Glimpses of Eternity

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Revelation 21:1-8; Luke 16:19-31

June 9, 2013 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

Questions, questions, questions. Life is made up of questions, isn’t it? From the moment we start talking, we start asking questions. You know the first one we learn, don’t you? Why? Why does this happen, Daddy? Why are you telling me no? When our kids are little, we can sometimes put them off with, “Because I said so.” That’s a phrase I swore I’d never use, and yet I found myself saying it more than I wanted! As we get older, the questions become more difficult, harder to answer, to the point where we sometimes wish we had someone to refer them out to! Being a pastor, I often find myself in the question-answering business. At my previous church, one of the Disciple classes that I wasn’t teaching would often e-mail me questions and began calling me “BibleAnswerMan.” I am pretty sure I don’t deserve that title, because I don’t know all the answers, and that’s especially true when we come to the questions I’m most asked, the ones having to do with life and death and life beyond death. Last fall, when I asked on Facebook what sorts of topics people wanted us to explore as a church in 2013, one theme that came up over and over again was eternity. That didn’t surprise me, because in my twenty years as a pastor, I have probably fielded more questions about heaven, hell, and eternal life than I have about any other single topic. Because it’s so unknown, we wonder what it will be like. Every once in a while, a book comes out that purports to describe heaven, or hell, or a bright, shining light, and people get very excited about that. But then we begin to wonder about it again. Is that really what it will be like?

For the rest of this month, we’re going to be exploring questions around life and death and life after this. But the reality is we only have glimpses in the Scriptures of what eternity is like. I think that’s why we’re so eager to believe whatever someone writes, because we want to know. We want to have a clear idea of just what we’re getting into. And so we’ve gotten ideas that hell is fire and darkness, and heaven is clouds and golden streets. Maybe sometimes we even picture heaven a little like this…

VIDEO: Is Heaven Boring?

So what does the Bible say? That’s the question we should always go back to as Christians, and if what someone else says is not supported directly by Scripture, then it’s just speculation. That’s not saying it’s wrong; it’s speculation. When the Corinthians were speculating about eternal things and “secret knowledge,” Paul reminded them, “‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”—the things God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:9-10). No eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor can we fully understand what waits for us in eternity. And that’s why the Bible only gives us glimpses. And yet, as we look at those glimpses, it’s my prayer that over the next four weeks, we’ll find hope springing up and be reminded again that the worst thing is never the last thing. That’s the Christian hope. That’s our story.

One of the brightest glimpses we get of eternity in particular is in the book of Revelation, at the very end of the Bible. There are a few things we need to understand about Revelation, however. It’s not a road map to the end times; instead, it’s a vision meant to encourage persecuted believers. John wrote this book while he was in exile, away from his brothers and sisters in Christ, punished for preaching the good news. And one day, during worship, he was given a glimpse of eternity. The sense in the book is that there are all these things happening all at once, and John’s just trying to write them down as quickly as possible. It’s not a linear vision; it’s a circular one. We keep coming back to the same images, most of which are drawn from the Old Testament and the wisdom writings like the Psalms and Ecclesiastes and Job. To try to take the book of Revelation and match it up to current events in any time or place completely misses the point of the book. John is trying to give his people hope, and he does so in coded language. Babylon is Rome. The Beast is any system that tries to oppress God’s people. And so on. The point of the book is simply this: God wins in the end. No matter how bad it seems to get here, God will triumph. In trying to communicate that truth, John is using the language of his day, but it’s insufficient to really tell us what eternity is like. It’s as if John is saying, “It’s like this, but so much more” (cf. Wright, Revelation for Everyone, pg. 187). We need to keep that in mind as we read.

