Before we start you need to know the word “eschatology,” which according to the Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms means the “study of the ‘last things’ or the end of the world. Theological dimensions include the second coming of Jesus and the last judgment.”
A few years ago I was sitting at a meal for family and friends after the funeral of the son of a parishioner of mine. The funeral was in a different town about 100 miles away at the Roman Catholic Church where he had been very involved. I sat with a bunch of people I don’t know and as I got to talking to the woman beside me she was interested when I told her I was a Presbyterian pastor. She was neither Presbyterian nor Catholic, but a part of an independent church. I assume as a gesture of kindness and hospitality toward me she said, “Doesn’t really matter what church you go to, what it boils down to is that it’s all about getting to heaven.” Over time I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing when is the proper time to verbally disagree with someone and when isn’t, so I just smiled, finished my Jell-O salad, and went to find the deceased’s parents to give them a hug before I left to make the long drive home. “It’s all about getting to heaven,” may be a good representative statement of the beliefs of some churches and many Christians, but it is not a good representative statement of what is in the New Testament.
This is, perhaps, the most important point I will make on the entire subject. The New Testament is not about what happens to us when we die. It comes up occasionally, but that’s not what it’s about. It is a book about what God has done through Jesus Christ and how that has caused the Kingdom of God to break into the world, which pushes us
in the direction of God’s final consummation of the Kingdom of God, when as we read at the end of Revelation, God will make a new heaven and a new earth. The New Testament is ultimately not about what happens to us when we die. The New Testament is about the first signs of the end of the “present age” and the coming of the “age to come.”Part of the confusion comes from the fact that in Matthew’s Gospel, he does not use the phrase “Kingdom of God,” but instead uses the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven.” It is used in exactly the same way as Kingdom of God, and actually a great many of its occurrences are an exact quote from Mark with “Heaven” replacing “God.” Most biblical scholars believe that Matthew did this very intentionally because we’re almost positive that the author of the gospel was a Jewish Christian writing for other Jewish Christians. Because of the commandment against using the Lord’s name in vain, a religious Jew would certainly never pronounce the name of God that is given to Moses at the burning bush, Yahweh (I am who I am), but also may not even say the word “God” in order to protect from never misusing it. So the consensus of biblical scholars is that Matthew, as a Jewish Christian, probably changed Kingdom of God to Kingdom of Heaven because of his own beliefs about the misuse of the name of God and in order to appeal to his Jewish readers. “Kingdom of Heaven” appears only in Matthew’s Gospel, nowhere else in the New Testament.
It might be surprising to some that Jesus never asks anyone in the gospels if they want to go to heaven when they die. Instead, he invites them to enter into the Kingdom of God/Heaven (Matthew, Mark, Luke) or to inherit eternal life (John). His invitations are invitations in the present that have eternal implications. He deals with entering the Kingdom of God now, inheriting eternal life starting now.
The “age to come” has entered into the “present age” through Jesus Christ. It is not completely here and we cannot make it come to completion any faster. That’s in God’s job description, not ours. The “age to come” or the Kingdom of God or Eternal Life goes on into eternity but we can participate in it, albeit incompletely, even now. Think about it this way: don’t you wish you would have gotten in on Apple Computers when it was just a fledgling little company making green screened computers that weighed forty pounds?
You could have invested in that early on when it was nothing more than potential and as it came to prominence you would have been able to reap the rewards. Your friends might have thought you were stupid for investing in something that was obviously a pipedream. But had you done it, what would your friends be saying now? We “invest” in the Kingdom of God by following Jesus and trusting in him. It may not look like much now but as Christians we believe that it will eventually whenever God deems the time to be right. But not only that, we live now in the ways that will be universal in the Kingdom of God then. If the poor, the hungry, and the weeping will be blessed in the consummation of the Kingdom of God then we bless them now. One of the Six Great Ends of the Church from our PC(USA) Book of Order is the “exhibition of the Kingdom of God to the world.” The Church is supposed to exhibit to the world now what will be universal later. We are supposed to offer a taste of when God makes all things new. Quite often we don’t do a very good job of that.Theologian N.T. Wright puts it this way, “By the time of Jesus many Jewish thinkers divided history into two periods: ‘the present age’ and ‘the age to come’—the latter being the time when [God] would at last act decisively to judge evil, to rescue Israel, and to create a new world of justice and peace. The early Christians believed that, though the full blessings of the coming age lay still in the future, it had already begun with Jesus, particularly with his death and resurrection, and that by faith and baptism they were able to enter it already.”
