When We All Get to Heaven

Good morning, welcome to NHCC. Please open your Bibles to Revelation 21.

New sermon series next week- Finishing Ephesians 2.

Eliza Hewitt- “When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be! When we all see Jesus, we'll sing and shout the victory!”

Life doesn’t often feel so victorious.

What happens that would cause us to sing and shout the victory?

C.S. Lewis in The Last Battle- “The things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Read Revelation 21:1-4- “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Pray.

1. A new existence.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

Think back to creation- God created the heavens and the earth.

What is being communicated here? Creation ex nihilo, creation from nothing.

What is being created that is described with these words of heavens and the earth? Everything.

Everything is made new.

God makes new.

We desire a utopia, and so we believe that we are able to bring it about.

Practice makes permanent.

What does it mean for something to be made new?

Couple of explanations.

The old is done away with completely and replaced with something new.

The old becomes new- He’s a new person completely.

The old has transformed into something that it wasn’t before.

Same that happens when a person places faith in Jesus.

God takes what is there, makes it new by re-directing it.

Same is likely true of creation.

What we do know- whatever changes are made to all of existence cater to our new reality with God.

2. A new body.

1 Corinthians 15. Or Jesus raised from the dead.

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Consider the impact on the body of occurrences in this life. How the body reacts to the stuff that it endures.”

Particularly the emotional toll that is taken on our bodies by the difficulties of life.

Abraham Lincoln Museum.

We are fragile.

Death shall be no more.

Mourning and crying shall be no more.

Life hits us hard and we mourn- feeling in the pit of the stomach.

Pain shall be no more.

Grandpa Stone.

The sea was no more.

Couple of different ways of interpreting such a passage, all of which make theological sense.

The sea as the place of evil.

The sea as a source of chaos and confusion.

Isaiah 57:20-21- “‘But the wicked are like the tossing sea; for it cannot be quiet, and its waters toss up mire and dirt. There is no peace,’ says my God, ‘for the wicked.’”

Consider what the sea meant to John, exiled to the island at Patmos.

The sea represented separation.

Tears wiped away by God.

Richard Philipps- “The imagery of Revelation 21 has us entering into glory with the tears of our sorrowful lives still upon our cheeks… But our loving heavenly Father greets us, wiping the last tears we will ever shed from our faces, and bidding us to weep no more forever and ever.”

No more tears, sadness, death, mourning or pain.

3. A new environment.

When I say environment, I mean what we have here- the church, the surrounding of God’s people.

New Jerusalem- the city of God made up of the people of God.

God’s people adorned for Jesus, as a bride adorned for her husband.

Revelation 21:9-11- “Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.” And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.”

Faith assumes impurity.

Jonathan Edwards in Heaven is a World of Love- “In this world, the saints find much to hinder them. They have a great deal of dullness and heaviness. They carry about with them a heavy, molded body- a clod of earth- a mass of flesh and blood that is not fitted to be the organ for a soul inflamed with high exercises of divine love, but that is found a great clog and hindrance to the spirit, so that they cannot express their love to God as they would and cannot be so active and lively in it as they desire.”

Jonathan Edwards- “There shall be no want of strength or activity, nor any want of words wherewith to praise the object of their affection. Nothing shall hinder them from communing with God, and praising and serving him just as their love inclines them to do. Love naturally desires to express itself, and in heaven the love of the saints shall be at full liberty to express itself as it desires, whether it be toward God or to created beings.”

Do you see the point? Every hindrance gone. Every impurity gone. Only perfected relationship remains.

And not only are you this pure in your standing before God, but EVERYONE is just the same.

This is surely a new environment.

4. A new relationship.

Leviticus 26:11-12- “I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.”

Ezekiel 37:27-28- “My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore.”

Joel Beeke- “Now the dwelling place of God, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, fills the earth. And there is no land, no place, and no time in this new age where God is not… There will be no activity in the new age in which God will not be manifestly present to you.”

We have no experience of such a reality.

1 Corinthians 13:12-13- “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

5. A new outlook.

Should we ponder often the future? Should we consider heaven?

Colossians 3:1-3- “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity- “Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next…It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”

Jumping from an airplane to save someone else.

What allows us to live in radical obedience to God?

Eliza Hewitt- “Onward to the prize before us! Soon His beauty we'll behold; Soon the pearly gates will open– We shall tread the streets of gold.”