Revelation 21, often read at funerals, tells us several things about eternity. First, notice how often the word “new” is repeated. New heavens. New earth. New Jerusalem. “I am making everything new.” The word for “new” doesn’t refer to something that never existed before, though. This is not like getting a new car or creating a new dish to serve at dinner. Instead, the word refers to a change of quality or a change of essence (Mulholland, Revelation: Holy Living in an Unholy World, pg. 315). It’s a renewal; it’s not a total destruction of all the old things. God made the world and saw that it was good (Genesis 1); we’re told that in the very beginning of the Bible. God’s opinion has not changed. When John says that the first heaven and first earth have passed away, he’s not talking about total destruction any more than we are talking about total destruction when we say someone has “passed away.” What John means by that is that creation is going to be renewed, made new, re-created the way God intended it to be from the very first. We live in world full of tears, death, mourning, crying and pain. But when the world is made new, there will be, John says, “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (21:4). The old way of doing things, the way that leads to heartbreak and hurt and woundedness—that will be done with. This is a renewed world, where sin no longer reigns and death is a finally defeated foe. Revelation tells us all things will be made new.

The next thing Revelation 21 tells us is that God’s grand plan is a place where God dwells with his people. No longer distant. No longer seemingly absent sometimes. Present with his people. John hears that word clearly in verse 3: “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” And he will not just be with us in a spiritual sense. One image that’s come to mean a lot to me recently is in verse 4. We read past it sometimes too quickly to get to the promise of no more death, but listen to it again: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.” Who’s going to wipe tears away? Some angel? Someone heavenly functionary? No! God himself will wipe every tear from my eyes and from yours. I remember so many times when my kids were upset and would be crying over a hurt or something, and I, as their father, would stoop down so that I was looking them eye-to-eye, wrap my arms around them until they calmed down, and then, ever so gently, wipe the tears from their eyes. And John says God himself will do that for us. God will stoop down, take us in his arms, and wipe the tears, caused by all the hurts and all the pains of this life, from our eyes. As Tom Wright says, it’s an act of “utter gentleness and kindness to be performed…by God himself” (190). Eternity is the place where God our creator and Father is.

But eternity is not about going to heaven. Now, before you accuse me of heresy, I want you to look at the text. In Revelation 21, John says he saw “the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (21:3). He also talks about earth being made new. In other words, eternity is going to affect all of creation. It’s about everything God made being renewed, freed from the “disgusting and tragic” effects of sin. Eternity is about the world being made right, becoming a place of “beauty, power, delight, tenderness and glory” (Wright 189), fit for us to live in. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, says this is what the creation has been waiting for: “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration…in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (8:19-21). The imagery of the Bible is that heaven, so to speak, is coming to us rather than us going to heaven. A renewed and remade world is where we will be with God. It’s about the restoration of all things (including human beings), renewed the way God intended them to be (Wright, The God I Don’t Understand, pg. 198). Now, I’ve tried to imagine what that will look like. I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel to some beautiful places in my life. Over my desk hangs a calendar with pictures from Italy, because the Italian countryside really captured my heart. It’s beautiful and there are times I imagine myself walking through some of those pictures. I also love the beauty of the Austrian Alps—tall, majestic mountains pointing toward the sky. I love the starkness of the desert southwest in our country, and I can understand why Jesus chose to center his ministry around beauty of the Sea of Galilee. But all of that pales in comparison to what God has in store when the world is made new. Those are shadows of the beauty God has in mind. That’s what John tells us (cf Smith & Card, Unveiled Hope, pgs. 209-210). New heaven, new earth, and the place we will live as beautiful as a bride.

Now, having said that, we might be bothered by John saying “there was no longer any sea” (21:1). How could the world be truly beautiful without seas and oceans and lakes and beaches? I mean, we live right here on the shores of one of the most beautiful lakes in the nation. How could it be that there would no longer be any bodies of water? Again, this is a place where we have to understand the whole of the book. In Revelation, the “sea” is the place where rebellion, chaos and evil come from. The Beast comes out of the sea in chapter 13, and the great prostitute sits on “many waters” in chapter 17. The sea is the place of rebellion. That’s what will be gone. No more rebellion, no more chaos, no more evil, no more sin. John’s not literally saying there will be no bodies of water (Smith & Card 210; Mulholland 315). In fact, in chapter 22, there’s a river of the water of life flowing out of God’s throne (22:1). Can you imagine the beauty of the seas, renewed to the way God intended them to be, with no more pollution, no more waste dumped in them? They will be more beautiful than we can imagine.

