We are studying together Matthew chapter 6, verse 9, the Lord's teaching — what is normally called the Lord's Prayer — the Lord's teaching concerning prayer. And the last occasion we studied together about "Our Father" and what it means that God is called Father. Last time we studied the Fatherhood of God — how and for what reason we can call him Father, why he is our Father, and what "Father" means. Today we study together another part of this same verse, that is, "Our Father who art in heaven." What is heaven? What does "heaven" mean? Where is heaven? What is the meaning of heaven? What is our concept of heaven? These are the questions we will study together today in the Lord's grace.
Today we study then together the Lord's teaching concerning heaven. What is heaven? Where is heaven? How are we to think about heaven? What is the whole meaning of heaven in the New Testament? Now this is an aspect of the Lord's teaching which is very important. There is no passage here we need to read since we know the Lord's Prayer very well. "Our Father which art in heaven," or in more modern English, "who is in heaven."
Now we need to ask this question: where is heaven? Where do you think heaven is? How do you think about heaven? When you read or when you sing the Christian hymns, it says vague things about "beyond the blue," the blue being the sky, the sky being blue in most parts of the world except England — England is normally grey. "Beyond the blue." So you stretch your eyes, you strain your eyes in the direction of the blue and hope that somehow, if you could get binoculars, you might somehow look beyond. And you think how happy are those people doing astronomy with those great powerful telescopes, if you can look beyond. But where is beyond the blue? And there are even songs which say "way beyond the blue." This gets further and further away all the time. By the time that you finish, you wondered how you are ever going to get to heaven, and how, if God is so far away, he can ever hear your prayers. Because "way beyond the blue" must be a long way off.
Now all this is extremely vague. And the danger of this kind of talk about heaven is that heaven somehow begins to get very far away for us. And since God is in heaven, way beyond the blue, well, God is an awful long way off. And if he is that far off, we perhaps don't need to concern ourselves too much with him, assuming that he is very concerned with us, since he is so far away. Presumably looking down at this world with powerful binoculars. Now this kind of concept of heaven, you can see, brings with it all kinds of dangers. And we have to ask: is this the kind of teaching that comes from the Bible? Is this biblical teaching?
And so we search the word of God, and I have searched through the word of God, and I have found always something very remarkable about the word of God. And it is this: that human ideas, wherever they come from — presumably from their own imagination — has a way of always diverging away from the word of God. It has very little to do with the teaching of the word of God.
Now the Jews had a concept very similar to this. I was looking at Jewish teaching on this matter just yesterday, and I was not a little amused to find here a section where one of the rabbis was saying this. How he ever figured it out, I have no idea, and too bad he is not around that we can ask him. He says this: from the earth to the firmament above is a journey of 500 years. The thickness of the firmament: 500 years' journey. And then there are seven heavens on top of that, each of 500 years' journey. Wow. By the time you get to the top of the topmost heaven, by my reckoning, it will take you 4,500 years. Now by what means of travel is intended of these 500 years, I have no way of figuring out. Does he mean walking for 500 years, or riding a horse, or sailing a ship? Whatever it is, I have no clue. But the rabbis gave this kind of a notion so that heaven is a long way off. And according to them, there are seven heavens. Where they got that from, I also don't know. Seven heavens, each 500 years between each layer of heaven, sort of like a layer cake, angel cake, or some kind of cake.
Now this kind of notion is bound to carry with it all sorts of serious dangers, above all the concept that God is exceedingly remote.
So we see that beyond this visible sky, there is supposedly another heaven which becomes "paradise." It is as if, if you could fly further out beyond the sky we can see, or somehow get out there, even further beyond what we can see — that is where paradise is. But where did this kind of thinking come from? Absolutely not from the Bible. It is from people's own imagination. I find the Bible's teaching very remarkable. I am often very surprised, because the Bible's teaching and human thinking are always different. Human thinking and imagination always wander off somewhere. But does the Bible have such teaching? I searched and searched and could not find it. I don't know where they invented it from. I looked at Jewish teaching to see what their rabbis taught, even from the time of the Lord Jesus. They said that to travel from the earth to the firmament above takes 500 years. And at the firmament begins another layer, which takes another 500 years to travel through. And above that there are seven layers of heaven, each requiring 500 years of travel. By my calculation, that comes to 4,500 years to reach the seventh heaven. This teaching is so far from biblical teaching. What is the danger of this teaching? It makes us feel that God is very, very far away from us. Does the Bible have such teaching? No, it does not.
And when we think of this kind of erroneous teaching concerning heaven, if heaven is somewhere there beyond the blue, wherever that is, then Jesus is also way, way off from us. He is very far from us, because he is seated at the right hand of the Father. And if the Father is in heaven, and if heaven is a long, long way off, and God is out there, and Jesus is out there — well, Jesus is a long way off. It's little wonder that when you try to pray, you begin to feel a sort of — you wonder whether he can hear. I mean, your prayer down here, and he is so far up. Unless he has super electronic equipment by which he can listen to your feeble mutterings, however is this 4,500-year distance going to be covered? And so because Jesus is so far away and God is so far away, prayer becomes almost pointless. It's like sending up a prayer by a rocket, and you hope that the rocket will be powerful enough to cover that vast distance up to this seventh heaven, according to the Jews anyway. The Bible nowhere mentions seventh heaven. And so anyway, never mind which heaven. Even the first heaven seems so far away that if you could send up your prayer with a powerful rocket — but since you don't have very powerful rockets, spiritually speaking — then you wonder if your prayers ever get there. And so you are overcome in the matter of prayer with a sense of futility, wondering whether God ever listens to our prayers.
