THE FOUR LAST THINGS

In Advent we look forward. We rekindle the eager hope and fear with which the Old Testament prophets looked forward to the coming of the promised Messiah; we prepare ourselves to celebrate his birth at Christmas.

When the Lord Christ came to live among us, he taught us to look forward to the hour when we shall each be called from this world through death: the crowning point of every life, when we appear before him for judgment.

He taught us also, and above all, to see our lives in his divine perspective, to long for the day when he will come again for us, the point beyond which all looking forward will cease, for time will have come to an end. Then all will be united and perfected in heaven, save what has been lost to hell.

Let us meditate on these four last things: death judgment, heaven and hell. Let us examine our preparation for death and eternal life, in order that we may be strengthened in hope, moved to thank God for his grace, and inspired to deeper penitence and greater love.

“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” (John 14:2)

Jesus bids us think of death not as a leap into the dark unknown, but as a journey to a prepared place. It will not be like arriving in a strange town in a foreign land, where you know nobody, nobody is expecting you and you haven’t even made a hotel reservation. No. Just as Jesus sent two of his disciples ahead into the city to prepare for him to eat the Passover (Mk.14:12-16), so now he would go ahead to prepare a place for them. In the familiar and true expression death is “going home” to a place prepared in our Father’s house.

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” (John 14:3)

Here is a second promise of Christ calculated to reassure us. Having gone ahead to prepare a place for us, he does not expect us to travel there on our own. Instead, he promises to come back in person to fetch us. Christ comes to take us to himself. Is it fanciful to suppose that when the dying martyr Stephen said he saw Jesus standing at God’s right hand, Jesus has in fact risen from his throne in order to fetch or welcome him? Christ is our destination as well as our escort. He comes to take us, and he takes us to himself.

This is the essential New Testament revelation about the next life for believers, whether the reference is to the final state after the resurrection or to the intermediate state between death and resurrection. Of the intermediate state Paul said he had a “desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil.1:23; cf. 2 Cor.5:8). Of the final state he wrote “so we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thess.4:17).

There is no need for us to speculate about the precise nature of heaven. We are assured on the authority of Jesus Christ that it is the house and home of his Father and ours (there are twenty-two references to the Father in this chapter), that this home is a prepared place containing many rooms or resting places, and that he himself will be there. What more do we need to know? To be certain that where he is, there we shall be also should be enough to satisfy our curiosity and allay our fears,

“I am the way and the truth and the life.” (John 14:6)

It is a beautiful truth that the Lord Jesus Christ, who is himself our heavenly destination, is in addition our forerunner (who has gone ahead to prepare the way), our personal escort (who comes to fetch us) and the way by which we travel there. The sense in which Jesus Christ is “the way” to the Father is suggested by the other two expressions; namely, that he is also “the truth and the life,” that is, the truth about God and the very life of God.

These, then, are the four positive assertions about the second coming of Christ which he gave to the apostles in order to cure their spiritual heart trouble (“Do not let your hearts be troubled”). And the same promises (if we believe them) will calm our fears in the face of death. Already he is preparing a place for us. Already he is the way along which we are traveling. One day (at his appearing or in a secondary sense at our death) he will come to fetch us and he will take us to himself.

It is those believers who thus keep their eyes on Christ as the Forerunner, the Way, the Escort, and the Destination, whose hearts are set free from the fear of death. Henry Venn when told he was dying, “the prospect made him so jubilant and high-spirited that his doctor said that his joy at dying kept him alive a further fortnight.”

(From the forthcoming THE GLORY OF CHRIST: The Theology of John Stott, Ted Schroder)