So, with that in mind, a couple of questions that I get asked a lot fit in here. First, do I go to heaven right away or will I have to wait? The parable in Luke 16 speaks a bit to this—if it is a parable, that is. It’s the only so-called parable where Jesus uses names; none of the characters in his other parables have names, so some think this might be an actual story. But whether it is or not, we are given (again) just a glimpse of what happens after our death. Lazarus is a beggar who lives outside the gate of a rich man, and he is ignored by the rich man. In time, both of them die, and we’re told Lazarus goes to “Abraham’s side.” The rich man, however, ends up in Hades (literally, the place of the dead), where he is “in torment” (we’ll come back to that in a few moments). There are many messages in this parable, but this morning, let’s just notice this one thing: there doesn’t seem to be a “gap” of time between when the two men die and when they find themselves in eternity. Paul says that to be away from the body is to present with the Lord (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:8). What that looks like we don’t know exactly. We do know that, at the end, when Christ returns, we will receive our resurrection body, a body like Christ’s after his resurrection (cf. Philippians 3:21). In between, we don’t really know except that when we die, if our faith is in Christ, our next awareness is that we will be with Jesus.

The other question that fits in here is whether or not we’ll know people there. Will we know our loved ones? Will they know us? Cathy and I had a miscarriage several years ago, and because I believe that’s a living being from the moment of conception, I’ve often wondered if we’ll meet our son or daughter. Will we know him or her? There are, again, glimpses. In the parable in Luke 16, the rich man can look from Hades to Abraham’s side and he recognizes Lazarus. Now, it also seems that Lazarus either can’t see or doesn’t recognize the rich man; only Abraham talks to the man in Hades. We also have the moment of Jesus’ transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-8) when Jesus speaks with Moses and Elijah. The disciples seem to know who they are. How did they know? Moses and Elijah lived centuries before the disciples. Were they wearing “Hello, My Name Is…” stickers? From these glimpses, I believe we will know other people, including people we have not met. Though we may not look like we do now, I think we’ll know each other. How relationships are carried over, we don’t know, though Jesus did say, “Those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage” (Luke 20:35). The reason relationships will be different is because every need we have will be completed in God. When we see Jesus face to face, we will be whole.

So there is a new—a renewed—place for the believer in Christ to live forever. That is a promise we can count on. But what about those who turn away from Christ? Because John says there is a dividing line. He says, “The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death” (21:8). Wow, that’s quite a turn from what he has been talking about, but the whole book of Revelation shows a clear line between those who believe and those who turn away. This picture of a lake of burning sulfur and images from the Gospels of a place where the fire never dies have inspired many artists as they try to depict what we call hell. These images also informed an Italian poet named Dante Alighieri, who in the fourteenth century wrote a poem that is considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. It’s called the Divine Comedy, and it purports to take people on a “tour” of hell, purgatory and heaven. Honestly, most of our images of hell are drawn more from Dante than from Scripture. Dante imagines nine circles of hell, where every torture gets worse, culminating in the tenth level, where Satan is.

In the Bible, though, Jesus often refers to a place called “Gehenna.” That’s a Hebrew word that refers to one of the two major valleys surrounding Jerusalem. In Old Testament times, Gehenna was a place where some people sacrificed their children to a pagan god, Molech. Because of this, that valley was considered to be cursed. In New Testament times, Gehenna was the city dump. It was the place where you put your garbage, the stuff that was no longer useful and you no longer wanted. There was a fire that “never went out;” it was a place that constantly smoldered as the refuse from Jerusalem was destroyed (cf. New Interpreter’s Dictionary, Vol. 2, pg. 531; Wright, Surprised By Hope, pg. 175). But the point is not really the fire; the point is the separation from the holy city. Jesus doesn’t focus a lot on what happens to those who reject him. Instead, he’s more focused on how to get heaven into us. But he does talk about a different fate for those who reject him, a separation. If things that distort God’s good and lovely creation are not part of the new Jerusalem, then those things and people would, by default, be left out. Evil cannot exist in God’s presence. I personally believe Tom Wright is correct when he puts it this way: “When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God…[because] you become like what you worship…It is possible for human beings so to continue down this road, so to refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmers of the true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way, all signposts to the love of God, that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all” (Hope 182). Hell, in the Biblical sense, is separation from God. The final punishment, if you want to call it that, is to be forever worshipping that which cannot give you life, to be outside the city, so to speak. The great author C. S. Lewis put it this way: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it” (The Great Divorce).

