Keep Me From Hell Series

This morning we start a short two-week sermon series devoted to the Bible’s picture of the afterlife. Christianity places a powerful emphasis on the world to come. I want to encourage all of you to think deeply about your eternity.

Find Romans 2 and John 3 in your Bibles. I want to examine five questions about eternity with you for the next few moments.

1. Why Should I Think about Eternity Now?

Your view of the end can have a profound effect on how you live your life in the present. If you believe in reincarnation, then perhaps you’ll view the disabled as Glen Hoddle, an English soccer coach. Hoddle believed that the sins you committed in a former life were punished by disabilities in the next life. “You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and half-decent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime. I have nothing to hide about that. It is not only people with disabilities. What you sow, you have to reap.” He later apologized for his comments calling his comments “a serious error of judgment…” But he soon lost his job as soccer coach when groups representing the disabled protested his public comments.

Thinking about eternity greatly mattered on 9/11 now almost twenty years ago. Muslim jihadists diverted passenger planes into office buildings in Washington DC and New York City killing several thousand people. What made these men do this? Several reasons but chief among them was this: these men were promised reward in the afterlife, an everlasting paradise. Anat Berko sat down with Palestinian who had attempted to be suicide bombers against Israel. Berko was a Lt. Col in the Israeli Defense Army & also had her Ph.D. in criminology. She noted the many of the male bombers believed that they would be wedded in Paradise (Heaven) with beautiful young women, while the females stated their interest in achieving certain entry into Paradise to meet with Allah. They are promised they will be able to see the light shining from the face of Allah, to be able to bath in the rivers of paradise, and live forever. Your view of eternity matters and can have a profound effect on how you live your life in the present.

“Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is” (Psalm 39:4).

1. Why Should I Think about Eternity Now?

2. What Happens When You Die?

I noticed earlier this week that weather experts making predictions about hurricane season beginning June 1. Why do we say a hurricane is powerful? Because it has some of the power of death; hurricanes can kill. Of all the powers you can find in the world, there is no power like death. Mankind can harness some of the power of creation. We can split the atom. We land a man on the moon, but we will always die. Don’t you realize, therefore, death is the main power that is arrayed against us? The Bible calls it the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). But the Bible teaches us that your death is a door to eternity.

Having just celebrated Easter, the resurrection of Jesus speaks to the powerful belief of life after death. The end of your life isn’t an end at all, you simply relocate.

“For he will repay according to each one’s deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek” (Romans 2:6–10).

“For God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11)

“on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all” (Romans 2:16).

Death is a door into your eternity. And many people think they will pass the “moral test” of getting into Heaven. But anyone who really thinks carefully about this realizes they will not pass the test. Imagine as it were that God put a little invisible tape recorder around your neck the day of your birth. Romans 2 is saying God did do that and there is a little invisible tape recorder around your neck. That tape recorder only clicks on whenever you tell somebody else how they ought to be. Whenever you tell someone else, “This is how it ought to be, this is how you ought to be, this is how people ought to be,” it clicks on. At the end of time on Judgment day, God will come up to you and say, “Excuse me, let me get that tape recorder off,” and you’ll say, “Oh, what? I didn’t even see that there.” He’ll say, “Well listen, I want you to know I’m going to be very fair. So fair. I am not going to judge you by the Word of God.” Especially if the person has never heard of the Word of God. Right? Somebody who never heard of the Bible, or never read it, or never had a chance to. He says, “I’m going to take that off and all I’m going to do is judge you by your own standards. All I’m going to do is see if you were the person you demanded other people be.”