Because we think this way and feel that God is very far away, it often affects our prayer life. We wonder whether God can hear our prayers, whether Jesus can hear our prayers, since he is at the Father's right hand. If God is so far away, then the Lord Jesus must be very, very far away too. We don't know if he can hear our prayers, and so in our prayer life we feel we don't know what is the point of praying, whether God can even hear us.
Now this also raises for us serious biblical problems. If heaven according to human reasonings and thinking is like this, what do you do with those scriptures? For example, in Acts chapter 7, it says there that Stephen looked up into heaven and he saw the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father. Wow. Stephen must have super eyes! Just think of this — his eyes can look through a million miles. Now look, if you were standing twenty miles away, I doubt that even with my very good glasses I would be able to see you twenty miles off. I'm not sure I could even see you ten miles away. And Jesus is 4,500 traveling years away. What kind of eyes do you need to be able to see Jesus up there? Or is it that somehow by some miracle Jesus is magnified millions and billions of times so that Stephen could be able to see him? Look, the sun, we are told, is a million times bigger than the earth, or whatever it is, and it is so vast. A sun in the sky looks only the size of a football. And that is not yet beyond the blue. It is within this firmament. It is within this planetary system. It is not even as far as the Milky Way by any means. The Milky Way is millions of miles further off. And if the sun is that small, how are you going to see Jesus beyond the sun, beyond the stars? Or as I say, is Jesus being magnified for us? A great problem with this kind of thinking is that it brings in all sorts of difficulties and confusions when you study the word of God.
If the Lord Jesus is that far away, then when Stephen was about to die and he looked up to heaven and saw the heavens opened and saw the Lord Jesus standing at the Father's right hand — does that mean Stephen's eyes were so powerful that he could see the Lord Jesus? The Lord Jesus, bearing our human form, standing at the Father's right hand, thousands and thousands of miles away — he could see him clearly enough to say, "This is the Lord Jesus, I can recognize him." If you stood ten miles away, even with my glasses, I don't think I could recognize you. Even seeing you would be problematic enough — recognizing you is out of the question. So how could the Lord Jesus be seen from such a vast distance? Did God use some miracle to magnify the Lord Jesus, enlarging his human form millions of times so that Stephen could see him? Otherwise, what does it mean that the heavens were opened? If the heavens were not opened, or if the Lord Jesus had come down a second time nearby for Stephen to see — but that wouldn't count as the second coming, it would just be a special appearance for Stephen. The more you think about these questions, the more confused you get, because our understanding of the Bible is wrong from the start.
There is another point. The Soviet astronaut once went out there and said, "Well, I went up to heaven and I didn't see God." What do you answer him? You say God is in heaven. He says, "I went up to heaven and I didn't see God." You say, "How foolish! God is not a person, nor is he material — how could you see him anywhere?" But then, is heaven material or not? If you went up to heaven and still couldn't see God, how would you see him? Of course, this Soviet astronaut spoke incorrectly, but he spoke incorrectly partly because what Christians have said was already incorrect, giving non-Christians the wrong impression. Non-Christians say, "You say God is in heaven. Well, I went up to heaven and I didn't see him." You could of course say, "You didn't go far enough. You only went as far as the moon. God is beyond this sky, even further out." He can never match that — you keep saying "further," and he keeps going further, and you keep saying "further still," and he can never get there.
Now a Soviet astronaut once went out there and said, well, I went up to heaven and I didn't see God. You say, what a stupid question. Well, God is not a person up there for you to see. But his point is this: you said that God is in heaven. I went up there into heaven and I didn't see him. Now you say this is ridiculous. Well, not so ridiculous, because sometimes it is the Christians who gave the non-Christian the wrong impression. You said he is up in heaven, so they went up there to have a look, and they couldn't see him. Now you may say, well, my dear friend, you didn't go far enough. Travel a few more billion miles out there and you will see God. Well, in this case he can never win, because if he travels a billion miles you say, "No, you haven't got to the seventh heaven yet. You've got to go further yet." At this rate he can never win that race against you. But I'm not sure that he will be very impressed with what you have to say about God.
Now all this — how does this measure up with the teaching of the Bible? There is still a further problem. If you say heaven is up there — up where? If you say, well, up here — the person in Australia is pointing the opposite direction. Well, that's fair enough, isn't it? I mean, if you say it's up — to heaven is this way — the Australian who stands on the other side of the earth is pointing the opposite direction. So you make up your mind which way heaven is. I mean, this is perfectly fair. And it is in such matters that Christians are often ridiculed by the non-Christian. "Heaven is up there, eh? Where?" You find yourself pointing in two opposite directions. So you decide where heaven is. Have you got one particular direction? Because everybody points upward, and where then is heaven? Are you going to say that heaven is some kind of a space outside the universe, or surrounding the universe, or what kind of a theory are you going to produce now to handle this problem?
So you can see that we must really come to an accurate biblical understanding of heaven, because of its spiritual dangers, because of the dangers of the wrong impressions that it gives to the non-Christian. So if it's up there — up where? Non-Christians hear your preaching and find it completely confused and senseless. They say these Christians don't make any sense at all. You say heaven is in this direction, and he says heaven is in that direction. Heaven is everywhere. And you say it's up in outer space. So which direction should one go? What is the Bible's teaching? We have gotten the direction wrong, the location wrong, and the question of God's nearness or distance all wrong. What is the Bible's teaching? When we look at this teaching, what will we discover?
Is God then in a kind of heaven that is out there that can be located in a certain place? Is heaven a place that we can put on a map of the universe? What is your answer to these questions, I wonder? Where is the error? Where is the error of human thinking? The error of human thinking is, like so much of human error of which the Bible in its perfection as the word of God never falls into that pit, is to think of heaven as a semi-material place. A place that you can pinpoint on a map. Now if a place is material, you can locate it on a map. But the error of Christian thinking is to think of heaven as material, or at least semi-material, or some type of diluted material if you like. Now if you think like this, then you see the error of your thinking, that after all your thinking is still far from being spiritual.
