What Is Heaven Like?: Surprised by Suffering with R.C. Sproul

0:01 When I was in seminary we had a professor who was, to use the contemporary jargon of the teenager, he was awesome. His erudition and acumen were so extraordinary that we lived in daily intimidation of this man. And I was convinced by the time I was a senior that this man knew all there was to know about theology and then some. I have to say, of course, after that I went on to graduate school myself and into an academic vocation where after being exposed to higher level of intellectual research I was less and less impressed by the brilliance of all these people with their credentials except with one occasion. The more I studied theology, the more impressed I became with this one particular man and realized that I could study this science for the rest of my life and a couple of more lifetimes and wouldn't know what he knows right now on his fingernail.

1:05 And so I had this kind of confidence in a man's ability, and one day after class I went up to him and I said, Professor so-and-so, I said, can I ask you a question? He said, what? I said, what's heaven like? I just, by this point I assumed that he had been there and he could give me a running commentary on every nook and cranny of the afterlife, and he just smiled at me and gave me some assignments to read and so on. He wasn't able to tell me because he had never been there. And it's really somewhat sad that so much of the Scripture is vague and shadowy about what actually is on the other side. And I suspect part of the reason for that vagueness is that the Scripture gives us a studied ambiguity because there is going to be a radical change in our natures from what we experience in this world and what we will experience in the world to come.

2:09 Paul articulates that in his letter to the Corinthians when he says that he uses the analogy, incidentally, that Plato used, the analogy of the seed, where for a seed to give life to germinate first, it must decay and rot and die in the ground before it can be transformed into a new substance of vitality. And so the apostle says we are sown in dishonor and we're raised in honor. We're sown a corruptible body and we're raised incorruptible and this mortal must put on immortality. And he gives this contrast between the present order of things and the future order of things. And so the keynote there, ladies and gentlemen, is that at death we will undergo a change. Just as Jesus when He returned from the grave was different.

3:08 There were those who didn't recognize Him immediately. He came with what was called a spiritual body, an immortal body, a resurrection body. Now what is that? We can only speak of it in terms of analogy. But, ladies and gentlemen, as much discontinuity that the Bible indicates will take place between this world and the world to come, as much changes will undergo, that change will not be total and absolute because there will still be a continuity, a continuation of our personal identities so that I'll be able to recognize you, you'll be able to recognize me, and you know, you wonder about, now, when I go to heaven, how old will I be? How much will I weigh in this new experience? I mean, will this new body that is not corruptible and immortal and everything, I trust it won't be overweight, how old will it be? Will I all my hair back and all of that? And what about children who die? Will they remain infants for eternity, or will they learn and have maturity? These are the kinds of questions that the Bible doesn't answer in any detail, but it simply tells us at the beginning these two things that there will be a radical change, but the change will not be so radical as to to eliminate our identity and our continuity of existence. But what will it be like there?

4:53 Somebody just handed me a cartoon this morning. There's two little guys walking down the street and their hands are in their pockets and they're having a very profound philosophical discussion, and the one little guy says to the other little guy, the way I figure it, heaven's a place with no baths, no girls, and no vegetables. Two out of three ain't bad, but if there are no girls, I don't want to go. You can keep the vegetables, Dr. LeMond. Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, said that of all of the creatures on this planet, Man is at the same time... The creature of the highest grandeur and the creature of the lowest misery. This is what Pascal described as the paradox of man.

5:56 And he said our grandeur is located in our ability to think and to imagine, to dream, to envision, and to project our thoughts. And he says that it's possible for human beings to think in such creative categories that we can imagine a life far better than we are able to experience in this world. That's a reflection of our grandeur. And at the same time, he said, it's a manifestation of our misery because the misery is in this, But as wonderful as we can imagine what life could be under certain conditions, we are not able to make it happen. There is nobody in this room, there's nobody hearing my voice right now who cannot anticipate or imagine a better life than you presently enjoy.

6:53 You may have all the money that you feel that you ever need, but you're lacking in health. You may have all the health and all the money, but you've lost love. There is no one in this world who is totally, 100 percent satisfied and fulfilled. We can all imagine a better life than we presently enjoy. That's why so many of the skeptical psychiatrists and philosophers of the nineteenth century We looked at the concept of heaven and say, well, that's obviously a human psychological invention. It's wish projection, wish fulfillment. Along the lines of Pascal's thinking, he said, nobody wants to anticipate a meaningless life and so we conjure up for ourselves this wonderful happy hunting ground, this Valhalla, this place where we go where all the bad things of life are eliminated.

