Lawyers' Christian Fellowship

Living in the Shadowlands

It has certainly been a remarkable year - remember this time last year we were wondering whether planes would fall from the sky, whether our computers would ever work again because of the much anticipated Y2K bug which disappeared quieter than Louis the Fly after a spray of mortein.

This year we have had all the drama and excitement of "the greatest Olympic and Paralympic games ever". By the end of which we had almost started to think perhaps Michael Knight might not be so bad after all, and then we found out about what he did to Sandy Hollway.

For those who follow Rugby Union - we have brought back Bill.

And John Howard made a memorable and passionate apology to the Aboriginal People - unfortunately it was John Howard the actor on the Games¹ and not the Prime Minister.

But it is to the celebrations that marked the beginning of this year, the beginning of a new millennium that I want to return tonight. They were remarkable celebrations. Remarkable in that I have never seen 5.8 million dollars go up in smoke so quickly though for Warwick Fairfax there was probably a sense of dejuveau and for Kerry Packer - well it was just another role of the dice.

It was remarkable in that it was not a new millennium unless you start counting from 1BC.

But the most remarkable thing about these celebrations was the Australian they remembered . It wasn't Donald Bradman, or even Dawn Frazer but a five foot three former alcoholic who wondered around the streets of Sydney in the early hours of the morning for twenty five years grafitting the sidewalks with one word Eternity. It was that word in the distinctive copperplate handwriting of Arthur Stace that was celebrated as it was lit up on the Sydney Harbour Bridge at the climax of the celebrations of the new millennium.

It was a timely reminder because I think we have missed Arthur Stace's daily reminder of Eternity for far too long and we have largely forgotten about eternity.

I first realised this in a bible study four years ago. The question we were addressing that night was this "what is the goal of the Christian life?". Being well-trained Sydney Anglicans everyone except one answered to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and to love your neighbour as yourself". But one member answered the question what was the goal of the Christian life with one word - "heaven". I thought about that and then asked, out of curiosity more than anything else - how many had heard a sermon on heaven recently. Only one member could recall hearing a sermon on heaven.

In 1997 Time magazine² even ran the cover "Does Heaven Exist?" noting that

Once upon a time, the hereafter was well mapped and familiar, the subject of detailed sermons and cautionary tales about doing and being good. Today, however, the silence on it is so pervasive that heaven may as well not exist.

Sadly I think the comment is equally true of Australian religion.

Yet heaven is where we will be spending eternity. If you were going to live in another land you would almost certainly want to find out everything you could about it and yet somehow when it comes to heaven we do not seem to have the same interest. It is our home and yet we hear so little about it. There is some truth in George Bernard Shaw's comment:

I think the heaven as Shaw conventionally conceived it was probably not dissimilar to that of the Irish Comedian Dave Allen - a long never ending Church service. For Dave Allen who would want to go to heaven when in Hell you could have all the booze and sex you wanted. But it is Hell that will be a long dull church service without God and not heaven. And while M.Scott Peck, of the Road Less Travelled ³fame describes purgatory as a one long counselling session and heaven as participation in endless committees these are what I think Hell will be like and not heaven. Unfortunately much of our church activity seems geared to preparing us more for long dull church services and endless committees of Hell than Heaven.

Remarkably while our pulpits may be silent about Heaven the Bible is not. While a visitor has not returned as Shaw suggests to describe a day in heaven God's Son came and gave us some picture of what it is like and the Apostle John received a revelation of Heaven.

We know from the bible that:

• Doctors are redundant in heaven - there are no tears⁴, no pain⁵, no illness⁶.
  
• Dr Fells wouldn't enjoy heaven because all the advocacy work is monopolised by the Father's son.
  
• Heaven is pictured as a wedding feast⁷, a mansion with many rooms⁸, the consummation of creation, an eternal city, the new Jerusalem⁹.
  
• We will see clearly what we see dimly here¹⁰.
  
• We know that in heaven the worship will be endless¹¹. It is a place of great joy.
  
• We know it is God's Kingdom come in all its glory¹² where we will be God's people, in God's Place under God's rule¹³.

So why is it that we don't think about heaven.

I think there are a number of reasons and here I am indebted to perhaps Christendom's greatest prophet on heaven C.S.Lewis because few appear to have thought and reflected more on heaven this century than Lewis.

Firstly - we are concerned about being so heavenly minded as to be no earthly good. I think many Christians think that Heaven is a cop out. Its pie in the sky. It is to borrow a phrase from Marx - an opiate of the masses so that they will be content with their lot in this life and not challenge the existing structure. Not only will thinking about it in this life do me no good but worse than that it will actually diminish my utility in this life.

It is escapism. It is ironic that Christians should not think about heaven because it is escapist when the whole multibillion dollar entertainment industry is aimed at marketing just that - escapism

Again to quote Lewis:

We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about "pie in the sky", and of being told that we are trying to "escape" from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is "pie in the sky" or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric."¹⁴

History is resplendent with great men and women of God who did make a difference in this world because they did not count "the sufferings of this present time worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us".

To believe in heaven is not to run away from life; it is to run toward it.

Secondly - we are too easily satisfied. Lewis writes, referring to the great promises about Heaven in scripture, that:

"Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea".¹⁵

We are far too easily satisfied.

Often when we sin it is because we see greater joy in sinning than we have in our God and in heaven. We are too satisfied with the delights of this world to think of the next. Yes we should be content with what God has given us, but not satisfied with what this world offers.

It was Malcolm Muggeridge who said that:

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realise , is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens, we cannot forget our true homeland.

