Well now, the existence of hell has been attacked
for many reasons even among believers, but nobody argues about heaven. Isn’t it interesting? We
argue about the things we don’t like usually, and the things we do like we don’t want to argue
about. And yet unbelievers do argue about heaven and they do criticize us for believing in it.
There are two criticisms in particular. Some unbelievers accuse us of a harmless delusion.
They say it’s a product of human imagination, compensation for a difficult life here. It’s like
a child’s fairytale with its pearly gates and golden streets—quite incredible, and so, just as
there are jokes about hell, there are also jokes about heaven, usually including the apostle Peter.
Even the Jews used to, some of them used to make jokes about it - the Sadducees; they didn’t
believe in heaven that’s why they were ‘sad, you see.’ Now you’ll remember it. They came
to Jesus once and said, ‘A woman’s husband died. His brother married her. He died, then his
brother married her, and she had seven husbands altogether. Now what a mess there’s going to be in
heaven. In the resurrection, whose wife will she be?’ They sniggered to each other, and Jesus
said, “You don’t know the scripture, and you don’t know the power of God.” He said, “In heaven,
you are neither married” - that’s for men - “nor given in marriage” - that’s the women - “but you
will be like the angels who cannot die.” That’s, by the way, where he said, “Angels cannot die.”
Others have accused us of being guilty of a dangerous distraction, not just a harmless
delusion. They say this is escapism from real life; this makes people content with bad
conditions here, and often Afro-American spiritual songs, Afro-American spirituals are cited. Do
you remember the song the slaves used to sing, “I got shoes. You got shoes. When I get to
heaven I’m gonna put on my shoes, gonna walk all over God’s heaven?” And reformers have said,
This is keeping the slaves happy without shoes, by teaching them about heaven. It was, in fact,
Charles Kingsley, the author of Tom and the Water Babies, who called such hopes of heaven - even
though he was an Anglican clergyman - he called those hopes of heaven ‘the opium,’ or ‘the
opiate of the people.’ Karl Marx picked that phrase up and changed it to ‘the opium of the
people,’ but he said, Christianity is opium; it’s a drug just to keep people happy in
their bad social conditions here and now. So the world criticized the church for talking too
much about heaven. And I’m afraid the result was the church listened to the world and allowed
the world to set its agenda. And now we have very little about heaven in the church at all;
hardly any choruses being written about heaven, have you noticed, never mind any hymns about
hell, such as we used to sing. So we’ve fallen in with the world’s criticism and there’s been
a swing from too much thought about the future, to far too little. We’ll have to get it back on
course and get a balance with the Word of God. So I want to talk to you about heaven. Now the
word “heaven” in scripture is a very flexible word. It’s used, for example, of the air through
which the birds fly - the birds flying in heaven. Or going up a little further, it’s used of the
place where the clouds are; it’s used for beyond that, the blue sky. In fact, the Hebrews thought
almost of heaven in layers, and they talked about the third heaven and the seventh heaven. In
fact, Paul once said he had an experience of being disembodied; an out of the body experience
in which his spirit was visited, went and visited the third heaven. And he saw things that were
so marvelous that God had to keep a thorn in his flesh to keep him humble forever afterwards. So
heaven means an awful lot of things in scripture, but ‘highest heaven’ was God’s address. When
you talked to God, you talked to God in heaven. Now a key to understanding heaven in the Bible
is to study the relationship between heaven and earth, not so much in spatial terms,
but in spiritual terms. You find this, that at the beginning of the Bible before sin
had got into our world, heaven and earth were very close. So close that God could take a
stroll down here, and Adam heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool
of the evening. But as soon as sin comes in, you get a sense that heaven withdrew, that a great
gulf opened up between earth and heaven so that God in heaven is a long, long way away. In fact,
if you want him to hear, you’ll have to call on the name of the Lord. You’ll have to worship with
a loud shout, so that he can hear. Do you get that impression as you go through the Old Testament?