Heaven, in the scriptural teaching, is not a place. It is not a material position that you can locate on a map of the universe. If you say it is not a place, what is it then? The biblical teaching is that heaven is a state of being. Not a place — a state of being. It is a way — a type of existence. A spiritual type of existence. It is not some place to be located on a map, but it is a completely different and spiritual way of existence. And so all this business of traveling a long distance — so if you die, you go to heaven. Presumably you have some kind of a rocket ship that is going to take you year after year through endless light years until you arrive in heaven. That is not the scriptural teaching at all. We don't have a great long journey to travel to heaven. No. Heaven, in the biblical teaching, is a totally different spiritual type of existence. That you must clearly understand. Never again, when you come to biblical thinking, think of heaven as some kind of a material existence, or sub-material existence, or diluted material existence.
The Bible's teaching to us about heaven is this: heaven is not a place, a distant place like the Jews tried to measure — its distance, how many hundreds of years of journey. This kind of thinking reveals the error of both many Christians and the Jews. Heaven is not a place. Heaven is a spiritual life. Heaven is a spiritual kind of existence, not a location. We do not enter heaven by entering some place. Rather, we enter into a new kind of life. That is what it means to enter heaven. So when we see that the Lord Jesus says, "Our Father who art in heaven," it does not mean that God is in a distant place, but rather that God is Spirit, and his life is lived in this completely spiritual mode of existence. When we understand the Bible's teaching in this way, we will not make this kind of error.
So we don't waste time debating where heaven is or speculating on what direction it is or how far away it is. All this is nonsensical. The scripture has nothing to say about the distances of heaven and which direction it goes. What the scripture has to say is that heaven is a spiritual type of existence.
Now you say, well, I read in the Bible that Jesus ascended upwards, and that would seem to locate heaven somewhere upward, isn't it? It says something about heaven being above. Now in the scripture, you have to distinguish between two things: whether it is speaking of the literal physical heavens, or whether speaking of the spiritual heaven. But when the Bible speaks of "above," when you study the scripture carefully, you will realize at once that the "above" the scripture speaks about is spiritually above, not physically above. This you must distinguish very carefully.
An example of this comes out very, very clearly in the Lord's teaching. Jesus is from above. What does that mean? That is from that spiritual life, that spiritual way of life which is far above the physical way of life. And he says this so clearly in John chapter 3, verse 31, to show you that he is not speaking in terms of a physical above-ness but a spiritual above-ness. Let me read this verse to you. "He who comes from above is above all." Notice this? He is above all. Well, he is not above all physically. He is now down on the earth when he has come. He has come down upon the earth. But Jesus is speaking spiritually, of course. "He who is from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth, and of the earth he speaks. He who comes from heaven is above all." I hope that you notice clearly this, that the whole point of speaking of heaven in being above is meant to teach us the spiritual fact of the spiritual superiority of heaven over earth. Because "above" always indicates superiority. And here the Lord Jesus uses exactly this to indicate the meaning of "above."
Now all this is again brought out very clearly by Paul. For example, in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. 1 Corinthians chapter 15, in this passage, Paul is speaking about the life to come, about what you would call heaven. And here is what Paul says:
"So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power." Notice again, "raised" — going above, up. "It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being'; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven." That is, we who are of heaven. "Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable."
Now, to avoid going through a lengthy exposition, let me just show you how Paul is contrasting heaven and earth. And if you had two columns — if you drew two columns out, you could use this passage to fill in two different columns. One column headed "heaven," the other headed "earth." And then you will find you can list a lot of things. One is in dishonor, the other in honor. One in weakness, the other in power. You would put power, honor, glory all under heaven. Weakness, dishonor, corruption, perishable all under earth. And then you will find that on the one side, he uses the word "spiritual" in reference to heaven, "physical" in reference to earth. Then "the man of heaven" and "the man of dust," again contrasted. And "perishable" and "imperishable" contrasted. So that if you took verse by verse, you could list them out on two sides, giving you the full definition of heaven on one side and the full definition of earth on the other side. Now when you study the Bible in this way, you will see it is not a jumble of difficult-to-understand phrases, but a very clearly discernible meaning emerges from it all.
From this passage of scripture, 1 Corinthians 15:42-50, Paul teaches us the distinction between heaven and earth. The meaning of the whole passage is very clear. What does heaven mean? What is the Bible's teaching? Heaven is spiritual. In this passage, we are told: on this side is spiritual, and on the other side — the earthly side — is not spiritual. So we see that the Bible lets us know that heaven is spiritual, not material. If it is spiritual, can you measure its distance? Clearly our thinking is wrong when we do not see that heaven is a spiritual matter. It is a spiritual reality. If one could speak of a spiritual "place" — but how can one speak of a place if it is spiritual? If it is spiritual, how can you measure its distance? If it can be measured, that already shows you are thinking of heaven as something material. Heaven is not material, brothers and sisters. Heaven is spiritual. Spiritual things cannot be measured with a ruler. That is not the right way to think. Spiritual things cannot be said to be "here" or "there" in the way material things can. That is not how spiritual things work.
And what is spiritual cannot be measured in terms of distance. It cannot be pointed out in terms of direction. Now if a thing is spiritual, how can you measure whether it's twenty-one inches long or 500 years' journey? The moment you say that, you immediately show that you are thinking of heaven in terms of material. Spiritual things cannot be measured in this kind of way.
