk-in closet). The total area of this apartment was about 500 square feet. It was “the old home place” to me, my sister, my parents and (later) my baby brother. There were 19 other nearly identical apartments on the floor we lived on and 20 more on each of the five floors above us (my sister’s best friend, Marcy Berman, lived directly above us, five stories up, in 6P, which was exactly identical to 1P).

120 families – about 500 people in all – lived in this building, which occupied less than a single acre of land, located at 142-30 Sanford Avenue, next door to the First Baptist Church. Within a one-mile radius of this home there were over 100 similar buildings (and, yes, even a few single-family houses scattered among them). Together, the people living in them made up the community of Flushing, with a population (then, as now) of about 70,000. Flushing is one of about two dozen such communities that comprise the Borough of Queens, the largest and most heavily populated of the five boroughs that constitute New York City. At the time, New York was the biggest city in the world, with a population of about 8,000,000 – not counting another 12,000,000 who lived in its suburbs in a three-state metropolitan area. My “home town”!

In John 14:2, Jesus told his disciples, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Did it ever occur to you to ask, “How can there be ‘mansions’ inside a ‘house’?” It’s just possible that my experiences as a child might help you get an idea of what Jesus might have meant.

I realize, of course, that most modern versions translate his statement as, “In my Father’s house are many rooms” (rather than “mansions”) – precisely, I think, because the translators aren’t seeing my Father’s “house” the way I do. The Greek word “monai” literally means “dwelling places.” Are you looking forward to an eternal “dwelling place” that can only be called a “room”? Not I! I’d rather have an old-fashioned “mansion”! And I think there’s a way that I can.

I see my Father’s “house” as a single, gigantic apartment building. Like the one I was raised in, it has many stories, or floors. On each floor there are many similar-sized, similar-shaped apartments. There are, of course, hallways to walk in, to get from one apartment to another. There is a front entrance that you can only get through by “buzzing” the person you’ve come to see – in this case, my Father. Some people refer to the entrance as “the Pearly Gate(s).” The picture, of course, is drawn from Revelation 21:10-16, where the Apostle John reports seeing a vision of “that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God…. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.”



The length and the breadth and the height! The “city” is in the shape of a cube – 12,000 furlongs east-to-west; 12,000 furlongs north-to-south, and 12,000 furlongs from the bottom of the ground floor to the roof – about the same shape as my “home” at 142-30 Sanford Avenue, in Flushing. But what about its size? The Greek word translated “furlong” is “stadion” (in the singular); “stadia” (in the plural). 12,000 stadia in length; 12,000 stadia in breadth; and 12,000 stadia in height. Suppose each “story” consisted of a number of apartments, rectangular in shape, two stadia in length, three stadia in breadth and one stadion from floor to ceiling. Six square stadia of floor space; six cubic stadia of total volume. Suppose, further, that the apartments themselves only took up one half of the total volume of the building – the other half being occupied by hallways, stairways, elevators, insulation, and room for wiring, plumbing, and so on. How many stories would the building have? How many apartments on each floor? How many people could live in a building that size?

12,000 x 12,000 x 12,000 = 1,728,000,000,000 cubic stadia of total volume.
½ x 1,728,000,000,000 = 864,000,000,000 cubic stadia occupied by apartments.
1/6 x 864,000,000,000 = 144,000,000,000 apartments.

More than enough for every human being who has ever lived to have his or her own apartment!

(Please note: I’m not saying that every human being who has ever lived is going to be saved. Jesus said, “wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13-14). What I’m saying is that there could be enough apartments in the holy Jerusalem for every person who has ever lived to have his or her own apartment if s/he were willing to receive it.)

It’s a “secure” building, like the one I grew up in, in New York, with one difference: you can’t cheat and get in by grabbing the door when someone else leaves. It doesn’t work that way. Jesus is the Door (John 10:7) and you can only get in if he lets you in (John 14:6).

But where do the “mansions” come in? The answer to that is found in the definition of a stadion. According to “Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament,” by Dr. Joseph Henry Thayer, published by Associated Publishers and Authors, Inc., of Grand Rapids, Michigan, on April 10, 1889, a stadion is “a measure of length comprising 600 Greek feet, or 625 Roman feet, or 125 Roman paces, hence 1/8 of a Roman mile [i.e., 606.75 English feet (about 195 meters)].”

My “apartment” has a floor space of 2,208,873 square feet, and a ceiling height of 606 feet and 9 inches. So does yours! That is far bigger than the Bill & Melinda Gates “mansion” in Seattle, Washington – the largest “single-family” home in America. Suddenly, the question isn’t, “Is there room enough for every person who has ever been saved to have a ‘mansion’ in our Father’s house?” It is, “What am I going to do with all that space?!”

