Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Well, I'm excited about this, mainly because I've been excited as I've begun to get into the scriptures and remind myself about what I know already and discover a whole lot of things that I didn't know before. I don't know whether it's my age, but the older you get, the more interested you get in heaven. And somebody said, well, so many more of your friends keep going there that it starts to make you a little curious as to know what it's all about.

About five or six years ago, I taught a small course on heaven and hell, just four messages. Now, this is only going to be six, but the interest that it piqued amazed me. And I began to ask myself why is that? Because to me, I thought everybody knew about heaven and everybody knew about hell, so what is there new to learn?

But sometimes it's what you know already that you need to look at again. Going deeper with God isn't necessarily learning something that you didn't know necessarily. Maybe it's just beginning to do the things you do know already. That's really getting to grips with the Lord.

But as I began to look at these things again myself, I began to get this huge sense of expectancy about the afterlife and also a huge sense of urgency because I realized there are so many people that are living without hope. In the vocation that Stuart and I have, we go to many, many funerals. And I am always amazed to see my husband in that particular situation and the calm he brings when he walks into the funeral home.

I don't know whether it's just the sort of assurance that he has about him anyway, it's just as if everybody breathes a sigh and relaxes and leaves the job to him as soon as he walks in the door. But it's a whole lot more than that. I have seen him conduct funerals for people that have committed suicide. I have seen him—the first funeral we had was a two-year-old child that fell out of the car and was killed by a car.

The second funeral we had was a lady that escaped from a mental home and threw herself under a train. We were only here a week and we had to go and tell the three teenagers what had happened. We arrived five minutes after they knew, seeing they'd been watching the news and nobody had bothered finding out if they knew first. So I know a little bit of the shock of the bereavement and the funeral that follows and all that death can mean.

I, of course, have lost my mom and my dad and some other relatives. Stuart has lost his mom and his dad, so personally we have been here before. But as I bring you some of the things that I've been discovering myself, I want to tell you right from the beginning, the Christian has a hope. And when I say a hope, it isn't a hope. It's a certainty. The word has totally lost its meaning, like the word love in 1 Corinthians 13 has lost its meaning today.

The hope of the Christian is a certainty because God has told us enough to make us certain that there is a heaven, that a God that took the trouble to become a baby and grow up like you and me so that he could tell us adequately what it's all about has laid out for us, not only in the scriptures but by his own word.

So we're going to start today, and today and next we're going to talk about heaven: where it is, what it is, when it is, why it is, who inherits the afterlife, who doesn't. Will the people I expect be there when I get there? Will the people they expect join them?

I came across a lovely little poem: "I dreamt death came the other night and heaven's gate swung wide. An angel with a halo bright ushered me inside. And there to my astonishment stood folks I'd judged and labeled as quite unfit, of little worth and spiritually disabled. Indignant words rose to my lips, but never were set free, for every face showed stunned surprise, no one expected me."

And I like that. I am absolutely sure that when we get there, we're going to be amazed, and so are other people. Heaven. Everyone has his or her own ideas about it. The Milwaukee Journal very obligingly took a poll for me, which the week literally that I began the series appeared. And it was just entitled, "God picks up strong support in newspaper." That was quite a good headline.

The poll found that most of us in Milwaukee felt we'd wind up in heaven. In fact, 90 percent of us think we'd do based on the life we've lived up to today. Can you believe that? 90 percent of the people living in Milwaukee then believed that they would end up in heaven based on the life that they'd lived. Well, I think that there are going to be some surprises if their opinions haven't changed.

96 percent of the people in Milwaukee believe that there is a God and 90 percent believe that there is a heaven. But if you ask those same people what heaven was like, you would get a variety of answers as varied as the thousands and thousands of people that live in Milwaukee. Most Americans have faith in a heaven and expect to find their way there.

What did the poets think of heaven? I had a marvelous time getting this ready because I love poetry, as some of you know. William Blake said, "To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour." He saw heaven in a wild flower. Maybe that's heaven. Look at a wild flower and that's it.

Milton: "What if earth be but a shadow of heaven?" He had an idea that earth was the shadow and heaven was the reality. Wordsworth: "The dawn that came alive, but to be young was very heaven." He believed actually in heaven and in Christ, but at this point when he was writing this poem, he believed that to be young was heaven. Well, that cuts a lot of us out, I think, looking around.

Thomas Campion: "Heaven is music and thy beauty's birth is heavenly. Beauty is heaven. Music is heaven." Those of us that love music, we think we'd certainly been carried to heaven, perhaps sitting listening to a favorite piece of music. But is that heaven? We use the word very loosely indeed.