Remember too that everything that is material is going to be destroyed. 2 Peter 3, verses 12 and 13, tell us this. "The heavens shall melt with fervent heat and be dissolved." The heavens will be dissolved. That's biblical teaching. You say, "Hey, what am I going to do when I get to heaven?" But the Bible is not talking about the spiritual heaven. It is talking about the physical heavens in 2 Peter 3, verses 12 and 13. You see, even the physical heavens will be destroyed, so that it tells us that there will be a new heaven and a new earth. So let us, brothers and sisters, once and for all, not fall into the error of thinking of heaven in material terms. In 2 Peter 3:12-13, we are told that the physical heavens will be completely burned up. Not only the heavens — the earth will also be burned. But don't worry, because there is a new heaven and a new earth. Let us understand the Lord's teaching. Heaven is spiritual, not material.
Now this teaching is made even more clear for us in the Lord's teaching in John chapter 4, verses 21, 23, and 24, in his discussion with the Samaritan woman. You remember the Samaritan woman was saying, "Well, you see, we worship God on this mountain, and you worship God on that mountain." And Jesus says, "We are not going to worship God in any one place. We are going to worship God in spirit and truth."
What is Jesus teaching the Samaritan woman? You see, her thinking, like so many Christians, is thinking of God in semi-physical terms. That you can locate God in this place, we worship God in this place, and that is the holy place. Today when you go to Israel, you will still see many holy places. This place is holy, that place is holy. I was shown, when I was in Israel, in Jerusalem, I was shown a place which I was told was the upper room where the Lord Jesus broke bread with his disciples. Well, I am no great architect, but I think I know enough about buildings to be able to tell that that building was nowhere near 2,000 years old. I would have been surprised if it were anywhere near 500 years old. But that is what tourists are being told all the time. You see, this is the room where Jesus broke bread, and this was the place where Jesus lived, and so on and so forth. And so these places become holy. God's presence is somehow thought to be there.
Now, we must understand, that is why the woman said, "Now we worship God on this mountain, and you worship God in Jerusalem." And Jesus says, "Not so. I tell you, the day is coming that we shall neither worship God on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. We shall worship God in no particular place." We are going to understand that God is spiritual, for God is Spirit. And we are going to worship him in spirit and in truth. And God seeks people to worship him in this way.
This shows that prayer is worship. And if you want to bring acceptable worship, you must worship him spiritually, in spirit and in truth. If your worship is not spiritual, it will not be acceptable. It becomes superstition. Superstition is belief that is tied up in a confused manner with erroneous and materialistic notions. Scripture doesn't want us to be mixed up with superstition.
And so, take for example, objects begin to get a special holiness about them. We are told that you can wear a special charm around you. Now that is characteristic of superstition: localizing spiritual power into a material object, and alleging that there is spiritual power in this material object. So that if you wear this charm around you, nothing will hurt you and the like. Now that is characteristic of superstition. And when one starts localizing — also that this place is more holy than another place — either if we mean it spiritually, in a spiritual way, that this is holy to me — not the place is holy, it's holy to me because I have met with God in this place, that is a different meaning. That means it brings back memories to me. But once we say that the place itself is holy, then we become superstitious.
And so now we find that we must understand the word of God very accurately. I am not saying, of course, that God's presence does not appear in some particular place. When God truly appears in a particular place, which he does, then that place is holy because of his presence. But once his presence is gone, it is no more holy, of course. It is holy only in the moment that he is there. That is why the temple was regarded as holy, and rightly so, because God's presence was there. But now Mount Zion is no more holy than any other place, because God's presence is no more there. So we must not go on sinking in these superstitious ways. And because, as we have seen, all superstition is marked by the fact that the material and the spiritual is confused. And so much confusion there is in the minds and the thinking of Christians, and that hinders our worship.
In John 4:21-24, Jesus says that those who worship God must worship him in spirit. It is not about worshipping in this place or that place. The attitude is important, the spirit is important, the material is not — this is the Bible's teaching. What is the characteristic of superstition? The characteristic of superstition is treating something sacred as if it were contained in a material object. For example, you buy a small gemstone and wear it around your neck, thinking it can protect you because this gemstone supposedly has some special spiritual power within it. That is superstition. Why is it superstition? Because the belief is wrong — it confuses spiritual things with material things, failing to distinguish between them. A stone has no spiritual power. Material things have no spiritual power. None whatsoever. You do not need to fear any material thing, because material things have no spiritual power. So we must be clear about this. If we are not clear in this area, our worship of God becomes hindered. We sink into superstition. Our worship of God is no longer from the spirit. We think we must worship in this place or in that place. We come to church to worship the Lord, not because the church building is more holy than other places, but because we believe that when we gather here, God has a special presence among us, and so this place becomes holy. But once God leaves this place, the place itself has no holiness at all. It is just some stones, some paint, a building. We must see clearly: unless God is among us, nothing is holy.
Once we grasp this, everything changes about our understanding of God. What changes? We realize that heaven is not far away. Heaven, being spiritual, can be coextensive with the material world. And that means it is very near. For example, we have a spirit and we have a body. But the spirit is coextensive with the body. I cannot measure the size of my spirit. I may be such and such a height, but that is not the length and breadth of my spirit. But the spirit is coextensive because it is not material. Material cannot be coextensive with each other in the same way. But now we can realize that we don't have to think of heaven as being far off. The Bible doesn't teach us that at all. The Bible tells us that heaven is near at hand.
And so because we find otherwise, we have again a conflict of understanding. What conflict? We are told on the one hand that God is far away, and on the other hand we are told that God is very near. And we are utterly confused. How can God be far and he is near? First you tell me he is 4,500 years of travel away, and now you tell me that God is here. And so we have a contradictory statement again, which theologians like to call paradox. Very interesting word, paradox. Everything that is contradictory or conflicting is described as paradox, when in fact, of course, this is a travesty of the word paradox.
