Heaven! Our Advent Study/ Chapter One: Are You Looking Forward to Heaven?
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Chapter One Are You Looking Forward to Heaven?
Getting Acquainted:
( ) I have been to Heaven
( ) I have had a near-death experience
( ) I have a fear about dying
( ) I have loved ones who have died
( ) I have positive feelings about dying
( ) I believe when I die I will go to Heaven
( ) I believe when I die I will go to the “other place.”
( ) I have preconceived notions about Heaven
( ) I will float on a cloud strumming a harp ( ) I will walk on streets of gold ( ) I will become an angel ( ) I will not know anyone because I will be a spiritual being ( ) I will never see my loved ones again ( ) I will greeted by my loved ones who are already in Heaven
( ) I have seen movies about Heaven.
( ) I believe the accounts in movies and books written by those who have been there. Heaven is for eternity. But, how long is eternity?
Eternity is a sparrow picking up a grain of sand from the northern beaches of North America, flying to the southern most part of South American, dropping that grain off there, picking up a grain from that South American beach, flying back to North America, dropping off the SA grain, and starting over. When the bird has successfully completed exchanging all the grains of sand from NA to SA and vice versa, that is only the beginning of eternity. The introductory remark on this first chapter of our book is by J.C. Ryle who writes: The (person) man who is about to set sail for Australia or New Zealand as a settler, is naturally anxious to know something about his/her future home, its climate, its employments, its inhabitants, its ways, its customs. All these are subjects of deep interest to him/her. You are leaving the land of your nativity, you are going to spend the rest of your life in a new hemisphere. It would be strange indeed if you did not desire information about your new abode. Now surely, if we hope to dwell for ever in that “better country, even a heavenly one,” we ought to seek all the knowledge we can get about it. Before we go to our eternal home we should try to become acquainted with it. “It becomes us to spend this life only as a journey to Heaven… to which we should subordinate all other concerns of life. Why should we labor for or set our hearts on anything else, but that which is our proper end and true happiness?” - Jonathan Edwards
One of Edwards’ life resolutions: “Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness, in the other world, as I possibly can.”
“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end.” - Pascal.
Tragically, most people do not find their joy in Christ and Heaven. Sadly, many people find no joy at all when they think about Heaven.
One pastor told the author, “Whenever I think about Heaven, it makes me depressed. I’d rather just cease to exist when I die.” Why, the author asked. “I can’t stand the thought of that endless tedium. To float around in the clouds with nothing to do but strum a harp… it’s all so terribly boring. Heaven doesn’t sound much better than Hell. I’d rather be annihilated than spend eternity in a place like that.”
One church member used to tease me by saying, “All preachers I know are afraid to die!”
I’m a graduate of Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology, and I had not one single course on Heaven, nor did we talk about Heaven in any of the other courses I had in my seminary education.
Any negative view of Heaven does not come from Scripture, for the Bible speaks positively about it, and those who talked about it could not wait to go there.
Those who have had near-death experiences, which took them to heaven, cannot wait to die to return for good to that celestial home. When Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s mother died, he wrote, in his sadness, but also from his faith, “If a baby could reason while in his mother’s womb he might be tempted to say, ‘I don’t want to leave this place! I’m comfortable here; everything I need is provided for me; I’m loved and nice and warm – why would I want to leave here?’ But when that baby leaves his mother’s womb, he is embraced by the hands of the one delivering him, who hands him over to his mother and father, who promptly embrace and love him and he knows that he is finally home. In the same way, my mother may have said the same as the baby; why would I want to leave this place! I’m comfortable here; everything I need is provided here; I’m loved and it’s been nice and warm, but upon entering Heaven realizes that she has been embraced by the One who loved her and saved her; and all her loved ones are there to welcome her home.” (Paraphrased from memory)
Why do we have an unbiblical view of Heaven? “Nearly every Christian I have spoken with has some idea that eternity is an un-ending church service… We have settled on an image of the never-ending sing-along in the sky, one great hymn after another, forever and ever, amen. And our heart sinks, Forever and ever? That’s it? That’s the good news? And then we sigh and feel guilty that we are not more ‘spiritual.’ We lose heart, and we turn once more to the present to find what life we can.” –John Eldredge, The Journey of Desire.
