What Most People Don’t Know About Heaven - Part A

Paul even said our citizenship is in heaven. And not far after that in the same book of Philippians he said for me to live is Christ and to die is gain. The only reason it would be gain is because heaven was waiting for him. But what is heaven like exactly?

This is where it gets a little murky. The world tries to comprehend heaven and even portray it in popular culture. But those depictions are different than what the Bible actually says about heaven. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip reveals some truths about heaven that might surprise you. Before we begin, we want to let you know about a resource that will help strengthen your faith as you explore the lives of notable women in the Bible.

What stands between you and a more fruitful walk with Jesus? Find out how four prominent women in the Bible faced their struggles in a new teaching series from Lenya Heitzig called Queens of the Bible. Here's Lenya on the Queen of Sheba. Hearing is the first step toward spiritual blessing.

Right now hearing is a step toward blessing because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Hear more from Lenya as she explores the faith and the failings of four different queens in scripture. The Queens of the Bible collection of teachings is our way of saying thank you when you give $35 or more today to support this Bible teaching ministry. Look, the cost of following Christ is to go wherever he leads. Get your copy of these unique teachings when you call 800-922-1888 or give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer.

Connectwithskip.com slash offer. Okay, we're in Revelation chapter 21 as we join Skip Heitzig for today's study. So a cat dies and goes to heaven. Now right off the bat, I have theological problems with that.

But I digress. So the cat dies, goes to heaven. There's Peter at the gate because Peter's always in these dumb jokes at the gate of heaven. And Peter sees the cat and asks the cat, is there anything I can do for you? I want to make your life really good up here. And the cat says, well, you know, Peter on earth, I as a cat had things pretty rough. I lived with a poor family. We didn't have anything soft.

I was always sleeping on hard surfaces. And so, boy, it'd be nice to remedy that. So Peter said, say no more. Don't worry about it.

I'll take care of it. And poof, the really nice fluffy pillow appeared and the cat had this wonderful bed in heaven. A few days later, a bunch of mice died and went to heaven.

Now, now we're really off base theologically, right? I don't expect to see rats in heaven. Anyway, these mice are there. Peter is there, gives them the same offer.

And what can I do for you? And the mice say, you know, Peter, we had a tough time on earth. We were always being chased by something or someone. Dogs chased us. Cats chased us.

Women with brooms chased us. So it'd really be cool if we could each have a pair of roller skates in heaven just to get around really fast. We just think that'd be really awesome.

Could you pull that off? Peter says, no problem. And these cute little roller skates appeared on all their feet and they wheeled off.

About a week later, Peter decided he would go check on how things are in that part of heaven. And he goes and sees the cat sleeping on the pillow, has to nudge the cat to wake up. Cat wakes up, big old yawn.

Oh, you know, just ah. And so Peter says, are you happy? The cat says, Peter, I couldn't be happier. This is really an awesome bed. And by the way, those Meals on Wheels that you keep sending by, they are like the best.

Like the best. Do you know that some people are going to be surprised when they get to heaven? Somebody once said there are going to be at least three surprises in heaven. First of all, who's there that you thought would never make it?

Second, who's not there that you were sure would make it? And then number three, the fact that you yourself are there by God's grace. That's the wonder of it all. I've discovered in listening to people describing their view of heaven that it has become a confusing nondescript place, sort of a make it anything you want kind of a place filled with all of your favorite activities and all of your favorite pets because it wouldn't be heaven without them. It's sort of like Build-A-Bear.

You know, you go to the mall and you have a Build-A-Bear and the kid can make the bear any way he wants it. Heaven has sort of become that. You make it what you want. So we want to look at what the Bible says we can expect when we go to heaven.

Now just some preliminary data. Our word heaven in English comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word, heave on. Heave on.

Of course, we don't talk like that anymore. You don't say, when I die, I'm going to heave on. But that is the original term. Heaven comes from heave on, and that means to be lifted up or uplifted, which isn't far from the biblical rendition. The Hebrew word for heaven is shamaim, and it means the heights or the lifted up place. Heaven is the lifted up place. The Greek word, likewise, is the word uranus, which means lofty or lifted.