And so we find, for example, that Paul says in Acts chapter 17, verse 28, that in God we live and move and have our being. Now how can God be far away and still be near? How are we going to reconcile all this? And it is covered by the statement that God is omnipresent. And it is further covered by these two aspects, that God is transcendent and that he is immanent. Now these words may mean absolutely nothing to you. But transcendent is the aspect which says that God is far and away and beyond. And immanent means that God is near. So God is both far and near, and that means that God is omnipresent.
Now scripturally speaking, God is certainly omnipresent. And God is certainly in every place, no matter how vast the universe is. But we are talking about heaven. And we must understand that scripture does not locate heaven in any particular direction. And so we realize that once we realize this — that heaven, being spiritual, is coextensive and can be easily coextensive with the physical universe — then we realize that God is always near. It is just a different mode of existence. Just as my body and my spirit are coextensive. That means to say, if I could pass beyond the physical at this stage right away, I'd find that right this moment, I'd be in heaven. I'd have to travel no distance at all. Do you realize that? Do you see the scriptural teaching? That God is right here all the time. That heaven is just the other side of the physical existence. And you see what difference that will make to your whole spiritual life? That you are not traveling vast distances. That God is right close. And when I whisper, he hears me right away.
# The Lord's Prayer (2): Heaven (cont.) — Matthew 6:9
All this is much easier for us to understand nowadays in terms of high energy physics, I am told. Many times when I've talked to my friend, the physicist, they tell me — well, I say, you know, how is it that people, says the Lord Jesus, could pass through a physical wall? The disciples were closed in a room, and the doors were shut tight, and Jesus comes through the walls, and there he is, standing among them. Many people found this very difficult to understand. My friend, the physicist, told me that's very easy to understand. It's just a question of frequency. You could change the person's frequency, and he can pass through a wall. You see, material things — for a nuclear physicist, he knows it's in fact all empty space. It isn't a solid thing that we see. We are told it's all empty space. And if you could change the frequency of one material thing, you could pass it right through the other. And so it is a matter of difference of frequency. Well, that helps us to understand spiritual things a lot. It shows that our friend, the physicist, seems to have some advantage over us here.
Now, in this being so, we find that it is much easier for us to understand how the spiritual and the physical can be coextensive. It is just a different mode of existence. It doesn't have to be located in a different place. And that mode of existence can be so utterly and unimaginably different. Imagine if a physicist had some means of changing your frequency, and you could suddenly be passing through walls, appearing and disappearing. Wow, that is a new type of existence, you can be sure. Even if it's just a change of frequency. Now, just think about that. And you change the frequency a bit more, and you enter into spiritual existence. And then you really begin to understand. And you have a wonderful and amazing type of existence, without having to travel to some remote place, in some spiritual rocket ship, or something of this kind. And so we see the wonder of Jesus' teaching. And somehow it takes us twentieth-century physics even to begin to understand the amazing depth and reality of Jesus' teaching.
Since heaven is not a material thing in the Bible's teaching, but a spiritual life, a spiritual existence, we don't need to talk about how far or how near this place is. We discover that, just as a person's spirit and body occupy the same space, there is no need for them to be in different places. We know that heaven and this universe — we don't need to think that heaven is outside the universe. Within the same realm of the universe, there is spirit and there is matter. The spiritual is heaven; the material is the universe we see. What does this tell us? It tells us that God is not far away. To enter into the life of heaven, we don't need to take a spiritual rocket ship and fly far away to someplace beyond the universe. Heaven is a new life — a new life that is wonderful and great. It is not a question of distance, but a question of a different kind of life, a different nature of existence.
We see that physicists have already helped us to understand these things. I once spoke with a friend about how to understand the Lord Jesus, with his spiritual body, being able to pass through a wall and walk into the midst of the disciples. The doors were locked, but Jesus could walk in and out, appearing and disappearing. Many people find this very difficult and don't know how to understand it. My physicist friend told me this is very easy to understand. Actually doing it is another matter, because we don't have that ability. But in principle, it is not hard to understand. You just need to change a person's frequency — I don't know how to translate that, perhaps speed or something — and a person could walk through a wall. Because a wall, from atomic physics, we know is not really solid. It is all empty space. So if you could change a person's frequency, or speed, then you could walk through the wall. In the same way, when we understand that entering into a spiritual way of life is what it means to enter heaven, we immediately realize we are entering into a marvelous new way of life. But all of this helps us to free ourselves from materialistic thinking, because such thinking hinders our prayer and our worship. Through these things we come to our worship. God is very near. God is in heaven, not far away. God is very near, because God is Spirit. God is near to us. As Paul says in Acts 17:28, "In him we live and move and have our being."
Now, we have to ask one more thing, once we come to realize these things. Is heaven attractive to us? When you study the Bible, you find another strange thing. You find that there is never a description of heaven in physical terms. We are never told that, say, heaven is rather like the South Pacific, where there are palm trees waving in the wind, and there are soft beaches, this beautiful sand that you can lay in the sun. Funny. Nowhere are we told anything like this. No description of heaven in these picture terms occurs for us. Sometimes in Revelation we are told of the beings in heaven, the kind of persons who are there, but we are never told what heaven looks like, what there is in heaven, what is the furniture, what is the landscape. That again shows you the vast difference of the Bible in its spiritual depth from human thinking.
If you turn to the Quran, to Islam, you will find that heaven is often pictured in terms of an earthly paradise, where there are exactly the things that I mentioned: palm trees, and softly flowing brooks, and beautiful girls, and things of this kind. That's heaven. And you have great big dates that you can chew on, and you have all the food you want to eat. Well, I'm not so sure that I find that kind of heaven very attractive. I might find the South Pacific more attractive than that. And if heaven is all there is — that is heaven — I might as well go and buy myself a house in the South Pacific, and work for a few years, work hard, and buy myself a house, because heaven seems to be no different from the South Pacific, or from wherever it is, you can have a nice place you can think of.