Mark Twain: (Miss Watson tells Huckleberry Finn about Heaven): “She went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it… I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said, not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.”
“If Miss Watson had told Huck what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures – now that would have gotten his attention!”
Mark Twain in his autobiography said, “The burden of pain, care, misery grows heavier year by year. At length ambition is dead, pride is dead, vanity is dead, longing for release is in their place. It comes at last – the only unpoisoned gift ever had for them – and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness.”
Charles Spurgeon, a contemporary of Mark Twain said, “To come to Thee is to come home from exile, to come to land out of the raging storm, to come to rest after long labour, to come to the goal of my desires and the summit of my wishes.”
“What God made us to desire, and therefore what we do desire if we admit it, is exactly what He promises to those who follow Jesus Christ: a resurrected life in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ on a resurrected Earth. Our desires correspond precisely to God’s plans. It’s not something we want, so we engage in wishful thinking that what we want exists. It’s the opposite – the reason we want it is precisely because God has planned for it to exist. As we’ll see, resurrected people living in a resurrected universe isn’t our idea – It’s God’s.´(pp 7-8)
John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536 AD): He encourages meditation on Heaven, but does not deal with it.
There is more written on eschatology (End times) than Heaven.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943AD); nothing to say about Heaven.
William Shedd’s three-volume Dogmatic Theology (1888 AD); contains 87 pages on eternal punishment, only two on Heaven.
The 900 page Great Doctrines of the Bible, by Martyn Lloyd-Jones; less than 2 pages on Heaven.
Systematic Theology, by Louis Berkhof (1996AD), 38 pages to creation, 40 pages to baptism and communion, 15 pages on “the intermediate state” (where people abide between death and resurrection); yet only 2 pages on Heaven.
A. J. Conyers, The Eclipse of Heaven, writes, “Even to one without religious commitment and theological convictions, it should be an unsettling thought that this world is attempting to charts its way through some of the most perilous waters in history, having now decided to ignore what was for nearly two millennia its fixed point of reference—its North Star. The certainty of judgment, the longing for heaven, the dread of hell: these are not prominent considerations in our modern discourse about the important matters of life. But they once were.”
“Until recently the doctrine of Heaven was enormously important to the church. Belief in Heaven was not just a nice auxiliary sentiment. It was a central, life-sustaining conviction.” -Conyers.
Off Our Radar Screens
“An overwhelming majority of Americans continue to believe that there is life after death and that heaven and hell exist, but what they believe varies widely.”
Television, movies, conversations with their friends – all mix together to give us a distorted view of what could be after death.
Revelation chapters 21-22 remain the most definitive passages on Heaven.
Heaven comes last as a subject in those seminaries that teach on it; nonexistent in others.
Most pastors don’t preach on Heaven either; congregations think the Bible doesn’t say much about it.
“I will not ask how often during the last 25 years you and I have listened to an old-style warning against the flames of hell. I will not even ask how many sermons have been preached in our hearing about a future day of reckoning when men shall reap according as they have sown. It will be enough to ask how many preachers, during these years, have dwelt on the joys of heavenly rest with anything like the old ardent love and impatient longing.” – Scottish theologians John Baillie.
How can our children be excited about Heaven when they grow up if they never hear about it?
Where Do We Get Our Misconceptions?
The author, Randy Alcorn, believes this is all because of the work of our enemy, Satan.
“When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44).
Satan’s favorite lies are about Heaven. In Revelation 13:6 tells us that the satanic beast “opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander His name and His dwelling place and those who live in Heaven.”
Three things that Satan slanders: God’s person, God’s people, and God’s place – namely Heaven.
Satan was thrown out of Heaven as reported in Isaiah 14:12-15). As a result, he became bitter not only towards God, but towards humanity and toward Heaven itself, the place that was no longer his. “What better way for the devil and his demons to attack us than to whisper lies about the very place on which God tells us to set our hearts and minds?”
Satan doesn’t dispute that Heaven exists; He tries to convince us that Heaven is a place of boring, unearthly existence.”
That robs us of our joy and our focus goes instead to this existence and not the next.
If nothing, leave this class knowing that Satan CANNOT steal the joy of the coming world.
Resisting Naturalism’s Spell
C. S. Lewis’ explanation. We must leave the thinking of this dark place, remembering Scripture tells us about Heaven.
Comments
Post a Comment