Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2004 : November 14, 2004
Jesus Gives a Glimpse of Heaven
3rd Sunday of End Time -- Saints Triumphant
Suppose you have a friend who's been blind from birth. All he's known is darkness, blackness. You take your friend to the ocean and want to describe it to him -- blue water, blue sky with white clouds, crashing waves lapping the shore. How would you describe it to your blind friend? He's never seen the ocean, so how can he even fathom the idea that there is blue water as far as the eye can see, and waves, and clouds? He doesn't even know what blue is, or seeing to the horizon. Even if you came up with a good way to describe it, the description would fall far short of the reality as we see it everyday.
Have you ever wondered what heaven will be like? As saints this side of heaven, we are actually in much the same situation as a blind person when it comes to knowing what heaven is going to be like. Even though it's what we are striving for our whole lives, we won't know what it will really be like until we get there. But the Bible gives us some glimpses of heaven, almost as if heaven and earth are two separate rooms with a door between them, and today Jesus opens the door a little bit to give us a glimpse of heaven while we are still here on earth. As he gives us that glimpse of heaven, he will show us that it is the home of God's children who now live with God.
Almost every culture has an idea of the afterlife. Native North Americans hunted deer and buffalo to survive, so their idea of heaven was the Happy Hunting Grounds. Norsemen were used to fighting and conquest and battle, so their idea of heaven was of the souls of warriors who died in battle being carried away by warrior spirits to Valhalla, a warrior's heaven. Muslims look at heaven as a place of wine, women and gratification -- a nomad's paradise. But since none of these ideas of heaven is based on God's Word, they are faulty because they are just man's idea of what heaven might be like.
There were plenty of false ideas of heaven at Jesus' time, too. We're introduced to one of those false ideas by Jesus' enemies -- a group called the Sadducees. Whereas the Pharisees were concerned with outward piety and work righteousness, the Sadducees were more political in nature. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible as God's Word because Moses was the author, and they denied certain doctrines such as the existence of angels or the resurrection because they couldn't prove it by what they saw or experienced in this life. As a result, they thought that if a person died, that was it -- they were dead, because no one could prove otherwise.
They asked Jesus a question meant to trip him up because Jesus had been preaching about the resurrection, which they didn't believe in. Their question was based on an Old Testament law which said that if an Israelite man was married but died before he had any children, it was the duty of the dead man's brother to marry the widow and have an heir who would keep the family line going in Israel. So they asked: If a woman were married to 7 different brothers in this world, in heaven, when they would all be raised from the dead, who would be the woman's husband?
Sounds like a pretty tough question, right? Well, it wasn't for Jesus because he knew exactly what heaven was like. Of all the people on earth, he was the only one who had been there.
So in answering their question, Jesus makes a distinction between "this age" of this world and "that age" of heaven. He says, "The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God's children, since they are children of the resurrection." Jesus gives us a glimpse of heaven, and it's very different from what we experience in this world. God instituted marriage for this world. It made the family the building block of society and gave a God-pleasing way to bring children into this world -- within the bonds of marriage. But in heaven families won't exist -- they won't be necessary because children will no longer be born, so marriage will not be needed any longer either. Also, Jesus says that we will not die. In both of these respects, we will be like angels, who are not married and who never die. In heaven, will we know the one who was our spouse on earth? Certainly -- but that earthly relationship will no longer apply in heaven. Only one relationship will be important in heaven -- our relationship to God. And Jesus sums it up nicely when he says that the saints in heaven "are God's children, since they are children of the resurrection."
That's the heart of the whole discussion -- the resurrection. And Jesus knows it. Remember, the Sadducees denied the resurrection. But Jesus showed that the resurrection was very much a fact. To do so he wisely quoted the book of Exodus, one of the books written by Moses, which were the only books that the Sadducees accepted as God's Word, so the Sadducees would have to accept what he said as true. He went back to the account of Moses being called by God from the burning bush. Jesus said, "Even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord 'the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive." Jesus' point was that (by the time of Moses) Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were long dead -- 500 years earlier they died. But God didn't say that he was the God of those believers when they were alive. Just the opposite: he said to Moses, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." So Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are still alive. Their bodies have decayed, but their souls are alive and with their Lord in heaven. Therefore, even though you can't see the resurrection or experience the resurrection until after death, yet it is a reality because God's Word clearly teaches it throughout Scripture, and because later Jesus would prove it by rising from the dead himself, so he could say: "Because I live, you also will live."