The Bible never goes into that kind of error that Islam and others fall into. There is no description of heaven in those terms whatsoever. Precisely why? Precisely because the Bible never makes the mistake of describing heaven as a material place. Therefore, you never have a picture of the landscape of heaven. Nowhere in the Bible can you find this whatsoever. Isn't that remarkable? Has it never crossed your mind? If I'm going to go to heaven, you better tell me what heaven is like. I'd like to know what's up there, what kind of a nice place it is. But in vain do you search the Bible for anything like it. Why? Why is that so?
Well, first of all, because we have seen already that heaven is spiritual, and once it's spiritual, you cannot describe it in terms of palm trees and flowing waters and pretty girls and the like. But secondly, heaven is nothing without God. For me, heaven would be utterly uninteresting if God is not there. The whole attraction about heaven is God. He is the whole wonder, the center of heaven. In fact, in the Bible sometimes, heaven is simply a metonym — another name for God. God is simply called, for example, in the parable of the prodigal son — what does the prodigal son say in Luke chapter 15? He said, "Father, I have sinned against heaven." Well, how can you sin against heaven? He means, of course, I have sinned against God. God is the whole center and meaning of heaven. He is the whole attraction of heaven. If you don't care for God, you won't care for heaven. You're not going to like heaven very much. In spite of all the wonderful attractions, and when you have the new body, you can pass through walls, you can eat or don't eat as you choose — that may be a very interesting existence. But God is the center of attraction. And so we find that unless you love God, you won't care for heaven.
So the attraction of heaven is simply in the person of God. And the more attractive God becomes, the more attractive heaven becomes. This is something we find, again, in the scriptural teaching. Take, for example, this. If I tell you that Norway is a beautiful place, with wonderful fjords, changing scenery — oh, it's marvelous. You might get a bit interested in Norway. But you think it's so far away. It's not yet, what, 4,500 years of travel to Norway, but it's so far away, I'm not sure it's worth the effort of getting there. But wait till one day, somebody you really love moves to Norway. Wow. Norway becomes interesting now. You want to get to Norway. At all costs, you have to get to Norway. Now suddenly, Norway is interesting. You see, that's the thing with heaven. You may tell me that heaven is very nice, very beautiful, and it means nothing to me. I'm not sure it's worth the effort to get there. But suddenly, there's somebody you love, like Jesus, and he's in heaven. Now it gets interesting. Now I want to get there.
And this is the reason you will find that nowhere in the New Testament, or in the Old for that matter, do you once hear the statement that when you die, you go to heaven. Did you realize that? I ask you to quote me one verse in the whole Bible which says when you die, you go to heaven. I give you two weeks or three weeks to search out the scriptures. Use your concordance. Look through every reference. And you show me one reference somewhere in the Bible where it says that I'm looking forward to go to heaven when I die, or anything that even remotely resembles that. You bring me one verse. I'd like to look at it. Because you know why? The attraction is never the place or the type of existence. It is always the person. That is why Paul, for example, says that for me to be with Christ is far better. Philippians chapter 1, I think it's verse 23. He says, "For me to depart and to be with Christ is far better." Why didn't he say for me to go to heaven is far better? No, he says nothing of the kind. He says to be with Christ is far better. Again, in 2 Corinthians 5, he says that I may be away from the body and at home with the Lord. He doesn't say a word about heaven. Remarkable, isn't it? You see, that is why, again, understand this whole scriptural teaching so that you know also where you are going. If you are thinking about a place — no.
Now, finally, let us also ask the question: how then do I inherit heaven? Inherit heaven? Can you show me a verse which says something about inheriting heaven? Inherit eternal life — yes. Notice that eternal life and heaven are again the same thing. It is the new type of existence, a new way of life. Eternal life is what we inherit. We inherit not heaven but the kingdom of God, which again is eternal life. Now how am I going to inherit eternal life? That is also the question we need to ask.
In the Bible, we searched and searched but could not find any place that tells us what heaven looks like. Are there many flowers there? Mountains, water, or anything? Not a single place tells us what heaven looks like. You would think that if I'm going to heaven, at least you could tell me what it's like so I can imagine it — so beautiful, so lovely, that I can have a hope and look forward to enjoying those wonderful things when I get there. But the Bible never once tells us. Isn't that strange? But when you understand what we have been discussing, it is not strange at all. Because heaven is spiritual. It is spirit. So of course you can't talk about whether there are flowers or mountains — these are material things. You cannot speak of such things. The other thing we discover is that the beauty of heaven is not about whether it has mountains or water. It is because God is there. If you don't love God, you won't like heaven. If you love God, you love heaven. If you don't love God, you don't love heaven. It is as simple as that.
So if this is true, we must be able to find it. Now we find that we must ask the question: how do we inherit heaven? First, the scripture tells us that we cannot both have this world and the next — the spiritual world. We cannot have both Mammon and God. We have to decide between one or the other. That's a hard choice, isn't it? The English saying is that a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush. And if heaven is so far away, we'd better settle for this one. Which one are you going to decide for? That's a tough choice. You're not going to have this life and the life to come both. You're not going to have your cake and eat it, in other words, spiritually speaking. We are faced with a difficult and important choice.
Now if you are like Demas, that we saw for example in 2 Timothy 4, verse 10 — he loved the world. Although he was a Christian, he loved the world and he left God. You can make that choice. But you cannot both love the world and have God. You will find that it doesn't work like this. You've got to make your choice. But why then do we make the choice for heaven? For that spiritual life? Because if you are wise, you realize that this life is passing away. You realize that this life is temporal. You realize the list we were talking about in 1 Corinthians 15. When you look through that list, if you have any wisdom, you will know which side you are going to choose. The world is passing away.
