http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15583319/the-messy-way-to-know-gods-will

Audio Transcript

Happy Wednesday, and thank you for listening. Last time, on Monday, we took some time to look at several judgment texts in the New Testament to answer a sharp Bible question. And one of the points Pastor John made on Monday caught my attention. Maybe it caught your attention too. It was how Jesus described judgment in John 3:19: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.” As Pastor John said Monday, it is the world’s love of the darkness that judges them in the end. I want to press into this point, press deeper into this text, and go back to Pastor John’s sermon on this text, preached back in 2009. With that, here’s Pastor John.

So verse 19 says there is a kind of judgment. How so? How is it that when light, this light, comes into the world, judgment happens? How is that? And the rest of the text explains. “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world [and here’s what happens, here’s the split], and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (John 3:19–20).

Now that’s the negative response. Verse 21 is going to be the positive. Let’s stay with the negative a minute. Let’s know ourselves and who we are, fallen under the wrath of God, under condemnation. If you’re an unbeliever, that’s where you still are. If you’re a believer, you’re still contaminated by it and need to constantly own your true identity in Christ and put to death the old identity. So let’s know ourselves here — believer or unbeliever, let’s know ourselves.

Hiding in Darkness

You can sum up what I just read about this person in five steps.

First, their works, our works — what we think, we feel, we do, all that stuff — are evil. It says so at the end of verse 19 (“their works were evil”) and verse 20 at the beginning (they do “wicked things”).

Second, they don’t want this to be exposed. What we’re thinking, what we’re feeling, what we’re doing, my whole life of evil — I don’t want that to be exposed. So verse 20, at the end, says, “lest his works should be exposed.” They don’t want that to happen. So first there’s evil, and then there’s the fear and the desire that it not be exposed.

“Unbelief is, at root, a love affair.”

Therefore, third, they love darkness. It’s safe. Verse 20, in the middle of the verse, says, “and people loved the darkness rather than the light.” This is a love affair. Unbelief is, at root, a love affair. Love is a big word. He did not have to speak this way. He could have stuck with belief language.

We all tend to think, “Oh, believing in Jesus is a decision.” Well, sort of; underneath decisions are torrents of reality. And this is a description of them. There’s love going on down there for all the wrong things. “I love you, darkness. I love you, darkness. You are so safe. You love me so much. You protect me.”

And therefore, fourth, they hated the light. Verse 20, at the beginning, says, “For everyone who does wicked things hates the light.” You’ve got to. “All that stuff, it’s just going to look so horrible and shameful, and I can’t stand that thought. I’ve just got to keep loving the dark and pushing the light away.”

And so, fifth, they don’t come to Jesus. They don’t come to the light. The middle of verse 20 says, “and does not come to the light.”

So there they are, five steps:

“I’m doing evil stuff inside and outside. I’m evil.”
“I don’t want that to be exposed.”
“Therefore, I love darkness.”
“Therefore, I hate the light.”
“I’m not coming. I’m not coming. I’m not believing.” (Believing and coming are, in John, the same thing.)

So this is Jesus’s explanation of unbelief. The division into two kinds of people, verses 19–21, is the same division as verses 16–18. Some believe, some don’t believe, and now he’s going into the inner workings of our soul.

Laid Bare

So let’s just linger here for a minute. I’m a sinner. You’re a sinner. What I mean by that is that my life is never fully in sync with the infinite worth and beauty of God — never. God is always worthy of more than I give him. He’s always worthy of more intensity than I feel for him, always worthy of more consistency of obedience than I give him, always worthy of more consistent mental work for him than I give him. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Who does that? Raise your hand if you do that — all of it, all in, all the time. Nobody, because you don’t. And I don’t either. We’re sinners, and therefore we’re under wrath because God is so infinitely worthy of more than we give him. And we dishonor him every day of our lives, believer and unbeliever. We do this.

“We’re under wrath because God is so infinitely worthy of more than we give him.”

And the difference is not that one is good and the other is bad, simply. The Holy Spirit is at work on believers. They are changing. But I’ve been a Christian since I was 6. I’m 63. I’m not optimistic about finishing without sin. I hope my sights are not too low. I just love grace more — a lot.

