Sermon
Is Heaven For Real?
September 30 - October 1, 2000
Pastor Donald Sheley

Take your Bibles, John chapter 3 the portion of Scripture that we have been working with now for a number of weeks. John 3:16 says, For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. We've come to that last phrase. Last Lord's Day we talked about perishing and eternal judgment and about hell. I received many comments on the sermon, in fact, one lady came to me and she said, you know Pastor, I've been a Christian for 15 years. I've only started attending your church just of recent weeks, but she said, in all of my 15 years of Christian experience I never ever heard one sermon on the subject of hell. And she said it was very, very interesting. She said, I want to tell you thank you, she said, to think that a subject so important would be so untouched by most pulpits. She said, I found myself learning much today.

Now we've come to that last phrase, shall have everlasting life. If you're new with us today you know that we just take a portion of Scripture and over the weeks and months and years, we just work ourselves through verse after verse, sometimes word after word. So today our subject is heaven. To our notes. Just before Jesus died on the cross He assured His disciples with these comforting words, John 14. Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me. For in My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that, where I am, there ye may be also. So the promise of Christ in His closing words to His disciples, I'm going away, I'm going to prepare a place for you, and I will come again and receive you unto Myself. Now in His prayer, recorded in John chapter 17, Jesus made this request of His Heavenly Father: Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. His prayer, Jesus, the prayer of Jesus, he prayed Father, I want my followers, the disciples, to enjoy the glory which You have given unto Me. That was His prayer.

Well, when Jesus ascended back into heaven the angels appeared and gave this promise to His astonished disciples, Now when He had spoken these things, while they watched, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as He went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel, who also said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven. And so the promise is there was a visible disappearance, an ascension, back into heaven and the angel said He will come again and we shall see Him.

In Paul's writings to the Thessalonians Christians, he writes, For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. So Paul reminds us that the great hope that we have as Christians is to spend eternity with our Lord. Now we, for weeks, have been thinking about the great theological truths that are embodied in our text, and today we have arrived at the closing phrase, but have everlasting life. Now the concept of everlasting life means much to John, the writer of our Gospel, for he gives a great deal of emphasis before his Gospel is finished. In the Prologue, that is, in the first 14 verses of chapter 1, he's informed us that this life, this everlasting life, is in the Logos. And we've learned that the LOGOS is a direct reference to Christ. And it is much the same thought here, with the additional thought in verse 15 where he mentions the "lifting up of the Son of the man" as the integral part of the process whereby the life is mediated to men. Now the word rendered eternal, always used in this Gospel of life, basically means pertaining to an age. You see, the Jews divided time into the present age and the age to come, but the adjective eternal referred to life in the coming age, not in the present time. As the age to come is never thought of as coming to an end, the adjective eternal came to mean everlasting, eternal. The notion of time is there, but eternal life will never cease. It's forever and ever unto the ages.

Now there's something else that's very significant in this thought of eternal life. The important thing about eternal life is not its quantity but its quality. It is not an endless duration of being in time, but being of which time is not a measure. Eternal life is life in Christ, that life which removes a man from the merely earthly. And one writer notes, eternal is used not in order to add to the life the idea of perpetuity, but to express more fully the quality which belongs to life itself. And in John's writings death is an ethical condition, that is, the condition of failure and evil in which man exists by nature, and out of which they are raised by Christ. The life, as referenced in our subject today, is the new condition, the spiritual order of being, the existence of fellowship with God into which Christ brings men. It's the eternal life and is the life in its quality of the divine order of life. The life which fulfills the whole idea of life, the good life, the perfection of life, the satisfaction of life in God. And William Hendricksen, in his excellent commentary writes, The life which pertains to the future age, to the realm of glory, becomes the possession of the believer here and now; that is, in principle. This life is salvation, and manifests itself in fellowship with God in Christ; in partaking of the love of God, and of His peace, and of His joy. The adjective everlasting occurs 17 times in the Gospel of John, always with the noun life. It indicates, as pointed out, a life that is different in quality from the life which characterizes this present age.

