Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word, a Great Commission project that explains the big ideas in the New Testament chapter by chapter. Well, once again, we’re splitting one chapter into part one and two. And in this episode, the idea of eternity and the hope of an eternal body is brought front and center, of course, along with other things. Paul, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, part 1. For we know. Are you familiar with the concept of near-death experiences?

I don’t mean when you’re looking at your phone and run off the road and you suddenly realize, man, I could have killed myself there. I mean more like real near-death experiences, or even death experiences, when someone dies in the sense we have always thought of death. Their heart stops, they have no pulse, or if they’re in the hospital hooked to machines, even no brain waves, yet then somehow come back to life. If you haven’t heard or paid attention to such accounts, and it sounds interesting to you, you’re listening on the right day. Moving from 2 Corinthians chapter 4 to chapter 5 is one of those places where whoever it was who inserted chapters and verses into the text created an awkward and unnecessary break, because the first half of chapter 5 is definitely continuing and completing Paul’s lofty thoughts about the temporary versus the eternal.

He writes at the beginning of this chapter, For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile, we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we don’t wish to be unclothed, but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now the one who has fashioned us for all this very purpose is God, who has given us His Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing us what is to come. You may remember this from our journey through the book of Acts.

In chapter 18, we read about Paul’s first coming alone into the great city, but spiritually dark city of Corinth, having left his team members Silas, Timothy, and so on in Macedonia behind him to complete things there after he had been run out of town. He admitted that arriving in Corinth was an intimidating experience, but God had a surprise waiting for him there, remember? He was flat out of dough, and so he went to the area of the city where tradesmen might find work, and there he ran into Aquila and Priscilla for the first time. That couple were not only Jewish Christians, which had to be a huge surprise and encouragement to Paul, but they owned a business making tents and other leather goods, which just so happened to be Paul’s trade, and he learned that they needed help.

So they ended up becoming great friends, great partners in ministry, as well as his employers while he was with them in Corinth. The Corinthians knew that Paul worked at this trade while he was there in their city, and so this analogy he gets into here is based on that, his and their familiarity with tents. My familiarity with tents, I admit, is very limited. I remember trying to camp out once in my backyard with my neighbor friend. But our attempt at constructing a homemade tent over the clothesline was very unsuccessful. Plus every noise made us go, Hey, did you hear that?

And then an owl hooted or something, and hey, we ran for the inside. The experiment was over. But in the Middle East, in biblical times, and still to this day in places, nomadic people lived in tents. And they were in Paul’s time made of tanned animal hides sewn together. They were waterproofed by rubbing oils or animal fat into the leather. These tents Paul had learned to make were pretty durable, but over the years, the sun would do its job.

The leather would begin to degrade, dry out, crack up. Eventually, they’d come apart. And then you needed a new tent. Paul saw in that a good illustration of how our human bodies age, start breaking down, eventually wearing completely out, meaning we physically die, and we need a new body. I think in the first century, death was a lot more in people’s face, if you know what I mean, than it is today. Life expectancy was shorter.

There weren’t the kinds of life-extending treatments and medications that are common now, at least in the first world countries. In America, I think most people hardly entertain thoughts of death or seriously come to grips with the fact it’s going to happen to them until the very end, if even then. It’s just not something we want to admit is real. But it is, of course, and it’s inevitable. Neither tents nor human bodies will last forever. They will wear out.

They are temporary by nature. Yet Paul says, I know. I know that when my earthly tent, this temporary body I’m living in now, is torn down, I have a building from God awaiting me in heaven, an eternal house, he calls it. Not another temporary tent, but a permanent replacement like a building. He’s referring to the immortal, glorified body God is going to give believers that is fitted for heaven and for eternity. Remember my discussion with my buddies based in 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

There, Paul told us what comes next for Christians after we physically die. He said, This body that will be sown is perishable. He means buried in the ground, like a seed. But it will be raised imperishable. It’s sown in dishonor, but it will be raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, but it will be raised in power.

