Preached · July 9, 2017
A New Series
Well, good morning. Again, my name is Anthony Parrott, and I'm here on staff at Good News. It's good to see you all.
One thing we didn't say about the brisket last week, which I missed out on — I was on vacation, so kind of a win some, lose some there — but one thing we didn't say was that overnight, from like midnight to 3 a.m., that crew served well over a hundred hot dogs and hamburgers to folks coming out of the bars. And it was a wonderful opportunity of outreach and conversation, so I just want to thank that team that was there overnight, Steve Petty especially, for heading that up. I was shocked to see my colleague Steve at work the next day. It was amazing. Thank you, brother, for all your hard work putting that together. And all of you who stayed up late, put it together, cleaned up — it's just absolutely astounding.
Well, last month, we talked about how to be rich. And this month, we're changing gears, and now we're starting a new series, and it's called I'm Dead, Now What? And we're going to be taking a look at 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 and taking a look at grief and life after death and beyond.
This isn't my joke — I think this is Jerry Seinfeld's joke — but he talks about how public speaking ranks as the number one fear of Americans, higher even than death. Which means that if you're at a funeral, you'd rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. Now, if you're the preacher preaching about death, I'm not sure where that lands on fears about public speaking and death, but here I am.
Why Talk About Death?
We're going to spend four weeks talking about life and death and what happens after death. Why? Well, because death is the most common thing in the world. Recent studies have shown that one out of one people die. Did you know that? It's true. And unless Jesus comes back first, everyone here is going to die.
And it's a truth, a reality, that we don't like talking about all that much. It makes us uncomfortable. It makes us cringe. We want to think and talk about different things. It gives us anxiety. When we surveyed you about this a few months back, a little bit before Easter, a full third of you said that thinking about death and life after death gives you fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. And so we felt that we needed to talk about that.
But here's the number one reason why I feel that we need to talk about death and the afterlife. What we believe about the afterlife affects what we do in our present life. What we think about then changes how we live now. For those of you who like a large little vocabulary, our eschatology affects our praxis. Our theology affects our practice, how we live.
How many of you have ever played poker? Whew, good thing you guys are in church. Now, if you've ever played poker or any card game or any board game without money on the table, you play it with a certain amount of lackadaisicalness, right? The stakes aren't that high. The prize is maybe a little bit of honor, maybe a little bit of gloating rights. But that's about it. But as soon as you start putting money on the table in that poker game, things change, right? You start playing with a little bit more attentiveness. Because now you know that you're going to walk out of that room with either less or more money than when you walked in. How you play the game affects how you play it. So when we talk about death and heaven and hell and the afterlife, we're talking about some of the highest stakes there can be. We're talking about eternal, everlasting, forever-long kind of consequences. So again, what we believe about the afterlife affects what we do in our present life. What we think about the stakes changes how we play the game.
What Americans Believe About the Afterlife
So let's talk about some of our current beliefs in America about the afterlife. About 70 to 80 percent, depending on the poll you look at, of folks believe in some sort of afterlife. Religious or not, most of you feel that death is not the end. And this is true across the majority of cultures, across the majority of human history. Most people have this sense, this feeling, that death is not the end. 72 percent of Americans believe in heaven, and about 58 percent believe in hell. 72 percent believe in some sort of good, positive, pleasurable place that good people go when they die, while 58 percent believe in some sort of bad, negative, unpleasurable place that bad people go when they die.
82 percent of people who believe in an afterlife believe that the afterlife is only a spiritual, not a physical, existence. It's only spiritual, you don't have a body. So you're like a ghost, you're floating on a cloud somewhere. And this to me is a massive, massive concern. And it's a big reason why I felt we needed to talk about this. Because that idea of a solely spiritual afterlife is not Christian theology. It's not what the Bible teaches. It's not what Jesus taught. But we're going to get there.
20 percent of people who believe in an afterlife believe in some idea of reincarnation. This is the idea that your soul is eternal. When your body dies, it's going to bounce to a new body. And this is prevalent in Eastern religions, but it's also happening in Christianity, where people can confuse the idea of resurrection with reincarnation — that your soul continues and just bounces from body to body.
65 percent of American Christians believe that many religions can lead to eternal life or salvation. So more than half of Christians — people who believe in Jesus, put their faith in Jesus — believe that many religions can lead to eternal life and salvation. And this is tied in with the idea that if I'm good, I'll go to heaven when I die. And if anybody's good, they'll probably go to heaven when they die.
