What Happens When a Christian Dies? B

Thank you for listening. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Whether in a TV interview or some best-selling book, you've probably heard of people who claim to have died and gone to heaven and then come back again. And maybe you've wondered if there's some truth to their tales, if heaven is really like they've said it is. But there's no need to wonder.

You only need to answer this question. John MacArthur's current series, he's tackling some of the difficult questions about dying and heaven and also hell. So stay here as John continues his look at the day when we all get to heaven.

Follow along now as John begins the lesson. Pretty strong language. Set your hope completely. Don't put your hope in anything in this world if you have hope in this life, only you're of all men most miserable.

This is not where you want to put your hope. Fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Upon the appearing of Jesus Christ, or you're meeting Him when you have died, when He is fully disclosed to you in the next world, you will at that point be given the greatest gift of grace and that is eternal perfection in heaven.

So fix your hope completely on that future grace. Now let's then look at this for which we should have constant interest and affection and desire and earnestness and eagerness, this future glorification. Let's be real basic.

What are the components that bring this about? And I'm just going to give you some things you're going to want to see here in this particular segment. He said, Lord Jesus, receive my Spirit. He knew there was no intermediate state, there was no limbo, purgatory, waiting place. He knew that His Spirit was going immediately into the presence of the Lord Jesus.

He knew that. The Apostle Paul said in Philippians 1, far better to depart and be with Christ. There's no gap. In 2 Corinthians 5, 8 he said, absent from the body, present with the Lord.

No middle place. So when a person dies, instantaneously they're in the presence of the Lord forever, Spirit, body in the grave, the ground, the ashes, wherever. So that until the resurrection, which hasn't happened yet, the soul exists without a body. Look at Hebrews 12 for a minute, Hebrews 12 verse 23. Hebrews 12, 23 helps us with this. It says that in heaven, it talks about the General Assembly and church of the firstborn, firstborn the prototokos, the premier one, Jesus Christ, the church of Jesus Christ who are enrolled in heaven. And to God the judge of all and to the spirits of righteous men made perfect. When you come to Mount Zion, verse 22, when you come to the city of the living God, when you come to the heavenly Jerusalem, you're coming to myriads of angels, you're coming to the General Assembly and the church that belongs to Christ, you're coming to God and you're coming to the spirits of righteous men made perfect. So all who die in Christ, their spirits, the inner person, the real person goes immediately into the presence of the Lord, absence from the body present with the Lord, depart and be with Christ. Heaven is the place of the spirits of righteous men made perfect. And so, they are there without bodies up to this point...up to this point. In fact, Revelation 6, 9 pictures the Tribulation and it says, under the altar, the souls of those who had been slain because of the Word of God.

And they were crying out with a loud voice, how long, O Lord, holy and true will You refrain from judgment in avenging our blood. So here you have souls praying, spirits occupying heaven. The bodies are not yet there.

So there is a separated state. And though the spirits, the souls, the inner person are now in heaven, the bodies haven't been joined to them. And that is true, beloved, that is true with the exception of Enoch and Elijah. That is true that the bodies haven't been raised either for the Old Testament saints or the New Testament saints because the resurrection hasn't happened because the resurrection doesn't happen until after the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the time of His coming.

So heaven right now is filled with the spirits of the just who have been justified by faith and are now perfect in the presence of God. You say, do you think they're kind of hanging around saying, when are we going to get our bodies? Well, first of all, you have to understand that in the dimension of heaven there is no time...there is no time.

I don't think anybody waits for anything. Whatever it means to live in an environment where there is no time, I really don't understand. But they're with the Lord, today with Him in paradise, depart and be with the Lord, absent from the body, present with the Lord. So the third element that we have to talk about, we talk about death, we talk about the separated state, let's talk about resurrection. The spirits and the souls now in the presence of the Lord enjoying all the full perfection that a spirit can enjoy are still not complete because they don't have their bodies. Romans 8 23 says that there's a groaning among us waiting for the redemption of our body.

There will actually be a body. And it's...I don't know that I can go any further than this, except to say it will be you and it will be me and not some alien form because Paul says this corruptible shall put on incorruption. This mortal shall put on immortality. And by the way, there will be a resurrection for the wicked and the righteous. Right now the wicked are suffering in their spirit and in their soul without their resurrection bodies. But Jesus said in John chapter 5 and verse 28, do not marvel at this, an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs shall hear His voice. Jesus has the power to give life to the bodies of all who have died in the history of the world and all will come forth, some to a resurrection of life, some to a resurrection of judgment. Verse 29, all who have ever lived will be raised. There are bodies fit for hell and bodies fit for heaven. Bodies in which the souls that are damned will dwell and bodies in which the souls that are glorified will dwell. In Daniel chapter 12 there is a wonderful prophetic promise of the coming resurrection of the Old Testament saints and many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt. There's an Old Testament text that says the same thing that I read you from the words of Jesus in John 5, everybody comes to life, some to everlasting life and joy, some to everlasting contempt. Now in the New Testament we get a bit of a description of what the body is going to be for the righteous.

We have no description of the body for the unrighteous. It will be a body suited to the suffering. But for those of us who are believers, we find out what our resurrection body will be like. Turn to Philippians chapter 3...Philippians chapter 3. Here we read in verse 20 that our citizenship is in heaven, as I was saying earlier, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And again, that word eagerly is put in there because I think it's so easy for us to lose sight of this.

One could wish we lived in a more depressed, deprived, painful, difficult, burdensome world than we live in because the level of our comfort gives us such satisfaction that we lose that eagerness for the life to come. But our citizenship is in heaven from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Look at verse 21, who will transform the body of our humble state. It will be the body of our humble state transformed, metamorphosed into conformity with the body of His glory. And He will do this by the exertion of the power that He has, even to subject all things to Himself. So the way to understand the body of our glory is that it will be like the body of His glory. It'll be like His resurrection body.

It moved around, it went through walls and through doors that were shut. He could speak, He could move, He could be touched and even the scars that He had from the cross could be seen and felt. The eight, this is the glorious body of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is coming...that is coming. No one has that resurrection body yet. The Old Testament saints are still waiting for it.

The New Testament saints are still waiting for it. Now the Bible describes this as the first resurrection. And the first resurrection actually has four components. First of all is the primacy of the resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Him we live, because He lives, we live. The resurrection that we receive comes through the power of Christ demonstrated in His own resurrection.

And of all who would ever be raised, He is the prototokos, the premier one. So the first phase, the first feature of the first resurrection is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Secondly comes the Rapture of the church. This is imminent...imminent...I-M-M. This is imminent, it could happen at any time. No prophetic things need to take place before this.

We live in expectation. We live believing the doctrine of immanency that Christ could come at any moment to rapture His church. This is what I read you, 1 Corinthians 15, 51, 52, 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, 13 to 17 and John 14, 1 to 6. The Rapture of the church, that's the second, at that point the dead in Christ in the church will be raised and they will receive their glorified bodies and those who are alive at that time will be metamorphosed on the way up in a nanosecond. The third aspect of this first resurrection, the third component will be at the end of a period called the Great Tribulation, a seven-year period of divine judgment in the world that follows the Rapture of the church. At the end of that seven-year period will come the resurrection of the Old Testament saints as prophesied in Daniel chapter 12. It comes at the end of the time of Tribulation and it comes immediately preceding the Millennial Kingdom of Jesus Christ. If you follow the flow of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, you know that the resurrection of the Old Testament saints is in preparation for the glory of the Messiah which will be revealed in the world. At that time also, Tribulation saints will be resurrected who died under the reign of terror of Antichrist. And any who are alive will go in their physical bodies right into the final element, the Millennial Kingdom...the Millennial Kingdom. And anyone who dies in the Millennial Kingdom would be instantly metamorphosed, instantly transformed. There would be no resurrection to wait for. So the first resurrection is launched in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And the event that makes up this first resurrection is the Rapture of the church, followed later after Israel's salvation by the resurrection of the Old Testament saints at the end of the Tribulation, along with the Tribulation saints. And there will be a sort of private, personal, immediate kind of resurrection or transformation for anyone who dies during that thousand-year reign of Christ, described in Revelation chapter 20. At the end of the Millennial Kingdom, there's a rebellion by Satan.

Satan's rebellion is eliminated immediately by the Lord Himself and all the wicked are judged and Satan and his hosts and all those who followed him are cast into the lake of fire and God at that point destroys the creation. Great white throne takes place and then God creates the new heaven and the new earth, the final dwelling place of the glorified, embodied, righteous spirits. This is the final grace.

This is the future grace. And when you stop to think about heaven and you ask, what is going to be the dominant thing? I keep going back to this with you and I've told you this before, the dominant feature of heaven is joy. There will be a level of happiness there that we can't even comprehend and it can never and will never diminish. So to find our joy in this world is to live at a very low level.

The only place you can find joy really in this world that's real joy is to find joy in the grace that God gives you, to find joy in the fellowship of other believers, to find joy in Christian family, to find joy in serving Christ, to find joy in living for His Kingdom and His glory and His gospel. To embrace the sinful world, to idolize the sinful world is to spurn the comfort of hope and the joy of hope and the fulfillment of hope. And it's to seek what you can't find and to forfeit the joy of hope's anticipation.

All it does is aggravate earth's miseries. But if you go through your life and don't expect much, then you'll have less disappointment. To wish for heaven is to love God above all. To wish for heaven is to desire Christ above all. To wish for heaven is to long for pure fellowship. To wish for heaven is to hate sin and the weakness of the flesh. To wish for heaven is to resent Satan and his world system. To wish for heaven is to long for perfect holiness and perfect joy. Set your affections on things above and certainly not on things on this earth and you will say with John, Revelation 22, 12, Behold, I'm coming quickly, Jesus said. Behold, I'm coming quickly, verse 20, again, I'm coming quickly and John says, Amen, come Lord Jesus. From my perspective, John is saying, you can't get here fast enough.

Some practical things just to think about. If you live with a hope of heaven, if you live with an eagerness of heaven, it is evidence of genuine salvation. It is evidence of genuine salvation. It means that your heart is truly God's.

It means that it's a flame and alive and exuberant with hope. Secondly, to live with eagerness for heaven is to be motivated to the highest excellence of Christian character. To live for what is to come for that future final grace is to be motivated to the highest excellence of Christian character. First John 3 says, He that has his hope purifies himself, even as he is pure. It has a purifying effect to live in excited anticipation that you're going to see Jesus face to face, knowing that he knows everything about you.

That kind of accountability, that kind of expectation causes purification, purging of sin. Furthermore, to live with a heavenly hope, to be eager for the presence of God is the truest path to a life of joy. It is the truest path to a life of joy because, look, the world is going to be full of trouble. But listen to what it says in Romans 8 18, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with...what?...the glory that is to be revealed to us.

That's how you approach life. If you live with a heavenly hope and a heavenly anticipation and you begin to understand the fullness of all that that means, nothing in this world that goes wrong that brings about suffering can be really debilitating. Truest path to life, to a life of joy, to real joyful endurance through very trying times is to have such a shining hope for heaven and to understand that nothing that happens here can even be compared with what is waiting for you there. A live, eager hope for heaven, number four, is a preservative against temptation. It is a preservative against temptation, very much like the second point, motivating us to the highest level of Christian character. But listen to the testimony of the Apostle Paul, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, we have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. And there we will be recompensed for what we've done, whether it's good or useless.