That takes us to the question of those who haven’t heard. Again, Scripture only gives us glimpses, but it has become my conviction that every person is judged or weighed in terms of their response to the light they have been given. There have been too many stories of missionaries who go into a remote area, tell people about Jesus, and they hear a similar response: “You’ve finally told us the name of the God we knew must exist.” Romans says God has not left himself without a witness, that creation itself proclaims his presence (cf. Romans 1:20). We are held accountable for the light which we have seen, which speaks two things to us: one, it’s imperative for the church to continue to shine the light, to be the presence of Christ in a broken and hurting world, and to declare the good news to all who will listen. Some of us may do that directly; some of us may even go to a far-off land to shine the light. But we’re all called to be following the final command Jesus gave us: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). And the second thing this puts on us is this: we’ve seen the light. There is no excuse for those of us who have heard this message week after week, all our lives. If those who have experienced God without hearing his name are called to respond to that light, small though it may be, how much more will we be held accountable for the light we have been given? Paul says we’re “without excuse” (Romans 1:20). These glimpses of eternity are not meant to just makes us sit around and count our blessings, glad that we have been saved even though others are not. These glimpses of eternity are meant to cause us to give ourselves more to the mission of the church, to call us more and more to become a community in this place where all people can encounter Jesus Christ.

And that brings us to one final set of questions to consider this morning: is our book “written”? Is our destiny set? Do we have any choice in our eternal destination? There are those among our brothers and sisters in the larger church who believe that everything is determined from the beginning, including who will be saved and who will not. Called “predestination” or “Calvinism,” this stream of Christian belief emphasizes the absolute sovereignty of God, and they define that as God deciding everything up front. You have no choice in the matter. Everything you do, say, and are is predetermined. And they can make a Biblical case for that belief, but that’s not our understanding of Scripture. There are clear instances—and we don’t have time this morning to go into it all—where people are given a choice. The rich young ruler, for instance, in Mark 10, is given the choice to follow Jesus or not. We’re told that God desires that all should be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), but we’re also told clearly that not all will be. We’re given instances where people turn away from God, both in the Scripture and in our own life experience. If there is no choice, then we are simply puppets. God will bring it all to a glorious conclusion—of that we can be sure. The word “will” is used repeatedly throughout this passage, and that’s meant to give us an assurance that though the world may seem out of control, there is a God who is constantly working to put it all back together (Mulholland, Journey Through the Bible: Revelation, pg. 115). Sometimes we cooperate with God and sometimes we frustrate God’s plans—on any given day, I can find myself doing both, depending on the moment. You probably can, too. But God has given us the freedom to choose—free will. And that, too, should compel us to tell everyone we know about the good news, to see it become good news in their life, as well.

So I know we’re pretty heavy on theology this morning, and I also know that theology is useless if it doesn’t make a difference in the way we live. We’ve not typically thought a lot about heaven or maybe even hell in our daily lives. Those who talk about it are usually labeled “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.” We think about it when a funeral comes around, but other than that, does heaven or hell have any bearing on our daily lives? Maybe if we lived in the light of eternity, we might find our lives shaped more like Jesus than we do now. Perhaps because we’ve lost sight of our ultimate goal we’ve become complacent. The message of Revelation and the reason John writes down this vision of eternity is because the “church is called to be the presence of the victorious Christ in the midst of our fallen world” (Mulholland Holy Living 118). We’re supposed to be the answers to the prayer we pray so frequently: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). I believe those who have done the most for the sake of the eternal kingdom of God are those who have sought to live that verse out wholeheartedly. Heaven in mind, the new Jerusalem on their hearts, and earth in their sights.