Why can we not choose one or the other? Why can't we have both? Because what you love, your heart will be there. Your whole way of life will be governed by what you love. And your way of life must commence now. Heaven is going to start now. It's something you have to inherit now. Eternal life is something that we get now, not just when we die. That's the scriptural teaching. And either you have eternal life now, or you are not going to have it. Either you are going to be children of heaven now, which is what 1 Corinthians 15 said: "We are of heaven." Not "we shall be of heaven." Notice those words. But "we who are of heaven." 1 Corinthians 15, verse 48. You are either of heaven now, or you are never going to get to heaven. You've got to make your choice right now. That's something you have to decide. But that decision should not be so difficult when we realize that this earth, this world, is passing away.
And I tell you something. When you begin to get a bit sick like I do, you suddenly realize how transitory life is. You realize it with a force you've never seen before. You suddenly realize that this physical life is passing away very, very quickly. And once or twice when this trouble has attacked me very severely, I suddenly come to realize that I was only one breath away from death. One more breath is the difference between life and death. You don't get that breath and you are gone. That's as close to death as we are in this life. Life is passing away. And if you cling to this life, as so many do, if you see the importance of this life but exaggerate this importance, then you are going to live for this world and not for heaven. You are not going to be a son of heaven.
And secondly, we saw in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul said also in verse 50, he said this: understand these things, "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." Well, but you say, we are flesh and blood. How can we inherit the kingdom of God then? There's only one way: by being born again. And that's what the Lord Jesus says in John chapter 3, verse 6. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." We are born of the flesh, so we are flesh. But he goes on to say, "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit." That's how we can be called sons of heaven right now, because we are born of the Spirit. Therefore we are spirit as well. Flesh and blood cannot inherit heaven. It cannot inherit that way of life. But the spirit can. And since I am born of the Spirit, I am spirit. Because I am spirit, I can inherit the kingdom of God. That kind of understanding — this logic is perfectly clear and easy to understand.
We cannot store up treasures both on earth and in heaven. You cannot store a little here and a little there. We would love to do that — to give 50% to Mammon and 50% to God, with one foot in heaven and one foot on earth, getting the best of both sides. But the Lord Jesus says this is not possible. You either serve God or you serve Mammon. You choose between the two. But do not deceive yourself, thinking you can hold on to both sides and get the benefits of both. You can deceive yourself, but you cannot deceive God. You must choose — either heaven or the life of this present world. You choose for yourself.
Why must it be this way? Why can't we have both? Because we must become a new person now. If we love the world and are double-minded, there is no way to be a true Christian. And if you cannot be a true Christian, you cannot receive eternal life. A double-minded Christian does not have eternal life — the Bible says so, not me. So you must be a true Christian to have eternal life, and then you live for God. Does this mean we don't work, we don't use worldly things, we don't live in houses, we don't ride in cars? No, that is not what we are talking about. What we are speaking of is the purpose of life. Are we living for this present life, or are we living for God? These two purposes must be clear. Once the purpose is clear, our whole attitude changes.
Another point from 1 Corinthians 15:50: "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." You might say, "Oh no, I am flesh and blood. What shall I do? How can I inherit the kingdom of God?" This is where the teaching of the new birth comes in. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit is spirit — John 3:6. Are we flesh? Are we flesh and blood? Yes, we are. But we also become spirit if we are born again — born of the Holy Spirit. Because I am spirit, I can inherit heaven. This is the clear teaching of the Bible.
Now the logic is clear, does it not? It tells us that God's will is done perfectly in heaven. And the prayer is that "your will be done on earth as in heaven." Heaven is a place then of perfect bliss, of perfect happiness, perfect joy. For what reason? For this reason: that God's will is done perfectly in heaven. Let me tell you something, brothers and sisters. If God's will is being perfectly done in our lives, you are going to experience heaven here and now. If God's will is done perfectly in your life.
There is nothing so miserable as to be a spiritual schizophrenic in which you are split apart inside, trying to live for God, trying to live for the world, trying on both sides to do something. That kind of existence is absolute misery. It's not worth it. Even if the Bible didn't tell you to choose between one or the other, you would be wise just to choose one or the other. Just choose the world and forget about the other side, because you just live a dual, hypocritical, schizophrenic existence with no joy, no peace, no power. You haven't got the experience of heaven here and now. Why do I believe in heaven? Because I experience it now. I know what heaven is like when I live in total obedience to God. There you experience joy and peace and power.
If a family lived 100% in total obedience to God, that family would be heaven on earth. When wife and husband do not quarrel with each other, when they don't put their conflicting characters against each other, when they cease to strive and to bicker and to bargain and to conflict with each other — I tell you, your family would be heaven on earth. When each person in that family is totally obedient to God. Now we may not be able to achieve that in the family, let alone in society, which doesn't want to obey God anyway. They want to go their own way. But we can achieve it in our own lives. I can resolve by the grace of God that God's way is going to be done in my life as in heaven. He's going to have his way totally and absolutely. And then you will experience the joy, the peace, and the power.
Have you experienced heaven in your life? Sometimes you experience it very literally, sometimes less literally. I've shared with brothers and sisters in Liverpool how I literally experienced heaven on earth about as literally as you can get. One Sunday morning I got up, and I knelt down before God in prayer and worshiped before him and prayed, opening my life as I was accustomed to do, yielding my life again totally day by day to him. "Your will be done in my life as in heaven." And you know what I experienced? I experienced heaven that very day in such a literal fashion that, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 12, I wasn't too sure whether I was in the world or not in the world, whether I was in the body or not in the body. Paradise — that is it. Oh, that was an experience I will never forget. And the experience went on not for five minutes, not for ten minutes, but for hours. Hour after hour. It was so wonderful to be in that sweet fellowship with God, filled with inexpressible joy. Have you ever experienced anything like this? We are meant to be sons of heaven now, not at some future date only. If we don't experience spiritual reality now, how do you know you're ever going to experience it? Do you know why some Christians are so uncertain about heaven? Because they don't know whether it's real. And they don't know whether it's real because, well, they've never even had a foretaste of it. But the Bible tells us that we can have a foretaste of those things. In Hebrews it says, "We have tasted the powers of the world to come." Have you tasted it?
