Heaven is not spoken of as the goal of salvation or the reward for righteous living in either the Old Testament or the New Testament. The concept of going to Heaven when we die is one of the most deeply ingrained of the traditions of Christianity. As far as we know, the phrase "going to Heaven" does not appear even one time in the New Testament. The Apostles of Christ preached the return of Christ in His Kingdom, not our going to Heaven.
We may have assumed that the early Apostles preached or implied that the righteous are going to make Heaven their eternal home, but they did not do so. Such is our tradition and it needs to be examined, because the wrong goal leads to the wrong approach to the process of redemption.
