A WORLD OF GLORIOUS LOVE
MIKE CUNNINGHAM

I met them last Sunday morning when Pastor Eddie Hilderbrand of the University Baptist Church of Huntsville, Alabama pinch-hit for me in this pulpit. His team of summer missionaries was used by God to bless the folks in our church enormously throughout the week. I especially enjoyed fellowshipping with them every day as they conducted VBS. So much so, that I was sorry they had to leave. I would like to have spent a lot more time with them, and I will, but it wont be in this world. Those are the kind of folks we will delight in living with in heaven throughout eternity.

Speaking of heaven, I have completely revised and modernized excerpts from Jonathan Edwards outstanding work on “HEAVEN.” He refers to it as being “the palace of the high and Holy One.” He explains that our invisible Creator is “the cause and source of all holy love.” The Bible teaches that God is everywhere. So much so, that He literally fills heaven and earth. However, in some respects, He is also said to be in some places more than He is in others. For instance, according to the Bible, in ancient times God dwelled in the land of Israel, in Jerusalem, in the temple, and in the holy of holies on the mercy seat, and over the arc of the covenant. Heaven is that part of creation that God has built to be “the place of His glorious presence,” and it is “here that He will dwell, and gloriously manifest Himself throughout eternity.”

“Heaven is a world of love because God is the fountain of love, just as the sun is the fountain of light. Therefor, the glorious presence of God in Heaven fills Heaven with love, just as the sun on a clear day fills the world with light. The apostle tells us that, “God is love.” Therefor, because He is an infinite being, He is a full and overflowing, and inexhaustible fountain of love. And because God is a never changing and eternal being, He is an unchangeable and eternal fountain of love.

Yes-God lives in Heaven and it’s from there that every stream of holy love and every drop that is, or ever was, proceeds. This invisible triune supernatural being; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit dwell in an infinitely precious, and incomprehensible mutual and eternal love.

God the Father is the father of mercies, and is the father of all love. It is He who so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son to die for it.

Christ, “the Lamb of God,” “the prince of peace” loved the world so much that He shed His precious blood, and poured out His soul and died for all men who believe in Him. Christ is the great Mediator, through whom all the divine love is expressed toward men, and through whom the fruits of that love have been purchased. Christ in His human and divine nature is sitting on the same throne in heaven with the Father.”

The Holy Spirit lives in heaven. Yes-The Spirit of holy love, the One in whom the very essence of God is breathed forth in love. It’s through the Holy Spirits’ supernatural influence that holy love is imparted in the hearts of all God’s people on earth and in heaven.

Heaven is the place from which the infinite fountain of love of the eternal triune God is manifested and from where it shines forth in full glory with beams of love. This glorious fountain flows forth forever in streams, and then in rivers of love and delight. And these rivers swell and finally become an ocean of love, in which all those who have been ransomed by Jesus may bathe to their hearts content, while their hearts and souls are saturated with love!

There are only holy people in Heaven. No non-Christian or unlovely or polluted person or thing will ever be seen there. There is nothing in heaven that is sinful or unholy, (Rev. 21:27.) For instance, there is no one that is deformed with any natural or moral defect in heaven. Think about it; I wont be a crippled sinner anymore nor will a fellow sinner such as Linda be disabled. There aren’t any cane’s or walkers or wheelchairs in heaven. Of course, there aren’t any sexually immoral people there either. You wont find any worrywarts in heaven. And there sure wont be any proud, know it all’s either. Heaven’s inhabitants will no longer be plagued by angry loose cannons throwing their childish temper tantrums or folks who lie and spread all sorts of gossip about other people behind their back. Nor will there be any nitpickers or anyone with an unforgiving spirit. Conspicuous by their absence are the multitudes of phony Christians and hypocrites. I could go on and on but I think you have the picture. The bottom line is that only true followers of Jesus will live happily forever in heaven with Him.

Edwards reminds us that, “the God that dwells and gloriously manifests himself in heaven is infinitely and gloriously lovely as a heavenly Father, a merciful Redeemer, and as a holy Sanctifier. All of heaven’s inhabitants are lovely. The Father of the family is lovely, and so are all His children. The head of the body is lovely, and so are all its members. Among the angels in heaven there isn’t any that aren’t lovely because each of them is holy. No evil angels are allowed to infest Heaven as Satan and his demons do in our world. They are kept forever at an infinite distance by that great gulf which is between them and the glorious world of love.”

