“God’s ‘Happily Ever After’ Story”
(Heaven Series: Part 1)
Gen 1:1, Rev 21:1


I. Introduction to Heaven Sermon Series

In the book of the Bible called Ecclesiastes in verse 3:11 we discover a sustaining promise and driving desire:  “God is making everything beautiful in its time.  God has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

The sustaining promise is that God is making all things beautiful in its time.  We have a parallel promise in Revelations 21:5 where Christ promises us that He is “making all things new.”  No matter how much sorrow, suffering, and injustice there is in this world, or in your life, God promises us that He is making all things beautiful in its time, and that Christ in the business of renewing all things.

But here’s the catch, because our immediate experience in this fallen world is a life full of trial and a world full of suffering, it is hard for our hearts to believe this promise fully all the time.  So God, in His mercy and grace, has also put into our hearts a driving desire.

The driving desire is this:  God has placed in every human heart an awareness that we are designed to live forever.  This awareness, this “eternity in our hearts,” creates a hunger within everyone to try to fathom how our life fits into God’s bigger plans.  We also yearn to know just what our life will be like after we pass from this current life into our eternal state.

So what we see then, is that this God-given promise and this God-given desire work together:
  - The more we see how our life, and all human history, fits into God’s Story, the more our hearts trust that God is making all things beautiful in its time.
  - This trust is what empowers faith, hope, and love.

And so, today we begin an extended sermon series on the topic of heaven.  Today’s sermon will be just an introduction and an overview.  

Now Heaven is a topic that is of great interest to believers and unbelievers as well.  So I strongly encourage you to begin to invite friends, family, coworkers, schoolmates, and neighbors to come hear this series.  There will also be printed invitations available, hopefully by this Friday that you can use as well.


II. Why Explore the Topic of Heaven?

Because God has placed eternity in the hearts of all humans, all throughout human history we have developed beliefs about heaven.  Randy Alcorn, in his book on heaven, a study that I will be drawing on for much of this sermon series, gives us a brief overview of some of these different beliefs.

“Australian aborigines pictured Heaven as a distant is¬land beyond the western horizon.  The early Finns thought it was an island in the faraway east.  Mexicans, Peruvians, and Polynesians believed that they went to the sun or the moon after death.  Native Americans believed that in the afterlife their spirits would hunt the spirits of buffalo.  The Gilgamesh epic, an ancient Babylonian legend, refers to a resting place of heroes and hints at a tree of life.  In the pyramids of Egypt, the embalmed bodies had maps placed beside them as guides to the future world.  The Romans be¬lieved that the righteous would picnic in the Elysian Fields while their horses grazed nearby.”  From the introduction in the book Heaven by Randy Alcorn

So there are all manner of erroneous, mistaken, or incomplete views of heaven.  And I am asserting that any belief system of heaven that is less than the full truth will not exert the depth of power, comfort, longing, transformation that our hope of heaven should foster.  This is why we are going to take as many weeks as we need to explore fully what the Bible reveals about heaven because to do so will significantly empower our faith, hope, and love.

So what do you think of when you envision heaven?  Chubby cherubs floating around on clouds playing harps?  Disembodied spirits engaged in a never-ending church service?  Pearly gates, streets of gold, and reconnecting with loved ones?  Now I don’t know about you, but the vision of floating around in a disembodied state in endless singing sounds a bit boring compared to the exciting pleasures, and purposeful activity that are available on planet earth.   

Now of course, the promise of being in God’s unhindered presence is the supreme and all-sufficient-in-itself blessing that makes heaven attractive.  But to deny that we have other longings as well is to deny how God has made us.  God has created humans with a longing to be engaged in purposeful activity, to enjoy recreation and relationships, as well as to worship God.  

So praise God, listen to what we will discover in this study:  In exploring what the Bible says about heaven, we will discover how all of human history fits into God’s grand plans of establishing an eternal kingdom.  This eternal kingdom will include a new physical planet earth, a new physical universe, and a new physical Jerusalem.  We will live in new physical bodies on this new physical earth engaed in meaningful work and exciting recreation.  

On this new planet earth and all throughout this new universe, all creation, animals, nature, humans, angels, whatever other created beings God has already made or will make, will dwell in harmonious, intimate relationship between one another, and best of all, with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  

Now that’s a future I can get excited about!

So we are going to explore this topic of heaven for all these reasons:
•    Our trust will deepen that God is making all things new and beautiful in its time
•    We will be empowered to persevere through trial as we discover how all trials reap eternal reward
•    Our hope will be strengthened which is our comfort in sorrow and struggle
•    We will be enabled to say no to the immediate pleasures of sin or overindulgence in worldly pleasure as
       we fully believe that heaven’s pleasure will be far surpassing  
•    Our faith will be strengthened so that we can reject cynicism or bitterness
•    We will serve God more sacrificially knowing that we are storing up treasures in heaven
•    Our love will be emboldened to tell others about God’s promise of heaven offered in Christ and gospel

So that all explains the 'What' that we are going to explore and the 'Why.'  Now let’s examine the how…


III. How Will We Explore This Topic?

This will be a topical study, meaning that we will be drawing on passages from throughout the whole Bible, as opposed to an expositional study that digs deep into one portion of Scripture.  We will explore an abundance of Bible passages in the coming weeks.  

We will be going through a series of questions like, “What will life on the New Earth be like?  What will our new Resurrection bodies be like?  How can one be sure he or she will be in heaven?  And other important questions like, “Do pets go to heaven” And, “Can it really be called heaven if they allow country music to be played there?”

Now another very important thing to explain about our study is this question:  What guidelines will we use to study the Bible?  We all know that faithful, Christian, brilliant, competent, highly educated scholars and theologians can all study the same Bible passage and come up with different interpretations.  This reality is certainly true when studying many of the passages we will look at in our heaven study.  So let me be very upfront about how I will be interpreting these passages throughout this study.