Jesus says that we dishonor the Lord every day, and the reason that people hate the light and love the darkness is this. When, by some amazing work of providence, we begin to know ourselves sinful, it becomes either really angry-making or really fear-making that that might be exposed. Just imagine your whole life, and all you did last week and all the weeks before, just out there. This is why people don’t come to Christ, this text says — “lest his works should be exposed” (John 3:20). Shame that is deserved is a horrible thing.

Have you ever been embarrassed to the point of just wanting to run out of the universe as a little kid wetting your pants at school? That’s nothing. What if everything were laid bare? This is why people don’t come. It’s just terrifying that I might actually have to live in absolute light, nothing hidden anymore. They don’t come. They stay hidden.

When God Shines Light

Now, careful. That does not mean people don’t commit public sins. You might draw the conclusion from what I just said, “Oh, people are afraid that their sin will be exposed, so they never do it in public.” What? Why? If it’s so terrifying to come into the light with your sin, why are sins so publicly flaunted in our day? There’s a real simple reason. As long as the public banishes the light, there are enough people to admire the sinful behavior that you don’t feel shame but approval. As long as the light of Christ is kept out of the sphere in which you’re acting out your evil, public sin is in the dark. Public doesn’t mean light. Public means dark people observing dark behavior, and liking it because it confirms their own.

But if God shows up, we call this revival, moving on a people in a church or in a community. And suddenly, Christ and all of his standards, the holiness of God and all of its perfection, begins to rest with some weight upon the world. You know what happens? People are either driven to Christ because of the horror of their own shame, or they’re driven away further into darkness. And the ways divide, and that’s the judgment that this verse is talking about.

Have you ever wondered why we don’t think about heaven more? In fact, if heaven is all that Scripture says, how do we manage to think about anything else?

Observing this tension, C.S. Lewis wrote, “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else” (The Problem of Pain, 149). In other words, all our longings find their true home in heaven. And yet, if we are honest, we spend far more time thinking about almost anything else. Why?

I suspect we don’t think much about heaven because we don’t think well about heaven. Until we learn to think well about heaven, we won’t think more about it. But if we learn to think well — ah, then it will be impossible to avoid thinking more. We must learn to rightly imagine heaven.

The Heaven Satan Loves

One of the main reasons we do not think well is because Satan hates heaven and wants us to do the same. Randy Alcorn explains, “Some of Satan’s favorite lies are about Heaven. . . . Our enemy slanders three things: God’s person, God’s people, and God’s place — namely, Heaven” (Heaven, 10–11). Satan is the father of lies, and some of his most damning lies involve the life to come.

Satan promotes the floaty no-place of Far Side cartoons, where ghostly figures sit on clouds strumming harps. This image, built on gnostic (anti-body) assumptions, induces utter boredom, and so Satan loves it. Saints may enjoy a bodiless heaven now, but it will not always be so. Satan knows no body-soul creature could be fully content to spend endless ages like that. And there’s the point. If Satan can get us to buy into a heaven unearthly, ghostly, or (God forbid) boring, we won’t think about heaven. And if we don’t think about it, why would we tell others or orient our lives toward it?

That final vision of heaven is an illusion, a dark enchantment cast by an envious Satan to extinguish our excitement about heaven. We don’t long because we don’t look, and we don’t look because we have believed lies. So, we must learn to banish this hellish hoax by thinking biblically about God’s place.

More Real, Not Less

Paul was a man who thought well about God’s place, and so it dominated his thoughts. In Philippians alone, Paul says, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23) — a Christ-centered way of saying, “I long for heaven.” Later, he says we are citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20). And he describes his whole life as a sprint toward a finish line: “One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).

That “upward call” is the heavenward call — the summons to come higher and higher. Like the saints in Hebrews, Paul desired to reach “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16). The hope of heaven consumed Paul. Why? Because he thought well about heaven.

When our thoughts run in biblical tracks, we begin to understand that the joys of heaven will be full and deep and exuberant — pleasures enormous! We will not float as disembodied spirits strumming harps for eternity (however that works). Heaven will brook no boredom. It will be more solid, not less — more physical, more tangible, more diamond-hard, more real than anything we experience now. And yet, everything we experience now helps us imagine what is coming.

This, but Better

Paul himself teaches us how to think about heaven when he says, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). From these verses, we may infer that paradise will be better than the best things we experience now, better even than the wildest joys we can imagine.

