Our Heavenly Home
One of the hymnals many churches of Christ use has the title, Praise for the Lord (Nashville: Mark M. Mclnteer, Publisher, 1997), edited by John P. Wiegand. This excellent hymnal, like so many others, has a great number of songs pertaining to heaven. One of my favorite songs about heaven is entitled, "There's a Holy and Beautiful City," by Arthur F. Ingler. Please listen to the words of this magnificent hymn. "There's a holy and beautiful city, whose builder and maker is God; John saw it descending from heaven, when Patmos, in exile, he trod; its high, massive walls are of jasper, the city itself is pure gold; and when my frail tent here is folded, mine eyes shall its glory behold." "No sin is allowed in that city, and nothing defiling nor mean; no pain and no sickness can enter, no crepe on the doorknob is seen; earth's sorrows and cares are forgotten, no tempter is there to annoy, no parting words ever are spoken, there's nothing to hurt and destroy." "No heartaches are known in that city, no tears ever moisten the eye; there's no disappointment in heaven, no envy and strife in the sky; the saints are sanctified wholly, they live in sweet harmony there, my heart is now set on that city, and someday its blessings I'll share." The chorus reads: "In that bright city, pearly white city, I have a mansion, a robe and, a crown; now I am watching, waiting and longing, for the white city John saw coming down." Our lesson today will be devoted to the topic, "Our Heavenly Home."
Since my Molly's death October 12, 2002, I have been asked to speak in several different places on heaven. I have honored the request, but I have to admit that I know nothing more about heaven since Molly's death that I did not know before. I have certainly thought about heaven much more since her death than during any comparable period in my life. Questions I had never considered before keep coming into my consciousness, but I have not yet found the answers to all of my questions. Maybe you have been challenged by some of these questions. Where is Molly right now? How did she get there? Whom has she met? Has she met her sister whom she loved so dearly? Has she met my father and mother, friends we have known during our fifty-three years of marriage? Does she remember our sons and our grandchildren? Does she remember me? Does she remember the good times we had together? Does she anticipate my coming to be with her? If I did not believe I would see her again, I do not know how I could handle her death.
Molly did not want me to take the responsibility of the International Gospel Hour. She said, "At your age, you do not need the pressure of the program." She also said, "You have been under pressure teaching fulltime at Freed-Hardeman, preaching at Scotts Hill, directing the annual lectureship and preaching in gospel meetings. You just do not need the pressure of the Gospel Hour." I believed then and I still believe it was an opportunity I simply had to accept. Molly eventually arrived at the same conclusion. A few months before she died, we had driven back to Nashville to St. Thomas Hospital because the cancer had returned. She sat on the side of the bed and said, "I do not know what is going to happen to me, but you have to keep on with your work." I think of her words almost every time I sit down to write a radio script or when I go to churches to ask for help in supporting this program. Her words both sadden and encourage me. Incidentally, part of today's message will be based on an article I wrote for "The Spiritual Sword," an outstanding journal published by the Getwell Church of Christ in Memphis, Tennessee, and edited by Alan E. Highers of Henderson, Tennessee.
Do you believe heaven is a real place or just a pipe dream? In his well-known and sensuous poem, The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam, Persian poet, astronomer and mathematician, wrote: "Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd desire. And hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire" (Stanza 67). Mohandas K. Gandhi, the famous Indian Mahatma, insisted: "Both heaven and hell are within us." Heaven for millions of people is not a real place. It is just "pie in the sky by and by." Alister McGrath's book, Glimpsing the Face of God (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), quotes Sigmund Freud: "All our thoughts and hopes of another world were nothing more than dreams and illusions, generated by our minds in a desperate attempt to mask the truth" (p. 11). Freud thought of heaven in terms of escapism. Peter Kreeft, a professor of Philosophy at Boston College, has written a beautiful book entitled, Heaven the Heart's Deepest Longing (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980). Dr. Kreeft affirms: "Otherworldliness is escapism only if there is no other world" (p. 102). Skeptics charge that we long for heaven because of the heartaches, sorrows and troubles we encounter in this world. Many of the great Negro spirituals were composed during slavery and expressed hope that their troubles would soon be over and they could rest on the golden shore of that eternal city. But is heaven no more than a wish?