When we look at the letters of Paul, it seems that he mostly deals with salvation as whether or not his readers will be saved from the wrath of God when God finally brings about the “age to come.” Generally, he does not deal with salvation from the perspective of what happens to us when we die. It is quite likely that Paul (and most early Christians) were under the impression that the final consummation of the age to come or the Kingdom of God was at hand, that any day Jesus would return and the new heaven and new earth would come, that all would be judged, and that those who had received the inheritance of eternal life by believing in and following Jesus Christ would be spared from God’s wrath and live eternally in the Kingdom of God. Why talk about what happens when we die when the new age will come fully before that ever happens? In fact, what many scholars believe to be the oldest document in the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians, was written to the Christians in Thessalonica in response to their fear and horror at the fact that some congregation members had died recently. This wasn’t supposed to happen! So what happens to them? Do they just miss out? Paul tells them not to worry. When everything goes down, God will raise the “dead in Christ.” Some Thessalonian Christians were so convinced that the end was coming soon that they quit their jobs to wait for it. In both instances, Paul deals with these quandaries in terms of what will happen eschatologically, at the “end times,” not what happens immediately upon death.
As N.T. Wright mentioned, the early Christian eschatology that is reflected in the New Testament grows organically out of the Jewish eschatology of the time. Jesus, fully divine and fully human (see Nicene Creed), was, in his approximately 33 years on this earth a Jew. As Christians we believe he is also the fulfillment of the promises that had been made by God to the Jewish people and made by God to the whole world through the Jewish people. So it only makes sense that he taught that he was the fulfillment of the Jewish eschatological hopes. The Jewish eschatology was that people just plain died then someday in the future God would resurrect all the dead, judge them as righteous or unrighteous, and those who were righteous would get to enjoy the “age to come” or the Kingdom of God that is free from illness, death, violence, and all forms of suffering, and those who were unrighteous were subject to God’s wrath.
This Jewish eschatology was adapted by the early Christians based upon the teachings of Jesus, but it doesn’t really change as much as you might think. The initial Christian belief seemed to be that Jesus had started that process and it would all happen very soon after his death, resurrection, and ascension. Here are the nuances however: people died then someday in the future God (early Christians believed any day now) would resurrect all the dead, judge them as righteous or unrighteous [with the followers of Jesus being judged based upon his righteousness and not their own], and those who were righteous (in Christ) would get to enjoy the “age to come” or the Kingdom of God that is free from illness, death, violence, and all forms of suffering, and those who were unrighteous were subject to God’s wrath. Because there was no sense that any of them would die before all this happened, the question of what happens to us between when we die and when we are resurrected didn’t really come up. That's why the Thessalonians freaked out.
So if Jesus’ teachings and ministry were not necessarily about what happens to us when we die but about “eschatology,” and the New Testament isn’t really all that concerned about us when we die but when God makes all things new, then what are we supposed to believe happens to us when we die? Well, I didn’t say the Bible doesn’t say anything about it, I just said it isn’t the overall point. Remember 1 Corinthians 15:19, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." But I’m out of time and space so we’ll continue this next week.
In the meantime, if you need some comfort read
Romans 14:8 and Question #1 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which is in our PC(USA) Book of Confessions or you can find it several places online.Thanks again for reading.
The Peace of Christ be with You All
