What's the Point in the End?

Nathan Adams · Tidal Church Moncton · January 29, 2023 · What's the Point? series

Nathan Adams closes the series by looking at heaven and hell through Scripture's metaphors, including Isaiah 66, Luke 16 and 1 Corinthians 15. He shows that eternity is real, that heaven magnifies life, and that God lovingly invites everyone to trust Jesus now.

More from Nathan Adams · The What's the Point? series

Topics: Hope, Faith, Mission & Outreach

Transcript

[0:00] I hope you've enjoyed this January series called What's the point? Dr. HC Wilson opened us up asking us to remember the point of finishing, and he shared that great story of the last place finisher in the Olympics from Tanzania, one Olympics, who came across that line and they said, "Why didn't you quit?" and the runner said, "My country did not send me to start the race. They sent me to finish the race." And what was so exciting was to hear how God used that word, and there's some people that said, "I'm going to finish the race. I've been wavering, but I'm going to finish it." Just so amazing to see that. And then we shared about how God is Creator and He's created us in our work to have a point in what we do, and we give our daily lives to Christ. Then we even talked about the point of gathering together at all in church, and some of us were challenged to stop taking easy ways that make us weak and to come together and fellowship.

[1:02] Last week was amazing with Teen Challenge, wasn't it? I mean, what's the point? They had lost the point of their lives, and Jesus gave them back the point of their lives. And today we're going to finish by talking about, what's the point in the end? So what is the point in the end? Heaven. Right? Is everyone in agreement? Okay, it's been a good service. Actually, people are largely in agreement about heaven. More people than not, whether they're church people or not, they believe in heaven. It's because the teachings of Jesus have totally permeated our culture and our psyche that we believe in heaven. And the only reason that His teachings were believed is because there's a claim that He died for our sins and rose again.

[1:54] And it is on that claim that we believe and trust our lives to Jesus, that He will also raise our bodies from the dead and we will live forever and ever with Him in a new heaven and a new earth that we can only begin to imagine. The importance of the words and actions of Jesus regarding heaven and resurrection are impossible to underestimate. However, they are possible to take them out of context. When Jesus spoke about heaven, He almost always juxtaposed what He had to say about heaven with hell. He compared and contrasted them. For example, in Matthew chapter 25, there's a series of three parables or stories where Jesus is talking about the fact that at the end of this life and the end of human history, we will all appear before the judgment seat of God, and God will separate all of humanity into two groups based on what the response to Jesus Christ was, as evidenced not by just what they say they believe but what their actions prove they believe.

[3:09] So for example, Matthew 25:34, "Then the King will say to those on His right, 'Come, you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.' And then He will say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' And these will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." Do you see that? Eternal life, eternal punishment contrasted? Compared, juxtaposed, and they both go on forever. It is extremely difficult to imagine heaven and how my father and mother recently went to the Grand Canyon and showed me the pictures.

[4:06] It's not the Grand Canyon though, is it? No. What had caused their jaws to drop and their eyes to be filled with wonder caused me mild amusement as I looked at the pictures. But I've had the same thing. I went up to the top of Whistler once in BC, and it blew my mind and I don't know how to communicate it to you, but let me try. Have you been on the chairlift at Poly? Up to that little hill they call Holy Mountain. It kind of goes. Well, I was on the gondola anyway, up the mountain, and instead of going up the mountain for five minutes or so, it went for 25 minutes up the mountain.

[4:52] When you get out at the top of Whistler, you feel like you're closer to space than earth. You can see everything from all around, but I still don't think you have it, because if you've only been in Eastern Canada, you've only seen hills, not a mountain. Okay, who's been to Canada's Wonderland? All right, Canada's Wonderland. How about that? Drop Zone? Have you been on that? 230 feet high. I went up that, me and my three brothers. We started men at the top. We were babies. Dropped us down and then we stumbled around for about five minutes before we got our equilibrium back. Imagine ten Drop Zones. One, two, can you see it? That little speck in the top of the sky. That's Whistler.