7:50 Well, you know, even at that our speculative and creative abilities run up against barriers. Somebody once said to me, he said, you try to imagine the most incredible situation that you can experience and think about experiencing that situation forever. What you have just described is hell. You know, doing only one thing or the thing that you think would give you the most happiness and do it and do it and do it and do it, sooner or later you'd get bored and certainly after ten thousand years you'd be tired of it. So none of us can really anticipate what eternal life would be like. But the Scripture does give us one little bit of an inside glimpse of the other side.

8:47 The glimpse takes place in the context of a type of literature that is highly imaginative. It's called apocalyptic literature. It's visionary literature where we're told at the beginning of the book of Revelation that the apostle John who is in exile on the island of Patmos has a mystical experience For he is in the spirit in a type of ecstatic religious orbit, and in this experience he gets a glimpse into the future and to the inner workings of heaven itself. And he's instructed by the Christ who appears to him that the sayings that he is about to hear and the vision he is about to see is true and faithful and Christ commands him, write it down.

9:40 He's told to write it down for the benefit of the people like you and me who weren't there, but who are to participate in this vision. And at the end of this lengthy view into the future that is given to the apostle, we come to the twenty-first chapter in which John writes these words, And then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first earth and the first heaven had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. Now, let's just stop right there. That's strange, isn't it, that the announcement of the appearance of the new heaven and the new earth.

10:35 Incidentally, that creates all kinds of theological speculation. Does that mean that God is going to utterly destroy and annihilate this order and create brand new and from scratch? I don't think so, because the idea that we encounter in Scripture from the Old Testament all the way through the new is that there's something wrong with this world order. There's something rotten about this world. You're not going to get an argument about that, are you? And what redemption is all about is not the annihilation of this planet, but the redemption of it. That Paul tells us that the whole creation groans together in travail awaiting the redemption of the sons of men, but that in the process of redeeming this planet, God puts the planet through a crucible. It puts it through the refiner's fire, and it goes through crushing pain to come out the other side into purity.

11:39 And John sees the end product, he says, I saw the new heaven and the new earth coming down, and there was no more sea. Now again, we read that from the vantage point of twentieth-century English-speaking people as Americans, in fact, and we say, wait a minute, if heaven doesn't have an ocean, I'm not sure I want to go there because I save my money every year and my time to go to the seashore, to go to Florida, or wherever I'm going to go because I love the ocean. There's something fascinating about the sea to us. It's in our literature. It's in our history. I mentioned Herman Melville. You remember Moby Dick? Call me Ishmael. He said, whenever I'm encountering grief and sorrow and sadness or I find myself inadvertently following along behind a funeral procession, what does Ishmael say? I'm drawn inexorably to the sea. We have this view of the sea as the place of recreation, of the place of adventure, of the place of joy, but not the Jew. Think of the Jewish nation.

12:56 That tiny little strip of real estate that joined Africa and Asia, separated between the Mediterranean and the desert. And in that land of arid wilderness there is a ribbon that goes right down the center of Palestine, and at the top of that ribbon there's a circle, and at the bottom of that ribbon there is a circle. It's the lifeline of Israel that goes from the Sea of Galilee down to the Dead Sea, and that little ribbon that transverses the nation is called the River Jordan. Over here is the Mediterranean, and the coast is extremely rocky so that in antiquity the Jewish people never developed a sea trade. The only thing the sea meant to them was the place the Philistines lived, and they used come in there as marauders and destroy the Jews, or the sea traders that came in off the sea, or the violent storms that came off the Mediterranean like the one that shakes up the Sea of Galilee when Jesus is with His disciples at night and they're threatened by the boats capsizing.

14:07 Everything about the sea to the Jew was bad. And so in Jewish poetry, in Jewish literature, the sea becomes the symbol of chaos, of the threatening darkness. Going all the way back to Genesis 1, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the heavens and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon what? The face of the deep. that foreboding sense of ominous terror that is associated symbolically to the Jew with the sea. The positive image for the Jew isn't the sea, it's the river. Listen to the psalmist, the sea roars and is troubled. God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in times of trouble, and though the mountains be, you know, shaken and be carried into the midst of the sea, nevertheless what?

15:19 There is a river. The streams whereof make glad the city of God, the habitat of the Most High. The contrast there between ocean and river, between salt water and fresh water, the well, the spring, the river in the history of a desert people are the positive symbols of life. And so when He sees heaven, He sees to His joy there's no sea there. That means there's no chaos. There's nothing threatening the joy of His existence. I saw the new Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband." What a marriage procession. Talk about a marriage gown, as we see what the adornment of the new Jerusalem will be like.

