Heaven: Redemption

Heaven

Redemption

Jeff Jones, Senior Pastor

September 28/30, 2007

Today we begin our new series on Heaven, both what it will be like then, in eternity (which is a long time!) and what difference it makes in our lives now. If you know Jesus Christ, you will spend far more time in heaven than here, so we are going to see what the Bible says about the life after this one. This is a series based on what the Bible teaches about heaven; I say that because there is so much written about heaven lately from the perspective of people who claim to have been there or had near-death experiences, which are interesting experiences—but I don’t base my faith on people’s interesting experiences. I base my faith on what God has revealed in this book, so that will be our focus. To get us started off right, we found a teacher on video from a few years back that did a pretty incredible job trying to capture in a nutshell what heaven will be like, so let’s watch the screens together.

Show video.

That video is like a dog that is so ugly it is cute; it is so bad it is good. Now just try to erase everything you just heard. Yet, it does a great job illustrating how we so often get our notions of heaven so wrong…so much so that who would really want to go there? What picture of heaven did you grow up with? At times I’ve pictured each of us with little chubby angel bodies and wings flying around with harps for eternity. Sounds fun. A few times in my life well-meaning but highly frustrated Sunday School teachers trying to get us to sing or listen to a lesson taught us that we better get used to singing songs like that because that’s what we are going to do forever in heaven. We are going to spend all of our time worshiping God. As a 10 year-old-kid, that sounds pretty exciting, doesn’t it? An eternal church service. That just made me pray that God would let me live a really long time down here. It’s kind of like the Far Side cartoon of this guy with angel’s wings on a cloud who has just gotten to heaven, and the caption says, “I should have brought a magazine.” Growing up, I honestly thought, “Okay, so right now heaven sounds really boring, but maybe when I get older I will change my mind, kind of like enjoying classical music or something.” But if heaven is an eternal church service, as I’ve gotten older that only seems more boring, not less.

And yet, I would also read the Bible about how people like Abraham and Paul were so excited to get to heaven. They couldn’t wait to get there. And I figured it was because they are so godly, they like boring stuff…that the more godly you get, the more you like what seems boring when you are not so godly. Or maybe God will give us a new desire to want to be in a forever church service. But maybe the reason these guys so looked forward to heaven is because they knew something I didn’t, that they have perspective that we have missed. As I’ve studied what the Bible says about heaven, what it will really be like, I realize that is indeed the case. We just finished a series called Twisted, and we could have easily thrown our view of heaven into that series because we tend to get it so twisted around that it is nothing like the real thing. And that is good! Because heaven is not an eternal church service, with us floating around in diapers and a harp. In this series, we are going to have our view of heaven twisted around 180 degrees to a much better and much clearer picture.

Today we are going to get started replacing what we think we know about heaven with the much more compelling picture provided in God’s Word. But before we jump into specific passages in the Bible like Revelation 21-22, we’ve got to understand the over-arching story of the Bible and of the world. If we don’t understand the bigger picture, then the specific pictures provided in the Bible make no sense. I think that is the main reason people have gotten it so wrong. There is this big story going on throughout the whole Bible, and heaven is the conclusion to that story. But you can never understand the conclusion if you don’t understand the rest of the book, the rest of the story. So, let’s begin at the beginning, in the world as it was in the very beginning, recorded in the book of Genesis.

In Genesis, God creates man and woman, Adam and Eve, and they are in paradise, called Alabama…or the Garden of Eden. That is the environment God created you and me to live in, paradise, a perfect environment. What was life like for them? They had a perfect marriage, kind of like Christy and me. They lived in a world of complete harmony with each other, with God, with the animals, with the environment. It was a place of responsibility without frustration…a world unstained by sin and foreign to the concept of death and disappointment. They walked with God and enjoyed a personal, up close relationship with their creator. God created humanity to live on a perfect earth, and yet there was one caveat. Their own free will…because God gave them the choice to obey him or choose sin, and unfortunately they chose curtain B. They chose sin, and when they fell head over heels into sin, creation and this whole earth fell along with it. When sin entered this planet, along with it came the promised curse. All of creation was tainted, and all of life was stained with sin and death. From that point, this planet was no longer paradise but something far less, the ruins of a once perfect environment. We now live on a cursed earth, which means that every part of life is stained, and we feel it every day. Life here is just messed up.

