Welcome to Grace to You, featuring the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. I'm Carl Miller. As the Puritan Matthew Henry said, the clusters of grapes that meet us in this wilderness should make us long for the full vintage in Canaan. In other words, any goodness in this life is only a foretaste of the abundant perfect goodness awaiting Christians in heaven.
Well, as we've been telling you the past several days, John MacArthur recently went to heaven, and though we miss him greatly, we are thankful that he is experiencing that abundant perfect goodness right now. He's in the presence of Christ, enjoying his heavenly reward, a reward that you also can look forward to if you're a Christian.
So now, to learn more about that amazing heavenly home, follow along as we continue a classic series from John MacArthur simply titled, Heaven. We are looking at the question, what will we do in heaven? What will we do? What will we spend our eternity involved with? The first thing we said is that we will adore God and Christ, i.e., we will worship.
Heaven is a place of worship. Secondly, we noted that we will reign with God. We will reign with Christ. That speaks to us of our authority, the sphere of our responsibility. Every believer, I'm confident, will have in heaven some sphere of responsibility, some sphere of authority.
We will be delegated that authority to be sure. There'll be no autocratic rulers, there'll be no independent rulers. We will all operate under the delegated authority of God, just as Christ did. You remember that Christ said he only did what the Father showed him to do, and of course, he reigns over an inheritance that the Father gave to him.
So, as Christ has delegated authority from the Father, so will we have delegated authority in heaven. We will reign, the Bible says, on the Father's throne, on the throne with the Son and the Father, and we will express that reign through perfect wisdom.
So, we will reign over a sphere of responsibility, being given delegated authority, and our reign will be a perfect reign with perfect wisdom. We will never make a mistake, we will never make a misjudgment, we will never err. Everything we do in our sphere of responsibility will be perfect and right.
Now, we were saved then to be worshipers. But it is also true that Christ has not only saved us to make us worshipers, but he has saved us to make us rulers. And we looked into the fact that there are several scripture portions that relate to the fact that we will be rulers in heaven. We will have a sphere of rule, ruling to some extent or another in a kingdom. But notice also what this verse explicitly says.
He has made us to be a kingdom, and then it says priests to his God and Father.
Now, keep that in mind. That is a very vital understanding. I don't know if you understand that in terms of its eternal implications. We talk a lot about the priesthood of the believer. That we all are given access to God.
We are all priests in the sense that we can go immediately into God's presence. But have you ever thought about the fact that we are to be eternal priests? As we are to be eternal worshipers and eternal rulers. We are also to be eternal priests. We are given a priesthood that is unending.
We are saved to be priests to God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now what do priests do? Whatever priests do, will do it in heaven. And the answer is very simple: they serve God.
So, the next point that I want you to jot down as you're thinking this through: thirdly, in heaven, we will serve Christ and serve God. The first thing we saw, we will praise. The second thing, we will reign. Thirdly, we will serve. We will serve.
And let's use the word duty. We will be called to worship, we will be called to authority, and we will be called to duty. What do priests do? Priests serve God. When Hannah Desired to dedicate the life of her child, a gift of God named Samuel.
She took that little child when it was weaned and gave it to the high priest, put Samuel in the house of God and left him there for the duration. Of his life, really, until he was fully matured as a man. He was a gift. To the house of God for the purpose of serving God. And that's what priests do.
They serve God. They offer sacrifices and offerings and service to God. The keynote is service. They render service to God. But there's another element to that service that I want to emphasize.
What priests do is serve God in intimacy. In intimacy. In the old covenant, You know it well that the priests had a unique relationship to God. In fact, the Old Testament taught that no common Israelite could get too near to anything that symbolized God. No common Israelite could come near things which were symbols of the presence of God.
And even the Levites Could only come so close. They attended to the things of worship, but they couldn't come as close as the priests could come. They alone served God in intimacy. The Levites served God. The Koathites served God in transporting the Ark of the Covenant.
All of the people of Israel served God in many, many ways, but the priests served God in intimacy. in intimacy. Anyone other than a priest who touched sacred things died. Only the priests could come near to God. And only the high priest could come into the holiest place and only once a year and only for a brief time and only after going through great ceremonial cleansing and true heart cleansing could he come into God's presence.
Priests, then, uniquely could serve God in intimacy, but under the old covenant, that intimacy was limited. In Numbers, where you have a discussion of Those who violated the priestly office, it says Moses sent a summons to Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, and they said, We will not come up. Is it not enough that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to have us die in the wilderness, but would you also lord it over us? And you remember the story that follows of Korah and all of the rest of them who stepped into the priestly office and the tragic results when they were terribly, terribly punished.
