Heaven - the age to come

This week the waiting world will finally be put out of its misery – or perhaps into more misery. Three thousand miles away the presidential election in the USA will come to its conclusion. Will a dubious businessman or a slippery politician become the world’s most powerful political leader? Will that be accepted as the final result? Who knows! When it comes to running a country, or for that matter, a county or city, we know we can expect differences of opinion. Even aside from the personalities, politics always produces divisions among groups of people. T’was ever thus! (Apparently even wearing a poppy is political and divisive - if you play football!) Just as with politics, so religion also produces sharp divisions among people, and it would seem that the sharpest differences come between people who essentially believe the same thing. We are all aware of Sunni and Shia Muslims, and the many different Hindu sects. I understand that Sikhism also has its different sects and sharp disagreements. And of course the Christian Church, called upon by Jesus to show unity, has had a long history of division and disagreement, aggression and martyrdom. It was the same in the Jewish faith at the time of Jesus. We’ve all heard the terms ‘Pharisee’ and ‘Sadducees’. We’ve probably also got views on whether they were good guys or not. The Pharisees certainly get a bad press in Christian thought, because they hounded Jesus to death, but in some ways they were good guys, exploring the scriptures for a greater understanding about how to live a good life. They might have come up the wrong answers, but they were asking the right questions. They took the broad sweep of Jewish scripture seriously, the Law AND the Prophets, in order to understand how to behave. By comparison The Sadducees might be regarded as the good guys, but they were involved in killing Jesus too. They differed from the Pharisees in that they only paid attention to the first five books of the Bible (known collectively as the Pentateuch or Torah/law), which they believed were written personally by Moses. They ignored all the prophecy and the later books. Because of this they had no belief in an afterlife (so they were sad-u-see). In fact they had no belief in anything spiritual. So they were worldly, materialistic, self-important and usually rich. They concentrated on making the most of this life and their own creature comforts. Sounds a bit contemporary, doesn’t it! (prosperity gospel and modern culture) Here, they put their standard test question to Jesus. They used a law that came from Deuteronomy (and Genesis) called “Levirate Marriage”, where if a man who died without children, his brother was expected to take on the widow and make sure she had children. Marriage and children were therefore viewed as contractual arrangements and aspects of wealth in those days, so this law appealed to the Sadducees. The question they asked was intended to prove that there was no afterlife, because otherwise the Levirate Marriage law would not work. If a woman had been married to several brothers, one after the other, then there could be no resurrection because she could not be married to all of them in the afterlife. It might seem daft question to us, since we do not have that law, but we do have people among us who have been widowed and remarried. So what can we learn about this afterlife, or as Jesus refers to it: “the age to come”? We might also use the word heaven. Firstly, it’s real.Secondly it’s different.Thirdly it’s a privilege that is not granted to everyone. Firstly he tells us that the afterlife is real. He refers to it as the age to come. He doesn’t give us many details of what it will be like, but there will certainly be a resurrection to eternal life. The dead will rise to live as God’s children in the age to come. We have to look elsewhere in Scripture to add a little more detail, although even then, what we are told is patchy. Jesus argues his case, not just from scripture, but from precisely the five books that the Sadducees accept. Clearly they have not fully understood their own scriptures. It might seem an odd proof to us, based on a point of grammar, but Jesus is quite clear: those we regard as dead are not lost to God. To Him, all are alive. It’s actually a very important point. If there were no afterlife, then there would be no accountability to God. We could live without much thought for the future – and in fact that is what the Sadducees did. That’s why levirate marriage was so important to them, because it related to producing heirs. It’s very important too in relation to God’s promises. Many faithful men and women had died without seeing the fulfilment they had been promised. If there were no afterlife then God’s promises would not be kept. But there is, so God’s promises will be fulfilled. Secondly, the afterlife is very different from here and now. Very different. For one thing, there will be no death. The age to come will have “no more death or mourning or crying or pain”, as we read in the Book of Revelation. (Not the endless reincarnation of Hindus and Buddhists.) Also, there will be no marriage. Some people find that disappointing, because they are looking forward to resuming a lost relationship, but it shouldn’t be disappointing. Marriage, wonderful though it is, is an exclusive relationship. It limits and focuses our love onto one person. It’s a restriction – one that we joyfully accept here on earth, but it will not be like that in the afterlife. Exclusivity and limit has no place in the age to come. What we will have instead will be far better. Marriage is also about security, and procreation – producing and raising children – but in the afterlife all that is unnecessary. There is no danger, or sickness or death, so there is no need and no place for new births. And it’s not just that the place is different from here. We will be different too. The resurrection and the age to come is not simply about going to heaven when we are raised from the dead; we are transformed (1 Cor. 15:35–58). Life after the resurrection takes place in a transformed community of transformed people, where sin no longer exists. The afterlife is so different that language fails us. We can see that in our first reading, where John sees Jesu in a vision and describes Him as: “someone like a son of man”, with “head and hair white like wool, as white as snow, and “eyes like blazing fire, feet like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice like the sound of rushing waters.” Moreover, “In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.” Try drawing that! Clearly [John] is trying very hard to describe something that is beyond mortal language, beyond our current ability to comprehend. Thirdly he tells us that the afterlife is a privilege, not a right. Jesus refers to “those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead”. Again, we have to look elsewhere in Scripture to find the criteria for being worthy. It’s quite clear from the Gospels and even from Old Testament prophecy, that no one is considered worthy on their own merits. Only belief and trust in the Lord Jesus, however we understand him, will make us worthy, and that Jesus is entirely trustworthy and faithful in this respect. Time and again, from the Patriarchs and the Prophets, through the Psalms, down to the Evangelists in the New Testament, true wisdom is shown by putting complete trust in God, before whom nobody can claim any rights. We have been saved by grace, through faith (a privilege, not a right). (There are plenty more sermons on THAT subject … ) So, afterlife is real, it’s different, and its’ a privilege given to us by the grace of God. That is the great Christian hope, offered to all mankind. We live in a world so full of sin, including our own, that it is hard to appreciate how wonderful such an existence will be. Yet God assures us that if we trust in Jesus he will not only take us there, but also he will make us like himself. As one commentary says: “It is not just where we are going that makes the hope so great, but who we will be when we get there.” The Sadducees question seemed like a trivial question, but the answer is far from trivial. There is a life to come to which all are invited, from every nation, tribe and tongue. This future will never pass away, and we get front row seats in the biggest praise party ever. Alleluia