Thirdly we are at war - it is no coincidence that our minds don't naturally turn to heaven it is part of Satan's strategy. In some parts of the world this war appears as very open conflict with what might be called signs and wonders - though I use that term loosely. But in our society I think it is more of a cold war. At least in my experience and I think also Lewis' it is often subtle not visible. The enemies key strategy is to make us Earth bound, to keep us from thinking about heaven.

This is described in Lewis' brilliant letters from Screwtape a senior devil to his nephew Wormwood who is a junior devil: Screwtape writes

"The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth." ¹⁶

The strategic timing for Screwtape is middle age which statistically I am now approaching. If the patient has adversity in middle age then:

"The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it - all this provides admirable opportunities for wearing a soul out by attrition."¹⁷

"If on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knots a man to the World. He feels that he is "finding his place in it", while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation , his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth, which is just what we want."¹⁸

Lastly-The final reason why we don't think about Heaven is that I think we have forgotten the centrality of the Cross. In my church the Cross is preached almost every week. We are reminded of God's great grace in sending his only son to die in our place to save us from judgment and sin. It is not the Cross that we have forgotten but its centrality. We focus so much on what God has saved us from that we forget what he has saved us for. To think of the Cross only as "saving me from Sin" is to remember the back end of the Cross. Heaven is about remembering the front end of the Cross - about what God has saved us for - eternal fellowship with him and our brothers and sisters in Christ. The Westminster Catechism has it right when it says

Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.

That is the chief activity of heaven and it should be our chief activity on Earth. Glorifying God is not just about an ethic of debt that is grateful for what he has done for us (which can almost become self-centred) but it is about glorifying the God who has saved us for Himself. God is most glorified when we worship him for who He is and not just for what he has done for us.

Lewis describes this life as living amongst the shadows¹⁹. This world is not real it is a shadow of the real. To live in the Shadowlands as God's people is to live in the light of heaven for it is from there that the shadows are. So how does living in the light of heaven help us:

Firstly it provides a context for our lives.

At times with the pressure of work, the demands of family and of church we get so caught up in this world. Or to quote Screwtape the world get so caught up in us. Things loom so large on the horizon that we forget what a small horizon this life really is. This life is but the title page of our existence. The only things that will survive are things of eternal significance. .

What we see here is only a dim shadow of the reality - in many things we have only a taste of what is to come. Unfortunately we come to think of the taste as the reality. Lewis writing to his friend Malcolm says :

"the hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as a substitute to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal." ²⁰

Heaven reminds us that we are strangers in a strange land - a strange land of shadows.

Secondly it shows us how we should live - if we are citizens of heaven we should live as citizens of heaven now. The Book of Revelation presents some spectacular pictures of heaven. What is sad is that when I read commentaries on Revelation they are so often preoccupied with trying to work out the meaning of all the symbols that they miss the big picture - and that is the most important thing about heaven.

The essential ingredient of heaven is not size of the city or the glassy sea or the precious stones, or the weird and wonderful beasts - it is that God is at its centre²¹. If we are to live as citizens of heaven then God must be at the centre of our lives.

John Piper, an American Pastor, when he speaks with his son who is living away from home, always starts the conversation with this challenge "Is the Centre holding?". That is a question we need to be asking ourselves again and again - is the centre holding - is Christ at the Centre of our lives - of all that we do. We need to ask it of ourselves and each other.

Thirdly - it reminds us that every person we meet is a potential citizen of heaven or of hell there are no mere mortals there are no ordinary people. We are all destined for eternity the question is whether we are going to spend it in God's presence or not.

Let me conclude with the final paragraphs of the last book Lewis' Narnia series as Edmund, Peter and Lucy prepare to say good-bye to Aslan and return to the Shadow-lands.

"And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the titled page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no-one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before" ²²

 
^{Steven Nicholson is a solicitor with McPhee Kelshaw Solicitors and committee member of the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship.  In his spare time he edits the LCF newsletter and is webmaster.  This paper was presented on the 2nd December 2000 to the Christmas Function of the LCF.}

For a brief bibliography of recommended text on heaven click below:

Heaven Bibliography

Endnotes

1.  For the benefit for non-Australians reading this paper - The Games is a satirical comedy which parodies the organisation of the Sydney Olympics in the Year 2000.

2.    Time Magazine, March 24, 1997 p.5. Article is titled "Whatever Became of Heaven? p.44 ff

3.    M. Scott Peck, M.D. In Heaven as on Earth: A Vision of the Afterlife. Hyperion, 1996 As to purgatory see chapter 3, as to heaven and committees see chapter 10.

4.    Rev. 7:16–17

5.    Rev 21:4

6.    Rev. 21:4

7    Rev 19:9

8   John 14.2

9     Rev. 3:11–12; Rev. 21:1–27; Rev 22:1–5

10    1 Cor. 13:12

11    Rev. 4:9–11; Rev. 5:14; Rev. 7:11–12; Rev. 11:16–18; Rev. 19:4–5

12    2 Cor. 4:17–18

13    Rev 21:3

14    C.S.Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Fontana, 1973, p.132. (see beginning of chapter 10 in other editions).

15    C.S.Lewis, "The Weight of Glory" in Transposition and other addresses, Geoffrey Bles, 1949 p.21

16.    C.S.Lewis "The Screwtape Letters, Geofrey Bles, 1961, at p.124 (in other editions see letter 28).

17.    Ibid p.124

18    Ibid p.124

19    Lewis uses this image in several places in particular in the Last Battle - the final book of his Narnia series. The image is drawn from the short story by George McDonald titled "The Golden Key".

20    C.S.Lewis, Prayer: Letters to Malcolm, Fontana, 1974, p.123 (in other editions see chapter 22).

21    Rev 4:6, 5:6,

22      C.S.Lewis, The Last Battle, 1986 Collins p.174 (in other editions the last page)