Now, the sort of traditional idea of heaven is summed up, I think, in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. "Lo, as they entered," that's Christian and Hopeful, if you remember, had arrived in heaven through the gates. "They were transfigured and they had raiment put on that shone like gold. I looked after them, and behold, the city shone like the sun.

The streets also were paved with gold, and in them walked many men with crowns on their heads, palms in their hands, golden harps. There were also of them that had wings, and they answered one another without intermission, saying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord.' And after that, they shut up the gates, which when I had seen, I wished myself among them."

Commenting on this, Mark Twain in his Letters from the Earth, taking Satan's thoughts on this, writes this. This is Satan speaking: "Everybody sings. The man who didn't sing on earth sings there. The man who couldn't sing on earth is able to do it there. This universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet. It goes on and on and on, all day long and every day. And everybody stays, whereas on earth, the place would be empty in about two hours. Consider the deafening hurricane of sound. Millions and millions of voices screaming at once. I ask you, is it hideous, is it odious, is it horrible?"

What do you think about when you think about heaven? Some people say, "I think there's something in that. I don't like singing, I don't like music. If that's all heaven is, maybe I'll come straight back instead of going through the gates." Most religions of the world have different ideas of heaven. Did you know that? Did you think that every religion in the world has a heaven? Very few religions in the world have a heaven as we in our Western American Christian culture think.

Religions have a pathway. All paths lead to a sort of heaven in some sense or to a common goal. What is that common goal? It isn't heaven. It's release of some sort. Release from pain, release from anguish, release from trouble. So you can say that all the major religions of the world certainly have a common goal. And all religions claim to provide release of some sort, but there's absolutely no agreement what man must be released from, what this release is.

But let's just take the first major religions: Islam. That's about the nearest to Christianity that you can get. Islam and Christianity believe some general facts about heaven. Both hold these things in common. Except the Muslim has doubts about women being in heaven, except the wide-eyed houris or maidens who are there for their pleasure.

In the words of one of their books, "Surely the God-fearing shall be in a station secure among gardens and fountains, robed in silk and brocade, set face to face. Even so, we shall espouse them," that is those that get there by martyrdom or by keeping all the commandments, etc. "We will espouse them to these wide-eyed maidens, calling for fruits, drinks," you know, the whole sort of party that we perhaps have down here elevated to a heavenly realm. That sort of idea. Rivers of milk and unchanging in flavor, rivers of wine, a delight to the drinkers. The Muslim's idea of heaven is about the nearest we get.

Buddhism. Well, Buddhism is a sort of fatalistic idea. The idea is to escape from the trouble of this life and from pain. They use the illustration of an onion, a giant onion, and they say if you just start peeling the onion, then when you get to the end of the onion and there is nothing left, that's heaven. It isn't a place, it isn't a state, it is nothingness.

Of course, the big thing is who you're going to cross over with, cross over into this peeling onion state so that you can begin to lose the trouble and the worries that you've had. So they don't have a sense of a state or a place such as heaven. It's an escape that they're looking for.

Hinduism. It's a great big storehouse. All religions and religious experiments can find their place in Hinduism. It's impossible to say which is true, it's impossible to say which is false if you're talking to Hindus. There is a kind of infinite tolerance about the Hindu religion, and a lot of the New Age thinking has come to us from the Eastern mysticism and from Hinduism in particular.

The animist. There are many people that believe once you are dead, your spirit is released from your body and that's how it is. No heaven, nowhere to go, just an endless wandering around. And this is where the animist, if you travel as we've had the privilege of traveling into the darkest regions of some of the most primitive places in the earth, many of these people are animists and they have this total horror of the concept of the afterlife because they believe that their spirit will wander aimlessly forever, whatever ever is.

But nowhere very nice. The best that the animist can hope for is that the spirit will become an intermediate between God whom they believe in and man, but he never goes to live with God wherever God is. He just wanders aimlessly around. I have talked to somebody not too long ago on a plane that believed that.

So the grave is the seal of everything for this reason and humans become simply disembodied spirits. Some are good, some are bad. That is the view of the spiritualist, too, that there are good spirits and there are bad spirits depending whether you've been a good person or a bad person here on earth. You just continue in the afterlife in that way.

Judaism. Surely Judaism has something to say about heaven. Well, in the Old Testament, our eternal existence was sort of determined by our moral behavior, says Judaism. The Old Testament is vague concerning heaven. And many Jews even today believe that we Christians, if we profess to be Christians, are selfish because we are concerned too much with personal eternal rewards. "What lives on," said a rabbi in a quite famous book, "what lives on when we die are our children. They are our legacy." Interesting thought.

