Popular Mechanics Tells Readers How To Find Heaven?

Second Peter chapter three.

And so this past week, as I'm kind of thumbing through, and actually two weeks ago, as I'm kind of thumbing through, okay, what are we talking about from the news?

I mean, I know everywhere in this world where a sovereign God reigns and he reigns everywhere, he cannot be hidden.

And so he shows up in the most unlikely places.

And so uh several weeks ago, I read an article that came out earlier this year in Popular Mechanics of all places.

And the title of the headline announced that physicists believe they have found the physical location of heaven.

Never would have thought in all the places.

Like I would expect to read that in Christianity today or you know, some other Christian uh publication.

But in popular mechanics, well, as it turns out, the deeper you go into fields of science, once you get down to the to the level of the cosmologist or the physicist, you you start hearing things about God because the bio the biologist can easily pass the baton down to someone else and say, it just looks like that this thing has design, but there's not really design there.

But as they pass the baton down through the deeper layers of fields of science, they get down to the physicist, and the physicist looks back up at the entire camp and says, guys, it's really weird down here.

I mean, it's really, really strange.

And so physicists are fantastic people to read whenever you're looking for examples of what is happening in this world that God is controlling.

And so, anyways, so uh one of the uh physicists, the actually the headline individual in this article is a man named Michael Gulon who suggests that heaven is located, in case you're wondering where to go to to find it, heaven is located near the end of the observable universe, two uh 279 billion trillion miles from here.

So you may want to pack your bags and start now if you're heading to get there on foot.

That's his idea.

Another physicist suggests that actually heaven is folded up into a smaller dimension within the space that we live in here.

And if you don't know what that means, then you're not alone.

I'm not sure that he knows what it means.

But I found this particular physicist quote to be kind of catching because, of course, not every physicist is willing to accept the possibility that maybe in this very complex world that they're examining, there's a place for heaven and for God.

And so there's a lot of pushback concerning whether or not this is rigorously scientific.

The individual who suggested that heaven was perhaps folded up in some sort of dimension that it's kind of like right here, but it's it's in a it's in a way that we can't, it's in a frequency, frequency we can't really experience.

His name is Michael uh Pravaka, and he is at the University of Nevada.

The other Michael was at the University of Harvard.

You may have heard of that one.

And uh, but Michael Pravica said this.

He said, I'm a physicist, but I'm also a human being.

I have the right to imagine what's beyond the bubble.

You ever stopped to consider, to imagine what's what's beyond the bubble?

What's after this?

I I know for some of you, I mean, for me included, and perhaps for folks who are watching online, like when I think about what heaven is like, it is, it goes in the category of unbelievable.

I mean, it's tough to wrap my mind around even the glimpse that we have of heaven.

It's unbelievable.

But it is no more unbelievable than the idea that this universe stands on its own as an eternal fixture, or that uh one day it's going to evaporate in the heat death of the cosmos.

Those things are equally unbelievable.

And for years, as I've been a Christian like you, I've kind of done what Michael Pravikov has done here.

And I've imagined what lies behind the bubble.

Now we do get some glimpses of what heaven is actually like in Scripture.

But as I was looking through this, I noticed that there's not a lot of detail about what happens there.

Peter gives us the call to look for it to happen.

2 Peter 3, verses 11 and 12, Peter raises the question concerning what's going to happen to this entire cosmos, to the world.

2 Peter 3:11

It's going to be burned up, it's going to fall apart, it's coming to an end.

That can be good news at times.

For his readers, it certainly was, because his readers were being persecuted, they were being challenged.

Life was not great for them.

They were not living the American dream.

It was tough.

And so Peter comes to them and says, listen, this is just all going to erode, anyways.

There's nothing, even if you have the good life here, it's not going to last forever.

Eventually, it's going to erode, it's going to implode, it's going to fall apart.

And Peter points that out.

And then he says, Since this is the case, what manner of people ought we to be?

And then he immediately answers it in verse number 11, in lives of holiness and godliness, right?

Doing what is right, making the most of our short time here so that God can receive the maximum amount of glory from our imperfect lives.

Waiting, he says, for the waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God.

