Do you ever think about heaven?
I’ll bet most of us do. We wonder what it’s like there. We
wonder what we’ll be like. We wonder what other people will be like.
Will we really see our loved ones in heaven? Will we be able to
recognize them? Will we even have a physical form? Or will we just
be spirits, floating around, with no particular shape or size to us?
Those and lots of other questions go
through our minds when we think about heaven. And we really don’t have
any answers. We really don’t know what heaven is like. But John,
the disciple of Jesus, was given a vision of heaven. And we read some of
it today.
Some of it sounds really awesome.
A rainbow surrounding the heavenly throne. Lightning and thunder
coming from the throne. Twenty-four elders around the throne, dressed in
white, with gold crowns on their heads. A sea of glass, clear as crystal.
And some of it sounds really
strange. Four living creatures covered with eyes. Six wings on each
of them. That sounds pretty scary.
Is that really what heaven’s going
to look like? I don’t know. If you believe it is, I cannot tell you
you’re wrong. And I’m certainly not trying to say I think John was lying
or made it up anything like that. I believe John described the vision he
was given by God as accurately as he could. It’s just that I suspect that
what heaven truly looks like is completely beyond the ability of humans to
understand. I think God showed John a vision in terms that John might be
able to understand. But that does not mean heaven necessarily looks like
that. It might, but it might not.
But I don’t think the point of this
passage is to tell us what heaven looks like. That might be the part we’d
like to know, but I don’t think that’s the main point of what John saw.
Look past how strange these
creatures are that John described, and look at what they’re doing.
They’re praising God. They’re worshiping God. They’re saying,
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.”
And when they do that, when they give glory and honor and thanks to God
the elders, those people who are sitting on thrones with gold crowns, fall down
before God. They lay their crowns in front of God and they say, “You are
worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created
all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”
I think that’s the main point of
this passage. I think that’s what we’ll be doing in heaven. No
matter what we look like, no matter what heaven looks like, no matter what else
we may be doing there, one of the things we’ll be doing there is praising God
and worshiping God.
Now, maybe that sounds strange to
you. Maybe you don’t think that sounds like much of a deal, to just
praise God and worship God all the time. Maybe it even sounds kind of
boring to you. If so, I’d like you to think about a few things.
Number one, this is the awesome and
holy and perfect and all-powerful God we’re talking about here. This is
the God that, as the elders said, created all things, including us. This
is the God who’s beyond our ability to understand. And we, as sinful and
unworthy as we are, we will be in the presence of that incredible God. I
think it may well be that all we’ll want to do is worship God and praise God.
I think we may be so overwhelmed to be in God’s presence that there won’t
be anything else we can think of to do but to praise God and worship God.
Having said that, though, I don’t
think praising and worshiping God necessarily means we’ll just be sitting
around. We can praise God and worship God by the things we do. And
if you look further in Revelation, it talks about God’s servants serving God.
It seems to me that means we’ll still have things to do. It seems
to me there will be ways we’re supposed to serve God in heaven, just like we do
while we’re on earth. It’s just that our service to God in heaven will
not seem like a burden to us. It’ll seem like a joy.
That’s what our service to God is
supposed to be like on earth, too, of course. And sometimes it is.
But it will be all the time when we’re in heaven. We will
constantly feel in heaven what we sometimes feel on earth--the incredible joy
that comes from being with God and serving God.
And there’s another aspect to this, too. If in heaven we’re
constantly praising God and worshiping God, think of all the things we won’t be
doing. We won’t be worrying. We won’t be arguing. We won’t be
struggling. We won’t be afraid of anything. We won’t be sad about
anything. If you think about it, there are times when it feels like just
that would be heaven enough for us--to be in a place where we have no worries,
no fears, no arguments, no sadness, and no struggles. What an awesome
thing that will be.
Now, of course, we can’t talk about
heaven without talking about hell. We really don’t know what hell is
like, any more than we know what heaven is like. There are a few
references in the Bible to fire, which is kind of the popular conception of
hell. And just like in the references to heaven, it’s not clear how
literally we’re supposed to take them. Just like with the description of
heaven, if you take hell as literally being a lake of fire, I’m not going to
tell you you’re wrong. That may be what it is. What I suspect,
though, is that just like what heaven truly looks like is beyond our ability to
understand, what hell truly looks like is probably beyond our ability to
understand, too.
But again, what hell looks like is
probably not the main point. It might be what we’d like to know, but I
don’t think it’s the main point.
If we look past the physical
description of hell, what we find is that hell is described as a place of
eternal torment. In other words, hell is a place of constant suffering.
And suffering can take a lot of forms. It can physical, but we can
also have mental or emotional or psychological suffering. And those kinds
of suffering can be just as bad as, if not worse than, physical suffering.
Most of us have probably been
through some form of suffering in our lives. But here’s the thing about
suffering. We can put up with a lot of suffering if we believe things are
eventually going to get better. We can go through a lot of suffering if
we have the hope that what we’re going through is not permanent. We can
keep going through our suffering as long as we have faith that it’s not going
to last forever, that better days are coming if we can just get past what we’re
going through right now.
But when suffering gets really hard
is when we lose that hope. When suffering gets really hard is when we
lose our faith. When suffering feels unbearable is when we no longer
think things will ever get better, when think things will never change and the
way things are now is the way things will always be. It is really hard to
go through suffering when we don’t have hope.
And where does
hope come from? Hope comes from
God. God is our hope. So to me, what hell really is, is the absence
of God. Just as in heaven we are
constantly in the presence of God, worshiping God and praising God, in hell we
will have no hope of ever being in the presence of God. In hell, we will be totally cut off from God. We will suffer with no hope of things ever
getting better.
Have you ever felt that way here? Like you were cut off from God, like you were
suffering and God either did not know or did not care about your suffering,
like God had abandoned you? I’m sure
some of you have. I have. And it’s a pretty miserable feeling.
That’s part of the story of the cross, after all. Jesus was suffering. He was arrested and he was tortured. And he was hanging on a cross, dying. And he put up with it all. He did not even complain about it. But then, he felt like God the Father had
abandoned him. He cried out, “My God,
why have you forsaken me?” That was the
only thing that really got to Jesus, the thought that God the Father had
abandoned him. To me, whatever else hell
might be, that’s the real meaning of hell:
being totally cut off from the hope that comes from God.
But the good news is that we don’t have to feel that
way. Because God has promised to never
leave us. God will not abandon us. Can it feel that way sometimes? Yes.
But I can tell you that, for me, the reason it feels that way is because
I’m trying to tell God what to do. I
want God to respond to my prayer in a certain way, and when God does not do
that, then I assume God is not hearing my prayer. I forget what it says in the Lord’s
Prayer. It’s not “my will be done”. It’s “thy will be done”.
So let’s do everything we can to do God’s will. Sometimes that may involve suffering. But we can endure it, because we know our
suffering will not last forever. God is
here. God is with us. So let’s worship God and let’s praise
God. Because with God, we are never
without hope. God sees what we’re going
through. And at the right time, God will
respond. And things will get
better. 
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