Now John's Gospel is known as the Gospel of belief. In fact, when John is finishing up his Gospel he says, I have written these things so that you might belief. John's throbbing concern and his passion was that after presenting these glorious eternal truths, he wanted you to claim them to establish them by faith as your life. And so I write this next paragraph; In order to receive this everlasting life one must believe in God's only begotten Son. We've already learned that from this precious passage. We've been studying it. It's important, however, to take note of the fact that Jesus mentions the necessity of regeneration before He speaks about faith. That is, the work of God within the soul ever precedes the work of God in which the soul cooperates. And you say Pastor, why did you put that sentence in there? And I'll tell you why.

I have mentioned this frequently. I was raised in an evangelical environment where I was taught everybody has a free will. The implied was that this will had the capacity to make divine choices. And thus, if man wished to accept Christ on his own initiative, he had that ability because he possessed what the preacher called free choice. But in reading the Bible in studying God's word it's very, very clear that salvation starts with God Himself, and He takes the initiative to arrange a moment in our life, no matter how that happens, where the word comes to us and He plants seed of faith, and faith responds, and the response of our faith, which has already been placed there by God, the fruit of that faith is the gift of everlasting life. You sit here today as a child of God because God in His infinite and sovereign grace chose one day to touch your life with His mercy. He took the initiative. And oh, if we never forget that how can we then ever fail to praise Him for the wonder and the marvel of our salvation. And He does this in each of our lives differently, at different times, in different ways. Some of us hear the Gospel over the radio. Some of us go to a church service. Some of us observe the life of a Christian that lives their faith so beautifully, and there's that experience in our life that God uses to draw us to Himself.

I've watch something very beautiful in just recent months here in the church. A lovely lady in our congregation wanted to study creationism in our theology class on Monday evenings so she invites a friend who does not believe, an atheist, an evolutionist. And when the lady arrives she's very, very kind, but very forthright. She's here to observe. She doesn't believe like we believe, but she's here to see what we believe. She comes week after week and we come to the conclusion of the study, and she returns frequently to church. And the other day she dropped by the church office and she said, Pastor, she said to one of the people, she said I'm applying now to become a part of the baptismal class. I want to profess my faith in Jesus Christ. You see, we come different ways, but God in His sovereign grace directs life, and brings us to that moment, drops the seed of faith in, we respond, God has already commenced His work within our soul.

And back to our notes. And because faith is the work of God in which the soul cooperates, and because faith is accordingly the gift of God, its fruit, everlasting life, is also God's gift. God gave His Son; He gives us the faith to embrace the Son; and He gives us everlasting life as the reward for the exercise of this faith. Now we've observed in various Scriptures, everlasting life is the life lived in the presence of Jesus, both now and eternally, forever and ever and ever and ever. And that brings us to the place where everlasting life will be realized in all of its wonder, in all of its glory, in all of its blessedness in a place the Bible calls heaven. But here's an interesting paragraph. Heaven; but let me observed something very interesting. Any careful student of Christian doctrine who wishes to obtain a well-balanced knowledge of the great basic truths set forth in the Scriptures will soon discover how little has been written on the subject of Heaven as set forth in the Bible in spite of its hundreds of statements pertaining pertaining thereto. In fact, almost all Systematic Theologies devote infinitely more space to Hell than to the subject of Heaven. As for instance, Shedd, the great evangelical theologian, in his commentary he assigns two pages in his Dogmatic Theology to Heaven, and eighty-seven pages to eternal punishment. Isn't that fascinating?

In Dr. Reinhold Niebuhur's exhaustive work, "The Nature and Destiny of Man", there is no treatment of Heaven whatever, and the only reference appears in a single sentence, which in itself many will think a regrettable statement. And I do. Listen to the ignorant theologian, "It is unwise for Christians to claim any knowledge of either the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell." And with that one dumb statement he wipes away the subject of heaven. That's sad. No wonder our Christian faith is in such dire straits today.

I want you to put your notes down and let's go to our Bible. I disagree very much with that last statement. And let's find out what heavens like, and I've got three minutes to tell you. (Congregation laughs) This is really frustrating. But go with me to the book of Revelation it's page 134 in your Bible. John will tell us as he sees a vision of this wonderful place in which you and I are going to spend eternal life with Christ. Remember, He said, I'm coming, I'm going away, I'm preparing a place, I'm coming back for you, and we who enjoy eternal life, this is where we're going.