By the way, uranus, the Greek word, is what inspired the name of the seventh planet in our solar system from the sun, Uranus. So it means to be lofty or lifted up or the heights. And that is because in the Bible, it is often spoken of as up, right? Jesus lifted his eyes up to heaven and prayed, John 17. Revelation chapter 4, I heard a voice from heaven saying, come up here. Heaven is a word that appears 532 times in the Bible. That's just in my version.

That's the New King James Version. If you were to search it, 532 times the word heaven appears. Another 171 times is put in the plural form, heavens. So about 700 times the Bible mentions heaven or heavens. So it's a big subject in the Bible.

It's a big subject. It's because it's our final destination. Paul even said our citizenship is in heaven. And not far after that, in the same book of Philippians, he said, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain. The only reason it would be gain is because heaven was waiting for him. But what is heaven like exactly? This is where it gets a little murky. And this is where even the best of us and the most imaginative of us, even reading the biblical text, it's just tough to imagine.

C.S. Lewis put it this way, our ability to imagine what eternity will be like is like two infants in a womb talking about what they'll be doing once they're born and are 25 years old. They have no point of reference. So heaven is going to be, as we read from the biblical text, a totally different kind of existence than we have on earth. I'm taking you to Revelation chapter 21. This is our series on 2020, Seeing Truth Clearly. And we're not going through the book of Revelation.

We have done that. And I've gone into much greater depth on all of these subjects. But in this series, we're going to look at heaven from this chapter. I've taken you to Revelation 21 because this takes us to the very end of all things.

And things get destroyed and things get made and created again, a new heaven and a new earth as we're going to see. But besides all the confusion that people have about heaven, it seems to me that our enemy, the devil, would like us to be confused about heaven. Randy Alcorn, who by the way wrote one of the best books ever on the subject of heaven, said, Satan labors to give people an inaccurate view of heaven. Our enemy slanders three things – God's person, God's people, and God's place. And some of his favorite lies concern heaven.

Makes sense to me. He got kicked out of heaven. He's not too stoked about the idea that you're going there by grace through faith. So confusion abound.

So let's go through this text, and I'm just going to draw out some themes. The name of this is what most people don't know about heaven. And the first thing most people don't know about heaven is that heaven comes in phases. There are different modes of existence, distinct phases of your heavenly experience.

That surprises a lot of people. So if you were to die and go to heaven today, that's one phase of it. But in the future, there's going to be a different phase and a different phase, and I want to show you that.

But it shouldn't be too great a surprise to us. After all, on this earth we have different distinct phases of our experience, right? We have the gestation phase, nine months in a womb. Then the live birth, it's another phase. Then you're a baby, then you're a toddler, then you're an adolescent, then you're an adult, and then you're a geriatric.

And I can say I have experienced all of those phases. Ephesians chapter 2 verse 7, Paul the Apostle said that in the ages to come, notice this in the plural, not singular, not in the age to come. In the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace toward us. So the moment a believer dies, his spirit, his soul goes to be with the Lord immediately. His body remains, obviously. That's why there are caskets.

And so their body remains, their body is buried in the ground. Typically their soul, their spirit enters God's presence. Absent from the body, Paul wrote, present with the Lord.

That's an immediate occurrence. You are with the Lord. You are with Him in spirit. God is spirit.

You, the real you, the spirit is with Him. It is a place of joy. It is a place of bliss.

It is a place of comfort. It's interesting, however, there's not a whole lot of information about that phase. Wilbur Smith said, however abundant the scriptural data on resurrection and life in heaven is, the state of the soul between death and resurrection is rarely referred to. Now let me just throw this out at you. Some people refer to this as the intermediate heaven.

I don't know if I like that term all that much. But it's, it's, it's, you go to heaven, you're with the Lord. Perhaps it's the throne room that you see, like in Revelation chapter four and five. But the big thing you need to know is that when you die, immediately you go to heaven. There is no purgatory. You don't get stuff burned off so that you can later be admitted into heaven. That is not a scriptural concept. And there's no such thing as soul sleep where you just sort of go unconscious.

