The Fourth Sunday in Advent
Series on the Four Last Things
Text: I Cor. 2:9,10
The Rev. Jerry D. Kistler

                                                                  “Heaven”

We’ve come to the fourth and last Sunday in Advent, our season of preparation for the coming of Christ. And
so we come to the last of the Last Things: the Christian’s hope, the eternal home-land all believers long for, the
country of our true citizenship, the place of the fulfillment of all things God’s has planned for man and indeed
for the whole universe, the eternally blessed reality we know as Heaven.

I’m immediately faced with a terrible difficulty in trying to preach to you about this place we’d all like to know
so much about. The problem is, when we open the Scriptures, we don’t find any detailed descriptions about
what our heavenly home will be like. The Scriptures speak much about the truth of there being a Heaven, and
that it is the reward of all those who believe in Jesus Christ, but they reveal very little about what sort of place
it will be, and what we will do there. In fact, what the Scriptures seem to be saying is that, in our present
condition, to know more than just the faintest glimmer of the truth of Heaven is totally beyond our
comprehension. We don’t yet have the capacity to know more than faint shadows of the glorious truth of
eternal blessedness. For, as St. Paul said, quoting Isaiah: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it ever even
entered the imagination of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”

So how do I preach about it? How do I speak about a subject that is beyond all speaking? With what words do
I try to describe to you what is, for us right now, beyond all words? Even where we find the most detailed
descriptions of heaven - in the book of Revelation - St. John not only sees but relates to us his heavenly visions
in signs and images and symbols taken from the Old Testament. Heaven is seen as the New Eden and the New
Jerusalem, and it’s pictured as having the dimensions of a cube. Why? Because Heaven is going to be a box?  
No. But because Heaven is being pictured as the perfect Holy of Holies, the place in the Temple where God’s
visible presence dwelt, the proportions of which were one-to-one-to-one.  

But to speak of heaven without the use of symbolic language is really beyond us. I think the greatest thing I
could say to you about Heaven and be totally accurate is that “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it enter
into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” But I’ll venture to say a little
more.

There’s another difficulty that I’m faced with as I approach this subject, and that is that we in our culture and
even in the Church today are generally bored with the whole idea. And I think this is for a number of reasons,
chief of which, perhaps, is that for years the only vision of Heaven people have been given, either by
Hollywood, or sadly by the Church, is a kind of sappy, sentimentalized or literalistic reading of the Biblical
revelation.  Heaven is the place where you get to sit on your own puffy white cloud strumming a harp and
giggling for eternity. Sounds more like Hell to me!
Or Heaven is conceived of as an eternal church service where we get to sit around the throne of God in a big
circle singing praise choruses ad infinitum. Ad nauseam is more like it!  

Or we get the youthful Billy Graham version of Heaven. In one of his revivals back in 1950 Billy spoke very
specifically about the world to come. Heaven, he said, was a place “as real as Los Angeles, London, Algiers or
Boston.” It is “1,600 miles long, 1,600 miles wide, and 1,600 miles high.” Once we’re there, “we are going to
sit around the fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us, and we’ll drive down the golden streets
in a yellow Cadillac convertible.”  A yellow Cadillac? Heaven forbid! At least it could have been a white BMW!

But with those kinds of images of our eternal reward being just about the only thing they’re ever given, no
wonder people are basically bored with the whole idea of Heaven. The world is a much more interesting place,
even with all the pain and suffering we have to endure, against that kind of lifeless backdrop.

Then there’s another reason why I think people in our culture and in the church today are bored with Heaven,
and that is that we are basically entertaining ourselves to death.
Think about it. Today through our technology we can see and experience virtually anything we can imagine.
We go to the theater or flick on the computer and we see things that are totally impossible in the real world,
things that push our minds to the point of total sensory overload. We can create our own visions of the perfect
world, or even of heaven itself, and yet it’s never enough. It never satisfies. And so as things go in the world
of entertainment, what was one week the most incredible, mind-blowing spectacle of your life, is next week’s
old hat.  To keep us entertained things have to become ever louder, ever more spectacular, ever more violent,
ever more interactive. And yet we’re still bored! We’re bored because nothing we can imagine can ever fulfill
our greatest longings. Yet we are forever seeking fulfillment through our imaginings. This is the trap of
entertainment. Our hearts and minds become more and more fixed to this world  - or to the virtual world – and
we become desensitized to the real world as a sign pointing to a greater reality, a sign pointing to Heaven.  The
modern mind has gotten to the point, says Peter Kreeft, that “When the skies roll back like a scroll and the
angelic trump sounds, many will simply yawn and say, “Pretty good special effects, but the plot’s too
traditional.” That’s where we’ve come, because our souls are being entertained to death.    

But where can people go to get a reality adjustment? Where can they go to get a real glimpse of Heaven? When
the church gives up the Biblical images and symbols of heaven - light and jewels and robes and stars and
candles and trumpets and angels and trees and thrones and crowns and incense and water and bread and wine -
when the church gives up those things for what is entertaining, then where can people go to have their worldly-
mindedness challenged? Where can they go to make them look up beyond this horizontal plane, to something
exalted, to something high and lifted up, to something eternal and that surpasses the imagination, to the hope of
something that fulfills our greatest longings? Where can they go?

In the Middle Ages men built cathedrals with huge, high ceilings and towering stained glass windows. Some
ceilings were/are as high as 185 feet.  The modern mind enters and says, “Look at all that wasted space. We
could get at least two, maybe three, floors of office space and classrooms in all that empty space!”  But the
medieval mind entered into those huge, open spaces, and saw something larger, something beyond this earthly
building.