Typical would be Jacob’s dream at Bethel where he saw this huge staircase or ladder
stretching all the way from earth right up to heaven up there. He saw angels ascending and
descending. That again is a clue. Why are there so many more angels in the Old Testament than the
New? Not just because it covers a greater period of time, there is a profound reason. God is way up
there in highest heaven. We are way down here on earth. How do we communicate with each other?
The answer is through angels. They are God’s messengers who come down with messages for us and
who ascend with messages for him. And so you have this tremendous sense of a gulf between heaven and
earth all the way through the Old Testament - a long distance to highest heaven where God lives.
But as soon as Jesus comes to earth, the gap closes; very striking. One of the
interesting things Jesus said in John chapter three - incidentally, everybody knows verse
sixteen, but nobody knows verse fourteen or verse twelve, and they’re just as important.
Here is one of those verses. Jesus said, “No man has been up into heaven, but the Son
of Man who has come down from heaven who is in heaven.” Did you notice that last phrase? In other
words, when Jesus came, he didn’t leave heaven, he brought it with him. Heaven was now back in touch
with earth. The kingdom of heaven was at hand, and to be at hand is to be within your reach. You
can just reach out and grab it, so the kingdom of heaven is here now. Heaven is touching earth again
when Jesus came. The gap is being closed again. Heaven is very real and very near, and Jesus is
still living in heaven even while he’s on earth. “No man has ascended into heaven except the Son of
Man who came down from heaven, who is in heaven.” Then the other verse in John three is this:
Jesus says, “If I’ve told you earthly things and you don’t believe me, how will you believe
if I talk to you about heavenly things?” If people don’t believe what Jesus says about
this life, how on earth will they believe what he says about the next? He’s the only
reliable source of information we have about the other world because he’s the only one
who’s been there and come back to tell us. All right then, let’s talk about heaven. And at
the end of the Bible, we have a new heaven and a new earth. This is rather important because, you
see, most people think of going to heaven as going somewhere else, but God has a future for this
earth. There’s going to be a new earth. I wonder when you last heard a preacher talk about the new
earth for you. I love talking about it. I was in Sydney, Australia about five miles from Bondi
Beach, and I said, ‘In the new earth, there will be no sun, no sea, and no sex.’ Yeah, that was the
reaction there. Their faces dropped. They looked as if they wanted to leave the meeting immediately
and get back down to Bondi Beach and enjoy all three while they could. I’ll tell you something
else. Though none of those three things will be there in the new earth, you won’t even miss them.
It’ll be so wonderful, but it’ll be different. But you see, God doesn’t want just to redeem
men and women, he wants to redeem all creation. He wants to make all things new and not just
all people, because this poor old planet’s so exploited and polluted now. And you know the
humanist thinks this is the only planet earth that the humankind will ever have to live on.
That’s why they’re panicking. That’s why the green movement is in danger of becoming a religion,
propitiating mother earth and going all the way back to the fertility cults of Baal, you mark
my words. Now Christians are concerned about the environment, but we’re not panicking, because
we know that the same God who made this one’s going to make a new one, but a new earth. And
there will be a new city, a new city; a big one. Now I do a bit of architecture in my spare time,
mostly designing church buildings to look not like church buildings, but to be a home for God’s
people. But I’m interested in architecture. One of the problems architects have is this: how to plan
a large building or city and yet keep the scale human. Now I’ve studied many new cities—Brasilia
in Brazil and Canberra. Interesting that in both cases, they dammed up a stream to create
water through the middle of the city. That’s in imitation of the New Jerusalem, but in none of
those new cities have I seen this human scale. I can’t wait to see the architecture of the New
Jerusalem. How can God build a city that big and yet keep it like a village; keep it human; keep
it to size. Do you realize the size of that city that will be, the city whose builder and maker was
God, and the city which Abraham was looking for? It would just fit inside the moon if the moon were
hollow. It would cover about two-thirds of the continent of Europe. It’s about fifteen hundred
miles each way, three ways, so it’s either going to be a pyramid or a cube, but how God will plan
that, I just can’t wait to see it. It will be the most perfect city. Soon as you see it, you’ll
say, ‘Oh, I wish I could live there forever.’ God will say, ‘There’s a room marked for you’
Now I want to be again, quite realistic. I want to prove to you that the Bible is inspired by
God and could only be written by God using human authors. Here’s a book - I don’t know where I got
it or when, but it’s one of my most interesting books. I don’t know if you know what polarized
light is. Normal light bounces at us from all kinds of directions. It’s reflected at us, so
normal light, the lines of light are going all ways. Polarized light goes in straight lines.
