To Encourage You

2 Corinthians 5:6-8 “Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.“

Are you going to heaven when you die?  Many people that I’ve asked this question have told me that you can’t know something like this.  At many funerals I’ve attended, on the other hand, there seems to be an assumption that the one who died is certainly in heaven.   It’s as if the only prerequisite for going there is that you just have to die. If you listen to the words coming from the Muslim terrorists, that’s what THEY think. They truly believe that if they kill someone – and themselves – in a homicide bombing, they will be ushered immediately into paradise. 

So what about you?  What do you think about what will happen to you after your last breath?  I assume that you are quite confident that you will draw your last breath someday.  But are you confident of what your condition will be one second after that moment?  Indeed, can anyone be confident about such a thing? Or can you be, as the saying goes, “often wrong, but never in doubt?” 

In reality, our confidence is based on the thing we most trust.  Some people are very self-confident. It seems like nothing flusters or worries them regarding a task they have to do. It’s their natural temperament.  But is that natural self-confidence something in which a person should trust regarding the matter of eternity?  Is it wise to trust ourselves regarding such a thing?  Muslims that walk into a building full of people with a bomb strapped to their chest are obviously very confident, for who would die in such a way if they didn’t believe with all their heart that something good would be the result.  Is the Koran or the teachers of Islam that they’ve been listening to a sound basis for confidence? 

Others apparently don’t think much about such things. I asked someone once if they ever thought about eternity. This person’s matter-of-fact response was simply “No, I never do.”  Apparently, they had the attitude about the subject of death that “they’d cross that bridge when they came to it,” confident that whatever happened to them would be ok.  But is that wise? 

Well, in the verses above, the word “confident” appears twice.  This word, or at least this concept, is found throughout the Scriptures. Often it tells us we can know certain things. In many places it purports to be true.  But on what did these writers place their trust? How could they know and why were they so confident?  Well, in the case of the Apostle Paul, who wrote the words above, his confidence was based on a personal encounter with the living Christ.  He had actually seen with his own eyes the One whom the Jewish authorities had condemned to die and that the Roman government had nailed to a cross. Yet He was alive. Paul saw Him in a vision that blinded him, and he heard Him say the following words “I am Jesus, Whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:5). 

The same for all the other writers of the New Testament.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, James, and Jude all saw Jesus after He arose. As Peter said, “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16).  It was on the surety of what they had seen that each of them went to their own death, most of them as martyrs, trusting Jesus with their last breath. And then there was Stephen. As the murderous Jewish crowd stoned him, he looked toward heaven and said “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).  It was in this living God that he trusted. It was in the fact that He had indeed risen from the grave and that He had told them “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:7), that these men had such confidence in the end.  It was because this One believed the Word of God as He taught them from it and personally fulfilled the prophecies contained in it that they, too, could have supreme confidence in it, including the question of what would happen to them when they died.  It’s why Paul could say in 2 Corinthians 5 above “We are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” 

You see, believers don’t have a “blind faith.”  Believers have a reason for the hope that is within them.  Believers know that “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2) and his Son lived, died, and rose again as multiple eye-witness accounts have well attested. 

So, what about you?  Are you going to heaven when you die?  Do you know that you can know?  And whatever you believe about this, is it based on something on which you are confident?  Well, if it’s anything other than the words of those who were “eyewitnesses of His majesty” it is sure to fall short in the end.  You see, true saving faith always comes from hearing – and not just from hearing anything, but in the hearing the very Word of Christ (Romans 10:17). And that is the only thing in all the world on which we can place our eternal confidence.