Back in the spring, we did another survey with you all. We like our surveys here. It's called Reveal. And Reveal asked a question of you all. It said, Do I believe that people who deliberately reject Jesus as Savior will not be granted eternal life? And the percentage of you that agreed with that statement was 55 percent. Which to me means that about half of you are playing at a low-to-no-stakes poker table. You have an idea that people can deliberately reject Jesus and still be okay on the other side of death. So when the stakes are this low, well, why bother evangelizing? Why bother telling other people about Jesus? Why bother with that at all? And what does this reveal about what we think about Jesus? Jesus' own words about being the only way to the Father. About him being the way, the truth, and the life. About salvation being through grace alone. Not about how good or bad you are, but by the gift of God through faith in Jesus.
Roadmap and Ground Rules
So that gives us an idea of the kinds of things we'll be talking about. Let me give you a roadmap of what we'll be talking about these next four weeks, as well as some ground rules for our conversations.
The roadmap. Week one, today, we're just going to be doing some introduction and background. We'll introduce our Bible passage to you, give you some biblical historical background. Next week, week two, Steve's going to be tackling the idea of how do we grieve as Christians? How do we grieve with people as people with hope? We know that in this room, probably all of us have dealt with death in one way or another. We've lost a dear one. So how do we grieve well? Week three, we'll be talking about life after death — the ideas of heaven and hell. And then week four, we'll be talking about life after life after death — ideas of resurrection and new creation. Plus some question and answer. Because when you talk about heaven and hell and all of that, there's lots of questions that can come up. So if you do have a question that you would like answered, we're going to try to do that all in that fourth week. You can send your questions to gncconline.com/imdead. I know you've always wanted to type that into your browser. And there, you can put an anonymous question. What's your question about life, death, the afterlife, heaven, hell, all of that? And then we'll do our best to get those answered by week four of this series, last week of July.
Now let's talk about some ground rules. When we talk about things like this that are somewhat controversial, we need some ground rules to guide our conversations.
Ground rule number one. The Bible is the best source of information we have about what happens when we die. The Bible is this library of documents written by a variety of authors across a long span of time. And the Christian church, for thousands of years now, has seen these 66 books in this library called the Bible as authoritative, that they speak the truth, and that they shouldn't be added to by any other source. And the founder of our faith, a guy named Jesus of Nazareth, he experienced death. He descended into the grave, into hell, and then — here's something you've probably never done before — he came back to life. So when it comes to issues like the afterlife, I'm probably going to listen to what Jesus has to say about it, because he's got some pretty good authority. So we're going to pay attention to what Jesus and what the Bible have to say about the afterlife. We're not going to add in a whole lot of other sources.
Ground rule number two. None of us — unless you're a ghost, and I don't know it — none of us are in the afterlife right now. So we've got to speak about it with humility and a little uncertainty. What we're talking about is inherently things that we don't have experience with. My job as a teacher is to let you know what some boundaries are as to what's orthodox and not orthodox, what's within the bounds of Christian belief or not. But within that, there's going to be a lot of things that we're just uncertain about. So beware of anybody — me included — who says, this is what the afterlife is like, no question, for certain, absolutely. Beware of people who say that.
Ground rule number three. Mere difference of opinion does not make you a heretic. When we start talking about things like this, we're going to be venturing into a bit of conjecture, best interpretation, and some of our own opinions. And Christians throughout the centuries have held a wide swath of beliefs when it comes to the bounds of Christian orthodoxy and historical teaching on the afterlife. So again, my job as a teacher, as a preacher, is to give you what those boundaries are. There's going to be a lot of disagreement in between those boundaries. And that's okay. In your conversations, when you run across somebody who has a different opinion than you, take a deep breath and say it's okay. The Apostle Paul, early church leader, tells one of his protégés, a guy named Timothy, this:
Command certain people not to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God's work. These people, they have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in constant friction.
Have you known anybody like this? Have you been anybody like this? I have. I've been the sort of guy who gets really into the deep intricacies and loves to debate people. And Paul tells this young pastor Timothy, tell those people not to do that. It's just creating friction. It's not doing a whole lot for anybody. So we're going to be the same way. We're going to avoid endless controversy. We're going to talk about what we can say with confidence. We're going to disagree on what we can't say with 100% confidence. We're going to love each other in the middle.