I am going to interpret each Bible passage from:
•    A Reformed theology perspective (which will be very different on many topics from what you hear from the majority of teachers in America right now)
•    A literal perspective (unless there is really sound reasons not to take a passage very literally)
•    A Biblically-informed speculation perspective (when a point is embraced by most Reformed theologians I’ll say so,
       and when I am just speculating on what might be, I’ll make that clear as well.)
•    A Narrative perspective (meaning that I believe the best way to understand the Bible is to see it as God’s inspired, authoritative, infallible Story)


IV. Getting the Big Picture:  God’s ‘Happily Ever After’ Story

For the remainder of this sermon, let’s use this narrative perspective to discover how this promise of heaven fits into the bigger story of what God is up to with creation.

The Bible, God’s Story, is an amazing book.  It is of course thee most amazing book!  It’s amazing because it is the revealed Word of God.  But it is also amazing in its structure   The Bible was written over a period of 1400 to 1800 years under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by over 40 different authors from all walks of life: shepherds, farmers, tent-makers, physicians, fishermen, priests, philosophers and kings.  

Despite these differences in occupation and the span of years it took to write it, the Bible is an extremely cohesive and unified book.  Indeed, the Bible is one, unified story, God’s redemptive Story of Salvation.  It is a story filled with drama, comedy, suspense, romance, tragedy, and mystery.  

And it’s a story that follows repeated themes.  Indeed, not only does the Bible Story follow repeated themes, but the story of the human race, and each of our life’s story, follows many of these same themes.  In knowing these themes, you can better understand all God’s story and our stories.  I’ll introduce these themes now, and we’ll come back to them often throughout this series.  

The charts of these themes are taken from an excellent and highly recommended book called “Restoring Broken Things,” by Stephen Curtis Chapman and Pastor Scotty Smith.
•    Creation----Fall-----Redemption----Consummation
•    Tree of Life----Tree of Loss---Tree of Love----Tree of Life
•    Harmony---Dissonance---New Song----Full Symphony
•    Banquet in Eden---Spoilage----Lord’s Supper---Lamb’s Wedding Feast

Let’s look at God’s Redemptive Story of Salvation:

In Gen 1:1 we read:  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  The first humans were placed in a perfect garden of beauty, goodness, truth, full access to the tree of life, and unhindered intimacy with one another and with our triune God.  And then we read of tragic rebellion, of talking and deceptive serpents, of expulsion from paradise, and banishment from the tree of life.  Yet even in the darkest of chapters, we discover a promise of hope, “the serpent’s head will one day be crushed by a mighty hero!”  

God’s love and life always finds a way, and God always has a plan.  

We flip through the pages and discover a God who relentlessly pursues us with unconditional love and inexhaustible grace.  We discover a chosen people though whom this mighty hero will come.  And we discover this chosen people perpetually cycling thorough the themes of rebellion, repentance, rescue, and restoration over and over again.  

Yet even in the darkest of chapters of rebellion, violence, futility, and despair, we discover promises of prophets like the one in Isa 65:17:  "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth.  The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind….the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.”  

God’s love and life always finds a way, and God always has a plan.  

We flip though the pages and we discover that finally, the mighty hero has come!  The chapters are exciting, the lame healed, the blind see, the forgotten remembered, the oppressed delivered, the bound set free, the captive rescued!  But we turn the page, and tragedy strikes again…our hero is murdered.  This cannot be!  Who wrote this story anyhow!  We quickly turn the page, and in hope against all hope, our hero rises from the dead, crushes the serpent’s head, and conquers death and darkness!  

God’s love and life always finds a way, and God always has a plan!

But wait a minute…  We look up from God’s Story to examine our life story, and the story of humanity around us.  We are confused.  I thought our hero was the victor over death and darkness?  What’s all this ongoing suffering, sin, death, and injustice?  So we turn back through the pages, we discover that God’s Story is still being written, and you and me are central characters.  We discover that we live in this in-between times, between Christ’s first and second comings to planet Earth.  

Even though the ultimate victory is assured, we discover that we are still at war with the eternal destiny of human souls at stake.  No, we cry out, we don’t have the courage, we don’t have the strength.  So we turn through the pages, and we discover our hero’s promises. “I will never leave you or forget you.  

We read further our hero’s promise: "Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Trust in God; trust also in me.  In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.  I am going there to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.  You know the way to the place where I am going."  And this promise of heaven once again comforts, sustains, and empowers us.  

God’s love and life always finds a way, and God always has a plan!

We turn to the end of the Story, just to be reminded once again in the face of our current chapter of trial and sorrow, that God’s Story does indeed have a happy ending.  

We read in Rev 21:1:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.”  We can’t get enough of this good news so we read more, "Now the dwelling of God is with people, and he will live with them.  They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."  He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!"  
Wow, just like the promises from Isaiah!  

We read on in Rev 22:1-5:
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city.  On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.  And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.  No longer will there be any curse.  The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.  They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.  There will be no more night.  They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.”  

Wow, we even get back the tree of life in this new paradise!  

God’s love and life always finds a way, and God always has a plan!

Our God is writing an amazing and good story with the human race, and with your life.  Do you believe that in your deepest heart?  If not, be honest about that struggle with yourself, with God, and with a trusted friend or counselor.  The power of your faith, hope, and love is directly related to how deeply you believe this to be true.

As we explore heaven together, we will discover and be assured that the story God is writing with humanity, with all creation, and with the life of all those who have personally surrendered their life over to Christ as Lord, hero, and savor, is story that does end with…”and they all lived happily ever after!”

Now that’s the story line you want to hear about your life.  The story line that I know you all long to hear right about this sermon is this… “The End!”