Now to live in this way is our heritage here and now. Then we will be Christians of a kind that really radiate, because heaven becomes for us a present reality. Oh, I plead with you, brothers and sisters, don't live in sin. Because sin brings misery and futility and waste and suffering. It achieves absolutely nothing. Why live in sin? I don't understand. It destroys you physically. It destroys you mentally. It destroys you spiritually. Why enjoy the pleasure of sin for a season? Five minutes of enjoyable sin — it's so enjoyable, it's really enjoyable. And the damage is done physically, mentally, spiritually. Everything is damaged. Why do that? And why not enter into the joy of heaven now?
And then you have the certainty of heaven. People say, why do you have such confidence in the things you speak? Because I experience them. If I don't experience them, I won't talk about them with such confidence. I will be dealing with theories and philosophies and ideas. But I deal with the things, as Paul says, that I know. I speak about things that I know are true. As Paul said in Timothy, "I know whom I have believed." I'm not speculating. I'm not imagining. I'm not philosophizing. I know whom I'm talking about. And so I say, brothers and sisters, we can experience heaven here, if only we learn to live in what is the situation of heaven: in total obedience, in total commitment to him. That is the normal Christian life, which it should be.
So may God grant to us that kind of experience. As I told you, I'll never forget that morning in London. Oh, what an amazing experience of fellowship with God. And remember this: I don't look for the experience. I sought only to be totally yielded to my Lord. Don't start out just by looking for an experience. That is where so many Christians have gone wrong. They pursue the experience, not the right state of mind. The reason why the error of pursuing experience is this: that once you have the experience, then you can forget about the requirements again. You can go back to where you were before and say, "Yeah, I experienced it. It was very interesting." God is not going to be there just to give you experiences to play around with, so they can boast to others about. Only if you are prepared consistently to live in this way, one day you are going to be — to use the words of C.S. Lewis — surprised by joy. Just as I was surprised. I got up and prayed as I did every morning, with nothing exceptional about it. But that morning, God determined to bring to me an experience of heaven such as I had never had before.
And so we find then, when we speak in the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father which art in heaven" — heaven, and this was the last point we had made — it should be something no longer strange or distant or foreign, but something that we know in our experience. The place of perfect fellowship with God because of total obedience to him.
The life of heaven is something we can experience today. We don't think of heaven as something far away. It is something we can experience today. This is the Bible's teaching. We can experience heaven today. We can already experience it now. So when we talk about heaven, we can experience it today.
I have also shared how, when I was in London, one morning I got up to pray. I knelt before the Lord and, as I did every day, I opened my life before him once more, asking the Lord to be completely King and Lord in my life. Wonderfully, suddenly I experienced heaven. God gave me this experience — not for five or ten minutes, but for several hours. I lived in that sweet fellowship. Beyond my expectations — I had not asked for this, nor did I know such an experience was possible. It was like being in heaven. I didn't know if I was in the body or out of the body, just as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 12. I entered into the life of heaven for several hours — a joy that cannot be described. So when I speak of heaven, I am not speaking of a theory or a philosophy. I am speaking of something I myself have experienced and can experience even more fully by God's grace in the future.
So I hope that brothers and sisters will know this secret. When we say "Our Father in heaven," the heaven we speak of is a heaven we know — and in the future we will know even more of heaven's wonder and beauty and the fellowship with the Lord. As long as we are willing to let God's will be carried out in our lives, as it is in heaven, we begin to enter into this wonderful life. I hope every Christian can experience God's power. This brings joy and brings power. Why do we have no joy and no power? Because we are unwilling to let God's will be carried out in our lives. We simply disobey God and still call ourselves Christians, living our own lives according to our own will, not submitting to the Lord. So there is no joy and no power. The church is already full of this kind of Christian. I hope that every brother and sister here will not be this kind of Christian. Let me ask you to think: if in a family, every person lets God's will be done in their lives as it is in heaven, I tell you, that family would be like heaven. How beautiful! Husband and wife wouldn't be arguing all the time — you want your way, I want my way, you want this, he wants that, pushing and pulling, fighting and quarreling. That kind of life is like hell. It's not worth living. You want hell? Just don't obey God's will, and there you have hell. But if every one of you — husband and wife, children — everyone submits to God, that family is truly heaven. But if we cannot control our family life, at least we can control our own lives. May God's will be done in my life, so that I can enter into God's joy now. Then my life can shine with a radiance that makes many people say, "How do you have such power, such joy?" It is not from me, but from God. His grace is what we can experience now.
If we think we have experienced wonderful things now, then Paul is saying, you haven't even started yet by any manner of means. There is still a long way to go. God has prepared things that eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor even has entered into the mind of man, the things that God has prepared for those who love him. And so we can see the joy, the prospect that is ahead. The Christian is a man who has a wonderful prospect. He has a future which no man in the world has who doesn't know God. What a future we have.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:9 that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human mind has imagined the things that God has prepared for those who love him. What does this mean? Paul could say, "My spiritual experience is very rich, very wonderful. Your experience may also be good, rich, and wonderful. But the things you have already experienced — you already find them wonderful? Let me tell you, your eyes have not yet seen, your ears have not yet heard, your mind has not yet conceived the wonderful things God has prepared for you." To be a Christian is truly to have hope, truly to have a future. How can we avoid having a joyful heart? God has given us such a wonderful future, such a wonderful hope. How precious God is.