In September 2001, Time magazine published an interview with Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the South African surgeon who performed the world's first human heart transplant. Dr. Barnard's parents were Dutch Reformed missionaries to South Africa, but Dr. Barnard did not share their faith in God or in heaven. Dr. John Blanchard's book, Is God Past His Sell-by Date? (Auburn, MA: Evangelical Press, 2002), records part of Dr. Barnard's interview with Time. Dr. Barnard said during the interview: "At about 79, people ask me, 'Where do you go from here?' I say to them, 'I'm on the waiting list. I don't know exactly where I am on that list or where I'm going, but I'm on the list" (p. 10). Dr. Christiaan Barnard died in 2001. Dr. Peter Kreeft quotes Teilhard de Chardin, a controversial Roman Catholic priest, as asking, "How can the man who believes in heaven... believe seriously in the value of worldly occupations" (p. 103). My question differs considerably from de Chardin's. How can we fail to find value in our worldly occupations when they prepare us for the heavenly city? C. S. Lewis beautifully refutes de Chardin's unreasonable position. "Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither."
One of the greatest tragedies that can come to a father or a mother is the loss of a child. How do parents whose understandings and insights are limited to their own experiences and not rooted in scripture handle such great losses? If they believe in God, do they blame him for taking their innocent children? Harold S. Kushner, a Reform Jewish Rabbi, lost a child at the age of fourteen to a disease called "infantile progeria." I have seen children on television who were suffering from the disease. The disease is also known as Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome. The symptoms of the disease usually manifest themselves before the child is a year old. The child loses its hair; its growth is retarded; it becomes dwarfed and has the appearance of an old person. They develop atherosclerosis in their major blood vessels as early as nine years old. Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., Publishers, 1986) defines atherosclerosis as follows: "characterized by the deposition of fatty substances in and fibrosis of the inner layer of the arteries" (p. 55). The ten-year-old looks seventy. The child usually dies at a very young age.
After the death of his son Aaron, Rabbi Kushner had a strong compulsion to write a book about his son, about the heartaches he and his family had suffered and about the adjustment he had made to his heart-rending loss. His book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon Books, 1981) became a national bestseller. It still appears after more than twenty-five years in most good bookstores. The Rabbi reports that Aaron stopped gaining weight at the age of eight months. His hair started to fall out at about the time of his first birthday. Rabbi Kushner explains that he had grown up with an image of God "as an all-wise, all-powerful parent figure who would treat us as our earthly parents did, or even better" (p. 3). He searched his Bible—the Old Testament— and found no comfort in the words of the Psalmist. "The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon" (Psa. 92:12). Neither did he discover any help in the book of Job. The Rabbi's friends and associates sought to comfort him by assuring him that "somewhere beyond this life is another world where 'the last shall be first' and those whose lives were cut short here on earth will be reunited with those they loved, and will spend eternity with them." Rabbi Kushner concluded: "Neither I nor any other living person can know anything about the reality of that hope" (p. 28).
While I respect Rabbi Kushner's sincerity and regret the loss of his child, I must kindly beg to differ about whether we can know about hope beyond the grave. I know a living person—the Lord Jesus Christ—who has complete knowledge of life beyond the grave and who has revealed that truth to us. Since he came down from heaven, he surely knows about the existence and the nature of heaven. When our Lord informed his immediate disciples that he was ready to leave them and return to the Father, they were understandably sorrowful and afraid. He then assured them: "Let not your hearts be troubled: you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself: there where I am, there you may be also" (John 14:1-3). Our Lord even told them the way to our heavenly home. Jesus Christ is the only way to those many mansions. No one comes to the Father but through Jesus Christ (John 14:4-6). Only by loving God and obeying the gospel do we have the promise of living with him forever (2 Thess. 1:8-9).
We know—both by experience and by divine revelation—man will not live forever on this earth. "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5:12). "And it is appointed unto men once to die, but after that the judgment" (Heb. 9:27). "For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come" (Heb. 13:14). Atheists, secular humanists and other unbelievers know that death is inevitable. They seem not to be bothered by that fact, although they could be just whistling in the dark. The authors of Humanist Manifestos I & II (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1973) claim not to be able to discover any "divine purpose or providence for the human species." They insist: "No deity will save us; we must save ourselves....Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal punishment are both illusory and harmful. They distract humans from present concerns, from self-actualization and from rectifying social injustices" (p. 16).
If "promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal punishment... distract humans from present concerns, from self-actualization and from rectifying social injustices," why have most hospitals, children's homes, nursing homes, hospices and great colleges and universities been established by devoutly religious people? Why has religion been the major influence on movements to eradicate slavery and other evils from the face of the earth? Even skeptics often credit our Lord Jesus Christ and his church with exerting a powerful and benevolent influence on the world. In his scholarly set of books, History of European Morals (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1971), J. H. Lecky, an English skeptic, affirms that Christ has done more "to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists" (volume 2, p. 9).