Our Passage: 1 Thessalonians 4
All right, let's dive into our passage. If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn to 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. In this book, again, early church leader, a guy named Paul, he's planted a bunch of churches. And he's writing to this church in Thessalonica about a certain situation that they're dealing with. We'll explain that situation, unpack it as we go.
1 Thessalonians chapter 4, verse 13. This is what Paul writes to this church. He says, we don't want you to be uninformed — some translations say, don't want you to be ignorant. Steve thought I should title this sermon Don't Be Dumb. The Bible has a lot to say about the topic of death, the afterlife, and resurrection. And all of us, we're some of the most literate people in the world. We have access to more books and more Bibles than anybody else in history. We have no excuse to be uninformed, ignorant, or dumb about this topic. Let's keep going. Verse 14:
For we believe that Jesus died, and he rose again. And so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not certainly precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself, he will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel, with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. And after that, we who are still alive and left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore, encourage one another with these words.
So Paul hits on a lot of topics in this passage. What happens immediately after we die? Does anything happen after that? What happens when Jesus returns? What was Jesus' resurrection all about? How should Christians grieve the dead?
The Kingdom and the Enthronement of Jesus
So let me give you a little bit of background and history. Jesus of Nazareth, who we call King, Lord, Savior, the Son of God, spent his ministry proclaiming and revealing his Father's rule and reign on earth as it is in heaven. And Jesus called this rule and reign the kingdom of God. This was Jesus' primary message. It's on every page of the Gospels: proclaiming the kingdom of God.
Now, first-century Jews — if you were with us for the story, you heard us talk about this — first-century Jews were expecting a Messiah, a new kind of king, who would come and establish this kingdom of God. They were waiting for the kingdom of God. But the Messiah they expected and the kingdom of God that they expected would be brought about by force and violence and war, by expelling the Romans and the Greeks out of Israel, Judea, Galilee. But then Jesus shows up, proclaims this kingdom of God, and it's a different kind of kingdom, led by a different kind of king — a king who dies for sinners, who experiences the totality of human suffering and temptation, a king who ends up dying on a cross, being executed by the state. Messiahs aren't supposed to die, and the kings of God's kingdom aren't supposed to be crucified. On the other hand, though, dead people aren't supposed to be resurrected either. And yet Jesus was. And so everything that Jesus had said and proclaimed and prophesied during his ministry — well, we might want to pay attention to him now, since he's the one who's risen from the dead and nobody else has done that yet. So we might want to pay attention to what he says about this kingdom of God, about being one with the Father, about the kind of kingdom that the Father is establishing through Jesus.
So when Jesus was resurrected, his followers, the disciples, they were still with Jesus, and they still thought that Jesus would eventually be the kind of king they were expecting, who would declare war on Rome and Greece and establish his kingdom through force. And we see this in Acts chapter 1. Jesus has been resurrected. He's hanging out with his disciples for some final lessons. And the disciples ask, Lord, is now the time that you're finally going to restore the kingdom to Israel? In other words, are you finally going to be the kind of Messiah that we've been expecting all along? And Jesus responds in verse 7:
Disciples, it's not for you to know the times or the dates the Father has set by his own authority, but you are going to receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all of Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.
And so Jesus says, you're going to receive power. And the disciples are like, Yes, what kind of sword am I going to get? What kind of shield? No, no, no, not that kind of power, Jesus says. It's Holy Spirit kind of power. The power that enables you to be a witness to what I have done. I want you to be a witness to tell the people what Jesus has done, to tell them what Jesus has said, to show them the kind of life that Jesus has lived. And then tell others the same thing throughout the ends of the earth.
And then the next verse, verse 9: after Jesus said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid Jesus from their sight. Now historically, this event right here, Acts 1:9, the church has called this the ascension. The ascension of Jesus. I think it would be less confusing if we called it perhaps the enthronement of Jesus. In our Christian creeds, we say Jesus sits at the right hand of God the Father. It's the fulfillment of an earlier prophecy in the book of Daniel, chapter 7. Daniel saw this event. He says:
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven.
