Have you ever heard? Someone who
died and came back to life has written a book about the experience, telling us
what heaven is like. Oh? You have heard? It seems that dozens, if not hundreds,
of “someones” have done that.
I and many people I know do not put
a lot of “faith” in those stories. We are apparently in the minority, judging
from the popularity of those books. While the books are interesting and many
have even found them encouraging to their faith, they are not reliable, not
objective, not verifiable and according to Father Abraham and Jesus Christ, they
are not what we should build our faith upon.
Paul is one of those “someones” who
went to heaven (the third heaven or paradise, he called it) and was so humbled
by the experience, he described it in the third person as if it happened to
someone else and could not verify if he was “in the body or out of the body.”
You can read about it in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, but don’t expect a New York
Times best seller, as he said it was indescribable and inexpressible on what he
saw.
Another apostle, John, also had a
vision of heaven, found in the book of Revelation. Try as he might, John’s
description is almost incomprehensible. The best and most understandable part
is Revelation 20:11-22:21. Randy Frazee encouraged us to read it aloud when we
get the chance and I’ll tell you, it is exciting.
Paul said that if the resurrection
was not true, then Christians of all people are to be the most pitied. Christianity
stands or falls on the resurrection and the promise of eternity. If Christ is
not raised, then our faith is in vain. The tree of life is from Genesis to
Revelation, meaning that the overarching theme of the Bible is eternity which
was forbidden for us in our fallen state, and only granted to us because of
Christ’s sacrifice. And yet so many people do not know what the Bible teaches
it means to have eternal life.
This is week ten of BELIEVE, and we
are one-third of the way through this study. This chapter also concludes the
section on “what we think” or the theological portion of the study. These ten
weeks have been deep, challenging, thought-provoking and even troubling for me
personally … and I have been to seminary, prepared sermons and have studied the
Bible for decades.
Some have said they opted out of BELIEVE because it was too
shallow (they must have CLEP’ed out of quantum physics in grad school) while
others have said they didn’t participate because it was too much work. Indeed,
the reading material has been 90 to 95 percent Scripture and perhaps ten times
as much Bible as our regular Bible Study material. We will get a break from
BELIEVE next week, as we prepare not only how to believe, but now for the next
ten weeks, how to behave.