16:11 It certainly far exceeds anything that any earthly bride has ever dreamed of wearing. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Now the dwelling of God is with men, and He He will live with them and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God." When Jesus was born, He was named Emmanuel, which meant God with us. When John says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, he used the language of tenting. The literal meaning of the text is He pitched His tent in our midst. Again for a nomadic people to have the Creator not isolated and remote and removed from His experience absent to His daily life, but to have His tent right next to Him. The tabernacle was called the tent of meeting, the place where the Jewish people would come to enter into the presence of God.

17:12 But ladies and gentlemen, you know as well as I know that one of the most profound experiences of our humanity in this world is not a sense of the immediate presence of God. Even in the life of the most spiritual and devout person, that life is experienced more by a sense of the absence of God than of the presence of God. I think perhaps we've had just enough experience with the presence of God to long after it and to yearn for it, for its permanence. But right now it's fleeting, transient, inconsistent, unstable. But now, as John says, that that moment will come where God will be in the midst of His people permanently.

18:06 The first thing He will do, listen, He 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. When I was a little kid, I told you about this uncle that was rather tough on me, and he lived in our house, and he wanted me to be a man, and so if I would start to sniffle or cry as a little boy, he'd boot me in the seat of the pants and send me outside, you know, he said, you're not allowed to cry. This one kid up the street used to beat me up, and I'd come home and my uncle would see me cry, and he said, if you come back here crying again, I'm going to give you something to cry about it? No, that was a big issue in my house, whether or not little boys were allowed to cry. But sometimes my uncle would go to work, and I would get myself in a peck of trouble when I was four years old, and somebody beat me up, and I'd come home, and I'd be crying, and my mother would be there with her apron in the kitchen. And when I would cry, not only would she talk to me to bring me comfort, but what she would do, she would take the corner of her apron, and she would bend over, and she would wipe away my tears.

19:29 with her apron. Have you ever done that to somebody? I had a friend who was dying of cancer. He was in the final days of cancer in New England about twenty years ago, and when I visited him in the hospital, there was nothing I could do except read the Scripture to him and pray and take ice and put it on his lips. And in his final hours when the tear would begin to escape from his eye, I could just reach over and wipe that tear away. Do you know that there's probably no gesture that a human being can make that is more intimate than wiping a tear away? You think about the communication that takes place when one human being touches another human being in the face to remove a tear. When my mother did that to me, somehow everything would be all right, and my smile would come back on my face, the tears would stop.

20:36 Stop that sobbing and that involuntary sniffing and so on. The tears would be gone, but ladies and gentlemen, they always came back. And I'd have to go to her apron again and again and again and again. But what John sees here is that when God Almighty descends from heaven and comes to His people, the first thing He's going to do is wipe away your tears. And when He wipes away your tears, they are wiped away forever. There will be no more crying. There will be no more pain. There will be no more reason to express this kind of hurt because, he says, in heaven no death, no mourning, no sickness, no tears. See, we can't conceive of that because we've never lived in any environment for five minutes that was free of death and pain and sickness and mourning and tears.

21:53 But that's the future that God promises to His people. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. And he who was seated on the throne said something. Notice this, that this announcement does not come from a philosopher on a podium or a beggar on the street, but it comes from one who is seated upon the throne, and the throne upon which He is sitting is the throne of cosmic authority. This is a pronouncement from the King of the kings and from the Lord of the lords. He says, Behold, I am making everything new. Write it down, for these words are trustworthy and true, for I have done it. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and to him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.

22:56 Then the vision continues of the seven angels who had the seven bowls and so on, came and said to me, Come and I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb, and He carried me away in the spirit to a mountain great and high and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, and it shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a precious jewel like jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great high wall with twelve gates and twelve angels. And then he goes and gives us this vivid description of this heavenly city that measures as a cube and it's fifteen hundred miles across the city. It's only a thousand miles across Texas. Can you imagine a city that measures four square fifteen hundred miles by fifteen hundred miles by fifteen hundred miles?

23:52 the mileage and the math here is symbolic. It's the furlong times twelve is what it is in the New Testament. That is that this city is enormous in its scope. Have you ever been to Palestine? Have you ever been to Israel? How many people here have ever been to Jerusalem? One of the most breathtaking aspects of experiencing modern-day Jerusalem is it's like being transported in a time machine, isn't it? Being hurried back to the past, You go, when we came into Jerusalem, we came at night, and the walls of the old city were illumined by floodlights. And I had this experience of seeing the old walls, and they are seventy feet, seventy-five feet high, and on the corner of the old wall of Jerusalem, these massive stones of King Herod are there, seventy-five feet high. And then the language of the Bible, a city set upon a hill cannot be hid. It jumps out at you.