Son of Man is what Jesus called himself. Daniel right now, in his vision, is in the throne room of God. And he sees the Son of Man coming to the throne room of God. And the Son of Man approached the Ancient of Days, God the Father, and was led into his presence. And the Son of Man was given authority and glory and sovereign power. And all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away. And his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
And so in Acts chapter 1, when the disciples see Jesus taken up and hidden by a cloud, they're seeing from an earthly perspective what Daniel saw in the future from a heavenly perspective. They're seeing the enthronement of Jesus. Jesus is now the king. Jesus is now the ruler and the head of God's kingdom. But if you're a disciple, you're watching this, you know the book of Daniel really well, you're realizing what's happening — but there's a problem. Jesus is king. He's given dominion and authority and all of that. But what's the problem? Jesus is gone. Panic.
The Second Coming and the Parousia
But wait. Keep reading. The disciples were looking intently up into the sky as Jesus was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. We know about the men in black who hide aliens from us. These are the men in white.
Men of Galilee, they said, why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven, he's going to come back in the same way that you saw him go.
And here, we are introduced to the second coming of Jesus. The idea that Jesus is in fact gone in bodily form, but will in fact be coming back in bodily form in the future. And this right here, Acts 1:11, is a massive turning point in Jewish and Christian theology. Because everyone had assumed up till then that the Messiah would be coming once. A one-and-done, a once-for-all kind of coming. But God, our loving God, for some reason, loves to work slowly. And he loves to work through human beings. And so instead of sending the Messiah once and auto-magically making this world into a better place, God instead sends us his Holy Spirit to indwell us and empower us to be the ambassadors and witnesses, the body of Christ and the presence of God to the world. We're not supposed to just wait around for heaven. We're meant to be the ones who bring heaven to earth, who reveal heaven here on earth. We live out our prayer that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
But as we work toward that goal, God's will being done on earth as it is in heaven, we still do have an eye to the sky. Because we're expecting Jesus to come back. The promise is in Scripture. It's a promise that's picked up through the rest of the New Testament. It's a promise that we have hope in, that Jesus will eventually come back and finish the work that he started and is continuing through us, his church, to destroy once and for all death and Satan and evil, finally.
In biblical language, this is called the parousia. It's a Greek word. It means royal arrival, or the coming, or the arrival, or the presence. Whenever you read Paul or one of the New Testament authors writing about the arrival of Jesus, it's the word parousia. It becomes this large, overriding theme throughout the New Testament. Now, if you lived in a city in the Roman Empire, you knew all about parousias. It's when an army general or a governor or sometimes the emperor of Rome himself would come to your town. It was a royal arrival.
How many of you have ever been in a crowd or a situation where you've met or seen a living, sitting president? It's a big deal, right? If the president comes to your town, to your area, the town's kind of turned upside down for a while. When my wife Emily and I were at Bethel College in Indiana, there was a fundraising dinner for a congressional representative, and President Bush — Bush 2, I'm not that old — came to Bethel to speak at this fundraising event. So our college was kind of turned upside down. There were Secret Service agents and all sorts of military folks securing every building, every area. They're putting up fencing everywhere. The students couldn't go certain places. We were situated 50 feet back behind this orange plastic thing. So we could see the president, but we couldn't get too close. There were snipers on our gym roof. That's how important and critical it was to secure our little Christian campus from anything bad happening, because the sitting president was coming to visit. It was a very big deal.
So the same is going to be true, except much, much more, if the emperor of Rome is coming to your town, if he's coming for a seasonal parousia. If you had the emperor coming to town, they're royalty. Some would even consider them divinity. And if you're part of a recently conquered city, the parousia was to establish your city as an extension of Rome itself, as part of the empire. So early Christians took this language and co-opted it for Jesus. Jesus, who is right now king of the universe, seated at the right hand of God the Father, who has ambassadors all over the earth establishing colonies across the nations — which is us, the church. Think about that. We are a colony of heaven. We're like embassies of heaven. The ground that we're standing on right now isn't American ground. It's the ground of heaven. So they take this language of parousia, apply it to Jesus, the king of the universe, and say that one day this king is going to come back and make his own parousia on earth, his grand return, the second coming of Jesus.