Now, these people who invaded priestly office when they had no right to that drew near to God beyond the barrier that should have limited them. Only the priests could come as near as they came. Leviticus chapter 16 tells us that The high priest alone could come nearer than the rest of the priests, and only once a year could he do that. But nonetheless, in the old covenant, the characteristic that sets the priests apart is intimacy, communion, nearness to God.
Now in the new covenant, what happened? When Jesus Christ died on the cross, the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom. The holy place in the temple in Jerusalem was exposed. The Holy of Holies was exposed to everyone. And God was by graphic illustration saying, all those who believe in my Son now can come into my presence.
And so in the New Covenant, every believer is a priest. And we all have access to God. We are a royal priesthood. We are literally, 1 Peter 2:9, called into God's marvelous light.
Now, just think about that. We are called into God's marvelous light. What did that mean to a Jew? That would be like stepping into the Shekinah. which in the old covenant would have consumed them.
But in the new covenant, because Christ has made our way open, we literally step into his marvelous light because God calls us into his light, because, as Peter says, we are a people. Mark this for God's own possession. Same verse, 1 Peter 2.9. A royal priesthood? A people of God's own possession, called by God into his marvelous light.
So, under the new covenant, we all enjoy intimacy. We all have access. That's why the writer of Hebrews says, Let us come boldly before the throne of grace. We boldly enter the presence of God to commune with Him. And out of that intimate communion, we serve him.
That's why, beloved, there's no priesthood. There's no special priesthood. There is no such thing as a priest in the church who is in some way an intermediary between us and God. There are no such intermediaries. There is one mediator, says Paul in 1 Timothy, between God and man, and that is the man, Christ Jesus.
There is no such thing as an order of priests who stand between people and God. That was abolished. At the cross of Jesus Christ, we are all priests unto God. We are all a royal priesthood, and we all commune with God in intimacy, and we need no intermediary priest to go to God on our behalf. But Someday in heaven, we will be perfect priests.
And mark this thought: we will not only approach the throne of grace, we will go beyond the throne of grace, which Thomas Manton, the great Puritan, says is the porch of heaven, and we will approach the throne of glory. We will be able to go to the throne of glory, not just the throne of grace. We can only now go to the throne of grace because we're sinful, and we can only stop at the porch of heaven where we receive grace. Were we to go to the throne of glory, we would be consumed because of our sin. But someday When we leave this world and go into heaven and are in a perfected state of body and soul, we in our perfected state will be perfect priests who go far beyond the porch of heaven, the throne of grace, and all the way to the throne of glory.
We will render eternal service to our living God. We will enjoy eternal and perfect intimacy with God. It says in Revelation that God will dwell with us and we will dwell with Him. He will literally pitch His tent with us. It says all of heaven is a temple and everyone there is a priest and God occupies the fullness of that eternal heaven.
It is one great, infinite, eternal heaven in which God fills it with His presence and we minister as priests to Him. The temple of God and the temple of the Lamb is as vast as the infinite eternal heaven, and we are its priests. Think of it. We are its priests. And somebody will say, Well, what is it we do?
And the answer is: anything he wants us to do. Eagerly. And happily, and perfectly. In Isaiah 58, A couple of verses might help to expand your understanding. It says in verse 13: If because of the Sabbath you turn your foot from doing your own pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable, and shall honor it, desisting from your own ways, from seeking your own pleasure and speaking your own word, then you will take delight in the Lord.
And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth, and I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. They say, What is that saying?
Now, listen carefully. Let me go through it again. This is God's desire for us. If, because it's the Sabbath, you turn your foot from doing your own pleasure on my holy day, this is what God has always wanted. He has always wanted those who represent him to do his service.
And if you call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable, and shall honor it, desisting from your own ways, from seeking your own pleasure and speaking your own word, then you will take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth. That's what God is after. And that's what's going to happen in heaven. We will turn completely from anything that is our own pleasure. We will call the Sabbath rest of eternity a delight.
We will call the holy, eternal day of the Lord honorable. We will desist from all our own ways, and we will desist from seeking our own pleasure and speaking our own word. And we will take complete and eternal delight in the Lord and His service, and He will make us to ride on the heights of the earth. That is the rest, the priestly rest, in which we enter into heaven. And when we talk about that as a rest, a Sabbath rest, it's not the rest that means we don't do anything.