24:46 And then you go and you visit the old city and they take you through the tour of the corner of the temple that survived, and they show you this hole down into the ground and they show you that they run this long stake down into this hole that measures another seventy-five feet that's now underground, that had been covered by the sands of the times. And then you realize that in Jesus' day when Jesus would come over the crest of the hill from Bethany and look at this city, he saw a city whose walls were 150 feet high. And as amazing it is to us today, it was even more amazing, well that's nothing compared to the walls of the new Jerusalem that comes from heaven, whose gates are of pearls, and every precious stone is described as being part of the allure and the adornment of this city. And we're told that the streets are of gold. You've heard of pearly gates and streets of gold. You may not appreciate that, but I lived in Pittsburgh that has the worst pothole problem in the world, but the gold of the streets of heaven has no potholes.

25:59 It's perfect in its refinement, and it says that the gold is translucent and that the basic image of this place is one of unveiled light. And he goes on to tell us that if you go into this new Jerusalem, the Jerusalem that every Jew longs for, Zion, even to this day, the Jew longs for the day that he can celebrate the Passover, not at home or in the synagogue, but that he can do it in the holy city. And so the tradition, the rite is what? At the end of the celebration now he would say to his friend, next year in Jerusalem. He wants to go to the temple. Then all of a sudden you read in here that John is told that in the New Jerusalem there is no temple.

26:58 And there's no sun, and there's no moon, and there's no streetlights. Because you don't need a temple, because God Himself is there. And He tells us that the ultimate, the ultimate unspeakable joy of every human being for which you were created will take place in the middle of this city where the light of the illumination of the very presence of God will illumine the whole place," he said, and we shall see His face. And His face will shine in the glory of God that will lighten this entire city. You know, I don't know what to make of all of this research into Kubler-Ross death experiences of people going through tunnels and seeing lights and all of that kind of stuff.

28:02 I don't know whether that's a short circuit in the brain or too much antibiotics or what it is that's producing those kinds of experiences, but we're seeing more and more of it. But I know one thing that's on the money, and that's this testimony to light, because the heaven that is described here is the place of refulgent glory of God. How many of you saw the movie Ben-Hur? I don't remember much about it except that this slave at one point in his abject humiliation is about to die of thirst, and he's in his chains, He's on the ground in the dirt, and he's by a well, and nobody will give him anything to drink, and he's so parched, and all he wants is some liquid refreshment to keep from dying. And you never see the person that comes along and uses the ladle and scoops the water out of the well and stoops down and gives him a drink.

28:58 You never see him. All you see is a shadow, and then the camera zooms in on Ben-Hur as he lifts up the light of his countenance to the one who gives him to drink. And you know who it is, don't you? You know instantly by the radiance on the face of Ben-Hur that he's looking into the face of Christ. That's what you'll see in heaven. You will see the face of Christ, and in the light of His countenance, the city will be as gold. The streets, the gates, precious jewels, pearls, all of these things as you look at the beatific vision.

29:58 Is it any wonder that the Apostle Paul says that the sufferings and the afflictions of this world are not worthy to be compared for what God has stored up for His people in heaven? Ladies and gentlemen, there is a heaven. And the only way we can get there is to die. I'll finish with this. I knew a friend whose mother died when she was a teenager. She had a somewhat strange spiritual experience. She was in her room and she was in grief-stricken state and totally taken apart and torn apart by the experience of this death. She didn't hear a voice, only a thought came into her mind, but it was very, very emphatic, and this thought pronounced her name, and it was simply this, Leslie, Leslie, death's not like that.

30:59 And she said, I walked out of there knowing that I had the wrong view of the matter, that as difficult, as painful, as challenging as the experience of dying may be, it is the gateway to paradise that's real. In the book of Revelation, the so-called apocalypse of John, we've just seen something of the geography of heaven. What are the visual imagery that is set forth there in the text to entice us to contemplate the glories of the future life. But I think that the most, the greatest moment of splendor that is found in that text that I merely touched on is the promise of the beatific vision.