Audio Adrenaline, the singing group who wrote “Big House” – the song the kids at camp like to sing – has a few ideas.

“It’s a big, big house….” The entire apartment building I grew up in could easily be placed in one corner of my apartment; its roof would only reach 1/5 of the way to the ceiling of the apartment, and it would only consume about 1% of the apartment’s floor space. You would hardly notice it was there unless you were looking for it.

“…a big, big table with lots and lots of food.” Revelation 22:2 informs us that “the tree of life” grows in the “City” – yielding “twelve manner of fruits” year round. There’s enough room in my apartment for an entire acre of fruit trees (an acre is only 43,560 square feet; I’ve got about 50 acres of floor space to fill). The ceiling is so high that I could fill a box 200 feet deep with California soil and grow redwood trees in it (they only grow to a height of 350 feet and don’t require half that depth of soil; there would still be 50 feet of air space above the tops of the trees for my pet eagles to soar in). Revelation 22:2 also mentions a river. Most rivers aren’t more than one or two hundred feet wide. That river could run right through the middle of my apartment and it would use up less than 10% of the total floor space! Ezekiel 47:9-10, describing the very same Place, refers to “a very great multitude of fish” and “a place to spread forth nets” – the kind that are used for catching fish to be eaten. I know people with resurrected, immortal bodies can eat fish, because that's what Jesus ate after He rose (Luke 24:42-43 and John 21:9ff.). There are also numerous references to bread, wine and other dietary staples in the passages that describe my Father’s house. I can believe that every kind of food that exists will be available there, because Jesus “declared all foods clean” according to Mark 7:19 (NIV) and Acts 10:9-16 (see, especially, verse 15).

“…And a big, big yard where we can play football.” Growing up in Flushing, it was difficult to play much of anything in the apartment, except checkers and Monopoly. If I tried to play catch with my sister, I’d probably break something and be punished. We could, of course, go outdoors if the weather were nice. We were fortunate enough to live right across the street from Public School #20 (where we spent many dreary days studying reading, writing, math, and social studies). I say “fortunate” because P.S. 20 also had a great big playground. There were sandboxes for the littlest kids, swing sets and jungle gyms for the slightly larger ones, even two handball courts where a game similar to racquetball (or “squash”) could be played by those high enough in the grade-school pecking order to qualify (the rest of us could play handball on rainy days if we didn’t mind getting wet). It also had a full-sized baseball diamond complete with bleacher seats and a backstop. And, of course, the ubiquitous half-courts for the basketball games that were the favorite of the taller kids. Football is a “country” sport not particularly favored in the Borough of Queens. But there’s enough room in my Father’s house for each and every apartment to have its own full-sized football stadium: it would only consume about 20% of the floor space that remains after putting in the mansion, the tree-of-life orchard, the redwood “forest”, the river, the bakery, the vineyard, the sandboxes, the swing sets, the jungle gyms, the handball courts, the baseball diamond and the full-sized basketball courts. We still haven’t accounted for more than three of the six square stadia of floor space in this single-person apartment.

I don’t know what you would do with all of your 50 acres. Maybe you want a single-story farmhouse with a barnyard, a chicken coop, a pond and forty acres of “fruited plain.” There’s certainly enough room for that. Maybe you don’t like the idea of living alone and would prefer that eight or ten of your closest friends and relatives could “pool” their apartment space and create a “mansion” with almost an entire square mile of floor space. That would work. I can’t imagine my Father’s house being so structured and stereotyped that every apartment is the same size and shape – the way Marcy’s (6P) was the same as ours (1P). He’s a God of infinite diversity and variety. So yours won’t be the same as mine; but, whatever it is, it’ll be big enough and good enough. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

There’s only one point that brings me sadness as I contemplate what the Bible teaches me about eternity. It’s the stunning fact that most of the 144,000,000,000 “mansions” that there could be will be uninhabited. Billy Graham (who should know as much about this subject as anyone now living does) estimates that only 10% of the people who have ever lived have responded in faith to Jesus’ offer of salvation and eternal life. Thinking about what the future holds for me – undeserving as I am! – makes me wonder how any one of them could possibly reject such an offer. Is human nature so ruined – so sinful – that most people would purposely choose a few years of “the pleasures of sin” (Hebrews 11:25) rather than “signing a lease” for eternity in my Father’s house?

Or could it simply be that no one has told them what’s available? And whose job would that be?

For more information, contact:
Dr. John H. Roller
johnroller@faithbiblechristian.com