The Problem: People Started Dying
And so the first-century church started making preparations. They started telling everyone that the kingdom of God is here and that Jesus is going to come back one day soon and you should meet him. And for first-century Christians, they thought that this parousia was going to happen within their lifetime. They thought the return of Jesus would be any day now, any moment. And so when Jesus returns, they're going to be given their resurrection bodies just like Jesus. There's going to be no more pain, death, sickness, tears, agony.
But then something terrible starts happening. People started dying. And imagine the confusion this would cause. You're a first-century Christian. You thought that Jesus was going to fully establish his kingdom in one step. But then you learn, no, it's a couple-step process. He came, he died, he's resurrected. He ascended, he sent his Holy Spirit. He's having his church create embassies, colonies of heaven on the earth. And Jesus is going to come back before I die, really, really soon. But then your mom dies. And then your friend, and then your neighbor. And then maybe you get sick, and it doesn't look like you're going to get better. And Jesus still hasn't returned.
And remember, at this point in history, people have a pretty negative view of the afterlife. If you're a Gentile, you believed in something called Hades, which is not like our hell. Hades was just a place of neutral, pointless existence. It wasn't pleasant. And there was no such thing as resurrection. Bodies don't come back. If you were a Jew, you believed in either oblivion — if you ever read the book of Ecclesiastes, you know that the guy who wrote that really strongly believed in oblivion, that when you die, that's it, that's the end — or there were some who believed in resurrection, but they thought, well, maybe Jesus was the one resurrected person and that was it. None of us get to experience it.
So there began to develop this fear that anybody who died before Jesus' parousia, anybody who died before Jesus returned, it was game over for them. They wouldn't see Jesus' return, and therefore they wouldn't get to experience the fullness of Jesus' kingdom. And that's why our passage in 1 Thessalonians 4 starts the way it does. Brothers and sisters, we don't want you to be uninformed or ignorant about those who are asleep in death. So what happens to them? What happens to those who die before Jesus returns? Are they stuck there? What's their existence right now? And those are the questions that we're going to be answering in the weeks to come.
Three Takeaways
Now I want to give you a couple of takeaways before we move into the conclusion of our service.
Takeaway number one: what we believe about the afterlife affects what we do in our present life. Thinking about these things matters. Death and the afterlife, it's an unknown. And the more we refuse to talk about them, the more anxiety we're going to have when we think about it. Our beliefs about the afterlife definitively, drastically change the way we live today. So to put it another way: How are you living today? Are you living like death has been defeated? Are you living like you're going to experience resurrection? Are you afraid of death? Are you afraid of persecution? Are you living like Jesus may not have been victorious over death after all?
Takeaway number two: don't be uninformed. We have no excuse to be uninformed about this stuff. Don't be ignorant. Don't be dumb. You all, as a group of Christians, you are filled with resources — the ability to read, access to books. And so if you're ignorant and uninformed about this topic, that means you're squandering the good gifts that God has given you. I want to let you know about a few resources that we're going to have available for you. A lot of my research in this comes out of a book called The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright. It's 740 pages and $33. I read it so you didn't have to. But if you want to take on the challenge of reading it, I will reimburse you for buying that book. A shorter version, Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright. There's a group video study available. It's a $10 book. If you want to get in touch with me about forming a group, about studying these things more in depth, we will make that happen. The Heaven Promise by Scot McKnight, $11, 240 pages. A really breezy read about everything that we're talking about this month. Great book. And then Heaven: 18 Questions and Answers. It's 60 pages long. I know some of you are waiting for that one under 100 pages. Kelly, I see that hand. It's free for you. We're going to have a bunch of copies of this available next Sunday that you can pick up. Just a short little primer on death, resurrection, heaven, and hell.
Finally, takeaway number three: live like the parousia is tomorrow. What if you knew that the president was coming to your house tomorrow? Or at least your favorite president. Or your celebrity crush. Or the Pope. Or the Duck Dynasty guys — they're still a thing, right? What if you knew they were coming to your house tomorrow? You'd start making preparations, right? And what if that person told you, I want to meet as many of your friends as I can? You'd start telling everybody you could, right? That's a taste of the sense of urgency that the first-century church felt about Jesus' return. It could be at any moment. It's going to be awesome, awe-inspiring, and Jesus wants to include as many people as possible in his kingdom. So get telling people. And the first-century church passed this urgency on to the second-century church, on to the third century, all the way up to us. And so are we living like Jesus could show up tomorrow? Because, brothers and sisters, he could.