If you’ve got sunglasses with polarized lens, it only lets straight light through and all
that bounced light is cut off. Now if you get two polarized sunglasses and turn them at
right angles, so that one is that way and the other is that way, you get crossed-polarized
light, a very pure light. You still with me? Now let’s take all the precious stones you ladies
wear in your rings and in your ears. I’ve got a bit of a shock for some of you. If you take a very
thin slice of precious stones, jewels, and look at it through cross-polarized light, two sunglass
lenses at right angles, one of two things will happen. Either that stone will go all the colours
of the rainbow, but in its own unique pattern, or it’ll go black and have no colour at all. Now
wouldn’t you like to know which is which? Some of you ladies would be very cross with your husbands
afterwards. Well, all the stones are beautiful here, but for example, diamonds go black in pure
light. Rubies go black in pure light. Garnets go black in pure light, but other stones go all the
colours of the rainbow. Now I’ve got here a book by a scientist with many of the stones that go all
the colours of the rainbow. I’m sure that most of you can see and you can come and look up closely
afterwards; all the colours of the rainbow, but different patterns. These are the stones
that lose all their colour and just go black. Now in the New Jerusalem, the only precious
stones that God uses are the stones that go all the colours of the rainbow in pure light and
none of those are used. There is no way that the apostle John could have known that when he wrote
the book of Revelation, because it’s only in the last twenty or thirty years that we’ve found
polarized light and been able to discover this. How then could John the apostle possibly have
known? There’s a speck of dust seven-thousandths of an inch across of one of the stones that is
used in the New Jerusalem. Look at the colour? Can you imagine what the New Jerusalem will look like?
There’s another point of interest - the shape of the stones. Now the crystal shape of precious
stones is different. These are all the stones that are used in the New Jerusalem and they’re all
angular and easily fitted together in a building, whereas the crystalline form of many other stones
is more like a round marble and very difficult to build with. God has used none of those in
the New Jerusalem, only these. How could John possibly have known this? Only God knew it,
and again I’ve brought that in to show you that we’re not talking about fairytales now. We’re
talking about something quite real. And to me that’s just proof that the Bible is inspired by
God’s Holy Spirit because nobody but God until the last twenty years could have known that.
I don’t know if you’re looking interested or dumbfounded or whether I’ve not explained
it carefully, but far more important, what will life be like in that city? By the way,
there’ll be fruit trees with a new crop every month. Fruit is obviously going to be a major
part of the diet. You know, there’s one tree that reappears in that city that has been absent from
all the pages of the Bible since the beginning. That’s the tree of life, the tree that will give
you all the minerals, all the carbohydrates, all the proteins and all the vitamins that you need
to go on living, because there’s no reason why our bodies should wear out. They’re most efficient
machines and they can reproduce themselves. You change your skin every six weeks. Most of the
dust in your bedroom is your skin. In theory, in theory, your body should be able to go on
renewing itself, but in practice it starts winding down. No scientist knows why; no reason why we
should die. The only reason why my body dies and rots is because it belonged to a rotten sinner.
That’s the only reason. God would not let my body see corruption if I’d been a holy one all my life.
Well what is life like? I want to give you fourteen points—seven negative and seven positive.
How about that? Seven’s the perfect number, so that’s good for heaven. First of all, what will
life not be like in heaven in the New Jerusalem in this metropolis? By the way, the gates are open so
you can explore the whole universe freely. You can step into space as freely as Jesus ascended and
be able to take your holiday on Mars, go anywhere. What a wonderful universe it’ll be to explore!