Have you ever been inside a cathedral? You get the sense that they’re almost bigger on the inside than the
outside. And if you look too closely at the building itself, you’ve missed the point. The cathedrals were meant
to point beyond themselves to something even more permanent and grand. Man alone of all creatures has the
wonderful ability to take the raw materials of earth -stones, and metals, and trees - which already proclaim the
glory of the Lord, and to fashion and shape them in such a way that they speak even more loudly and clearly of
God’s transcendent majesty and of the glory of his kingdom. That’s what the cathedrals were for. And that’s
what all of our forms and symbols and ceremonies are for. They’re not there for mere aesthetics. If you’re
interested in crosses and candles and paraments and vestments for their own sake, you’ve missed the point.
They are to be pointers to a greater reality. And it’s not that heaven is going to be like church. These things are
themselves still only pale shadows of that reality. But we need them. We need our Biblical symbols. For “eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it even entered the imagination of man the things God has prepared for
them that love him.”

Oh, there are any number of things that bore us with the idea or Heaven, or even frighten us.  The Scriptures
speak of Heaven as the place of our eternal Rest. But that bores or frightens us, because it sounds like we’re
going to be up there in an eternal state of inactivity - lounging around on our heavenly recliners while the angels
feed us grapes and massage our feet. That’s good for about an hour, but what do you do with the rest of
eternity?  Fortunately that doesn’t even come close to the Biblical doctrine of eternal rest. Rest in the Biblical
sense is to have rest from your enemies. Rest means we will have perfect rest from sin, rest from the burden
and struggle against our sinful desires, rest from the pangs and accusations of conscience, rest from the
temptations of the flesh, rest in the perfect love and mercy and forgiveness of our Heavenly Father for Christ’s
work of obedience, rest from guilt, rest from fear, rest from pain and sorrow.  Rest doesn’t mean inactivity.
On the seventh day God rested. But Jesus says that even until now the Father works and He works. What will
we be doing in heaven? Worshipping for eternity? Yes. But more importantly, we will be made perfect
worshippers, so that in whatever we do, in whatever tasks and activities God gives us, we will perfectly glorify
Him. That’s what we were made to do in Creation, so that is what we will do in the Redemption. Beyond that:
“eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the heart of man the things which God has prepared for
them that love him.”

I think we fear that Heaven is going to be a place where we live a totally disembodied, phantasmal existence, a
place of pure spirit, and where the physical has been completely done away with. But that is the very opposite
of the Biblical view of heaven. Heaven is going to be so physical a place - even beyond the physical as we
know it - that we’re going to have to have resurrected and glorified bodies - bodies like Jesus’ glorified body –
to be able to fully participate in and enjoy our heavenly country, a more solid and tangible country than this one
in which we now live.  Imagine it!

C.S. Lewis did imagine it.  My very favorite book of his is about a bus-ride from Hell to Heaven. It’s called The
Great Divorce. And he wrote himself as the main character. He was one of the people who came up on the bus
from Hell. And he describes his vision of Heaven as he got off the bus. He says, “I was alone in the bus, and
through the open door there came to me in the fresh stillness the singing of a lark. The light and coolness that
drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise, only that
there was a certain difference. I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space,
than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they
could be on this little ball of the earth. I had got “out” in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem
an indoor affair.”  

That’s how C.S. Lewis, the master of imagination, saw it in his mind. But… eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
nor has any man ever imagined the fullness of the truth of what God has prepared for those who love him.  

The Biblical truth is that the earth itself will also be resurrected and glorified and will ascend into Heaven, as
Christ ascended. To deny the physicality of Heaven is to deny the Incarnation of Christ. And to deny the
Incarnation is Anti-Christ.

Then one more reason I think we’re bored or even afraid of Heaven is the idea that Heaven will be a completely
static reality, one eternal moment, no change, no possibility of development or growth. And again, I don’t
believe that this is the Biblical notion whatsoever. Heaven will be the eternal contemplation of God. But because
we will forever remain finite and God infinite, we will, as Kreeft says, be engaged in “the endless and endlessly
fascinating task of exploring, learning, and loving the facets of… the inexhaustible nature of God.”  Heaven
won’t be one eternal moment of staring at God on his throne, but an eternity of exploring and growing in the
knowledge of God. And to be eternally growing in the knowledge of God is to be eternally growing in the
knowledge of his love. And to grow in knowledge of his love, is to grow in our love for Him, and for one
another.

But “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for
those who love Him. But,” Paul continues to say, “God has revealed them to us through His Spirit.”  In other
words, have faith in God’s revelation to you that your heavenly reward will be a reward; trust Him that it will
be beyond anything you can imagine or at this point you can even desire; trust Him that all your greatest
longings will there be fulfilled; trust Him that you will have rest from you sins, and that knowing Him and
seeing Him face to face will be your greatest reward; Trust Him for Heaven. Even if you’re a little bit
frightened, or even a little bit bored with the idea. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of
things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).  In that faith, “seek those things which are above;” “lay up for yourselves
treasures in heaven,” “set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.”

C.S. Lewis said, “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”; aim at earth and you will get neither.” But
I would say this: seek God through Christ and you will get heaven and earth both thrown in.  “Seek ye first His
Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you,” – things that eye has never seen,
nor ear heard, nor have they entered the imagination of man, which God has prepared for those who love Him.
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