10 Mistakes People Make About Heaven, Hell, and the Afterlife

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CHAPTER 1

All Roads Lead to Heaven

You’re at the grocery store. You’re in the chip aisle. You want to buy a big bag of chips for a gathering at your house this weekend. You’ve got choices. Corn chips, potato chips, cheese puffs, tortilla chips, pita chips, kale chips, bean chips, lentil chips, and yes, even cricket chips. Select flat chips, chips with ridges, lattice-cut chips, or coned-shaped chips. And don’t forget to choose sea salt, regular salt, no salt, or low sodium. The soda aisle is much the same—choices, choices, choices. The cornucopia of colors, flavors, sweeteners, and brands are virtually endless.

Your local supermarket carries all these options because people love their choices. One type of cheese isn’t going to cut it for the clientele that frequents today’s neighborhood grocery store. Imagine for a moment if you were to go to the store to buy some breakfast cereal, and all you saw in that aisle was a long row of nothing but Cocoa Puffs. Or envision the deli meat section having nothing but smokehouse barbecue bologna. I’m quite sure you would look for a new store to get your food. But if you went store-hopping and still found nothing but French onion sun chips, black cherry Fanta, Cocoa Puffs, and barbecue bologna, you would fear that you had stepped into a George Orwell nightmare. I’d venture to guess you would be willing to join the rebellion.

Surely that is how many of the people you know feel about those Bible-believing Christians who keep harping on there being only one way to God, only one true religion, only one true holy book, and only one mediator between God and man—namely, Jesus Christ. How bigoted! How intolerant! How snooty! How phobic! How narrow-minded! A quick web search for the words narrow-minded Christians will confirm the hostile reaction these exclusive Christian claims generate in our open-minded, modern culture.

EXCLUSIVITY

For all the anger and opposition expressed against the exclusive claims of Christianity—that Jesus is the only way to get right with our Creator—there is a gaping inconsistency between what people expect from a religion, compared to what they expect in several other important areas of life. Sure, they want choices when it comes to their groceries. But if they are going scuba diving, they don’t want a dive shop offering them a selection of tanks—one filled with tear gas, another with a nerve agent, this one brimming with ice tea, and that one loaded with mocha almond fudge. They want a tank filled with oxygen. If they are going in for an appendectomy, they certainly don’t want the nurse saying, For your surgeon today, you have the choice of a welder, a lawyer, a waitress, or a barista. No, they want a qualified, certified, well-trained medical doctor. A first-time skydiver doesn’t want to be offered the choice of a pack filled with notebooks or cell phones, Grisham novels or Band-Aids. He wants a carefully constructed and intact air-catching parachute.

It is interesting that in so many life-and-death situations, people don’t want a wide variety of choices, they want the one thing that can provide what is needed. If I am suffocating, I want air, not a shopping spree. When it comes to our mortality and what lies beyond, we don’t need, nor should we want, a variety of choices. What we need is the specific solution that can fix the hazard caused by a very specific problem—namely, sin!

The Bible is clear and our consciences testify that the problem we have before our Creator is sin. Humanity’s moral choices, our bent for compromise and rebellion, and our engagement in a variety of sins and transgressions have put us in a situation that can be solved only by something or someone who can directly deal with the problem of sin before the tribunal of a holy God, and eradicate the dire penalty of sin. This is what Jesus said he came to do. He claimed he was uniquely qualified to do it. He said that an alliance with him, by faith, would authorize us to benefit from what he came to fix.

This is no different than having a skilled carpenter construct a lifeboat on the deck of a sinking ocean liner. As the ship begins to list and the call goes out to board the only lifeboat available, which was just graciously constructed and is now available on the starboard side of the ship, can you imagine the critic huffing about the exclusivity of this means of salvation? How foolish it would be for someone to roll his eyes and say, There should be more ways off this sinking ship! Or, Why can’t we just fly to safety? Or imagine the stupidity of saying, I might be interested in this way to get saved, if only there were an option on the port side of the ship! If the problem is real and specific (a sinking ship), and an adequate solution has been graciously provided (a well-crafted lifeboat), then it makes no sense to neglect the means of solving the problem because there are not more choices!