All right, on the negative side, what will not be there? Well I’ve said already, there’ll be
no sex. Now it’s important to realize this: that marriage is for life. It does not survive
the grave. It is “Till death us do part.” If you meet again, you’ll meet again as brother and
sister, not as husband and wife. It’s quite wrong to encourage people to think their marriage will
be renewed beyond the grave. The Mormons teach that. You can be married for eternity if you get
married in one of their temples, but I believe Jesus was right when he said, “You are neither
married nor given in marriage.” That is why, if death intervenes in a marriage, the partner
is perfectly free to marry someone else. Indeed it could be a tribute to their first marriage
if they do. Some people have an inhibition on that score. You needn’t. No sex; therefore blood
relationships are ended as far as human blood is concerned. You belong to another family there.
Secondly, no suffering will be there—no hospitals, no sanitoria, no cemeteries, no pain, no
handicaps, no deformities. There may be scars, which will be badges of honour. I believe Jesus
will have his nail prints and Paul will have a more scarred body than anyone else probably, but
they are scars he bore with pride and honour. He’d suffered for Jesus, but handicaps, no; pain,
no; no suffering; no separation. Isn’t life full of good-byes? I spend a lot of time in airport
lounges and I love watching people. You know, sometimes they rush towards each other with
arms out like this and seem to blend into one; other times you see them sorrowfully pulling
themselves away reluctantly. You just see so many good-byes. Life is full of them. We shall never
meet like this again. This group of people will never be together again. Life’s full of good-byes,
isn’t it? Well, there’s no good-byes in heaven. That’s probably why there’s no more sea, because
sea separates people. You go overseas, and sea to the Jew was always a barrier that cut them
off from others. There’ll be no such thing, no distance. No sorrow; I think one of the loveliest
little phrases in the Bible - it’s repeated twice at the end of the Bible. It says, “God will wipe
away all tears from their eyes.” Have you ever seen a parent say, ‘Don’t cry; no need to cry any
more, it’s all over.’ God will wipe away every tear; no sorrow. No shadows; no darkness; no night
- just pure light everywhere; twenty-four hours; no streetlamps in the New Jerusalem, just pure
light. No sanctuaries; no temples; no cathedrals; no churches—hallelujah for that! They’re a
liability, aren’t they? Do you know it’s going to cost forty-eight million to repair our cathedrals
this year? That’s almost a pound for every one of us in the country, but you won’t see any spires
in the New Jerusalem because God will be there. No need of any reminders pointing to heaven.
Above all, no sin, no sin; no pride, no greed, no lust, no lies; nothing to defile or spoil it,
and above all, no temptations; can you imagine that? It’s all yours. You can enjoy everything.
There’s nothing forbidden. The tree of knowledge of good and evil doesn’t pop up again, just
the tree of life. No temptations; again, you’re allowed to whisper hallelujah if you feel like it.
What a relief that will be! No more curse; only blessing; now that’s the negative side; that’s
pretty good, but now listen to the positive side. First of all, there will be rest; there will
be rest. Now that is not sitting in an armchair doing nothing. People think of heaven as a lot
of armchairs with RIP embroidered on the end or a macassar or whatever. It’s not that kind
of rest, because actually that’s not the rest that you would like. You wouldn’t enjoy doing
nothing. Rest is doing something you enjoy doing, that’s stimulating, that leaves you more
refreshed after you’ve done it. That’s the kind of rest there will be. Working day and
night, it says; serving him day and night, twenty-four hour shifts every day, and yet,
never getting tired. Can’t imagine it, can you? It’s a place of reward. Now some people think
that rewards are immoral, that you shouldn’t have to need the incentive of a reward - you should
be good for nothing. Well I don’t believe it, because Jesus offered reward. He said,
“Great is your reward in heaven.” Mind you, it’s sobering. When I used to go behind the Iron
Curtain or when I went behind the Bamboo Curtain, I thought, ‘How much greater reward these people
will get than we in the West. We just play games. We play church, but to them, what a reward!’