When I saw an advertisement for Corliss Lament's book, a Humanist Funeral Service (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1977), I was curious to know what one officiating at the funeral service of a humanist should say. Dr. Lament seeks to comfort those who mourn the death of a loved one by saying: "A new relationship of memory alone must be established" (p. 8). "Because," he says, "these bodies must perish we are greater than we know.... We accept as inevitable the eventual extinction of human individuals and the return of their bodies, indestructible in their ultimate elements, to the Nature that brought them forth. In death as in life we belong to Nature" (p. 16). How tremendously comforting to know that our dead loved ones have simply turned to fertilizer! If the humanists were right, we will never see our loved ones and friends again.
The Old Testament does not speak so explicitly on life after death as does the New Testament. But there is hardly any doubt the great heroes of the faith expected to live with God forever. What else could David have had in mind when he wrote: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Psa. 23:6)? The house of the Lord could not have been the earthly temple or tabernacle. David almost certainly did not have the knowledge of heaven the New Testament provides, but he did believe he would be with the Lord forever.
Abraham—"the friend of God" (Jas. 2:23) and "the father of them who believe" (Rom. 4:11)—was a wanderer for many years after he left Ur of the Chaldees. Although God had promised the land of Canaan to Abraham, the great patriarch never really settled in the land as a permanent resident. But Abraham had implicit faith that God would fulfill his promises. "By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God"(Heb. 11: 9-10).
Since childhood, I have had some fear and trepidation about death—maybe not so much about death, as about dying. But since my Molly handled her death with such faith and hope, I eagerly look for that city that has foundations. In fact, I have asked our sons to place the word "Reunited" on our tombstone after my death. I want to be united with our Lord and reunited with my Molly and with other loved ones.
The apostle Paul expresses great faith and hope in God's promises that his people will enjoy "a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Paul uses the Greek oidamen ("we know"), a word meaning we have come to know and we still know; we have full knowledge. "Therefore we are always confident, knowing ("having sure knowledge") that, while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (for we walk by faith, not by sight). We are confident, I say, and willing to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5:1, 6-8). Dr. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, asks, "What may I hope?" He answers: "Just as faith fulfills the mind's deepest quest for truth and love fulfills the moral will's deepest quest for goodness, so the hope of heaven fulfills the heart's deepest quest for joy" (p. 1). In his outstanding book, The Problem of Pain (New York: Fontana Books, 1957), C. S. Lewis affirms: "There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else" (p. 133).
The apostle
Peter provides some insight into the nature of our heavenly home. The early
Christians were undergoing intense persecution from the Roman authorities.
Peter wanted to bolster the faith and courage of those early Christians. He
urged: "Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial that is
to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: but rejoice,
inasmuch as you are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that when his glory shall be revealed, you
may be glad also with exceeding joy" (1 Pet. 4:12-13). But why should Christians in
any generation gladly endure afflictions and sufferings if there is no reward at the end of the
journey? Peter assures all faithful believers: We have "been begotten
again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible,
and undefiled, and that fades not away, reserved in heaven for you" (1 Pet. 1 :3-4).
"Incorruptible" means imperishable, undying, immortal. "Undefiled" means without
defect or flaw. Dr. Hugo McCord translates the Greek "unstained." The
expression, "fades not away," means that our inheritance does not
wither or dry up. The inheritance Christ has prepared is reserved for those who are prepared to receive
it.
Colossians 3:1-4 is one of my favorite passages on heaven. Because Charles Williams' translation takes into consideration the tenses of the verbs in that passage, I shall read from his version. "So if you have been raised to live in fellowship with Christ, keep on seeking the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Practice occupying your minds with the things above, not with the things on earth; for you have died, and your life is hidden with God through your fellowship with Christ. When Christ, who is our life, appears, you too will appear to be glorified in fellowship with him."
I close our lesson today with the
words of William Hunter and James D. Vaughan's song, "I Feel Like Traveling On."
"My heavenly home is bright and fair, I feel like traveling on, nor pain, nor death can enter
there, I feel like traveling on. Its glittering towers the sun outshine, I feel
like traveling on, that heavenly mansion shall be mine, I feel like traveling
on. Let others seek a home below, I feel like traveling on, which flames devour, or waves
o'erflow, I feel like traveling on. The Lord has been so good to me, I feel like traveling on,
until that blessed home I see, I feel like traveling on."
Winford Claiborne
The International Gospel Hour
Back to Home Page
Back to Transcripts
Titles