What about the "isms" as the Christian would call them: the humanism, the Marxism, the atheism, the existentialism, the rationalism, cultism? The humanist. Well, heaven is here. It's Utopia, isn't it? Humanism is "man is good." If there was a fall, it was a fall upwards. It is our environment that makes us what we are, and it is up to us to pull ourselves up with our bootstraps. And when we arrive at Utopia here in America, that will be heaven.

Marxism, on the other hand, is Animal Farm, the Orwell thought. Heaven is here. We look to the state to provide heaven for us. Atheism says heaven is pie in the sky. They don't believe in a heaven. God does not exist, neither does his heaven. Existentialism says heaven is now. If it feels good, it must be right. If you have a good time with sex, that's heaven—existentialism. Rationalism, same sort of thing.

And then there's the cultism, which I haven't got time to get into. Let me just take for an example the Jehovah's Witnesses who believe that only 144,000 people will make it to heavenly glory. Yet, of course, the Christian believes that the book of Revelation talks of the countless multitudes on high. Mormonism: every man who reigns in celestial glory is a god. We are god, man is god to his dominions.

So where do we go? So many ideas. I remember when I first went up to college at Cambridge. I was unchurched. If you'd asked me or if you ask me now, did I believe in heaven, I don't know what I would say to you. I can't remember. It seems so long was that the same person as I am now? No, certainly not. Christ changed me, made me a new creature.

But I did live 19 years of my life without God and without hope and without Christ, and certainly without a hope of heaven. If I believed in heaven, it was a sort of glorified earth with everything removed that made earth tough here. That's what heaven would be. But that was the extent of my little belief, my meager belief.

What an incredible thing it was when I first came to Christ to be presented with a Bible that claims to reveal enough information for us to know there's a heaven, to know there's a way to get there, and to expect us to be interested enough to figure it out. That was a total revelation to me. The Christian believes that God does not leave us to speculate. Speculation isn't going to get us the answers. Revelation has given us the answers.

It's a little bit like in Genesis 11 when man began to be scattered over the earth. We read about in the Bible they came to a big plain and they said, "Now what we need to do—everybody speaks the same language here—we need to build a city that's never been built before. We'll just get everybody together on this thing. We are all together, we all speak the same language, we all have the same heartbeat. Let's build a city so that we make a name for ourselves. And what's more, in the middle of it, we will build a ziggurat or a tower." The word is ziggurat.

A ziggurat was a huge tower because they believed that the nearer you got to heaven, the nearer you got to God, believing God was up, and therefore the cleverer you would be, the more you would be able to see God and figure him out. So the taller you could be, the cleverer you would be at figuring God out.

Man would speculate, man would work it out, man would search, man would look, man would reason until he had God and he knew all about heaven. And God came down, it says in figurative language, to look at the tower that the men were building. And he said, "If they've started to do this, they can do anything they want to do. But I'm going to show them that they cannot by searching figure me out." And he confused their language there. That's why it was called the Tower, the Ziggurat of Babel, confusion.

And the tower was never completed because God wanted man to know that there was a revelation, that he would lean out of heaven and say, "Listen, little man, little dustman," as I often so say. "Little dustman with your little dust brains that I made from dust. I am going to tell you all you need to know. You cannot figure it out with your clever little dust mind, however clever your little dust mind is, and it's clever.

It can do many, many things, but it can't figure me out without the work of the Holy Spirit. I will show you, I will tell you." Revelation is where it's at. And this wonderful book, the Bible, is not a scientific textbook telling us how the heavens go. It is a book about faith and doctrine telling us how to go to heaven.

So we don't need to look in here for a scientific answer to where heaven is or what heaven is, because it didn't purport to be a science book. We need to go and buy a science book if we want to learn about science. But if you want to learn about God, you want to know him and you want to know if you're going to live with him forever and all about heaven and all about hell, then God has graciously preserved his written word.

And in case it all got messed up, I guess, he came in person: Christ the logos, the Word, who was with God in the beginning, became a baby, grew up to tell us the truth about heaven and how important it is that we figure it out his way.

The word heaven itself means concealment. It implies incomprehensibility. It means concealing or concealment. And in 1 Corinthians 2, we read these words, Paul writing: "Eye hasn't seen and ear hasn't heard, neither has it entered into the little dust mind of man what God has prepared in heaven, wherever it is, whatever it is, for those who love him."

So our eye hasn't seen, our ear hasn't heard it, it hasn't entered our mind. It is so incomprehensible. I can throw out a whole lot of pictures, which I will in this series. I can throw out a whole lot of images for you, which are here in the Bible for us to try and grasp. And when we finish, it'll just be as if we're a little kid walking into a science laboratory and we tap the nuclear physicist on the shoulder, and here's this little three-year-old saying, "Explain it all to me."