There’ll be great differences in heaven. It won’t be one gigantic egalitarian, socialist republic in
which everybody gets the same. Some people get a great reward, some a little reward.
That brings me to the third thing - responsibility. There will be jobs; not
preachers, not evangelists, not missionaries, but people to look after God’s universe; people
to be creative in art and music. “The treasures of the nations will be brought into it,” it says, and
what riches there are. If you go to Israel today, you’ve got nearly eighty-five nations who’ve come
back to one country and they’ve each brought their own music, and their own dance, and their own
art. What a rich, rich variety of culture it’s made. There’s a whole new music emerged from
that. Think what it’d be like when all the cultures of the world and people of every kindred
and tribe and tongue are brought in to that city, and bring with them their culture and their
insights and the riches of their background. It’s a place of revelation. You’ll know all
that you want to know. You can finally settle the matter of predestination and freewill. You
can actually go and ask Paul about all those parts of his Epistles that are difficult to
understand. Can you imagine it? You won’t have to go up to someone and say, ‘Could I just
have two minutes with you?’ You would say, ‘Do you mind if I just have the next thousand
years to discuss?’ A place of revelation; a place where you will know even as you
have been known; where you will know God as well as he knows you now, and he knows how
many hairs there are on your head. If you’re dark-haired you probably have about a hundred
and twenty thousand. If you’re fair-haired you probably have about a hundred and five; if
you’re ginger you probably have about ninety-five thousand, but God knows the exact number. Looking
around, it’s an easier task for him as you get older, but that’s how well he knows you. It
says we shall know, “No longer looking through a mirror, a dark mirror, but looking face to
face.” All your questions answered - think of it. You know we’ve got a lot of questions. There are
mysteries; there are things we don’t understand, and it’s wise for a Christian to admit they
don’t know when we’re asked about something. It’s wise to say, ‘I don’t know, but I know him
and I believe he knows, and one day I will,’ rather than try and explain all mystery.
We’re not God, but we will (know) one day. A place of righteousness, of positive goodness, of
love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and generosity and faithfulness and meekness
and self-control; fancy living in a world where there’s nothing but goodness. Again it’s almost
beyond our imagination. It’s a place of rejoicing. Every picture of heaven is a happy picture—a
picture of a party, a picture of a feast, a banquet, a celebration. One of the most amazing
things I ever read from Jesus’ lips was this. Jesus said, “Faithful servants of mine, I will
sit them at table and I will wait on them.” Can you imagine sitting at a table and seeing a plate
of food put in front of you and you look up and it’s Jesus who brought it for you? I’m afraid I’ll
feel like Peter who didn’t want his feet washed, but that’s what he says. I tell you, if one
person in this room repents of their sin today, they’re going to have a party up there. They have
a celebration when one sinner repents. What will it be like when the saints come marching in? Boy!
It’s a place of recognition. People say, ‘How will I recognize anybody?’ The answer
is, immediately you will know. How did Peter, James and John know Jesus was talking to Moses and
Elijah? They’d been dead for centuries. They just knew. That’s how it’ll be with you. Why there’s
Noah over there, always wondered what he looked like. There’s Paul, and that’s dear old Peter.
Well let’s begin to wind up. We still haven’t touched the best. What turns a house into a
home? Fitted carpets, kitchen gadgets? What turns a house into a home? The people who are
there, right? Home is where your loved ones are. The real question we need to ask about heaven
is who will be there? I’ll just finish with four answers. First, the saints will be there.
Now many of them we’ve heard of. Great saints, we’ll be able to talk to them, get to know them,
but there will be millions we’ve never heard of and we’ll have all eternity to get to know them.
