View from Death's Door - Part 1 - Part A

The focus of most everyone is what goes on here during this life. But we all know that death is a part of life.

We all know, though rarely do we think about it, we don't like to think it's so unpleasant that one day the future real estate will occupy is in our own homes with an acre or two or much smaller but just a little plot of land six feet underground. We'll be there, our bodies, unless the Lord returns anytime soon, we'll be there for a long time. One popular game show includes a choice between doors. Behind three doors are three different prizes and the contestant is made to choose a door and hopefully win the best prize. Well, today here on Connect with Skip Weekend Division, Skip Heitzig reminds us that when it comes to death, we have two doors to choose from, life with God and life without Him.

And what lies beyond the threshold doesn't have to be unknown. We'll find out today as we join Skip for more of our series, From the Edge of Eternity. And as we get started today, we invite you to add Skip Heitzig to your social media accounts. Skip shares encouragements, updates in his teaching schedule and even personal photos so that you can get to know him better. Just like him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter or add him to your Instagram feed.

And the hub for all that is connectwithskip.com where you could also find out about this month's brand new resource offer. Does God exist? And if he does, is it possible to know him? Your answer to those two questions shapes how you see the world.

Skip Heitzig once wrestled with those very questions himself. You know, I've been teaching the Bible for over three decades before I became a Christian. And when I was new to the faith, I studied science and philosophy alongside the Bible. As I studied, I grew confident that God does exist. And yes, we can know him. In Biography of God, the brand new book by Skip Heitzig, you'll learn to remove the limits you may have placed on your idea of who God is. Everything changes when you acknowledge and believe that God is who he says he is. Biography of God is our way to thank you when you give $35 or more today to help expand this Bible teaching outreach to more people.

Request your copy when you give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. We'll have Skip and his wife Lady in studio today, so we hope you'll listen in for that after today's teaching. Now let's open our Bibles to First Thessalonians chapter 4 as we join Skip Heitzig. It's all about living. It's all about life and the focus of publications, the focus of most everyone is what goes on here during this life. But we all know that death is a part of life.

We all know, though rarely do we think about it, we don't like to think it's so unpleasant that one day the future real estate will occupy is in our own homes with an acre or two or much smaller, but just a little plot of land six feet underground. We'll be there, our bodies, unless the Lord returns anytime soon, we'll be there for a long time. Malcolm Muggeridge used to say when he was living here on Earth, he said, One foot in heaven and one foot on earth and the foot on earth is on a banana peel. He knew that life was precarious here.

Doesn't matter if we work out, if we eat right, if we take vitamins, count calories, pump iron, stretch our fishes back. Eventually we lose that battle and death will overtake us. There's even a Washington, D.C. undertaker that signs all of his correspondence instead of like we write cordially yours. He always ends his letters, eventually yours.

Just to remind people where they're all heading. I've done funerals for over 25 years. I've buried hundreds of people, young, younger, middle aged, old, believers, unbelievers. I've watched many people die over the years, including my own mother this last year. And I've learned a few things in doing that and in watching people die. I've learned that you want to live in such a way so that when you die, you're going to be missed and you're going to be ready for the future.

Without any regrets and without any longings that you should have done something different for the future. I heard a story about three guys. They all died in the same auto accident.

They were taken up to sort of an eternal holding tank for orientation. They were all asked this question. That if during your funeral, as people are mourning your loss and they're saying things about you and they're weeping over your casket, what is the one thing you'd like people to say about you? One guy said, well, I'd like them to say that I was a wonderful family man and doctor. The second guy said, I'd like him to say that I was a great teacher who helped kids out and I loved my wife with all my heart.

The third guy thought about it a while and he said, I think I'd like to hear people say, look, he's moving. Now there's a guy who lived with some regrets. There's a guy who didn't want to end it all.

He wanted to go back. He lived in ignorance and without any assurance. And those are the two things that I want to talk to you about out of this text. I want to talk about the ignorance concerning death and the assurance that as believers we have concerning death. Those two themes emerge side by side in verses 13 through 18 of 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. So let's look at those verses together. But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who sleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. And then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. Now those verses that we just read out of 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 will occupy our time this week and next week as we look at a view from death's door. And we want to follow those themes of ignorance and assurance that Paul is writing about. Ignorance concerning death and assurance that we can have concerning death. Because this section will answer many questions that we have.

Questions like, we discussed a few of them last week and in that we said we want to answer some of them in this series. What happens at the moment of death? When we die are we unconscious? Are we what some people call in soul sleep? Since Paul says those who sleep in Christ.

Does that mean we're unconscious during that time? When will the resurrection take place? Is it proper to grieve when a Christian, when a believer dies? Or though Jesus Christ triumphed over death by resurrection and promises triumph over death to believers, Jesus said whoever believes in me will never die. Why is it that Christians still die? When will death eventually be over with?