How does that apply to us in our everyday lives? Well, we might think the Sadducees were fools because they didn't believe in anything they couldn't see or touch or experience in this life. But really don't we act like even a worse fool when we know of the reality of heaven and we know that it's the place where we want to go when we die, but often we don't live with that view of heaven in our mind. Are we guilty of sometimes trying to make a heaven for ourselves on earth? We're surrounded by all kinds of materialism and looking at ways to amass all kinds of wealth for ourselves on earth, that sometimes that can get in the way of looking for heavenly treasure which we all know is much more important. We have an opportunity to hear God's Word at church or in Bible study or in home devotions, but how often don't we find something else to do instead? If anything gets in the way of our heavenward gaze, then it is sinful -- and so also very dangerous.
We can also experience doubt about the reality of the resurrection or heaven. When we see a loved one in a casket, the doubts can easily come, even though that loved one was a Christian. Then death is staring us right in the face and saying, "You don't know what happened to your loved one because you can't be sure of what happens after death. Oh, certainly the Bible tells you there is a resurrection. Jesus even rose from the dead. But was this person good enough to be in heaven right now? Will you be good enough to go to heaven when you die?" Staring death in the face is scary, isn't it? In reality, a dead body rising from the dead is ridiculous, ludicrous, preposterous. When someone is dead, they're dead. We have no other experience that tells us otherwise. But that's why Christ showed us what he experienced. He experienced suffering the likes of which we will never comprehend when he suffered for the sins of all mankind, sins which he was not guilty of committing, but sins which he nevertheless took willingly on himself to Calvary. That's where we see Jesus lay down his life for us, shed his blood for us, suffer hell and die for us. And we preach Christ crucified. But that is not the end of the story. Jesus showed us that rising from the dead and going to heaven is a reality because he broke death's chains first. Death couldn't hold him, and through faith it can't hold us. We don't have to have any doubts about the reality of the resurrection or heaven either because we're not going to heaven based on how good a person we are. We're going to heaven based on how good of a person Jesus was. The Bible tells us he "had no sin." (2 Corinthians 5:21) The Bible also tells us that Jesus' perfection has been given to us as a gift, and that we hold onto that gift through faith -- simply believing that Jesus credited his perfection to our account when he took all our sins on himself, even sins of not focusing on heaven in this life all the time or doubting our forgiveness and salvation.
Jesus takes the doubts away. He focuses us on our heavenly goal, which is already ours simply by trusting in him as our Savior from sin. So that brings up the question, "What exactly will heaven be like when we get there?" We already heard that there won't be any marriage or death. It will be perfection -- no sin or the results of sin -- death, sorrow, crying. Isaiah describes it as being like the Garden of Eden. (Isaiah 51:3) In Revelation heaven is described as a marriage feast. (Revelation 19:7) Heaven is described as a mansion with a room for every believer. (John 14:2) And Revelation pictures heaven as a city with gates of pearl and streets paved with gold. (Revelation 21:18,21) showing that heaven will be so wondrous that the most precious things in this sinful world can not even compare with its splendor. It is beyond our comprehension.
But most importantly, the essence of heaven can be illustrated by a story from everyday life: A doctor was called one day to visit one of his patients who had only days to live. The doctor had a dog and didn't have time to get anyone to look after him, so he thought he would take the dog with him. When he got to the dying man's home, the doctor left the dog out in the hallway as he went into the man's bedroom and shut the door. Eventually, during the conversation, the man asked the doctor a very serious question. "What will heaven be like?" he said. The doctor was looking for some way to describe what he knew about heaven from the Bible, when he heard his dog scratching at the door outside the room. Then it came to him that he could use it to describe heaven. He said, "My dog hears my voice in this room. He has never been in this room before, he doesn't know what it looks like at all, but that doesn't really matter. All he wants is to be with his master. That is what heaven is like."
When it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter how much or how little we know about heaven through the small glimpses we get in Scripture. The important thing is that heaven is already ours through faith in Jesus Christ, and, as Paul says in 2 Thessalonians, we will finally be with our Master, our Lord, our Savior forever. Until then, we live without fear of death, we live without doubt even when faced with death, we live our lives everyday for our Lord, knowing that some day we will see him in our heavenly home. Amen.