You get the sense of this eagerness, this willingness to let everything here go to attain what God has set before us in heaven to come.

We are called to be people who look and hasten and await eagerly the coming of the Lord.

For me, I'm just going to tell you like my week looks something like this.

Monday, like I'm hastening the day.

Like when Monday comes around, I am looking deeply and waiting for the coming of the Lord.

If Jesus were to come on Tuesday morning, I would be okay with that.

But like most of you, by the time I get to the end of the week, my mind is just spread around and I got things to do, and I'm not so eagerly looking for the coming of the Lord, but we are called to do that.

And so here's what I want to do this morning is I want to examine one statement, and I want us to move through it looking at three specific encouragements that were given from this single statement.

And all of them are biblical.

All of them focus in on heaven as paradise.

He doesn't use the word heaven.

That would have been okay, but he uses the word paradise.

Paul, of course, talks about being caught up into the paradise of God.

And then later to the church of Ephesus, Jesus tells them that if you want to enter paradise, there's a certain way that you should be focused and turned.

Now, those are the only three occurrences of the word paradise in all of Scripture.

And that's important because each of these verses tells us something, they show us a different facet of what heaven is going to be like.

The word paradise actually comes from a Mid Eastern word uh pardais in Hebrew and uh pardaeus in uh in Chaldean.

And when we think of paradise, I don't know about you, but my image is typically of you know some perfect city, some perfect place, you know, streets of gold and and and you know, towering stones and marble, and and that's true, the New Jerusalem, but the word paradise, some of you are gonna love this, the word paradise or parades in Mideastern terms referred not really to a city, but to a garden, to a forest.

Specifically for the Persians, it was the hunting ground of the king.

And why is that important?

That's important because when you and I are called to enter paradise, our invitation comes from the king.

And our hearts should be drawn to look for it.

So let's just look at this phrase here together.

Those who love Jesus should be looking for heaven.

Those who love Jesus should be looking for heaven.

Now I know it's a simple phrase, but it's very deep, and we're going to unpack it together over the next few minutes.

And my heart is when we leave this place, we will be people like if if if we love, we should look.

Are you with me?

People who love Jesus should be looking for heaven.

Here it is, number one.

People who love Jesus should be looking for heaven.

Sometimes we think that the greatest enemy to Christianity is humanism.

Humanism is that uh worldview that believes that we have to live for down here and make the most of every moment down here to accumulate the most money, the most sex, the most attention, the most fame that we possibly can down here, because this is really all there is.

And so it's all about like humanism tells you that the humans are the end objective.

Your experience is the end objective of all of all of creation.

Now, as Christians, we look at that and we know like that tastes bitter to us.

We know it's not the case, but yet many of us live as though we're functional humanists.

A humanist would use his 401k to attain what he felt like he needed.

A humanist would use his network, his clout, his education to achieve the goals that he wanted to accomplish for himself or herself.

I have been at this a long time, and I have faced the temptation myself, and I have seen many others do the same, face the temptation of basically turning their Christianity into another form of humanism.

See, the truth is some of us, our objective is like we talk about heaven and we give heaven its accolade and we talk about going and we feel like, hey, maybe someday I would like to go, but like I'm really living for the moment.

If we're honest, we're really living for the moment.

And our goals in life, the living righteously, the affirming what's correct in culture, the you know, the way we vote, the way we talk, the way we share, what we're really trying to do is to just make this world a better place.

Now, there's nothing wrong with this world being a better place.

And there's nothing wrong with our 401ks doing for us what they were designed to do, or to lean on our network that God has blessed us with.

But if the end objective of all of that, if that all stops right here in this place, then we are, as we discussed last week, some miserable people.

Because humanism, even if it's practiced using Christian tactics, ends in the grave.

Real hope doesn't lie in this world.

Real hope lies in heaven.

We should be people who are looking for heaven.

Luke chapter 23, verse 42 tells us about Jesus.

Luke 23:42

It gives us the account of Jesus on the cross.

And you were you recall the story, he's there and he's mocked and spit upon and abused by everybody, including including the two thieves that are dying next to him.

I mean, you would think that an awareness of death would make us less humanistic.