Everyone shall be perfectly lovely in heaven. Just as there are spots on the sun, there are many men and women in this world that are loveable. However, they still have traces of sin within them. For instance, even the best of people living in our world still have many character defects. In other words, no human being living in our world is perfect. But in Heaven, there isn’t any kind of pollution, or deformity in any person or thing. Everyone living in heaven is perfect in purity and love. That wonderfully awesome world is perfectly bright, without a glimmer of darkness. It’s perfectly fair, without any spot, and it’s perfectly clear, without a single cloud.

No man or woman, boy or girl with a moral blemish or natural defect can possibly enter into heaven. In fact, nothing will ever be seen in heaven that is sinful or weak or foolish. Nothing which is displeasing, or which can offend the most refined taste or the most delicate eye is in heaven. No string shall ever vibrate out of tune to distort the harmony of the music of Heaven.

Jesus, the Son of God; He who is the brightness of the Father’s glory is living in Heaven in the fullness of His glory. In heaven the Holy Spirit shall be poured forth with perfect richness and sweetness, as a pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

Every citizen of that holy place shall be without any stain of sin, or imperfection, or weakness, or blemish of any kind. In Heaven the whole church, ransomed and purified, shall have been presented to Christ, as a bride, clothed in fine linen, clean and white, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing. Wherever the inhabitants of that blessed world shall turn their eyes they shall see nothing but dignity, and beauty, and glory. In heaven, followers of Jesus will be reunited with those brothers and sisters in Christ that they loved and cared about deeply while they dwelt on earth.

Up in heaven they will find those things that they delighted in while they lived here below. Things of which they rejoiced to think about often. There too, the things which were so dear to them that they were ready for the sake of them to undergo the severest of sufferings, and to forsake even father, and mother, and friends, and wife and children, and grandparents, and life itself. All the truly great and the good, all the pure and the holy and excellent from this world, and from every part of the universe, are constantly moving toward Heaven. Just as the streams tend to flow to the ocean, so too, all these folks are flowing to the great ocean of infinite purity and bliss.

Figuratively speaking, every precious gem which death rudely tears away from us here is a glorious gem that’s forever shining in Heaven. You and I can take comfort in the fact that every Christian friend that goes before us from this world is a ransomed spirit waiting to welcome us into Heaven.

As I said a moment ago, the Christian father and mother and wife, and child, together with grandparents and friends with whom our fellowship on earth was interrupted by death will be restarted in the upper sanctuary and shall never end.

In heaven we will meet and enjoy eternal fellowship with the patriarchs and fathers and saints of the Old and New Testaments, all those people of whom the world was not worthy. I don’t know about you folks but for starters I would like to meet Job followed by the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, as well as Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, and the Apostle’s Peter and Paul.

In Heaven, Christians are going to enjoy dwelling with God the Father, the One whom they have loved with all of their heart and mind and soul and strength while they lived on earth; and with Jesus Christ, their beloved Savior, together with the Holy Spirit, their Sanctifier, and Guide, and Comforter; and you and I and every other follower of Jesus will be filled with the fullness of the Godhead forever! I urge you folks to make the time to think about and savor everything you just heard me preach and seriously contemplate what it’s going to be like to live in heaven.

Now I’m going to give you a little more food for thought by citing excerpts from “Evil and the Justice of God,” by N. T. Wright who says that, “The trouble with imagining the future world is that we’ve all been given the wrong impression. We shouldn’t imagine “heaven” as popularly conceived, but “the new heavens and the new earth” of which both Isaiah and Revelation speak. The Bible doesn’t give us a picture of the ultimate future as a world of disembodied spirits or cherubs on clouds. It’s much more solid, and much more real than that. Revelation 21-22 for all its language full of symbol and imagery, clearly envisions that the reality to which these images and symbols point will be a new creation, an actual world which will resemble our world of space, time and matter in all sorts of ways, even as it will be far more glorious, full of new possibilities, new healing, new growth, and new beauty.”

“Sticking with those last two chapters of Revelation for the moment, we find that we are invited to imagine a community, a great multitude of people constituting a city, the city which is the New Jerusalem. This is a community from which every type of sub humanity, every sort of diminished and dehumanized behavior, has been excluded (Revelation 21:8, 27; 22:15.) This community is a place of dazzling beauty, as the jewels and the gold and the perfectly proportioned buildings all indicate. It is a place of healing, both in the present (Revelation 21:4) and, in the future (Revelation 22:2,) where the leaves on the tree of life, growing by the river which flows out of the city are for the “healing of the nations.”