Of course, this is what Christ claimed, and what Christianity has always preached. Our problem is sin, and the wages of sin is death. That death, as we will see, is a portal into a reality that comes with some serious consequences. But, thankfully, by his gracious provision, God sent Jesus to construct a way out of this terrible situation. There are not a lot of ways, just one. But that one well-constructed lifeboat is available and ready for you and I to climb on board.

THE SHIP IS SINKING?

Of course, the portrait painted by my little illustration will quickly be dismissed by those who think the whole dilemma couldn’t possibly be real. Many think, Come on, the ship of humanity can’t possibly be sinking, or God wouldn’t sink the ship just because we make a few mistakes, or This can’t be, because not everyone has heard the call to get to the lifeboat, or This whole life-and-death scenario just seems too harsh!

God, however, has been clear about this: The dilemma created by sin is one in which we have actively participated, and one for which we need to take responsibility. Obviously, the ship of humanity was sinking before we were born in our stateroom, in our little corner of the ship. True. There is much explained by God regarding the irreversible effects of the first guests on the ship—our great, great…great grandparents. But unlike the passengers on the Titanic, who were going about their innocent business when someone on the bridge steered them into an iceberg, when we joined the manifest on the HMS Humanity, we actively engaged in the subversive acts that attacked the seaworthiness of this vessel.

Within a matter of years, after being added to the passenger list, we started engaging in willful acts of sabotage. It is as though we began drilling through the hull of the ship. Every time we participated in an action that was expressly forbidden by the Commander, we were assaulting the integrity of the ship. The Captain’s rules were for good. His moral laws are for the good of humanity. Every act of rebellion against God’s precepts and commands are a self-destructive act of treason. Yes, our sinful words and actions are sins against our Maker, but they have a direct impact on our future well-being.

That brings me to clarify what should be obvious by now, though we are good at ignoring it: This is God’s ship! It is his jurisdiction. He is the Boss, and he can make the rules. If one of my daughter’s schoolteachers decreed that there would be no chewing gum in her class, well then, that’s the rule. There will be consequences if my daughter breaks that rule. On her way to school in the morning the sheriff’s deputies won’t impose any penalties if her mouth is loaded with bubblegum. But when she steps into that classroom as a registered student in that school, she knows there will be consequences if she takes out her gum and starts chewing it. The teacher is in charge of that 1,500-square-foot teaching space, and she makes the rules.

I don’t happen to like that rule. I love bubblegum. On Back to School Night I didn’t give it a thought. I came in chewing away. I may have even blown a bubble for all I remember. She’s not my teacher, I thought. Those rules don’t apply to me. This, by the way, is how a lot of people feel about God. They think for a variety of reasons that they don’t have to submit to any of the rules that they find objectionable. They may not dispute that they are in God’s classroom, on God’s HMS Humanity, but they foolishly think, I didn’t sign up for this…I will live by my own rules.

Unfortunately, there is no way out of this one—just as at school some days my daughter feels that she didn’t sign up for junior high either. True, I signed her up. She is a junior higher and enrolled in that third-period class whether she likes it or not. It is the same way with us. You and I are under the jurisdiction of God by birth, not by choice. Just as we didn’t choose where or when to be born, we are all subject to God’s rules because we are under his jurisdiction, born on his ship—which happens to be sinking because our first parents broke the rules. Every subsequent generation of passengers since has broken rules as well and has actively drilled holes in the hull of the ship.

That may not silence the objection that you would rather not be subject to something for which you never signed up, but, just like the unyielding rule that your lungs need oxygen (another law for which you and I didn’t vote), there are some realities that are not democratic. The realities of sin and our need for a Savior are as fixed as our daily subjection to gravity.

