How We Will Relate to One Another

Selected Scriptures

Tonight again we return to our series on heaven. This is part 5, "Looking Toward Heaven." And we're really not examining any one particular portion of Scripture, so get your Bible handy, we're going to be on the move tonight. You need to have a Bible and maybe a piece of paper so you can jot down some of the scriptures that we're going to be calling your attention to as we think together on the subject of heaven.

I was thinking earlier as I was praying with some of the elders that whenever I get to the Christmas season, I note that there seems to be a little bit of a helter skelter mentality among people. We always sort of kiddingly say that the closer you get to Christmas the more useless people are at work. Now you've probably experienced that same thing. Everybody sort of gets very very distracted. And I think we're sort of getting into the season of distraction.

But one of the things that happens that is not a distraction is that children begin to focus in on one day and one great moment. And that's the moment when they get to open all the things that you have purchased for them. And I remember as a kid the anticipation building and building and building until that wonderful Christmas morning when we would wake up and march down the hall with all the expectation in our hearts to receive what had been prepared for us.

And I was thinking, too, that there's something like that kind of anticipation that ought to be in our hearts as we think about heaven, only even more so. I fear, however, that there is even less anticipation than that, not more. And that may tell us a little bit about where our preoccupations are.

I had occasion to read a little bit of a book this week that was quoting some things from Mark Twain. And I thought they were interesting as just kind of a beginning of our thoughts tonight. Mark Twain who was the great American humorist and popular author reflected a very sad view of eternal reality. He wrote in his autobiography these words. "The burden of pain, care, misery grows heavier year by year. At length, ambition is dead. Pride is dead. Vanity is dead. Longing for release is in their place. It comes at last, the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence, where they achieved nothing, where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness," end quote.

Quite a cynical view of eternal reality. Mark Twain in his arrogant cynicism even went so far as to mockingly equip on one occasion, "You take heaven, I'd rather go to Bermuda." That showed the fact that he believed that this life was all there really was...a shallow short‑sighted treatment of eternity.

And it really goes against the grain of the human heart. In Ecclesiastes 3:11 it says, "God has set eternity in the hearts of men." There is a tug and a pull and a yearning and a longing for an after life. And people generally find it hard if not impossible to believe that this life is all there is and when it's over there's nothing but going out of existence. It's the cynic that looks at life and sees nothing more than a mistake and a failure and foolishness.

But when you don't have hope for the life to come, you wind up a cynic, much like Macbeth, you remember, after the queen's death said that life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. That's the cynicism of people who have no hope in the life to come.

But we as those who know and love the Lord Jesus Christ have that kind of hope. And I think it's high time in the church of Jesus Christ that we begin to focus our attention on heaven. There was a time, I believe in the last century, the nineteenth century, when the hope of life after death was a major theme in literature and a major theme in sermons. There were many poems written on immortality. There were many sermons preached on it. There were many sermons and poems and literary works written on the very subject of heaven itself. And not a few were written even on the theme of eternal hell.

But we don't talk much about heaven anymore. Our modern self‑indulgent life style has affected a great change. As society has made this life more comfortable, it has less and less concerned itself with the life to come. As this life begins to deliver to us more and more of the things we lust after and desire, we have less and less cravings for the life to come. The subject of heaven, and frankly the subject of hell, have for all intents and purposes vanished from the pulpit and the page. And you need only ask yourself the question when the last time was that you heard a definitive sermon on either of those subjects, that's just something that's not common.

It seems to me today, in fact, and over the last maybe fifteen years that the only people who seem at all interested in the life to come are in the cults, or in Eastern religion, or in psychic circles or in some form of pseudo‑science that attempts to study death and dying and those near‑death experiences. There have been plethora of books on death and dying and returning from the dead and speaking about mystical lights and tunnels and restlessness and weightlessness and floating sensations, and so forth. But it seems as though the preoccupation with those things is tied more with the psychic and occult world than it is to the church of Jesus Christ.