If what Paul said is correct, the last enemy that will be defeated is death, when will that take place? Now just a little background before we jump in. And again we're only going to cover part of this tonight, not the whole thing.

It'll take at least two weeks to get through it. But here's the deal. Paul on his second trip, we called it his second missionary journey, stopped by the town of Thessalonica and there for three successive weekends, Sabbath days, he preached the gospel in the synagogue. People came to faith in Christ. Because of an uproar, a persecution that took place, Paul had to, for his own life, get out of town. But a body of believers was established there, saved from the Greco-Roman pagan world. Now they're believers in Christ. Paul had been telling them that Jesus Christ is going to come back. Be ready for him.

He could come at any moment. But time passed. And during that time, relatives, friends, loved ones died. And now they're worried. And Paul gets wind of the idea, the fact that they're worried. They're worried because, wait a minute, if Jesus is going to come back and start his kingdom again here, what about my friends? What about my relatives, those who have died?

Will they miss out on all of that? They were panicking because some of the people that they thought would share in that glory have died. And so he writes about that. So let's consider tonight the ignorance of death. And again, look at verse 13.

That's where we want to camp tonight. I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as those who have no hope. Now something that Paul does bring up in this verse that I do want you to notice is just how widespread ignorance of death is. He's writing to Christians and he says, I don't want you to be ignorant, brethren. Who are brethren?

Brethren are Christian believers. Now you don't tell somebody, look, I'm writing because I want to dispel your ignorance unless there is a level of ignorance among those you're writing to. So even though they were believers in Christ, there was a level of ignorance about death that they held.

And it hasn't ceased from that time onward. I read a story about a man who got up every morning and read the newspaper, but he'd always read the obituaries first. Every day he read the obituaries. Finally he turned to one of his relatives and he says, I just can't figure out how it is that people can die in alphabetical order.

Well, non-Christians and Christians are uninformed or misinformed when it comes to death and dying. I've always loved the little quip about the four-year-old boy with his dad on the beach. Four-year-old boy grabs dad. His dad's a Christian man, been in the church a long time. And the little boy brought his dad over to a dead seagull and said, what happened here? And the dad came up with the dad explanation. The bird died and went to heaven.

And so the little boy looked down and looked up at his dad and finally said, well, then why did God throw him back down? I think that's an excellent question if we're going to explain it like that. We sometimes don't do a whole lot better when it comes to explaining death and the afterlife.

Okay. The people in Thessalonica were surrounded by a culture of ignorance. And I want to explain briefly to you what the Greeks and the Romans thought about death, just so you know how important this statement in verse 13 is. Most of you know that the Greek culture was filled with mythology. They had several gods in the pantheon of deities that they thought existed and believed in. And one of the lesser deities was a god named Thanatos. Thanatos.

We get the idea of death from that. Thanatos was the personification of death and mortality. Thanatos was the offspring of two gods, Nix and Erebus, which means night and darkness.

And he had a twin brother by the name of Hypnos, where the idea of sleep comes from. According to their mythology, Thanatos despised human beings. And human beings despised Thanatos. And so there are some Greek stories of how certain people cheated Thanatos, cheated death, and were able to live longer than was expected. Now that's sort of the nutshell of what Greeks believed.

The Roman culture displayed as much ignorance as the Greek culture. And that's evidenced by reading some of the tombstones you can still find in Rome today. Go down below the city and there's miles of catacombs. And many of those graves were filled with the unbelieving remains of people who occupied them. Here's a few of the gravestones. Some were apathetic about life and death. And on one tombstone it reads, I was not. I became. I am not.

I care not. Another Roman grave on the tombstone reads, Live for the present hour since there is nothing else. And yet another gravestone that expresses some of the religious superstition that some Romans had reads, I lift up my hands against the gods who took me away at the age of 20, though I had done no harm. This is what happened when a Roman died. When a Roman citizen died, they laid the body out and they put a coin in the body's mouth, the person's mouth. Now the coin was to pay the fare to a deity called Charon, who was the sort of the guardian in the underworld, the ferryman in the world, who would convey the person's soul across a river. The river stooks. And your soul would take the journey across the river where you would be met by three judges who would demand an account of your life.

Three would be impartial. If you were a warrior or a hero, your soul was sent to a place called the Elysian Fields, or sort of an ancient view of paradise. If you were an honorable citizen, your soul would be ushered somewhere else. If you really perturbed the gods, then you would pay for your misdeeds. You pay off the debt to society only for a period of time.

