For the first part of this 2 part article click here.
The Eschatology That “The Good Place” Failed To Understand
Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote: “Without an infinite reference point nothing finite has any lasting or enduring meaning.” He was more right than he knew.
The final episode of NBC’s The Good Place is one of the least honest pieces of secular eschatology ever put on television. It tries and fails—with the wisdom of the world—to uncover a mystery already uncovered 2,000 years ago in scripture.
After billions of Jeremy Bearimys, the main characters reach eschatological and moral perfection, universal reconciliation is achieved, and paradise is… boring, mind numbingly boring! Eternal bliss turns out to be eternal stagnation.
The only door left is the one that lets you walk out of existence altogether.
Chidi’s last line could have been Nietzsche’s: “Mankind has finally become healthy, happy… and there is nothing left to do but die.”
That is the logical endpoint of every vision of eternity that lacks an infinite, personal, ever-deepening Object of desire. When perfection is static, hope has nowhere left to go. And when hope dies, all that’s left is oblivion.
From Static Perfection to Living Marriage
The Bible describes a telos that inverts Malthusian despair in a magnificent irony: eternity stretches out linearly forever, while hope, joy, and discovery grow exponentially—producing not collapse, but ever-expanding delight. Eternity starts with a wedding, not with a battle.
Paul says about the telos: “Now these three remain: faith, hope, and LOVE*. But the greatest of these is LOVE.” (1 Corinthians 13:13). He does not retire hope like a utilitarian, like Google maps with: “you have arrived.”
He insists that even in the age to come, hope still stands. Hope—like faith and LOVE—never ends! Why?
Because the telos of the biblical story is not a frozen perfection but an everlasting marriage, and marriages (real ones) are not static. They are living, growing, endlessly discoverable covenants between two infinitely rich persons: the Lamb and His Bride.
Science holds a beautiful clue for us because it, too, grows exponentially. For every question science answers, it births a hundred deeper ones—and that curve will never flatten since scientific knowledge is a finite inexhaustible curve. By contrast, God is actually infinite—by ontological definition, so the “curve that never flattens” is not just empirical optimism but a metaphysical guarantee in Christ. In Him, the law of diminishing returns is abolished.
In the Happily Ever After I sketched in the previous article (Happily Ever After), Christ’s mediatorial kingship is handed back to the Father (1 Corinthians 15:24) and the Son takes up His eternal vocation as Husband to the Church. The kingdom is entrusted; the house of Jacob is kept (Luke 1:33). This transition is the moment the great cosmic victory culminates not in a legislative rule, but in a living, growing covenant of love. And in that house, hope does not expire; it flourishes forever. That single shift changes everything about eternity. It is not a static palace; it is an ever-expanding home. And that is why hope never retires. This ever-deepening marriage will unfold under the Father’s ‘all in all’ reign.
Some may say that Paul is not speaking about the eschaton, he’s speaking about these three remaining in the here-and-now Church age. But far more than three remain in the here-and-now! In Ephesians 4 there are five gifts of Jesus’ that remain “until we reach the unity of the faith,” the gospel and it's mandate remain, discipleship remains, the gifts of the Spirit remain. If Paul is not speaking about the hereafter it becomes a nonsensical statement.
As 19th-century Scottish preacher Alexander MacLaren argued: "That Future presents itself to us as the continual communication of an inexhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable spirits. In that continual communication there is continual progress. Wherever there is progress there must be hope."¹
Here’s how it works:
- Faith remains because every morning of eternity the Bride wakes up and chooses again to trust her Husband. “I am my Beloved’s and my Beloved is mine” is never a past-tense statement. It is the daily, delighted “I do” of the age to come.
- LOVE remains because LOVE is the substance of the union itself, the bond that grows brighter, not dimmer, throughout eternity. LOVE is not a problem to be solved; it is a Person to be enjoyed without end.
- Hope remains because the Husband is infinite. There is always more of Him to know, more glory to uncover, more delight to be surprised by. The Bride never exhausts the Bridegroom. Every revelation is followed by a deeper longing, every discovery by a sweeter anticipation. There is always more house to be made into a home, more jungle to be cultivated into a garden. Hope is not the scaffolding that gets dismantled when the building is finished; it is the permanent posture of a wife who knows tomorrow will be even better than today, forever.
This is why Paul can say hope “remains” even after “that which is perfect has come.” Because the Perfect One is not a state; He is a Person. And persons, unlike puzzles, are never “finished.”
The writers of The Good Place were right about one thing: a perfection without forward motion is unbearable. They were wrong about the stoic solution.
The biblical answer is not amnesia, reincarnation, the door to oblivion. The answer is an ever-advancing, ever-intensifying, ever-happier marriage to the Lamb who is infinitely interesting and eternally in love with His Bride.
In the eschaton, faith says, “I trust You.” LOVE says, “I have You.” Hope says, “There’s more of You tomorrow.”
It really is Happily Ever After for those in Christ Jesus.
And because there always will be more of Him, hope never, ever walks through that door of annihilation—the thought will never even cross our minds.
* When I write LOVE in all caps, I mean agape—self-giving, covenantal, unbreakable devotion, not fleeting emotion.
Reference:
1. MacLaren, Alexander. "What Lasts" (sermon on 1 Corinthians 13:8, 13). In MacLaren's Expositions of Holy Scripture.
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