“I suspect we don’t think much about heaven because we don’t think well about heaven.”

Now, I take Paul’s statement as a challenge because it means I can look at every good thing now and every good I can envision, and I can say of it, “Heaven will be this, but better.” You can learn to think well about heaven by enjoying all the good things in this life now, lifting them as high as your imagination can go, and saying, this, but better. After all, the best things now serve as a mere taste test, as echoes of the music or bright shadows of the far better country to come.

Let me apply this way of thinking well about heaven to three of the best gifts God gives now.

1. This Body, but Better

In heaven, we will enjoy new bodies. Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Secular propaganda leads us astray on this point and tries to make us more “spiritual” than God. But he made our bodies. As a master artist, he judged them very good (Genesis 1:31). He took a body for himself — and by taking, forever hallowed. When God became man, he definitively declared the permanent goodness of the body. No approval could be more final than the incarnation.

And so we will enjoy both souls and bodies for eternity — new bodies, better bodies, bodies like Jesus’s right now, bodies with glorified senses, bodies without disease or pain, bodies that can run with joy, work without exhaustion, see without glasses, live without aging — or better! And so when you enjoy your body at its best now in holy eating and sleeping and sex and running and sports and singing and hugs and work and laughter, think to yourself, this body, but better.

2. This Earth, but Better

Biblically speaking, when we talk about our eternal heaven, we mean the new heavens and the new earth. In the end, heaven is not the opposite of earth; heaven is earth redeemed and remade and married to the new heavens. As Alcorn says, “Heaven isn’t an extrapolation of earthly thinking; Earth is an extension of Heaven, made by the Creator King” (Heaven, 13).

Oh, what good news for those homesick for Eden! God created us to enjoy God’s presence with God’s people in God’s place. An earthly place with glorified trees and garden mountains, with unfallen culture and undiminished art, the taste of chocolate and the smell of bacon, with majestic thunderstorms and soul-stirring apricity — the warmth of the sun in winter. One day, paradise lost will become paradise regained and remade into a garden-city.

The new earth will be just that — new. Like our new bodies, we will recognize it. It will be free from the bondage of corruption and the ravishes of sin, but it will not be utterly different. When God renews this earth, no good will be finally lost, no beauty obscured, no truth forgotten. And so, every time you glimpse the gigantic glory of God here, think to yourself, this earth, but better.

But of course, the place is nothing without the person.

3. This Joy in Jesus, but Better

As Christians, we enjoy Jesus now. That’s what it means to be a Christian. We seek to enjoy Jesus in everything and everything in Jesus. But in heaven, our joy in Jesus will increase. It will grow deeper and sweeter. It will bloom and blossom. Our happiness will expand forever in every conceivable way. Why? Because we will see Jesus face to face. Our King will dwell with us bodily. We shall behold the Word made flesh.

This was the hope Job harbored amid his suffering:

I know that my Redeemer lives,     and at the last he will stand upon the earth.And after my skin has been thus destroyed,     yet in my flesh I shall see God,whom I shall see for myself,     and my eyes shall behold, and not another.     My heart faints within me! (Job 19:25–27)

Job fainted for the beatific vision, which will undoubtedly be more than physical but not less. If this hope of heaven is yours in Christ, then one day you, with the saints of all ages, will bask in the smile of Jesus himself. Our new knees will bow on a new earth, and we will join in the cosmic praise of Christ with new tongues. Can you imagine that?

Fullness of Joy

If you can, you are beginning to think well about heaven. You are learning to anticipate the place where God will satisfy all our longings with the pleasures at his right hand. When we finally set foot in the far green country, everything good we ever wanted — the longings we have cherished since childhood, the desires we downplay as adults, the yearnings that visit us in the silent moments and echo endlessly in our hearts, that sweet something we have searched for, reached for, listened for, hunted after — God will satisfy all. My whole being — body and soul — will cry out, “This is what I was made for. Here at last, I am home!”

Friend, we cannot hope for what we do not desire, and we cannot desire what we have not imagined. Therefore, let’s exercise our imaginations — our Bible-saturated, Spirit-empowered, Trinity-treasuring imaginations — to think well about heaven.

Heaven will be like this, but far better.