But it doesn't, does it?

For these two thieves on the cross, they're just joining in the crowd.

Maybe in the back of their mind, they were thinking to themselves, at least I'm not the lowest man on the run here.

I can abuse someone and join in with the crowd and feel like I'm with, or maybe they thought to themselves, you know, if if we mock him enough, maybe people will see that we're we're with them, and maybe there's some subtle hope to get us off this cross.

We don't really know what was going through their mind, but what we do know is at some point, those two thieves, one of them stopped mocking and riling, uh, railing against Jesus.

And he turned to the others and said, and said, Listen, this, don't you get it?

Don't you get it?

We we are up here justly, like I belong on this cross, and so do you.

But this guy hasn't done anything wrong.

And then he turns to Jesus and he says, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Jesus turns to him and gives him that very famous promise that we all long to hear.

Truly, he says, Today you will be with me in paradise.

See, in the same way that the the paradise of old was the abode of the king.

It was his forest, and no one came into his forest.

It was his garden, and no one came into his garden except by invitation.

This individual had to be invited into the king's garden, into the king's, uh, into the king's forest.

And don't you know, like staring death in the face, that there was nothing left here for him to hold on to.

I think you know where I'm heading to with this.

Most of us in this room assume that we have longer here in this place than the thief had on the cross at that moment.

But there is no guarantee of that.

And even if that is the case, the truth is this life that you and I live in, that we enjoy at this moment, is going to come to an end.

And whenever it does, what happens next?

We should be people who are living as sojourners, the same way that Abraham lived, the same way that Isaac lived, lived, the same way that Jacob lived.

And the author of Hebrew said, they all lived in faith, not having received the promise, but having, and I love how the writer of Hebrews says this, having greeted it from afar, out in the distance.

Hello, home.

Just like miles away, yes, but they knew like it was that close, and that's what they were looking for.

They were hastening to the day.

They were people who were who were looking for heaven, who were looking for home.

Alright, so those who love Jesus should be people who look for heaven.

Those who love Jesus specifically should be those that are looking for heaven.

For heaven.

Whenever you think about heaven, what's the image that comes to mind?

I mean, something has got to come up, right?

It's impossible for for it just to be a word.

Can I just be honest with you for a moment and share with you what comes to my mind whenever I think of heaven?

I'm not proud of this, so please don't tell anybody.

But I'm 12.

I'm back in East Tennessee in a little church.

It's um I think it's Christmas time.

In fact, I know it's it's Christmas time.

And and I don't know why, but they're doing a play at Christmas, and it was called Gates of Heaven, Gates of Hell.

Now, if you've not seen it, um no need to Google it.

I'm just going to tell you, it's completely heretical.

Totally off.

Um, Peter is not standing at the Pearley Gates uh to mark your name off some list.

That's that's not how it works.

There's not a choir law behind him of a family that's just you know waiting on you.

I mean, so far as we know, the objective, the centerpiece of heaven is is not the the tent where your family reunion gathers at.

The centerpiece of heaven is the throne room of God where the lamb had been slain and stands there now ruling over the cosmos.

And so when we look for heaven, we are looking for something uh indescribably beautiful and yet um totally, totally unlike anything we've ever seen.

I mean, that's what Peter says in the book of Ephesians, or Paul rather, he says that look, I hasn't seen nor ear heard, it's not even entered into the mind of man, what God has in store for his elect.

But the one thing that we do know in all of this is that our images of heaven, the heaven that we are seeking, the one that we are pursuing, the one that we, our hearts, like if you really are going to be drawn to heaven, if you really want to be the kind of people who are looking for heaven, we have to be the kind of person who knows what the real draw of heaven is.

So you may think of heaven as like some some beautiful uh uh gated cul-de-sac where you're gonna have your very own mansion and at a large palatial estate and someplace where you can finally be alone.

And that's not enough for you to suffer the things of this world.

The truth is, is that's just you saying, okay, I want prosperity.

I know I'm not gonna get it now.

Maybe I will get it later.

But prosperity without the presence of God is not prosperity at all.

Prosperity without the presence of God is simply a description of hell.

That's what's actually happening in the great judgment zone of eternity in hell.