Brennan Manning, a Christian author who passed away this past April, once told of a time when he was brought up short by someone who didn’t believe and yet acted more Christian than he did. In his own words: “One Christmas Eve I was working with a rescue team in the Bowery of New York City, fishing drunks out of the street. In a grimy doorway the stench of one particular alcoholic was so vile that I asked my partner, an agnostic social worker, if he would handle that one. ‘No trouble,’ he answered. Whispering tender words of consolation, he gently lifted the drunk into the van, and began to speak tender words of comfort” (qtd. in Dunnam, The Workbook on Abiding in Christ, pg. 181). Manning goes on to say he realized he had failed to live out his faith in that moment, a faith which said Christ could be seen in the lowliest and the least of these. His agnostic friend was more like Christ in that moment than he was. Manning went on to live in light of eternity, seeking to make sure every person after that knew they could be and were loved by their Abba, God their heavenly Father.

One of the most powerful examples we’ve had in our lifetimes is that of Mother Teresa, who lived and worked in the slums of Calcutta, India, reaching out to the dying and the sick. Everyone deserved to be treated with dignity, she believed, and it was her hope of eternity that compelled her to continue on day after day. Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote one of the most well-known books about her life, put it this way: “It will be for posterity to decide whether she is a saint. I only say of her that in a dark time she is a burning and a shining light; in a cruel time, a living embodiment of Christ’s gospel of love; in a godless time, the Word dwelling among us, full of grace and truth” (qtd. in Dunnam 181). As citizens of God’s New Jerusalem, as those with the hope of eternity in our hearts, we’re called to spread that good news, that hope in every place we go. We’re called to push back the darkness with the light of Christ, to be the presence of Jesus in the midst of our dark and hurting world. We can have assurance that the New Jerusalem is our destination when we put our trust in Christ. As Ben Witherington puts it, the New Jerusalem “is not achieved; it is to be received. It is not accomplished; it is entered by grace through faith” (Revelation and the End Times, pg. 100). But we’re not called to just hang onto that hope for ourselves. We’re called to be those who offer that hope.

My grandmother was a huge part of my life when I was younger. For many years, she lived just two blocks from my family, and we would often ride our bikes to her house, or we’d spend the evening when Mom and Dad were out doing something. She got remarried and moved to Rossville, but that was where school was, so we sometimes went to her house after school. Grandma was a godly woman, she lived like Jesus as best she could and touched many lives with kindness and the light of Christ. She also taught Sunday School for many, many years. Every week, she was in the sanctuary, teaching the “Royal Comrades” class, the older adults class. We had the same problem at Rossville church that we have here: not enough Sunday School rooms for all the classes. It’s a good problem to have, but hers met in the back of the sanctuary. And then Grandma began having strokes; I was with my mom when we found her after her first one. Grandma became someone else. She said things she never would have said before, and she acted in ways my brother and I had never seen her act. The stroke had damaged part of her way of thinking and acting. Eventually, she had a series of strokes and she went home to be with Jesus. And I still remember standing by her grave, a high school student, and weeping uncontrollably. Hers was really the first death I experienced of someone close to me. I was sad to lose her influence and her presence in my life. But you know what? I wasn’t weeping that day as someone without hope. I believe Grandma is in the presence of Jesus this very day. Jesus said he was going to prepare a place for us, and I am confident that I will see her again. In fact, to borrow a line from Pastor Adam Hamilton, I not only believe it, I’m counting on it. I hope you are, too. Until that day, we work to see God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven and we live in constant anticipation of the day when we bow down in eternity and worship the God who loves us more than we can ever imagine.

Mike King: “I Can Only Imagine”