Now let me shock you a little bit, if I might. Today on our earth 100,000 people plus went to those two places today. It didn't make the headlines and it won't. But another 100,000 people tomorrow will go to those two places. That's a Rose Bowl full of humanity. Every seat occupied descends into hell or ascends into heaven every single day of our lives. And there's no news coverage. In fact, for the most part we don't seem at all concerned or even interested in such a reality. And yet down in the heart of every individual, there is this sense of the impending reality of death.

I'll never forget reading an article a number of years ago that said the average teenager thinks about dying once every five minutes. There is that foreboding threat of the reality that the saddest most fearful most devastating moment faces every one of us, that is the moment of death. And frankly, a fear of death is well founded since most people will enter into eternal hell. The vast majority of those 100,000 people who died today went to hell. What is hell? The Bible says it is that wicked place somewhere in this universe, in the universe and yet apart from the presence of God where unredeemed sinners who refuse God's salvation in Jesus Christ go forever to experience unmixed and unending pain and torment of both body and soul in eternal wretchedness and imperfection...out of God's presence in utter and eternal aloneness and ugliness.

Now on the other hand, today out of the 100,000, some went to heaven. And there's some rejoicing in heaven because there's some new arrivals, even in this moment of time somewhere on this earth some folks are entering heaven. And we who know the Lord Jesus Christ can rejoice that we're headed there as well to that place of joy, that place of love, that place of peace, that place of praise, that place of perfection where we will forever be with the Lord. And what I'm trying to do in this series is to excite our hearts about the reality of heaven. And as I noted last time, as we concluded our study, if you find your joy and contentment in this life, that is irrational, that is unspiritual and that is unwise. If you're not more excited about heaven than you are about this life, then you are idolizing the passing cursed world. You are contracting the promised goal of God in your salvation. You are seeking what can never be found and settling for less than God wants to give you and you are aggravating your misery because you will never find what you pursue here.

I want us to set our treasures in heaven, not on earth. And so we're looking closely at the subject of heaven.

Now our approach has been to ask and answer a number of questions. Question number one, what is heaven? You remember what we said? We said it is a place where God dwells with all the redeemed of all the ages forever. And it is also a condition of being to which all believers on earth belong through salvation. We are going to heaven, we live in the heavenlies.

The second question was where is heaven? And we said heaven is...what?...up in the third heaven beyond the atmosphere, beyond the stratosphere. We said that heaven is the infinite abode of God that surrounds the expanding universe.

The third question we asked, what is heaven like? And we said it is a glorious perfectly righteous pure holy indescribable place of infinite joy, infinite love, infinite peace and infinite satisfaction where God dwells in radiating beauty and His presence permeates everything and every one.

The fourth question we asked was last time and that is, what will we be like in heaven? Do you remember the answer? We said that we will experience the perfection of body and soul through which the full expression of absolute righteousness and holiness will be made manifest. And in that perfected life, believers will be able to enjoy all of the longings and desires of the redeemed nature perfectly expressed through a perfectly redeemed body.

Now tonight we come to question number five, our fifth lesson. And it is this, what will our relationships with others be in heaven? What will our relationships with others be in heaven? Now I want to give you three categories of relationships, all right? We're going to look around the Scripture, we're going to have a little Bible study. Just imagine you're sitting around a table somewhere with me and we're just talking about Scripture because I don't want to preach to you a sermon, I want to just take you through the Scripture and let's think together on what the Word of God has to say.

Now the first group of beings we want to find out about are the angels. Okay? So we want to find out what is our relationship to angels in heaven. Martin Luther wrote, "An angel is a spiritual creature without a body created by God for the service of Christendom and the church." We know that to be true.

They are moving about always attending to the presence of God. God dwells with His heavenly hosts. So when we go to heaven if God is there, angels will be there as well.

Scripture indicates to us that the angels are in heav