There was never a thought of eternal punishment in the Roman world. So that's the ideology, some of them, that these Thessalonians were surrounded with. So it helps to know that when you read this verse, I don't want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. The Greco-Roman world was empty, hopeless, bankrupt when it comes to anything eternal. And young believers in Thessalonica, though they heard the Gospel and rejoiced in salvation and were told that Jesus was going to come, they thought he's going to come like tomorrow, like next week or like next month and then months go on and then people die and they wonder, well, now what's going to happen? Are they going to cease to exist? That's what we've always been taught.

Or have they been taken somewhere else? Those are the kind of questions that filled their minds. So the ignorance was pretty widespread. Now, that ignorance continues today in our modern, sophisticated, educated world, both among believers as well as in the secular world.

I think you know a lot of them already. Ask the average person about death, heaven, hell, afterlife, and they'll probably say things like, well, all you've got to do to go to heaven is just die. And that's what I've noticed at funerals. Here's a person who lived his whole life without any thought about God at all. Suddenly when they die, there's some preacher who will say wonderful things and now they're in heaven. So all you've got to do to get to heaven is die. Or people will say, well, if you're good enough, you'll get to heaven. All good people go to heaven. Or everybody goes to heaven. You know, you'll never hear anybody stand up at a funeral and say, today we're remembering somebody who's not in heaven. You'll never see that at a funeral.

It'd be very disturbing to see it. And yet, Jesus taught that only very few people go to heaven, right? He said, broad is the way that leads to destruction and many enter therein, narrow is the way that leads to eternal life and only a few enter therein.

So what do people think? Well, the materialist believes in extinction. You live, you die, there's nothing else. No hope to look forward to, no afterlife, nothing at all. Make the best of it because after death you just cease to exist in complete unconsciousness. Others who are a little more superstitious, more along the New Age lines, will teach absorption, that we're all part of a divine cosmic mind.

They'll even call it the Christ mind and we'll all merge back into that united mind. Whatever that means, though I've read stuff, I still don't get what they mean by it. In other parts of the world, people hold to an animistic belief, tribal religions, that when you die your soul stays on earth or goes to the underworld where you merge with the souls of your ancestors and you forever eternally wander without any joy, without any sorrow at all. Hindus believe in reincarnation. That's a pantheistic worldview. It says the soul is recycled from one form to another.

It's become very popular in our culture, though even in my unbelieving days it did not seem attractive to me. The idea of coming back here and going through certain experiences again was not attractive to me. I don't want to go through diapers again. I don't want to do another first date ever again. I don't want to have to take high school English ever again. There's just certain things I'd like to just not do. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, it's over. Skip and Lenya in studio today to talk a bit more about this.

Lenya? Skip, today your message explored what happens after you die and you even talked about death itself. And I think so many poet's authors over history have personified death as the grim reaper or death takes a holiday, you know, meet Joe Black or that kind of thing. And I think it's because death produces such fear and sadness and questions and, you know, when death is the doorway to heaven, to eternal life with Christ, then why does the Bible call death the last enemy?

I think it's pretty simple and straightforward. The Bible calls death the last enemy because A, it's the last enemy we're going to face while we're alive, we face death. So in terms of chronology, that would be the very last thing we would face. But more than that, it's an enemy because it takes away what God intended us to have and that is life. God breathed life into Adam. His intention was man to live and live forever. And that's why I believe Jesus at the grave of Lazarus wept. He wasn't just weeping because he missed his friend.

Goodness, he was going to raise him in a few minutes. He knew that was coming. But he also knew this is wrong and what they are feeling is a right feeling. Death takes something away and that is life. And God never intended—that wasn't in his original design. And he saw what death can do to people. And so death does that to life.

It robs us of it. And the thing is, is that God has taken the very worst circumstance that most people say is the worst and that is death and turns it on its ear. I think death's not so bad. It might just be the dying.

Yeah, to quote Woody Allen, you're right. But death isn't—not only is it not bad, it's wonderful for the believer. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. You know, you have been at bedside of those who have been passing, as have I.

And so, you know, in cheek said it's the dying that's hard. But when people know what's coming after that, you can see them relax. I've seen so many deaths that have been peaceful where they're ready and waiting for the Lord. And that idea as if you let go of this loved one's hand, you're going to reach out for the hand of Christ. And so even knowing where you're going will make death and dying so much more peaceful. Yeah, because what Jesus does, he takes the last enemy and makes it a new friend. It's like this doorway that you're going to walk in, marked door number one, is going to lead you right into the presence of the living God where there is joy and pleasures forevermore. Well, thanks so much, Skip and Lenya.

And just one last thing. Our current Weekend Teaching Series is called From the Edge of Eternity. And you can get a copy of any of the teachings you hear at connectwithskip.com.

Or for personal help with your order, just call 1-800-922-1888. Why are there so many ideas about what comes next when we die, even among believers? We'll talk about that more next time here in Connect with Skip Weekend Edition, a presentation of Connection Communications. Connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever changing times.