It's the rest that means we are not weary, we are not weak, we are not distracted, we are not interrupted in our eternal service to God.
Now, to enforce this from specific texts, let's go to the end of the Bible, the book of Revelation, for a moment. and see what the Bible says about our service in heaven. Let's look at Revelation chapter 7. Here in this seventh chapter. We are introduced.
To some folks in verse 9. A great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne, before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, palm branches were in their hands. They cry out with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. And here are all the redeemed in heaven. And they're praising God and exalting God and extolling God.
And all the angels standing around the throne, and all the elders, the four living creatures, falling on their faces before the throne, worshiped God, saying, Amen. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen. And one of the elders answered, Saying to me. These who are clothed in white robes.
Who are they, and from where have they come? And I said to him, My Lord, you know. And he said to me, These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation. And they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. This particular crowd is the redeemed of the tribulation period, that seven-year period of judgment after the rapture of the church.
And these redeemed have come out of the tribulation, having washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. That is, they're saved. For this reason, verse 15, note it. They are before the throne of God. And what do they do?
Like true priests, they serve him what? day and night in his temple. And even though there is no day and night, you get the idea of the sort of earthy terminology. They serve him continually. And he who sits on the throne shall spread his tent or his tabernacle over them, and they shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore, neither shall the sun beat down on them, nor any heat.
For the lamb in the center of the throne shall be their shepherd, and shall guide them to springs of the water of life, and God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes. That's the serving rest. No tears, no exhaustion, no heat, no hunger, no thirst. There we are near the throne of God, near the throne of Christ, sheltered by the presence of God, in the presence of the Lamb who is our shepherd and our guide, that is serving as priests in intimacy. You see it?
That's the intimacy of heaven. We serve him day and night in his temple. And God, who's on the throne, spreads that tabernacle over us. We're never out of His presence. And the Lamb is at the center of everything.
The word serve here is litruo, it means priestly service. The service rendered By a priest in intimacy to God. May I add a footnote that will help you understand what I'm saying? In heaven, we will not serve each other. As such, we will serve God.
You won't need me, and I won't need you to make up some lack in your life. You understand that? We're not going to need to serve each other in the way we do now, which in a sense builds up each other's weakness in areas of need. We won't have that necessity. Since we will all be perfect and glorified and like Christ, all our service will be directly service to God.
That's why we will never leave His presence. We will always be like priests whose primary duty, in fact, in heaven, whose consummate and complete duty is to serve God. Priestly service.
Now, let's go to Revelation chapter 22, the last chapter of this. Wonderful prophetic book. Verse 1: He showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was a tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
And there shall no longer be any curse, and the throne of God, and of the Lamb shall be in it, and his bondservants shall what? Serve him. Again, the same word: doulas latruo, bondservants who do priestly service. We will render priestly service to God. We will never be out of His presence.
We will be there at the throne of God, there at the throne of the Lamb. In verse 4, and we will see his face, and his name will be on our forehead.
Somehow God will mark us with his own name as those priests who belong to him. There'll no longer be any night. They'll have no need of the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, because the Lord God shall illumine them and they shall reign forever and ever. There's the other element: we reign forever, we serve as priests forever, priestly service. This is so thrilling.
So thrilling. I'm so glad to hear this. I couldn't imagine anything worse than just being somewhere forever doing nothing. You say, what kind of service will we do? He doesn't spell out the specifics.
Why try? We can't understand heaven. We can't understand it at all. But we will serve God in some way. But that fits my own Sense of humanness, of what a man or a woman really is.
We need to serve. We have a sense of creativity built into us. We want to see something accomplished. I get pleasure out of doing something well, don't you? I get pleasure out of the sense of accomplishment, out of doing a task.
I get great pleasure out of rendering service and knowing someone is pleased, and how wonderful to render service to God with which He will be perfectly pleased. There's the challenge of the task. There's the challenge of accomplishment. There's the challenge of doing something and doing it perfectly. Imagine that.
that throughout eternity, everything you do, you'll do perfectly. And you'll do it. Yes, you'll do it. It isn't that God will make it automatically perfect. You'll do it, and it will always be perfect.
That's what God intended you to be and to do.
Now, let me give you another thought while I'm on this point. I really believe. That the nature of our service, now think this one through. The nature of our service is likely determined by our service here and now. Did you get that?
