About Heaven Series

Many of you are familiar with Christian writer Lee Strobel, most well-known for his book The Case for Christ and his movie by the same name.

Well, Lee had a near-death experience more recently. This is his account:

"My eyes fluttered. They opened and struggled to focus. My mind fought confusion. I was on my back, stretched out on a firm surface below a bright light. A face came into view looking at me—a doctor, his surgical mask pulled down.

'You're one step away from a coma;' he said, "two steps away from dying."

My eyelids sagged shut. I drifted back into unconsciousness, a welcomed relief from the grotesque hallucinations that had plagued me.

At times like this, hovering over the hazy border between life and death, the afterlife is no longer a mere academic topic to be researched, analyzed, and debated. Heaven and hell, our existence beyond the grave, become desperately relevant. They're all that matter."

And then Strobel makes this comment for his readers:

"I know what you're thinking: Poor guy, he almost died. But here's what I'm thinking: Just wait until it happens to you!

Because it will. One way or another, next week or in decades, you're going to creep up to the dividing line between now and forever. When you slip from this world, what will you find? A void of nonexistence? A dark realm of regret and recrimination? Or a reality that ore vivid, more exhilarating, more rewarding, more real than anything you've ever known? At that moment, in the midst of that existential transition, nothing will be more important. And if it will matter so much then, isn't it worth investigating now?"

Isn't the after-life worth investigating now?

If you think so, then you're in the right place this morning. Because today we investigate the subject of heaven—the afterlife of course most of us here are hoping for. Now there is another alternative, one we don't like to think about much, and we may get to that in a couple of weeks. But for the second part of our series entitled, "What Jesus Said," we're going to focus on what the most incredible and credible man in all of history had to say about heaven.

Now you may not have noticed this in the Gospels, but Jesus actually claimed to have a credibility regarding his statements about heaven that no one on else during His time could possess. He had been there—yes, to heaven. And He was reporting what He had seen. Of course, we would expect this with the Son of God. But he told Nicodemus in John 3:11-13: "Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we have seen, and you do not accept our testimony. If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended from heaven: the Son of Man." Now that last statement is quite a statement, if you think about it. Jesus is here saying that no one, absolutely no one, had ascended into heaven but He who descended from heaven—and that was Him—the Son of Man.

And that might make us wonder what happened to Old Testament saints after they died. Didn't they go to heaven? And if they didn't go to heaven, then where did they go? And I'll leave you with that question for the moment.

And other questions that we'll seek to answer this morning are these: What happens immediately when you die? Where and when does the resurrection fit in? Exactly where is heaven, and where will we be when we experience it eternally? What will we be doing in heaven? And finally, and this may be especially important to some of you here this morning, how do you get there?

So our first question is basically the question that Lee Strobel asked. What's next? What happens immediately after death? What will happen to you when you do what he did: "Creep up to that dividing line that separates now from forever, and then slip into eternity?"

Jesus said, when you die, you'll immediately be with Him in Paradise forever.

Now Jesus talked a lot about the fact that believers will have eternal life. But the one instance where He spoke of what would happen immediately upon someone's death was while he was on the cross. And you probably know the story pretty well. He had a very brief conversation with the thief on the cross next to Him. We find the story in Luke 23:39-43. But before we read that, there's an important backdrop to the story. Matthew 27:44 tells us that originally both of the robbers who were crucified with Jesus were mocking him from the time He was crucified. But as Jesus was being crucified by the soldiers, Luke 23:34 tells us that Jesus was praying, repeatedly, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Then we have this account Luke 23:39 and following: "One of the criminals who were hanged there was hurling abuse at Him saying, "are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!" But the other answered, and rebuking him said, "Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." So, apparently one of the thieves had a change of heart about Jesus, because He went from mocking Him, to defending Him, and acknowledging that He had done nothing wrong. And this may well have been because he heard Jesus' incredible prayer—so unlike the ugly abuse that everyone else involved in this scene was hurling at each other. And after defending Jesus, in verse 42, this repentant criminal makes this request of Jesus, "Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!" Obviously, it was the dying request of a man who was hopeless apart from Jesus' mercy which Jesus granted to Him, not just when He would come into His kingdom, but immediately upon His death. For Jesus answered Him in verse 43: "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise."