The Life Everlasting

Revelation 21: 1-7 and 21:22 - 22:5

 

A wise man once said, "When you begin describing the furniture of heaven or the fires of Hell, be careful, because you won't get one nice enough or the other hot enough." Describing the afterlife can be a rather perilous proposition considering only one person has ever gone there and come back...and we didn't get to see a slide show of his trip.

The images of the life everlasting are as varied as the people who hold them. The popular media image is one of white robed angels riding on currents of air, playing their harps at all hours of the day and night. Others have held that heaven is a place where the streets are all paved with gold, where everyone smiles a lot and no one is in a hurry to get anywhere. Native Americans spoke of the afterlife as the happy hunting grounds, a place where there is food in abundance. Still others see heaven as that place where we will meet old friends and renew friendships long since lost. The majority of us carry a vision of what we will find on the other side of this life, but what is it that really awaits us?

 

*****

 

Before we get to what awaits us, however, we need to take a detour because to confess Sunday in and Sunday out that we believe in the life everlasting is to hold a two-edged sword. What awaits those who believe in Jesus Christ is heaven; this is our hope and earnest belief. But the life everlasting is not just about heaven but includes hell as well. It would be dishonest of me to ignore this truth of Scripture and Christian faith. I know we don't like to talk about hell much, nor even think about it, but hell is one option for the life everlasting. But what is hell?

Preachers used to be extremely comfortable picturing hell as eternal torment where a vengeful God took great pleasure in the utter agony of those who chose not to confess Christ as Savior and Lord. I like John Stenibeck’s humorous description of the Vermont preacher he encountered in his Travels with Charley (Charley was his dog):

 

The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with a prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot.  And he was right.  We didn’t amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since.  Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon…He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order…this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me.  He put my sins in a new perspective, gave them some size and bloom and dignity…I wasn’t a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it. I felt so revived in spirit that I put an extra five dollars in the plate…I even considered beating Charley to give him some satisfaction too, because Charley is only a little less sinful than I am.

 

Much of our understanding of hell comes from the Middle Ages and has been translated to us through Dante's Inferno. But please remember: Dante was a literary fiction author, not a Biblical scholar and not a Biblical theologian. Dante's graphic images of a fiery furnace neglect to account for some important questions such as whether or not the language of Scripture referring to hell should be taken literally or metaphorically. Consider: there are two central images of hell given in the New Testament, that it will be an eternal fire and that it will be utter darkness. Now how is it that, if these images are literal, they both can be true? Doesn't fire produce light, and if there is light how can there be utter darkness? Or consider also that Jesus' term for hell in the gospels is "Gehenna." Gehenna was a valley outside of Jerusalem where the people would go to dump and burn their garbage. Is this valley in Southern Israel literally where hell is going to be found?  Of course not. Or is it that Jesus is saying that life without God is worth as much as the trash burned down in that valley over yonder? Perhaps our distaste for the so-called cruelty of hell is a misunderstanding of the metaphorical nature of the language that describes it.

 

When one studies the New Testament, one finds that the language about hell is uncertain. Some passages seem to depict hell as an eternal punishment in which people will be cognizant of the fact of their punishment. Other passages seem to depict hell as an eternal punishment, but one in which people will be relieved of consciousness by ceasing to exist, body or soul – kind of like sleep without dreams or our pre-birth awareness. Some Scriptures seem very clear that a decision for or against Jesus Christ in this life is the sole determiner of whether one receives the punishment of hell. Other Scriptures seem to suggest the possibility that, because God is just and desires that no person die but that all would come to eternal life, there yet may be an opportunity to confess Christ in the next life if one has not had a fair chance to do so in this life.

 

There is a lot in the New Testament about hell...and much of it begs us to be very humble and gentle before we speak in too certain a voice. But there is one constant in all the New Testament as regards hell: hell is the absence, the eternal absence, of God. God is not in hell. God is not known in hell. God is not felt in hell. God is not heard in hell. God is not seen in hell. Whether one believes in hell as a lake of fire, or whether one believes in hell as obliteration from existence with no past, no future, nor even a present, or whether one believes in hell, as C.S. Lewis paints it, as an eternally gray city that goes on for miles without end and without any sort of color or life or love, hell means God is not there. What a sad existence hell will be.

 

*****

 

Of course, the good news of the gospel is that we need not fear hell for, in Christ, we hope for heaven. St. John's description at the end of his Revelation is an attempt to give some insight into heaven as an option for the afterlife. In St. John’s vision, heaven is described as a great city…that's right, a city.  Sorry, folks, there are no pastoral panoramas here. All you folks who never wanted to live in Denver, get ready to move...Ouch!  Of course, in the ancient world, cities were the preferred place to live because they ensured security and community.