It is sown a natural body, but it will be raised a spiritual body. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: Death has been swallowed up in victory. This is what Paul said he knew. I know this will happen, he said. When my body wears out, death ultimately comes. Death will be overcome by victory.

God will have for me a new immortal body. What a thing to know, or alternatively, not know. I’ve been around people at the end of their lives in both of those situations. I remember clearly being with my parents the day my father died. He was in the critical care unit of our local hospital. Multiple things were failing in his body in his 80s.

He had a serious infection on top of that. His tent was coming down. I remember that the day he died, I was in the room. He was fixed in conversation with my mother. I don’t think he even realized I was there, but I was, like a fly on the wall. And I heard him say, What’s the Lord trying to do to me today, Mary?

Take me home? And my mom said, I really don’t know, Bob. I don’t know. Then he said, I’m ready to go. I just don’t want to go without you. He spoke with confidence.

He knew what would happen next when this earthly tent collapsed. I remember, too, a member of one of the churches I pastored who was dying with cancer. His name was Charlie. He had always been a big, strapping man, but near the end, cancer had wasted him quite a bit. His tent was coming down. One of the last conversations I had with him, he sent whoever was there with us in the room out for ice cream, and he said, Bring me back some rum raisin.

Once they were gone, he said, Paul, I want you to speak at my funeral. All my friends are going to be there. He was a well-known businessman in our area. Please preach the gospel to them as plain as you know how. I want my friends all to be in heaven with me one day. Charlie knew where he was going.

I’ve seen the other side of the story as well, sadly. I remember on another occasion being asked to go see a relative of one of my church members in the hospital who was dying. This was never something I looked forward to, especially when it was someone I didn’t know very well. I wasn’t aware of their spiritual condition, but I felt it was very important to my church member friend to go, so I went. I remember walking into this man’s hospital room and him looking at me like, Who are you? I pulled up a chair near his bed and told him who I was and said, John, your sister asked me to come see you because she knows you’re very sick.

And she’s concerned about your soul. As I started to say, Can I talk with you about what’s coming next? he literally rolled over in his hospital bed and turned his back to me and wouldn’t say another word. For whatever reason, he wasn’t going to talk about it, even on his deathbed. And I knew from what I’d been told by his family he was not a Christian. As that man’s tent was coming down, he had no idea what was going to happen next.

I’ve often wondered what exactly goes through someone’s mind at that point who does not know Christ. I want to dissect these verses in the first part of 2 Corinthians chapter 5 a little bit because this is such an important subject. At verse 4, Paul writes, While we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Although Paul uses we, he’s giving his own perspective here. When he wrote this, he was a man in his late 50s, probably close to 60 years old. But remember, people aged more quickly then, and Paul in particular had lived an extremely hard life.

His body had been through a lot. He says here essentially, I’m not anxious to die, what he means by be unclothed, to leave his body, he means, but he is anxious for the new immortal body God has promised to him. I certainly identify when he says, In this body I groan and feel burdened. You know what? Groaning is something that starts. I don’t even know when it starts.

It starts involuntarily as you age. All of a sudden one day you realize you’re groaning every time you have to get up out of a chair or off the couch, like, ugh. Your joints are stiff. Stuff hurts in your body. Today we can, you know, take additives and pain pills that help somewhat. These are things Paul didn’t have access to.

But we know that it’s ultimately a losing battle. As time wears on, I long more and more for what he’s talking about here, that new body that God has promised us that will be strong and immortal and ageless. That’s what Paul is describing. At verse five he says, God has given us the Spirit as a deposit of that, guaranteeing what is to come, meaning the Holy Spirit who comes to indwell believers when they accept Christ. He’s the one who regenerates us and gives us new spiritual life. In fact, if you remember, we learned this during our study of the Gospel of John, when we receive Christ and the Holy Spirit comes in to indwell us, at that point, right then, whatever age we are, we start living eternal life.