Our works are going to be burned up as wood haste double or they're going to be preserved like gold, silver, precious stones. The heavenly mind doesn't stoop to the sensual life because it knows it's going to face a judgment and a time of reward, not condemnation, but one who lives in the anticipation of heaven and the coming of the Lord Jesus knows that he wants, or she wants the full reward for His glory and His honor and for the love of Christ. I think also that this hope when it shines bright in the heart of a believer maintains the vigor of spiritual service.

I think it really makes the difference in how diligently you serve and how you endure. Second Corinthians, this is a great, great text, verse 16 of chapter 4, we do not lose heart. If anybody could lose heart, it would be Paul, just hammered. We don't lose heart.

Why? Even though our outer man is decaying, why don't we lose heart? Because the inner man is being renewed day by day.

How do you do that? Because momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison. The more they do to me, the bigger the weight of glory becomes. The more I am faithful and the more I am persecuted and abused and the more I suffer for the gospel, the greater will be my eternal glory.

We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen for the things that are seen are temporal, the things which are not seen are eternal. This hope, this shining anticipation of glory is evidence of true salvation. It is a motive to the highest excellence of Christian character. It is the truest path to life and joy. It is a preservative against falling to temptation and it maintains the vigor of spiritual service. If you run slow and you work little and you offer the Lord a meager offering of service, it's probably because you have very little regard for the heavenly prize. If you don't endure, it's because you don't understand the things that are not seen. If you're not living a godly and faithful and honorable life before the Lord, it's because you don't have a vision of the value of an eternal weight of glory.

And so I certainly wish with all my heart that we could live with this hope. That's the Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and he's the featured Bible teacher here on Grace to You, John MacArthur. He calls his current study, When We All Get to Heaven.

You know, the lesson you just heard, really, it's the same thing you'll hear every day on this broadcast. In this sense, every day you're going to hear John MacArthur teach the Bible in a careful, systematic way. And John, you're passionate about helping people understand the Scriptures. And day after day, we are reminded that people who listen actually share your passion for knowing God's Word. Yeah, I think that's the common denominator for people who are a part of our Grace to You family. They have not only learned that we don't live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

They not only know that, because that's what Scripture says, they've lived it. I think once people feast on the Word of God, they never, ever, ever can get enough. And that's why we don't have people who get exhausted with the Word of God and drop out of our Grace to You family.

Once they're in, it's like a life commitment. It's amazing to me. I meet people all the time who have been listening to Grace to You for decades and decades, and you wonder, you know, don't you get tired of this? And no, it's the Word of God. It feeds our souls.

It's what we hunger for. So I would say for people who don't regularly listen to Grace to You, it is an acquired appetite. If you are not used to feeding on the Word of God, you're feeding your souls on something inferior and something very likely harmful. Once you get a taste of the truth, you can never get enough of it. I say this about, for example, the doctrine of election. People fight against that doctrine until they understand it, and once they understand it, it's like the lights go on everywhere, and they see it on every page of Scripture.

And they can't ever get enough of that wonderful, secure reality that God has chosen me. So it accumulates and it transforms lives when they feed on the Word of God. Thank you for supporting your local church, if they're faithful in doing that, and thank you for supporting Grace to You as we continue to bring you the Word of God day after day. Yes, friend, we really can't thank you enough. Your support helps ensure that people in your community and communities across the globe have access to Bible teaching that changes lives. To stand with us, contact us today. You can mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. You can also donate online at GTY.org, or you can call us at 800-55-GRACE. Thanks for supporting verse-by-verse Bible teaching, and thanks for praying for us. Again, to partner with us, go to GTY.org or call 800-55-GRACE, that's 800-554-7223. And remember, there are thousands of free resources available at our website. If you're looking to grow in your love for God and His Word, if you want to know how to be a better parent, or you want to know more about key doctrines like salvation or holiness or spiritual gifts, you will likely find a sermon or a blog article or a devotional that will help meet your spiritual need. Again, our web address, GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember to watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, or check your local listings for channel and times, and then be here tomorrow as John continues his study when we all get to heaven with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.