It's it's the greatest pains of hell aren't the sensations of of fire and loss and damnation.

It is separation from God.

Listen, I'm here to tell you if our imagination of heaven is focused in on those things which we want to receive that we didn't get down here, and God does not appear like dominantly in the mix of what we're seeking in the next life.

I'm here to tell you like we have some serious soul searching to do for whether or not we are in this for the right reason.

Paul has this beautiful image of heaven, and it is indescribable.

He tells us about it in the book of 2 Corinthians.

By the way, just food for thought, in the Bible, we have a number of people who saw heaven from a distance.

You know, the heavens were opened up and the celestial beings were dancing and singing and circling the throne, and both uh the vision of Isaiah and then also in John.

We have a number of people who've who've glimpsed into heaven, but so far as I can tell, we only have two people who have gone to heaven, came back, and gave any sort of description of what it was like.

How many of you would have liked to have interviewed Lazarus the day after he raised from the grave?

Like I would have, I would have really enjoyed sitting down and asking him a couple of questions.

There's nothing, there was nothing given from his testimony.

There were only two people who brought back testimonies.

One of them was Jesus, of course, and Jesus did not come back teaching us about heaven, where its location was, or even so much what it was like.

Jesus was much more focused on how we get there.

Peter, whenever he comes back from heaven, this is what he says to the church at Corinth in his second letter.

He says, earlier in the verse, he says, I know a man who was caught up to third heaven.

Don't know if it was in the body or not.

God knows.

And then here in this verse, he says, I know, he restates his experience.

He says, I know a man who was caught up into, here's the word again, paradise, into the garden of God, into the great king's hunting ground, into his forest.

Whether it was in the body or out of the body, I do not know.

God knows, and he uh and he, this man, Paul is referring to himself in the third person here, heard things that he cannot, that cannot be told, which man may not utter.

In the Greek, literally, it's it would be illegal for him to speak these things.

That they're not able to be described.

We don't fully know what heaven is, but we know it is far better and far more, far more complex and beautiful and multidimensional than what we can possibly imagine.

What we are seeking, like if all we are seeking is our own personal view of heaven and what it's going to be, we are letting ourselves down because the crown jewel of heaven is the God who sets at the center of it.

And this is what Paul tells us that when we got there, he's he he is experiencing something that is indescribable, and it presses on him so much that it humbles him.

Those who love Jesus should be people who are looking for heaven.

Those who love Jesus should be those who are look here, listen, who are looking for heaven, who are looking for heaven.

Now in the book of Revelation, we get some description from Jesus to the church at Ephesus concerning their love.

And you recall the indotment of Ephesus, even if you don't remember the indotment of any of the other churches, the one at Ephesus.

Probably stands out for you because it's the one that pierces the heart of so many churches that do a lot of good things, that do well, and have a lot of great ministries, but so often it's easy for us to focus in on doing on attempting to do what is good and to avoid doing what is wrong and all the while forget the thing that is most important.

The indotment we read in verse number four of Revelation chapter two, John says, but I saw Jesus says to the church at Ephesus, I have this against you that you have abandoned the love you had at the start.

And then at the end of his conversation with them, he draws them to this view of paradise and says, This is how you get there, this is how you achieve there, this is what you need to do.

Revelation 2, 7, he says, He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the church, to the one who conquers, I will grant to eat from the tree of life, which is in the what?

Paradise of God.

You know, it's when Kim and I were moving, we opened up this one box in our basement, and inside of it there was this folder that had all of this old documentation.

It's stuff that you keep, and then 20 years later you're not even sure why it's there, but you just can't let it go.

You know what I found in one of these boxes?

I found a couple of sheets of paper, and at the top it had a header and it said MapQuest.

How many of y'all remember MapQuest?

All right, before there were cell phones, there was there were web pages.

And one of the websites, one of the web pages was a place called MapQuest.

And what you would do is before you got in your car and you drove away, you would punch in the address of where you were going to, and it would give you the directions on where you needed to turn and places you needed to go.

And like, and and who knows what the traffic was going to be like whenever you got there, right?

It was just, I mean, it was, man, that that was roughing it, in my opinion.