Now, you remember that I told you that the nature of your inheritance in glory will be related to how you handled your inheritance here. If you were faithful over little, he'll make you lord over what? Much. And we looked at the parables about those who were faithful with a few talents and were given more, and the parable those who were faithful over a few cities and were given more cities, and I think those take us into glory. There's a sense in which, if you're faithful over a little bit of responsibility here, God will give you more responsibility there.
That's your inheritance. If you're faithful over some service here, He'll give you proportionately more service there. That's your reward. And we talk about believers' rewards. I believe that believers' rewards are not something you wear on your head like a crown.
They're not stripes on your white robe. They're not rooms in your mansion.
So that the more service you did here, the bigger your mansion, that's your reward. It's not that your chariot will be bigger and faster than anybody else's. or your white horses that I believe that your reward in heaven is going to be a capacity for service. And the greater your commitment to service here, the greater the capacity God will give you there so that you can express in a greater capacity your service to God. Capacity for eternal service is, I believe, the essence of what your reward will be.
It's not going to be a hat to wear. It's not going to be stripes on your robe. It's not going to be a house that you live in that looks better than everybody else's house. It isn't going to be that. It is going to be the capacity for spiritual service.
Each of us will be rewarded. Look at 1 Corinthians for a moment. Let's examine chapter 4 and then chapter 3, just very briefly. 1 Corinthians 4. Verse 5.
Do not go on passing judgment before the time, that is the time when the Lord comes, but wait until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness. And disclose the motives of men's hearts. Then listen to this. And then each man's praise will come to him from God. Each man, at the time when the Lord faces that man, will receive praise from God.
But each man's praise will come to him from God. uniquely. God is going to make the valuations of our stewardship. Verse one, we are stewards and servants. Verse two, stewards are to be faithful.
Verse three, it doesn't matter to me how you judge me or how I even judge me. Verse four, even when I don't know anything against myself, I leave judgment to God. The day is coming when he will judge my motive and he will judge my service and he will give his praise to me.
So God has The plan of rewarding every believer. Please notice each man's praise will come to him from God. Every believer will receive praise from God, every believer will receive a reward. The rewards may differ. You notice back in chapter three.
That That work which we do may differ as well. You remember that he says in this chapter. Coming down to verse 12, if any man builds on the foundation, that is Christ, with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man's work will become evident. We will all be rewarded, but we will be rewarded differently.
Some of our works will be gold, some silver, some precious stones, some wood, hay, and stubble. Wood, hay, and stubble aren't bad, they aren't wicked, they aren't evil, they just aren't as valuable. In fact, they tend to get burned up. We will all be rewarded and receive praise from God, but we will each be rewarded differently according to the service we have rendered. And the reward, I believe, will be the capacity for serving God in glory.
And that, I think, is pointed out to us in those parables where those who were faithful over little were given more. That servant who took care of a few talents was given twice that many by the rewarding Lord. That servant given five talents was given twice that many by the rewarding Lord. What we do with our privilege to serve here will determine what God does with us in letting us serve Him there. And in those parables of the servants that we find in Matthew and Luke, we remember that in each case, when the Lord came back to reward His servants, He rewarded them in proportion by giving them greater sphere of service or greater sphere of rulership.
And so we will rule and we will serve in relation to how faithfully we have fulfilled our ruling responsibility here and our service here. You're listening to Grace to You, featuring the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. I'm Carl Miller. Thanks for being with us today. And friend, as I mentioned at the beginning of today's broadcast, John went to heaven about two weeks ago, and although we grieve John's death, as believers we don't grieve as those without hope.
And that's because we look forward to the glory that awaits Christians. To help you be encouraged by what is waiting for you if you are in Christ, we want to send you a booklet written by John. It's titled The Truth About Heaven. It's yours free of charge. Ask for the free booklet as you contact us today.
The phone number here is 80055Grace and our web address is gty.org. Request the free copy of The Truth About Heaven by calling 80055GRACE or going to the website gty.org. You can also request the truth about heaven by email, the address letters at gty.org. Again, that's letters at gty.org. As you've listened to today's lesson, perhaps you've been reminded how John MacArthur's Bible teaching has encouraged your walk in Christ.
If that's the case, we'd love to hear that story. Let us know how John's teaching has impacted your life. Write to Grace TU, Post Office Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. We also have a special phone line that's been set up where you can record your story and pass along your condolences to John's family. That number to call is 661-251.
Again, reach the remembrance line at 661-688. And now, for all of us here at Grace to You, I'm Carl Miller, thanking you for joining us today. Be here again next time for another half hour of Unleashing God's Truth, one verse at a time on Grace to You.