Revelation 21:9, Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls filled with the seven last plagues came to me and talked with me, saying, "Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb's wife." And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God. Her light was like a most precious stone, like a Jasper stone, clear as crystal. Also she had a great and high wall which had twelve gates, and twelve angels at the gates, and the names were written on them, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel: three gates on the east, three gates on the north, three gates on the south, and three gates on the west. Now the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. And he who talked with me had a gold read to measure the city, its gates and its wall. The city is laid out as a square; its length is as great as its breadth. And he measured the city with the reed: twelve thousand furlongs. Its length, its breadth, and its to height are equal: Twelve thousand furlongs - fifteen hundred miles - the distance from San Francisco to Chicago. It's a cube. Then old John sees heaven as a great big jewel box. He's got only human language to explain the glorious. He's wrestling with words. Look at, he goes on to say, and he measured its wall: one hundred forty-four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of an angel. The construction of its wall was of jasper; and the city was pure gold, like clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with all kinds of precious stones: the first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald, the fifth sardonyx, the sixth sardius, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls: each individual gate was of one pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass. And I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light. And the nations of those who are saved walk in its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and their honor into it. And its gates shall not be shut at all by day (there shall be no night there). And they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it. But there shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie, but only those who are written in the Lamb's Book of Life.

And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, and each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. There shall be no night there: They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light. And they shall reign forever and ever.

The let's go back and see how he starts this chapter. Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth. I'm in Revelation 21. For the first earth and the first heaven had passed away. And there was no more sea. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adored for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away." Then He who sat on the throne said, "Behold I make all things new." And He said to me, "Write, for these words are true and faithful."

Now much of Revelation is symbolic I know, but whatever heaven is like it is going to be glorious. Now I can understand the words of John when he says, in heaven there's no more pain, no more sorrow, no more death, and no more crying, but I've always been fascinated by that phrase, God shall wipe away every tear. And I've thought through this little mind of mine, if heaven is that place where there is no crying, there is no pain, there is no sorrow. It's a place in the presence of Jesus. Why would God have to wipe away tears? I don't have any theological proof of this so this is strictly my imagination, but it must be that there is something that causes the Christian, once they move from this life and they are immediately present with the Lord, there must be something maybe for a moment of time that relates us to the journey we've just made. Maybe there's remorse. Maybe there's the knowledge of some who we thought would be in heaven who are not there. I don't know, but there's going to at least be a moment. Maybe it will be because we'll realize how we failed to tell of the love of Jesus Christ to others, and now all the opportunities are gone. I don't know, but there's going to be a reason for tears. And then John says God wipes them all away. There must come a moment in heaven when the memory of earth is expunged from the mind, and thus the ending of tears. For John writes everything now is new. I don't know.

Last night I lay in my bed thinking about heaven because I knew I was going to talk to you, and I made up for all of these theologians who don't write very much on heaven. You have twelve pages of notes so you can read them when you get home today. But I was singing in my bed an old hymn, and you have to be 60 years or more to remember this one:
There's a land beyond the river,
that we call the sweet forever,
And we'll only gain that shore
by faith's decree
One by one we gain the portals,
to the land of the immortals,
When they ring those golden bells
for you and me.
Ah, Don't you hear those bells now ringing?
Can't you hear the angels singing?
It's a glory hallelujah Jubilee.
In that land beyond the river,
where I'll spend my sweet forever,
When they ring those golden bells
for you and me.
And, of course, the writer was remembering the golden bells of the Day of Atonement. And when you get older, like I am, you can almost hear the bells in the distance. I'm going there soon and I want you to be there too.

Lord Jesus, they may not write much about it and theologians may not even want to talk about its furniture, but we do because we look forward as people of faith of spending eternity with You dear Jesus. And however majestic, and glorious, and marvelous, and wonderful heaven is, it's just going to be heaven to be with You dear Jesus. And everybody said, amen. God bless you.