Romans 8 talks about the curse,

Slide: __________ ) Romans 8:19-22

19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

All of creation was subjected to frustration, a Bible word that means futility. The world got broken by sin. That’s why every part of life is sometimes good but never perfect, and often just messed up. Here is what happened in the curse, and why all creation groans awaiting the time that God will make the world right again:

Slide: __________ )

Relationships messed up

Relationships in a sin-stained earth are just hard and often frustrating. We all want perfect friendships, those married want perfect marriages. As parents, we want perfect relationships with our kids and teenagers. But though sometimes good, they are far from perfect.

Slide: __________ )

Relationships messed up
Planet messed up

We also live on a messed up planet, the ruins of what was once a perfect earth. Even the most beautiful part of this earth now is just a shadow of what the earth once was like. And because of the fall, the world does not always work as it was meant to work. Hurricanes like Katrina destroy homes and lives. Rivers overflow their banks, destroying homes and fields. Tectonic plates shift beneath the surface of the earth, causing earthquakes and tsunamis. Germs and viruses run rampant. And human beings have only made things worse: acid rain, global warming, endangered species. The world is not getting more and more hospitable, but in fact less and less conducive to life as we know it.

Slide: __________ )

Relationships messed up
Planet messed up
World of people messed up

Would you look at the world right now and say that the nations are living in harmony? The heavenly vision of all peoples, all races, all classes all unified together—are we even close to that? Paradise includes the concept of justice and plenty for everyone, but just travel a little and realize that most of the world lives in abject poverty.

Slide: __________ )

Relationships messed up
Planet messed up
World of people messed up
Relationship with God messed up

Sin separates man and God, and even now that Jesus has come and many of us have a renewed relationship with God, it is far from perfect. He is changing us, and one day we will enjoy that perfect relationship. Yet, for now it is a long-distance relationship. I can’t see God. I can’t walk with him like Adam and Eve did.

Slide: __________ )

Relationships messed up
Planet messed up
World of people messed up
Relationship with God messed up
Bodies messed up

Not everyone on this planet has this perfect specimen of a body like me

Slide: __________ ) [show pic].

Our bodies are messed up, and they don’t get better over time. They just keep getting worse as we age. Romans 8 talks about all creation groaning, and I can relate to that because as I get older I groan more. My kids talk about that. They often say, “Dad, how come every time you get up or sit down, you make a noise.” I’m groaning, getting older. Our dog is also getting older, and she sleeps in one of the boy’s rooms. When I come into wake them up, I wake her up, and she always makes this groaning noise, every morning, and I can relate. Do you groan when the alarm clock goes off? Our bodies wind down, and they eventually die. The last time I checked the death rate in the world is about 100%. We know that, but every time that happens it feels like a violation of the way things should be. Last week, we had a funeral for a leader in this church who was close to our family, Bill Leavitt, and even though he is in a good place, still death just stinks. It is not the way it is supposed to be, and it stings so bad whenever it happens.

I could keep going to talk about work and recreation and other parts of life, but the point is this. The world is messed up. You and I were created for paradise, to live on a perfect earth, but we chose curtain B. But the good news is that right away God promised redemption. He promised to change it back. In fact, God is in the process of redemption right now, and one day the Bible says that he will completely re-create this earth. One day he will liberate it from its bondage to sin and death and decay. Again, we read in

Slide: __________ ) Romans 8:18-25

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

What is all creation waiting for? God to fully redeem and restore the earth as it was meant to be, to reverse the curse. We all long for paradise. We were created for it, and one day God will restore the earth to what it was meant to be.

Slide: __________ ) Acts 3:21

says, He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets. God has promised that he will restore all things. In the book of Matthew, Jesus refers to his coming as the time that he will “renew all things.” In Revelation 22, one of the Revelation passages that describes heaven, says a great summary statement about what heaven really means,

Slide: __________ ) Revelation 22:___

No longer will there be any curse. No longer will there be any curse.

That is exactly what heaven will be: a redeemed, restored earth, completely unstained by the curse. That is what God is up to, which means that heaven will not be this other-wordly, completely different existence from what it is now. Heaven will be this earth, re-created, re-made, the way it was meant to be. I’ll repeat that and make a big point about it:

Slide: __________ ) Heaven is a re-made earth, life as it was originally meant to be.

If you do not understand that, you cannot understand heaven. Heaven will be the perfect earth we were created for.

If you have your Bibles, you can read along with me in Revelation 21, where John is allowed to view a picture of what heaven will be like. He says,

Slide: __________ ) Revelation 21:1-7

1Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." 5He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true." 6He said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life. 7He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son.