So, you know, of course, uh, today we're so accustomed to like getting real-time plays on like what's happening on the interstate ahead of you.

Like you, you know, you know for a fact, you know for a fact, whenever you leave this location and you head to Roanoke, you're gonna get on the expressway, and immediately Google's gonna tell you there's an accident four miles ahead, and the delay is like 30 minutes.

That's that's how it works.

Um, but just imagine with me for a moment that you you you decide, okay, we're gonna go on vacation and we're going to leave our cell phones behind, which by the way is not a terrible idea at all.

Just to totally detach.

And so, so you get like you got you don't have that resource there with you anymore.

You and and your spouse, your friend, you right, you get into the car and you drive off.

And you come to a certain point where a decision has to be made about which direction you're going to turn, and your spouse turns to you and looks at you, or you know, your friend turns to you and says, Okay, which direction do we take?

And you say, Man, this place is gonna be great.

You know, there's a hot tub on the back porch.

Yeah, but what way do I need to turn?

Did I tell you the views are amazing?

Like you can literally see the mountains from out of the distance.

I mean, like you can hear the waves crashing.

That's great, but which way do I need to turn?

See, when we say we're looking for heaven, it's not just that we're looking for this pinpoint location.

Looking for heaven isn't really looking for heaven at all, it's looking for the way to heaven.

Because you can know the place all about it, you can have it imagine in your mind what it is, uh, biblically or otherwise.

By the way, you want to be very careful of individuals today who have gone to heaven and supposedly came back.

Those stories so frequently wind up fraudulent or extra-biblically uh focused when in truth the only thing we have in scripture that's given to us from the individuals who came back is from one a description that says this this can't be discussed, and from the other one saying, This is how you get there.

We should be people who are looking for heaven, not just for ourselves, but for others.

See, this is the way we avoid being humanistic is our objective, our goals aren't set down here.

Yeah, we should have goals for this church, absolutely.

We should have goals for our family, definitely.

We should have personal goals of growth and discipline, but the end of those goals, the key objective for those who love, is to look, to set our eyes on Jesus, who is the author and finisher of our faith.

You know, I don't know where heaven is.

Uh Michael Gullion may be right, it may be uh 270 billion trillion miles away at the edge of the known universe where the where the cosmic radiation just dissipates into eternity.

Maybe it's there.

Maybe it is folded up into some dimension that we can't yet see, like Michio Kaku would say, and that it's it's here.

It's kind of like we're on one radio frequency, but there are other radio frequencies that are out there as well.

And maybe maybe one of those radio frequencies is heaven.

Maybe it's there.

I don't know where it is, but I do know who is there.

And I'm not like you, I'm not seeking a place, I am seeking a person because the truth is heaven is wherever Jesus is.

And whenever he calls us into his side, the greatest joy in my life is not just going to be seeing lost loved ones.

Sure, I'm going to enjoy that.

It's not going to be simply being separated from the news of this world.

Oh, yeah, I'm going to celebrate that.

It's not being separated from this body of its weakness and its flesh and its sin.

The joy of heaven, the prize of heaven, the thing that I'm looking for is to be connected to my Savior because that's what I'm built for.

I don't make it here.

I this is like there's there's nothing here that I pursue that is here that provides me lasting joy.

I get my hand a hold of it, I grasp it, and then the joy fades.

But whenever I lean myself towards heaven and I pursue him, and I and I become the kind of person that because I love, I look, I find the greatest peace in that place.

That's not easy, is it?

Because this world is so distracting.

There are so many authentic needs, so many temptations to want to put up a permanent tent here to I mean, even in spiritual moments, to be like Peter and James and and John, whenever they saw the transfiguration, and there's Jesus talking to Moses and Elijah, and them saying, This is this is it, this is let's just stop here, let's just put up tent here, let's just camp out here.

This is good, this is a great place to be.

And the Father in heaven says, Listen, you you've not heard enough yet.

You need to, this is my beloved son.

You need to listen to him because this is not our home, this is not the place we set up our tent, our tabernacle.

Our we are sojourners in this land.

We are in exile.

We are those who are pursuing a better home like Abraham, and we are hastening the