Isn’t that exciting? The saints will be there; so many unnamed, plenty of those who’ve been
named, but plenty of unnamed ordinary people who were saints of God and who overcame. All your
spiritual relatives will be there. Your physical relatives may not be, but your spiritual
relatives will be - one huge family. Isn’t it true that when you’re converted you
feel closer to your spiritual relatives than your physical? Of course, you have a responsibility to
remain in total communication with your physical relatives. You may be the only link they
have with the Lord, but deep down you can’t share with them like you can share. And you can
meet a stranger and find out he’s a Christian and you can be talking within five minutes as
if you’ve known each other twenty years. Have you noticed that? People are surprised. ‘How
long have you known that guy?’ ‘Well I just met him.’ ‘But you’re talking as if you’ve known
him twenty years!’ ‘Well in a sense I have, because we’ve had everything in common for
twenty years. We’ve known the same Lord for twenty years.’ The saints will be there.
The angels will be there, and you may well recognize some of them. They do not appear with a
harp and a long white nightie and wings. I mean, if that’s how they appeared, you could not
possibly entertain an angel unawares. But the Bible says, “Be given to hospitality, for thereby
some have entertained angels unawares.” Listen, they appear like humans. You could have given
a hitchhiker a lift and had an angel in your car. You may discover it when you get there.
A girl told me not long ago that she was walking alone home through the dark streets of one of our
cities. A young man leapt out from the shadows, grabbed her, and was tearing her clothes off and
was obviously going to rape her. But she cried out to the Lord of Hosts, and another young man came
round the corner, pushed that young man off her, took her arm and said, ‘Come on, Helen.
I’ll see you home.’ She got to her home, put the key in the door, turned around to thank
him, but he wasn’t there and there was no one in the street. She will recognize him when she meets
him again in glory. We don’t need to be aware of the angels. We need to have the faith that God
surrounds us with his hosts. And we’ll recognize some of them and say, ‘Why, I gave you a lift in
my car. I thought you were just a guy from down the road.’ Always be aware that there are angelic
beings around us. So the angels will be there. Jesus will be there—the Lamb with horns and the
Lion. He says, “I will come and get you so that where I am, you may be too.” That’s heaven;
I don’t know whether I’ll look at his face first or his hands—probably look from one to
the other. However will we thank him? I know this. He will probably say to us, “I didn’t do
this for me. I did it for my Father. I got all the kingdoms of this world back in my hands
so I could give them back to him and he can be all in all,” which brings me to the climax.
God will be there. Now just to say that… Well, let me say something more - you’ll see him as King.
You’ll see his throne; you’ll worship him, and yet you’ll be able to call him “Abba, Dad, Father.”
But here is the most amazing thing I discovered in my Bible. I find many Christians have never
spotted it. The Bible doesn’t talk about us going to heaven to live forever with the Father. It
talks about just the opposite. It says, The Father is moving to earth to live with us forever. Isn’t
that incredible? You see, the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven to earth, but it’s not just the
New Jerusalem that comes down. It is God who comes down, and the angels are amazed. They say, Look!
“Behold! the dwelling place of God is with men!” Not the dwelling place of men is now with God,
but the dwelling place of God is now with men. Here is the most amazing truth. God’s going to
change his address at the very end of history. He’s moving in with us. Well the angels have
been down here and his Son has been down here, but the great climax of the Bible is that God
moves house. His dwelling place is with us in that new earth. This will be the center of
the new universe. Isn’t that incredible? God, from highest heaven, moves down here. We no longer
say, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” We say, “Our Father, who art with us on earth.” That’s the
climax in my Bible. God loves us so much he wants to live with us and move in with us. He wants
to be our God, so that we might be his people, and the dwelling place of God at the end of
the Bible, is with men - Emmanuel, God with us. Well that’s enough about heaven. If we spent
more time on it, we’d get so impatient with earth that we wouldn’t be any use down
here. But God has told us enough about heaven to make us sure that it exists, that
it’s being prepared. It’s not just heaven; it’s a new heaven and a new earth. It’s right
here that the New Jerusalem, built out in space, will come to be the capital city of God’s kingdom.
At the end of the Bible, the kingdom of heaven is established on earth; as we pray every day, “Your
kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven.” Amen.