THE CALL TO THE LIFEBOATS

The good news proclaimed by Christianity is that God has provided a Savior! There is a solution. Christ can rescue us from the sinking ship. There is a lifeboat that is buoyant and able to save. The exclusivity of that lifeboat is not in question in the pages of the Bible. You can’t cling to the bedpost in your stateroom, no matter how sincerely, and be saved. You have to respond to the call to enter into the solution that God has graciously provided.

That call has gone out in a few different ways. At the core of what God has instilled as a testimony in each person’s need is what we know of as the conscience. The Bible states that this inner voice we call conscience is a mechanism that has been wired by God, imprinted with his standard of right and wrong (Romans 2:15). It is said to give us the sense that something is not as it ought to be (which, by the way, isn’t a bad shorthand definition of sin). When the first sinners did wrong in the Garden of Eden, they hid themselves out of shame and guilt (Genesis 3:8-11). They didn’t need a sermon or a lecture; they knew their lives were not being lived out as they ought to have been.

Back to the ship. Our conscience can be equated to that amazing mechanism in our inner ear called the vestibular system, which impresses upon us the concern, Hey, this ship is listing! Our conscience sounds the alarms that everything is not well with our lives. While we are all good at justifying and rationalizing our sins, the ability of our conscience to sense the wrong that others are committing, the Bible says, is a reminder that our consciences are fine-tuned and have divinely implanted spiritual capacities that can quickly see the moral wrong throughout the sinking ship of humanity (see Romans 2:1-5 and 2 Samuel 12:1-9).

God is not only calling every human to his lifeboat of grace by their conscience, he has been making clear that this merciful provision of a lifeboat has a name—Jesus Christ. Since the first century, the call of God’s commissioned preachers has shifted from Admit your sin problem and trust in God’s merciful provision of grace to Admit your sin problem and trust in God’s merciful provision provided in Jesus Christ! And it is not as though this call to take responsibility for sin and trust in Christ for forgiveness has been sounding through the halls of a stable and smooth sailing boat. The ship has been listing all along, people have been sensing their need and groping for an answer to a world gone wrong, while the speakers in the hallways have been blaring for everyone to get on the lifeboat.

The call of God’s evangelists may be ridiculed and maligned by those who spurn its exclusivity, but the call to run to the only solution for our sin problem has been going out while most people are trying to do something to deal with the gnawing problem of wounded consciences, societal degeneracy, and the ravages of debauchery and evil.

LOVE’S PROVISION

It is popular these days to presume that if God loves people, then his love will win out—meaning that anyone who rejects his gracious provision of salvation in Christ would never be excluded from God’s coming kingdom. But this is not the definition of the love of God described to us in the Bible. The Lord himself tells us that the ultimate demonstration of his love was the provision he made for us in Christ. The amazing love of our Creator is seen in the merciful and undeserved lifeboat! And recalling that we, as the passengers of this doomed voyage, have been actively drilling holes in the hull, and that the provision of this deliverance has come at a great personal cost to the Triune God, our sense of the Lord’s love should be overwhelming. Ponder the compassionate extravagance articulated in these words:

One will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:7-8).

Now that the means of our rescue has been made available, God’s incredible love is expressed in the repeated warnings he provides in creation, conscience, and Christian preaching to turn to this saving provision found in Christ. God’s urgent call for everyone to see their plight, admit their need, and cling to the salvation given to us in Jesus is God’s ongoing expression of love. Divine love is demonstrated in the urgent declaration that salvation is needed and available in Christ. Love warns! That is what biblically minded Christians have been doing for centuries. This is the call of the first chapter of this book to any and all who presume upon the love of God—to those who may even now be persistently rejecting his means of salvation! We dare not assume that love somehow means that God will overlook our rejection of his warning. God has clearly stated that he will not. Christ is the only means of salvation! As the earliest church persistently