Eternal life is not out in the future somewhere ahead of Christians. We already have eternal life, and the Holy Spirit is the promised down payment from God on all the rest that he has promised us in the future in heaven, the guarantee that God will resurrect and transform our bodies into these new, powerful, immortal bodies that Paul was longing for, that he has a beautiful place prepared for us to live, that we will be reunited with friends and family who have also died in faith, and that we will enjoy all the amazing things that he has planned for us in the future. The first account of a near-death experience that I took seriously was when I heard the testimony of a Baptist pastor named Don Piper, who was killed in a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer on a bridge one night, driving home from pastors’ conference. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

This was a rural Texas area before cell phones were common. It took more than an hour, if I remember right, to get an ambulance or a coroner’s wagon to the scene of the accident. But paramedics arrived there, and his mangled body was pulled from the car and was pronounced dead. He was put under a plastic tarp to the side to await the coroner’s wagon. In the meantime, along came another pastor returning from the same conference, came upon the scene of the accident, and he stopped to see if he could help or comfort anyone. He said he stopped.

When he did, the Holy Spirit just urged him to pray for the man under the tarp, and he did. It was Pastor Piper. He had been dead for approximately 90 minutes by that time, and when he did, Don opened his eyes and showed signs of life. It took years and more than 30 operations for Pastor Piper to recover from all his injuries, and during that time, he only shared with those closest to him what he’d experienced in that hour and a half he was dead. It wasn’t until years later that he even felt okay talking about it. It seemed so personal and so, frankly, unbelievable.

But eventually, a friend convinced him to write down his recollections, and his story was published in a book called 90 Minutes in Heaven. I don’t usually do this, but I want to give some extensive excerpts now from an interview with Don Piper that he later gave. It’s very interesting. Listen. People often talk about near-death experiences, he said, but 90 minutes is not nearly died. I was dead.

I had four different sets of emergency medical technicians pronounce me dead. It was a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer. I had no time to react, and there was no sense of passing away. I think that was why I was instantly there, he means in heaven. There was no ebbing away of my life. It was just a split second impact, and then I was standing there.

What I encountered first was, I’d have to call a welcoming party of people. I realized these were people I’d known and loved on earth who had already deceased, including my grandfather, my great-grandmother, and other relatives. And I was surrounded by all these familiar faces of people who had gone before me. And they were breathtakingly beautiful in a way. It was a splendid reunion with these people who had told me about Jesus and invited me to church when I was young, people who I realized had helped me get to heaven. I didn’t see anybody that I didn’t know, he said, and I was very curious about that.

The only thing I can conclude is that the people who are sent to welcome us are the people who helped us get there. The people I saw were as familiar as when I knew them on earth, yet they were more beautiful. They all looked perfect. They didn’t look complete in the sense that they are in a bodily form. It was a kind of spiritual form. But I did recognize all these people for who they were, and they were quite breathtaking for some reason in their appearance, almost glowing, but still very recognizable.

I felt so accepted. I can’t wait to go back. I really never wanted to come back from there. To know that they are there and they are waiting for me at the gate is something I earnestly long to return to. He went on, While there, I heard incredibly magnificent music that surpasses anything I have ever heard on earth. All the songs were hallelujah songs, like praise songs, glory to God songs.

And there was no chaos. I could hear all this myriad of songs, thousands of songs it seemed like at once, and yet I could distinguish each one if I focused in on them. So heaven was kind of a buffet for my senses, a sensory explosion. I saw colors there that don’t exist here, sounds that don’t exist here, even aroma that doesn’t exist here. That’s a kind of uniquely heaven smell. It was all incomparable to anything here.

Don said that time didn’t pass when he was in this heavenly encounter, and all the worries and concerns of earth were gone for him. However, he came back to earth before he had a chance to see God. He saw the city, he said. He saw the gates to the city. I knew that’s where Jesus was, and that’s where I was moving toward. But when I got close, close to the threshold of passing over, suddenly my time there ended, and I was back on earth under that tarp in the car with someone praying over me.