[5:39] So what I've done to help you imagine, I've taken you, giving you something that you know a little bit about and try to describe it. I've used a metaphor. Metaphors help us imagine real things that we have experienced, real things that we have not experienced, based on real things that we have experienced. The Bible uses metaphors to help us imagine hell and heaven. It says, imagine this, it's a little bit like this, sort of. One metaphor for heaven is of a restored earthly paradise, a new Garden of Eden. The book of Isaiah closes with a great vision of heaven, and God says, "See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad forever and rejoice in what I will create."

[6:33] And it gives this vision of heaven, saying it's kind of like a super abundant life, where no one dies young, where everything's full of harmony. The lion and the lamb can lie down together. It's going to be absolutely amazing. It's gonna be like a glorious city in which God is in the middle and the people see the glory of God face to face. And so almost the last verse of the book of Isaiah says, "As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before Me," declares the Lord, "so will your name and your descendants endure from one new moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before Me," says the Lord.

[7:22] But then catch the very last verse of the book of Isaiah that immediately follows. And they, these people in heaven, "And they will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against Me. The worms that eat them will not die, the fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind." That is the strangest thing. It's almost like they're in this heavenly city, coming in and out sometimes, and on the way in and out, they noticed the garbage dump full of the people that didn't make it. And it says that they're dead, but they're not quite dead. This image of hell as a death is a deeply biblical image. In Revelation it calls the lake of fire the second death, and it uses that term four times in the book of Revelation.

[8:21] It's as basic as the gospel truth in Romans 6:23, that the wages of sin is death. And when we think of death, we do think of something ending. Jesus' own words bear this out. He says, "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." So something about the human person is destroyed or ending when they go to hell, but something is remaining too. As if the process goes on eternally. I need to add one too in there, one o in there.

[9:07] So another metaphor that the Bible uses to describe heaven and hell to us is that heaven is a bit like a rich person's feast, and hell's a little bit like a homeless person's agony. So Jesus tells the story. And can you just enter into the story with me for a moment? There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died, and the angels carried him to Abraham's side.

[9:56] Heaven. The rich man also died and was buried in Hades. Where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. So he called him, "Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire." But Abraham replied, "Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us."

[10:46] So the rich man in hell answered, "Then I beg you, Father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so they will not come to this place of torment." Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the prophets," the Old Testament, "let them listen to them." "No, Father Abraham," he said, "but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent." And he said to them, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced, even if someone rises from the dead." That's some serious foreshadowing. We see a few things here. First, in heaven and hell God brings final fairness to those whose lives were unfair.

[11:34] This world and life can be very unfair. And heaven and hell are part of the balancing of justice. Secondly, people in hell are in conscious agony. Third, the desire of someone in hell is that no one else would come to this place, to this end. The Bible has many passages that use this metaphor of ongoing conscious torment or agony. Revelation, which called hell an eternal death, also refers to it as eternal suffering. And it says in Revelation 14, "And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever. And they have no rest, day or night."

[12:21] And Jesus, speaking of those in hell, how He said it, that they are thrown into outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. We are definitely dealing with metaphors, because on the one hand, hell is referred to as a place of fire, and in another place, in Jesus' words, it's a place of inky darkness. These are just trying to describe the horror of being separated from God, away from His glorious light and life. We see the same contrast in one other verse in 2 Thessalonians 1:9. It says, "They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might on the day He comes to be glorified in His holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed."

[13:19] You see, you have eternal destruction, which sounds like a death metaphor, and you have eternal torment in being separated from the presence of the Lord. The Bible says that God is the ultimate source of every good and perfect thing, James 1:17. And evil is simply the absence of good. So let us imagine together for a moment. Imagine good things in your life. You can close your eyes if you want and just start imagining some of these good things. Experiences, people, that perfect day when the sun shines and good feelings flow.

[14:06] And now if we take this goodness and we amplify it to the maximum, we are beginning to glimpse heaven, where the glory of God will shine like a sun at every moment and our souls will bask in His light. But now let us imagine hell as the absence of every good thing. So many wrong things are pleasurable because they are in fact a twisting of something good, or mixing in of something good and something evil. But the good in hell is totally withdrawn. There is nothing left to mix with the nothingness of evil.