You're just hanging out. You have no recollection of any of that. And then one day you wake up on resurrection day. The Bible doesn't teach either of those. So absent from the body, present with the Lord, I want to depart and be with Christ, which is far better for me to live as Christ, to die as gain. He wouldn't say that if he was thinking of purgatory or soul sleep.

So that's phase one. You die, your spirit goes to be with the Lord. Phase two is the rapture of the church. And that's because at the rapture of the church, you get a resurrected body. That's when you get your resurrected body at the rapture of the church. The dead in Christ will rise first. So on rapture day, that's resurrection day. First Corinthians 15, you get your new body, resurrected body. Then, as we saw last time, you will stand before the bema seat of Christ, the judgment seat of Christ. Second Corinthians chapter five. And that's not a judgment for your sin.

That's past. That's the cross. You get rewarded. God hands out rewards to you. This is the cool thing about heaven. Not only do you get heaven, once you get to heaven, you get rewarded by God for things you did in his name. Wayne Grudem wrote in his book Systematic Theology, heaven is the place where God most fully makes known his presence to bless. I love the idea that God's heart toward us is to bless you. So when you get to heaven, if that's not a blessing enough, he says, oh, wait, I've got some gifts I want to give out to you. So you die, your spirit goes to be with the Lord. At the rapture, you get a resurrected body. Then there's the bema seat of Christ. Then there's the marriage supper of the Lamb.

We looked at that last time. Some think it lasts seven years. Some think it lasts for a whole thousand years.

I can't tell you, but I'll find out. And then after the marriage supper of the Lamb, Jesus comes back and sets up a kingdom, a millennial kingdom called the Kingdom Age or the thousand year reign of Christ. Chapter 20 delineates thousand years, thousand years.

Several times it mentions that. Revelation chapter 20. The Kingdom Age, get this, is heaven on earth. So you die, you go to heaven, right?

You wait for a resurrected body. Then at some point you come back to this earth, but this earth gets a makeover, a total makeover. And the prophets describe a renewed earth, a Kingdom Age. And it describes it by saying there will be a tamed animal world.

This is mostly out of the prophet Isaiah, but others as well. A lush biosphere, which means if you're looking for Rio Rancho, you're going to have to look for a place that's filled with palm trees and ferns and water. There'll be a lush biosphere. There will be longevity on the earth. There will be world peace.

That'll be a new one. And there will be perpetual health. Then there's yet another phase of heaven, and that is what we call the eternal state. And the eternal state is a new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem. Verse 1 of Revelation 21, now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea.

Then I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. So after all those events that I just talked about, after the thousand year reign of Christ, the Kingdom Age on earth, the earth, this earth, will have served its purpose. And when that time comes, it will be destroyed. It will be obliterated. It will be, if you will, uncreated, reduced simply to energy, which brings up a very interesting point. Did you know the earth is a disposable planet?

It is. So if you're trying to save the earth, good luck, because it cannot be saved. You can be a good steward of it, and you should be. We should always be a good steward of what God puts in our grasp. But God Himself is going to destroy this earth.

Why would He do that? Sin has polluted it, that's why. And by the way, that's why there's not just a new earth, but a new heaven and earth, because heaven has been polluted as well. There was a fall that took place by a guy named Lucifer, and God will create a new heaven and a new earth. So remember when Jesus said heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away? You know, we usually focus on the second part of that, not the first part, but the first part says heaven and earth will pass away. In other words, Jesus announced the world is going to end, and Peter tells us how it's going to end.

2 Peter chapter 3 verse 10, the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. So it is going to be destroyed. All the planets, the sun, our solar system, the universe is going to be uncreated. You know, until this past century, till about a little over a hundred years ago, the prevailing cosmology among scientists, cosmology is the study of the origin and maintenance of the universe, the prevailing cosmology was known as the steady-state theory, that everything is in a steady state.

There's really no beginning, there's really no end, it's just sort of continuing. But then science caught up, and they studied things like the sun. They discovered that the sun's radiation is produced by the loss of part of its mass. So 4,200,000 tons of mass per second are lost by the sun. It burns that off every second.

It's where we get our heat. What that means is the sun is running down. If the sun is running down, it means it had a beginning. If the sun is running down and the sun had a beginning, it means the sun has an end, and it will be destroyed along with this earth.