Church friends who had heard about the accident were in prayer for him at the same time as that pastor stopped at the scene. Returning to life was a mixed blessing, Don said. He wrestled with it for some years. To his skeptics, he responds with confidence, I found things and saw things in heaven that I never really paid attention to in the Bible before, because, you know, it all seemed so far away from me. I was a young man at the time. But when I came back and did an extensive study of heaven, I really found that so much of what I saw there was what the Bible said is there, stuff that I had ignored before.

Pastor Piper said, as Paul has been saying, he is now profoundly aware that life on earth is temporary. Now he realizes this world is completely temporal. It’s all passing. So I live my life in complete reverse fashion now, Don says, to how I did before. To me, heaven was the most real experience of my entire existence, and I’m going to try to get as many people to go there as I possibly can before God calls me back. That’s just a piece of Don Piper’s recollections of what he experienced after he died.

Since I heard that testimony, I’ve done more looking into this fascinating area. The apostle Paul himself had a near-death experience. I’m not certain when it was, but could have been after he was stoned and left for dead at Lystra in Galatia. We’ll get to that again as he talks about it later in 2 Corinthians. But Paul, like Don Piper and many others I have read, said it’s very hard to put into words what they saw in heaven because it was too wonderful, like a world with more colors, music with more notes to the scale, things visually breathtaking in beauty, hard to explain, knowing things intuitively with no need for explanations. I found Don Piper and many other Christians who’ve experienced death and return sharing the same kinds of feelings and memories, describing the same kinds of things.

That’s what makes it credible for me. It gets very hard to ignore when there’s so much personal testimony. Skeptics would say, Well, these are all Christians who’ve been indoctrinated to believe such things will happen, and so could have been having the same kind of or similar hallucinations. Yeah, well, how then would you explain kids, young children like Colin Burpo, who was, I believe, three or four years old when he fell out of a tree, had a head injury, and died? And they experienced the same kinds of things that Piper talks about. Some of them so young they didn’t even have the words to tell about it at the time, but as they got older began to share their memories, and they were the same kinds of things.

The most extensive research on this subject is probably in John Burke’s study titled Imagine Heaven. He shares the experiences of hundreds of people he’s interviewed, including doctors and surgeons. It’s a fascinating read, and it’ll make you excited if you’re a believer about what God has in store for us. Another book on this topic is Randy Alcorn’s simply titled Heaven. That one is a thorough discussion of everything in the Bible, even the tiniest clues that we can get about what heaven will be like. Put both of those books on your Christmas buy me list if you’re interested in the subject, so you can know better what’s ahead for you as a believer.

In the final verse I have time to comment on in this section, Paul writes, We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. Therefore, we make it our goal to please Him. Paul was very confident. I know, remember? He knew what came next for him after his earthly body was done and he passed through the gateway of death to a far better life in heaven. This is one reason he said he made it his singular goal to please Christ.

This is why he lived to share the good news with others and fulfill God’s calling on his life. Just as Don Piper said when he came back, reluctantly, his goal became to be sure, if he could, that everyone he knew and loved would one day be with him in this wonderful place we call heaven. Do you know? Know that when your tent comes down, you belong to God and all the promises of heaven are yours. If you don’t, today is the day of salvation, as the apostles would say, and I’d urge you to turn in faith to Jesus today and accept Him. Remember, none of us is guaranteed tomorrow.

This is Paul for Share the Word. Thank you, Paul. I love when you said that once we accept Christ, that’s when we begin living our eternal life. Do you know where you’re going after you die? This world would have you believe that all you have to be is good and follow the commandments. But the truth is that we must believe into Christ, ask for forgiveness of our sins, and accept Him as Lord and Savior.

Jesus was very clear when He said, I am the way and the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Me. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.