“To imagine a community of beauty and healing is to take a large step toward seeing in our mind’s eye the world that God intends to bring about through the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is the world toward which we are to direct our Spirit-given energies.”

“When we come to the Pauline pictures of the same ultimate reality that we first saw in 1 Corinthians 15, the emphasis is on a future world without death. Death-the corruption and decay of the good creation and of humans who bear God’s image-is the ultimate blasphemy, the great intruder, the final satanic weapon, and it will itself be defeated. That is the point of the resurrection, which is the main theme of the chapter. When we think of a world unreachable by death, we tend in Western culture to think of a nonphysical world. But the truly remarkable thing Paul is talking about here is an incorruptible, and non-destructible physical world.”

“New creation is what matters, a new kind of world with a new kind of physicality, which will not be subject to the seasons of the apparently (to us) endless sequence of deaths and births within the natural order. God’s new world will be the reality toward which all the beauty and power in the present world are mere signposts. But they are true signposts,” “…because they point to a world that will be more physical, more solid, more utterly real. A world in which the physical reality will wear its deepest meanings on its face, a world filled with the knowledge of God’s glory as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14).”

“The greatest Pauline picture of the future world is Romans 8:19-26. “Creation, writes Paul, has been subjected to futility (Romans 8:20.) Don’t we know it: the tree reaches its full fruitfulness and then becomes bleak and bare. Summer reaches its height and at once the days start to shorten. Human lives, full of promise and beauty, laughter and love, are cut short by illness and death. Creation as we know it bears witness to God’s power and glory (Romans 1:19-20) but also the present state of futility to which it has been enslaved.”

“But this slavery, like all slaveries in the Bible, is then given its exodus, its moment of release, when God does for the whole cosmos what He did for Jesus at Easter. This is the vision, which is so big, so dazzling, that even many devout readers of Paul have blinked, rubbed their eyes and ignored it, hurrying out to the more “personal” application in the following paragraph. But this is where Paul’s whole argument has been going. This is where his great theme of so many treatments of “the problem of evil”-comes to one of its greatest climaxes. The theme of God’s justice has for so long been subsumed in popular readings of Paul under the theme of human salvation that we need to remind ourselves, that the theme stated in Romans 1:16-17 comes to its full expression not simply in Romans 5:1-11 or Romans 8:1-11, but in Romans 8:19-27.”

“It might look as though God the Creator had blundered or was weak and incapable, or was actually unjust. No, declares Paul: the renewal of creation, the birth of the new world from the laboring womb of the old, will demonstrate that God is in the right. Romans 8, is the deepest New Testament answer to “the problem of evil,” to the question of God’s justice. And it is all accomplished according to the pattern of exodus, of the freeing of the slaves, and of the cross, and of the resurrection, and of the powerful new life of following the Spirit.”

“The New Testament invites us to imagine a new world as a beautiful, healing community, to envision it as a world vibrant with life and energy, incorruptible beyond the reach of death and decay; to hold it in our mind’s eye as a world reborn and set free from the slavery of corruption, free to truly be what it was made to be.”

“The question of how we can imagine such a world is itself challenging. Using the scripture’s lets try to visualize what it might look like. Then we can begin to anticipate this new world in the present. As Paul insists in Romans 8, when we anticipate this future life, our entire lifetime in this world will be one of groaning in the Spirit as we wait for the final gift, but we will also be rejoicing because we know that the victory is already won (Romans 5:1-5; 8:31-3).

As I shared during a VSB break last week; I will be eternally grateful that a long time ago God inclined me to believe in Jesus, acknowledge my sins to Him, and accept the free gift of forgiveness which is available only through His Son, Jesus Christ. I truly want to live in heaven. I know that I will be happy there, and, based on the way that I’m sincerely trying to live my life today, I know that I’ll be welcome in heaven.

It’s been my prayerful hope as well as one of the desires of my heart, that all those folks that we love and care about deeply, including those wonderful summer missionaries that God sent to us from Alabama last week, will one day live together forever in A WORLD OF GLORIOUS LOVE.

Lord willing, next week ….