He will make a new heaven and a new earth, and the two will merge. This is new ground for me, after having read Randy Alcorn’s book called Heaven. He cites other Bible scholars who do a great job demonstrating from the Bible, that the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, will descend, just as Revelation 22 says, onto this planet, so that the dwelling of God and the dwelling of humanity is the same dwelling. We will live together, that the new heaven and new earth merge, and that the new heaven is a newly re-made earth. God will make his dwelling among us, which the Bible often promises as the great promise of the after-life. If you have more questions about that, I encourage you to get the book called Heaven.

This has huge implications, and it changes everything about how we think about heaven. Heaven will not be us living up in the clouds with angel’s wings in some eternal church service. Heaven will be a real place where we will have real bodies and real relationships and real responsibilities and real recreation opportunities and a real relationship with God.

Heaven will be on this planet, but this planet completely remade. So, if you want to know what heaven will be like, travel around a little on this planet. This planet is cursed and compromised, just the ruins of the way it was created to be, but God will remake heaven to be the perfect version of what it was meant to be.

C.S. Lewis captures this concept really well in one of his books, the last of his Narnia series, called The Last Battle. He shows Lucy mourning the loss of Narnia, a great world created by Aslan, a beloved world that she assumes has been forever destroyed. Jewel the unicorn mourns too, calling his beloved Narnia,“The only world I've ever known." Although Lucy and her family and friends are on the threshold of Aslan's country (Heaven), she still looks back at Narnia and feels a profound loss. But as she gets deeper into Aslan's country, she notices something totally unexpected.

"Those hills," said Lucy, "the nice woody ones and the blue ones behind—aren't they very like the southern border of Narnia?" "Like!" cried Edmund after a moment's silence. "Why, they're exactly like. Look, there's Mount Pire with his forked head, and there's the pass into Archenland and everything!" "And yet they're not like," said Lucy. "They're different. They have more colours on them and they look further away than I remembered and they're more … more … oh, I don't know … .” "More like the real thing," said the Lord Digory softly.

Suddenly, Farsight the Eagle spread his wings, soared thirty or forty feet up into the air, circled round and then alighted on the ground. "Kings and Queens," he cried, "We have all been blind. We are only beginning to see where we are. From up there I have seen it all—Ettinsmuir, Beaversdam, the Great River, and Cair Paravel still shining on the edge of the Eastern Sea. Narnia is not dead. This is Narnia."

"But how can it be?" said Peter. "For Aslan told us older ones that we should never return to Narnia, and here we are.""Yes," said Eustace. "And we saw it all destroyed and the sun put out.""And it's all so different," said Lucy.

"The Eagle is right," said the Lord Digory. "Listen, Peter. When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there, you will know what I mean.”

It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right forehoof on the ground and neighed and then cried: "This is the land I have been looking for all my life, thought I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia was that it sometimes looked a little like this."

That really captures the truth of heaven according to the Bible. I like his sentence,

Slide: __________ ) The reason why we loved the old Narnia was that it sometimes looked a little like this.

If you want to know what heaven will be like, we see glimpses in the ruins of this once perfect earth. One of my best memories in my relationship with Christy is a trip we took to the Oregon coast when we were newly married. We were really going to Portland, Oregon to talk to someone about a potential job, and they suggested that we take some extra time and see the Oregon coast. Sure, we thought, why not?! We had no idea what it would be like, sort of like Galveston or something. When we got there, and looked over these rugged cliffs

Slide: __________ ) (show pics)

it blew our minds. We walked together on this trail along the cliffs that revealed more and more of these little beaches and rock outcroppings, and we couldn’t believe it. We were almost running because we were so excited to see the next scene…then we’d stop and take it in…then hurry again to see the next thing. It was so beautiful, it literally took our breath away. Or go the Rocky Mountains or Alaska or the Swiss Alps or Waco or other parts of this planet, and you see this breathtaking beauty. But these are just glimpses of what it will really be like, only glimpses…because even the most beautiful of spots is cursed and compromised.

What this means for us in heaven is that if you love the water now like Christy and I do, or if you love the mountains or the desert, you will love the new earth. We won’t just do recreation activities, but we will do recreation activities. Adam and Eve were commanded to rest and to enjoy their environment, and they did, and we will.

Every part of life will be what life was originally meant to be before sin messed it all up. So, let’s look at that list again we saw a few minutes ago:

Sllide: __________________ )

Relationships messed up
Planet messed up
World of people messed up
Relationship with God messed up
Bodies messed up

Relationships messed up: Marriages and friendships and parent-child relationships are so hard here, but there relationships will not be hard. We really will have the kinds of relationships our souls were created to experience.

Planet messed up: As we just described, it won’t be then. No curse, no disasters, a perfect environment.

World of people messed up: Not then. No more injustice, no more segregation, no more genocide, no more racism, no more violence, a perfect world of people.