[14:52] There is no pleasure left in it. It is the utter withdrawal of all good, and the person in hell is left with absolutely nothing at all. My friends, this is why. This is why we rejoice when people are baptized. This is why we are offering Alpha for people to explore their faith in this coming few, seven weeks. This is why we go after the lost sheep from our congregation. Because these things matter. This is what it leads to, these ultimate realities. Now, one thing I find that few people consider about heaven and hell is the question of the magnitude of life in both situations.

[15:45] C.S. Lewis once pointed out that when we think of the next life, we often think of it simply as a change in location. I, as I am now, will end up here or there. But the Bible tells us in fact that there is a change in the magnitude of the person in the next life, depending on the location. Paul explores this idea in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. He opens the chapter saying that the whole of Christianity is based on this resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if He's not raised, we won't be raised, but if He is, He has been raised, we can be raised.

[16:31] And then he gets, in verse 35, to a question. But someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?" How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or something else. Are you catching that metaphor of the seed that Paul is using? He's saying that our present personal existence is very small now compared to what it will be in heaven. We are like a kernel of wheat in this life.

[17:20] But in the next life we're going to be like the whole stalk of wheat. We will have grown and expanded as people and as beings, he says. If we're like a little kernel of corn in the next life, we're like the whole bunch of cobs of corn on the stalk. If we were like an acorn now, we'll be like an oak tree in heaven. And I'm not talking about size. I'm talking about who we are as human beings is greatly magnified, and Paul tries to describe it again in verse 42. The body that is sown, the body that is sown like a seed in the ground, is perishable, but it is raised imperishable.

[18:06] It is sown in dishonor, but it's raised in glory. It's sown in weakness, but it's raised in power. It is sown a natural body, but it is raised a spiritual body. Body and spirit have permeated one another, and we live with a magnitude of life that is directly tied to the source of all life, God, Father Almighty, and we participate in that love that the Father has for the Son through the Holy Spirit. It's a life that expands, that is tied to the endless creativity of the Creator. It's a life with nothing but future before, with endless eternal horizons to explore and endless love animating it, making it pulsing with joy.

[18:57] Can you see that? But like Jesus, we must now juxtapose this vision of heaven where life is massively amplified with the vision of hell, in which life is radically diminished. If heaven is the whole stalk of wheat and this life is a little kernel of wheat, then hell is the empty husk of a human being. If a person in heaven is like the full stalk full of cobs of corn bursting with life that came from that one little kernel of life and potential and goodness, is hell a hollowing out of all that was ever good about that person, and the remnant remains?

[19:57] And if heaven is like being an oak that came from the acorn, is hell the leftover tops scattered all over the place that never became what they were meant to be? You see, our balancing scales of justice are off when we wonder why when we wonder why God created humanity. If the way is narrow and few enter the path of life, but broad is the path that leads to destruction. See, we've been weighing each life not by its eternal potential but by its current weight in this life, seed for seed, kernel for kernel, acorn for acorn.

[20:44] And we go, there seems to be more going to hell than heaven, and we go, "God, what are you doing?" But in eternity we're not weighing seed to seed. We're weighing full stalk, hundreds of seeds to an empty husk. We're weighing the full cobs of corn on the stalk for the one empty. We're weighing oak trees against acorn tops, and the scales of justice are firmly in God's favor. It will be shown that He has made a good and beautiful thing in creating all of these things. You see, heaven sees the giant that is to be.

[21:29] Did you know that this Wednesday night at youth group 14 teens gave their lives to Jesus from death to life? These are huge things. But hell is eternal separation from God that removes all His goodness from us and leaves us with the bare remnants of human existence in an eternal torment. That is also an eternal ending of all we could have been. I wonder if one of the reasons that young adults and others are so fascinated by movies about the undead, with zombies and ghosts and things, is that the fictionally undead are a small idea of what the spiritually undead and tormented will be like for all eternity. Now, people in hell aren't ghosts.