So this universe is designed to be temporary. So he said, I saw a new heaven, new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. So verse one, new heaven, new earth. Verse two, new Jerusalem.

Go down to verse five. Then he who sat on the throne said, this is sort of a summary statement. Behold, I make all things new. And he said to me, write, for these words are true and faithful. That sort of sums up the universe, right?

I make everything new. Isaiah, the prophet, also predicted this. This is important because don't think that the idea of a new heaven and new earth just sprung up in the book of Revelation. Isaiah, the prophet, writes in Isaiah 66, I will make new heavens and a new earth, which will last forever, never be destroyed.

Second Peter chapter three, which I just quoted, after he talks about the earth being destroyed and melting with fervent heat, he says, we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth. Now, a couple words about the word new. When he uses the word new earth, new heaven, new Jerusalem, he does not use a typical Greek word, which would be naos. Naos means new chronologically.

He uses the Greek word kynos, which means a quality of freshness. It's new in quality. It's different in kind. It's a completely different kind of newness.

It's brand spanking new. New materials, new atmosphere. I'll show you that in just a second.

At least I believe that. So what's coming up is the obliteration of the earth and the heavens. So if you're gonna be up in heaven, that's gonna go, the earth is gonna go, and God's gonna make you brand new heaven and a new earth. So you have heaven, call it the intermediate heaven. Then you have heaven on earth for a thousand years. Then you have the earth destroyed and God makes a new heaven and a new earth.

So you see the phases of heaven. We love new things. I love new things. I love, when I get a new phone, I love it.

Say, what? Let me see how cool it is and the features it has and the camera that's on it, right? We like new stuff. When you go get your car washed and they offer you, you want lemon? No. You want lavender? No. You want spice?

No. I want new car. Oh, I'm sorry. We're out of that today. Oh, because everybody wants the smell of a new car. One of the dumbest things you could ever say in heaven is, is that a new suit of clothes you're wearing? Because I make all things new.

Everything will always ever be new. So heaven will come in phases. The second thing most people don't know about heaven is it will feel unfamiliar.

There are certain things that are not there that are here in our earthly experience that because of that will feel unfamiliar. And one of them is found in verse one. I just sort of passed over this because I don't like this verse. And it says, I saw a new heaven and new earth. The first heaven and earth passed away. Also, there was no more sea. I have wrestled with this verse for years.

This to me is so harsh. Almost to the extent where I go, do I have to go there? I mean, this is heaven? A brand new world with no ocean? I mean, if I'm writing the script on heaven, it's not going to read this way. If I'm writing the script on heaven, it's going to say this.

There were no more cities, but there was lots of beach and a whole bunch of ocean and palm trees galore. But it says there's no more sea. I got to tell you, I have wrestled with this so much that over the years I even early on rationalized the interpretive process of this. I thought perhaps sea is a metaphor for nations that are not in covenant with God that are described in the Bible like a troubled sea. So for example, Isaiah 17, the uproar of many peoples, they roar like the roaring of the seas. Isaiah 57, the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest. Revelation 13, the Antichrist comes out of the sea.

See, I've really researched this. Revelation 17 even says the waters which you saw where the harlot sits are peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues. So I thought there's hope. Maybe it's just a metaphor for lots of angry people won't be there.

But now I've resigned myself to a more literal approach. I just think what John is saying in a few words, it's so short, it's profound, is that the earth is going to be a different earth. It's not going to be anything like this earth. That's Skip Heitzig with a message from the series 2020. Now here Skip to share how you can keep these messages coming your way to connect you and many others around the world with God's truths. In the book of Revelation, John gives us a glimpse into the throne room of heaven. Because of that, we have great joy knowing our future is to reign with Jesus forever. And we want to share that hope with as many more friends like you through this ministry.

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That number again is 800-922-1888. Or give online at connectwithskip.com slash donate. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate. Your support is vital to help connect more people like you to Christ. So thank you for giving generously today and be sure to come back next week as Skip Heitzig shares incredible insight with you about heaven and how longing for eternity helps you live more intentionally now. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.