32:04 Now, maybe you're not even familiar with the term beatific vision. The beatific vision is so-called because it is the vision of blessedness. It refers to the future promise that God gives to us that someday we shall see His face. John tells us that we don't know yet for sure what we're going to be like in heaven, what our bodies are going to be like, what a glorified body will function as. But this much we know for sure, that when we see Him, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is. That is, the veil will be removed. The mystery will be gone. We will be able to look directly and immediately into the vision of the glory of God. I've contemplated that, and I've said many, many times that one glimpse of the presence of Christ in His exalted glory would satisfy every yearning and every longing that I find in my soul.

33:19 Think of it. To be able to look into the face of the One that you love. on an earthly sphere, the visible presence of those whom we love is so important to us. We see advertisements for telephone companies saying calling long distance is the next best thing to being there. But it's not the same, is it? We love the substitution of being able to hear somebody's voice or to get a letter, a written message from that person. And what we long more than anything else is to see them face to face. And that is the promise of the New Testament, that the believer will see Christ face to face, and he will look into the face of God, the thing that is prohibited in the Old Testament that says, no man shall see God and live.

34:16 Now let me just recapitulate this idea. Do you ever wonder why it is that you can't see God now? When we read of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, that it seems to suggest that there was a visual awareness that went on between Adam and Eve and their Creator. But part of what is lost in the fall is our ability to see God. Now we sometimes think, well, that's because God is a spirit and He's intrinsically invisible and as created beings, physical beings, we don't have any ability to see what's really out there. I would also add to this that the most difficult dimension of living a godly life is the fact that we are called to serve and obey a God who is invisible, out of sight, out of mind. The reality of God is not a part of the tangible dimension of what we experience, what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears and touch with our fingers every day.

35:20 And I think that's what makes it tough to live a life of following after God. We can't see Him. Now the question is, why can't we see Him? Well, according to the Old Testament, the deficiency is not with our eyes. The problem is with our heart. In the Beatitudes, Jesus gave certain promises. He gave promises. He said, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, they'll be filled. Blessed are those who mourn, they'll be comforted. Blessed are the poor in spirit, and so on. Every one of these groups that He pronounces His blessing, there also is a promise added. Now who, to whom was the promise made that they would see God? are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The reason why I can't see God, the reason why God is invisible to me is because there's something wrong with my heart.

36:19 My heart is not pure, and unless it becomes pure or until it becomes pure, there will always be a veil over the face of God. But this is what John is promising us in his letters and in the book of Revelation, that when that moment of transition occurs where we move from this world to the next, we will be purified. We will have the residual, the remnants, elements of our wickedness taken away so that after we are purified, the scales will fall from our eyes and we'll be able to see Him face the face, the vision of God, the supreme vision for which every human person was created. And no human being can ever possibly be fulfilled short of that moment when we see Him as He is.

37:19 We call it beatific because the moment that the vision takes place, our souls will be flooded with the rapture of joy and peace and happiness for which every human being was created. Remember, in closing here, Augustine's famous line, O God, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee. philosophy philosophers, particularly those who are in the school of existentialism, talk about this nagging, ongoing sense of emptiness and anxiety that is so much a part of our lives.

38:11 What we call anxiety in modern terminology is what Augustine called restlessness, and He rooted it in our distance from God, and that we're never going to get over that restlessness once and for all until we see Him as He is. Well, we've just spent time together now looking at the problem of suffering. And though there is that dimension of glorious hope and excitement of looking forward to the life that is beyond this life, to life in heaven, to life in the New Jerusalem with the streets of gold and all of those beautiful things that we've just seen. Nevertheless, we still must continue to live out this life and our days with the reality of suffering.

39:14 It's a reality that's all around us. It's not simply found in the hospital. But as one man wrote from a literary perspective that most people are out there living lives lives of quiet desperation. Perhaps what this world at this time needs more than anything else is to be comforted, to be encouraged. Even though we've come so far with the alleviation of human pain with modern technology and drugs and medicine and that sort of thing, it's by no means vanished and by no means disappeared. And each one of you who have been a part of this series have been touched in some way personally or by friends or family by the reality of suffering. And what we've done in this series is by no means given an exhaustive study of all there is that can be said about this matter.

40:18 But I hope that what has happened is that you have been provoked, not in the negative sense but stimulated to search the Scriptures and see how much of the Word of God is devoted to this question of suffering. It is certainly clear to me that God knows our circumstances, that the God of Scripture is the same God who heard the cries and the groans of His people Israel and said, let my people go," He still hears people when they weep, and He still has something to say to us in the midst of that suffering. And the more I study what Scripture says about suffering, the more I'm encouraged, the more I am strengthened, the more I feel a sense of the promise of God to go with me when it's It's my turn to suffer.