 

Once again it is wise to see St. John's painting of heaven as metaphorical in the same way the gospels’ portrayal of hell is metaphorical language. Think about it: metaphor is simply the right language tool to describe something no one has ever seen or can even imagine. Let's not be like the preacher I once heard who commented on the fact that St. John, (who was using numbers as symbols), describes the heavenly city as 70 miles high, 70 miles long and 70 miles deep, so obviously heaven is a cube! I was a college aged intern at a junior high summer camp when I heard that one.  The junior highs looked at me with confused expressions that said, “Brad, what does that mean?  Heaven is a cube?”  I shrugged them off at the time but later explained that what St. John was actually describing were dimensions for heaven that mirrored on a larger scale the dimensions of the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple.  The Israelites believed the Holy of Holies was that place on earth where the clearest experience of God’s presence could be found.  What St. John is saying, then, by describing heaven “as a cube” is that heaven will be the place where we live in God’s clear, direct, unmediated presence.  The preacher erred by interpreting the language of heaven too literally rather than allow the poetry of St. John’s words to speak for themselves.  Listen….

 

Heaven is a city surrounded by great high walls made, not of stones, but of gems. The walls have gates, gates not made of wood, but of a single pearl each. The city itself is composed of gold, but the gold is as clear as glass. The city has no Temple, but God and the Lamb are its Temple. There is neither moon nor sun, yet there is no need for light for God and the Lamb are present there. There are rivers as bright as crystal, trees which bear twelve different kinds of fruit all year round, and the purpose of persons in that place is to worship and serve God day and night though there is no way to tell time. Such is the description of the place in which we are to spend our life everlasting. Of course, John's picture of the afterlife architecture, while it may be extremely interesting, raises as many questions as it answers except for one thing, except for the one common thread which binds all of his vision together, and that is the word "life."

 

The word life is the theme which holds John’s vision together. Life is something which does not end the moment we cease to breathe; life will not be confounded by death. Much of John’s language in the Revelation seems incomprehensible to us; it makes no sense. But for a moment let us imagine with our hearts  and place ourselves in a city, a community with high walls where we are safe from attack. We will live forever in a city whose inhabitants are those who know the love of God in their lives; evil doers remain outside. Within the city are the tree of life and the water of life, accessible to all who live there. Death will be no more. There is no Temple in which to worship God but that's ok because we will have immediate access to God himself. There will be neither lamps, nor sun, nor moon and again that's ok because God's presence is all we need to illumine our lives. The quality of our life everlasting is that of life free from fear, free from death, lived in community and filled with the very intimate presence of the living God. It is not physical life as we know it; it will be so much more. It will be life as the real thing rather than the shadow lands in which we live today.

 

*****

 

Once upon a time, twins were conceived. Weeks passed, and the twins developed. As their awareness grew, they laughed for joy: "Isn't it great that we were conceived? Isn't it great to be alive?" Together, the twins explored their world. When they found their mother's cord that gave them life, they sang for joy: "How great is our mother's love, that she shares her own life with us!"

As weeks stretched into months, the twins noticed how much each was changing. "What does it mean?" asked the one.

"It means that our stay in this world is drawing to an end," said the other.

"But I don't want to go," said the one, "I want to stay here always."

"We have no choice," said the other, "but, fear not, for maybe there is life after birth!"

But how can there be life after birth?" said the one. "We will shed our life cord, and how is life possible without it? Besides, we have seen evidence that others were here before us, and none of them have returned to tell us that there is life after birth. No, this is the end, and I am afraid." And so the one fell into deep despair, saying: "If conception ends in birth, what is the purpose of life in the womb? It's meaningless! Maybe there is no mother after all?"

 

"But there has to be," protested the other. "How else did we get here? How do we remain alive?"

 

"Have you seen our mother?" asked the one. "Maybe she lives only in our imaginations. Maybe we made her up because the idea made us feel good."

 

The last days in the womb were filled with deep questioning and great fear. Finally, the moment of birth arrived.  When the twins had passed from their world, they opened their eyes...and they cried, for what they saw exceeded their fondest dreams: "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor mind imagined what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9).

 

To say “I believe in the life everlasting” is to say that to encounter God in Christ is to encounter life not merely for its longest duration but at its deepest level. It is to acknowledge that God desires our company, our companionship, our communion for more than a few mortal moments: he desires it forever.

 

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