Relationship with God messed up: Not in heaven. We will see God face to face, and will know him and be getting to know him for all eternity.

Bodies messed up: Not then. I’ll have more hair, won’t groan all the time. Life will be good. Those of you who are sick and suffer and ache, not then.

Work messed up: We’ll talk about this next week, because we will have work just as Adam and Eve did, but it won’t be messed up…no longer subject to the curse. Work will be truly engaging, fitting to our design, and fulfilling.

Basically, the life we live here is messed up. The great news is that God is a redeemer, and he is doing his redemptive work. He is in the process of restoring all things, and heaven is the culmination of that. Heaven is not going to be some boring, floating in the clouds experience. It will be a life lived as it was meant to be lived, on this planet in a perfect environment. Over the next couple of weeks, we will get much more specific about life in heaven, what we will actually do, what our bodies will be like, and what our relationships will be like. But the overall point of today is this: heaven is a re-made earth, life as it was meant to be.

When God does re-create this planet that process of redemption will be complete, but another huge implication I want us to understand is this: that God is working his redemptive work right now. Let me share a few minutes in the “so what does this mean here and now” category. God is doing his redemptive work right now.

When Jesus came, he came as a redeemer, to buy us back from sin and its hold on our lives and into a forever relationship with God. He is in the process of redeeming us and all of life. It isn’t just that he leaves us here to deal with the curse and a terrible life until we die or until he comes back to bring about redemption. He is redeeming and doing his redemptive work in our lives now. When we come to know Christ, he starts re-building our lives and our relationships. If we open up our lives to him, he begins to reverse the curse in our lives.

Take marriage for example. In Genesis, marriage gets specifically cursed. God told Adam and Eve that marriage would be really hard, and it is. Yet, when we come to know Christ and allow him to remake our own lives, we learn what it means to be loving husbands and responsive wives, and God begins to rebuild a marriage. He begins to do his redemptive work, making it progressively closer to what he originally intended. The same is true in our friendships and parent-child relationships. If you are in relationships that seem so hopeless, gain some hope…because God is a redeemer. He takes messed up relationships and restores them. Allow him to do that. Don’t just give up. Open up your own life to what God wants to do in your relationships.

God is also redeeming our individual lives. We can really mess up our lives with sin and the consequences of sin, so much so that we can think we are worth nothing, that God would never be interested in us or ever really use us for his purposes. But God is a redeemer. He loves to rebuild and redeem. It’s a little like people who love to remodel houses or restore cars, God’s passion is to restore lives. Other people may look at your life and think you belong in a junk yard to rust out the rest of your existence. But the restorer sees you and thinks, “Wow! What a wonderful opportunity. I would love to restore that life! What a beautiful person he or she could be.”

God want to bring his redemptive power into every part of your life. Take work as an example. You may feel purposeless and frustrated, but God designed work to be purposeful and enjoyable. We’ll talk more about this next week, but God can transform your work and you as a worker.

God also works his redemptive power in the world of people in and through the church. In the church, he is creating a redemptive community, people who love each other and who are committed to each other…a community that is diverse, full of people who normally would not be together but are united in Christ. A couple of weeks ago, I was so pleased to meet a mix-raced couple who are new in our church, who said, “We know that this is a diverse church where we can be accepted and comfortable here. We can see that diversity is a value here.” I just about leaped up for joy. That’s what God wants, and that’s what he is creating.

He wants to use our church as a whole as a redemptive force in this world, working hard to reverse injustice and poverty and other diseases on this planet. What we are doing in Ethiopia for example is redemptive work. We aren’t just telling them about Jesus. We are. But we are also working to reverse the poverty and lessen the injustice. It is redemptive work.

You get the picture? The story of the Bible and of this world is a story of redemption. God made the world perfect, and we ruined it. So life here is sometimes good but often not good at all, an everything is compromised, stained by sin and ruined by the curse. But God is a redeemer. Instead of just saying, “You chose sin, so good luck to you.” He promised redemption, and he is in that process now. Open up your life to that process, and join his redemptive community…be part of God’s redeeming work in this world.

And looking ahead means that God’s redemptive work will be complete. Heaven is not some ethereal, floating on the clouds with wings and diapers, experience. Heaven is a fully redeemed earth, life as it was meant to be. The Bible people in the past that so looked forward to heaven knew that. That’s why they couldn’t wait. And in all of our souls is that same sense of longing. We were created for paradise, but we live in a world that is so much less than that. We wish the world were different. We sometimes wonder why God doesn’t intervene. He is intervening, and one day will make the world perfect. That is the great hope of heaven.