[22:33] Everyone will be raised with the new body of the last judgment. So they're not disembodied spirits. People in hell are not zombies. They're not mindless, but they're people that are alive and not alive who are in torment, who were so full of potential, and now we're not. It's a great delusion that a lot of people suffer with. They think that if I just end this life, everything's over. But in fact, everything is just beginning. And how we leave this life can impact how we spend the next life.

[23:20] So what is the point in the end of someone that doesn't make it to heaven? There is no way to blunt the harshness and sadness of that loss. We consider our own loved ones in that potential, although we don't ever know exactly how it's going to end for them. We are not the judge, but there actually is a point that people in hell I think Did you catch how the rich man in Hell said? Could you send someone to warn the others? Did you catch in that verse in Isaiah? how the people in heaven go out, and they're aware of how you see, in the first start of human existence, in the Garden of Eden. There was a big question.

[24:12] Is there anything good outside of God? And hell is the eternal answer that says there is nothing good outside of God. And so God did not make us to compel us to love Him. He gave us freedom. But in heaven, I don't think anyone will ever misuse their freedom, because the question has been answered. Everything good that there is in God. And we must be connected to Him forever. The only way to be saved is to believe in Jesus Christ, the God become human, to live this life and defeat our sins, pay the price of death for our wages of sin, and to rise with new and glorious life that He can share with you today.

[25:13] That's what being born again means. It means that the Spirit of Christ has come into you and made you alive spiritually and prepared you for an eternal existence when your whole being will be made new. Some people are very offended by teaching about hell, but no one is more offended than God. God was so offended by hell, and He loved the world so much that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. He was so offended by eternal death and suffering that He sent His only Son to die and suffer.

[26:02] He was so wanting you to hear the good news that He made sure that the number one selling book in the whole world by a hundred times over is the Word of God. He was so committed that you would hear about Jesus Christ that He has sent His disciples into every nation on this planet with the good news of Jesus Christ. He has been so concerned about your life that He has peppered your life with Christians, people that know what it all means in the end. From the moment you were born, He has had His eye on you. He has poured one good thing into your life after another, that you might know that He is good and that He loves you.

[26:51] And today by His Holy Spirit, He speaks to you in your soul and says, "This is true. I love you. I love you. I love you. I have gone to the ends of this earth to bring you to Myself, to share My glory with you, and I will never force Myself upon you, but I am now inviting you to respond to Me." This is the heart of God for you. We're gonna sing a song now. My wife Jen is going to lead it. It's called "I Can Only Imagine," and it invites us to think about the amazing power and glory of heaven that is in store for us.

[27:44] It challenges us at the same time to think about the alternative. And I want you to, I want each person that is listening online or present in this room to be able to go out of the doors or out of this meeting and say, "I know the point. I know where I'm going to be. I not only believe in Jesus, but I will line my life up with those things so that at the last judgment there is no doubt about who I love and who saved me." So if you would stand right now. I want to invite you to come down to the front as this song is sung. I invite you to kneel at these altars. The Bible says that at the end, whether in heaven or hell, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

[28:38] And for those knees that bow now, for those knees that bow willingly now, heaven is in store. And the seed of this life will begin to blossom. It might shoot out a little shoot that says, "Hey, something more is coming." It will fill your life with meaning and purpose. The Lord will enter in, and you will have the peace that passes understanding, knowing where your eternal destiny is, knowing who's got you in between here and there. So I invite you, if you're home in your living room, to kneel on your floor and put your hands up to God and say, "I accept Jesus. I commit my life to Him," much as the people who are baptized today.

[29:26] I'm going all in with Jesus. I invite you to come down now and make that happen in your life, and we'll have prayer team members that can help guide you in prayer. Just come down as we sing. And let's worship the Lord. Let's anticipate what lies before us. Let's ask Him to help us to imagine something so incredible, so unbelievable that it is the most important thing we could ever hope for. God bless you.