Heaven: Making Wrongs Right Isaiah 65:17-25 May 11, 2014 17 See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. 18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. 19 I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. 20 Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. 21 They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. 23 They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them. 24 Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear. 25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord. Last week, we talked about how in heaven, our relationships with others only grow stronger. We don t lose relationships with those we love. They become more real. Today, we re going to talk about another crucial aspect of heaven. We not only want heaven to be a place where we are with loved ones. But we want heaven to be a good place. A lot of you wrote on your My hope for heaven cards, I want heaven to be a place of peace, or a place where there is no evil, or a place where everything is the way God intended it in the first place. Notice how Isaiah 65 describes this to be real: no more weeping. No more tragic end to life. No more exploitation or being taken advantage of. No more building homes or building livelihoods that someone else just takes over. Will there be animals in heaven? If so, they won t be eating one another. They will be peacefully coexisting. And there s a word we use to describe where everything is put right. And that is justice. 1
Justice is a big, big theme in the Bible, and it s a big theme in our life as well. We want justice to be done. Justice is what drives the storylines of so many movies. The bad guys can t get away at the end. Justice has to be done. Or how many of you have been conscientiously driving down the highway, when all the sudden some guy in a sports car goes tearing by, weaving in and out of traffic? What are we always thinking when that happens? Oh, I wish there were some patrolman up there to get that guy. We need some justice. One of the big stories nationwide in the early 2000s, but in particular in Houston where we lived, was when Enron energy corporation, headquartered in Houston, collapsed as a company and went bankrupt. Executives managed to keep millions and millions of the company s debt in secret, and in doing so were able to get very rich. Meanwhile, when the company s stock price dropped from over $90 per share to less than a dollar, lower level employees lost millions and millions in their pension accounts. Talk about a cry out for justice! When you look at what the Bible says about God, one of the most repeated things about God is that he is a God of justice. Psalm 11:7 says: The Lord is righteous, he loves justice; the upright will see his face. And because the Lord loves justice, we can imagine that justice will be a part of heaven. So let me outline this message a little. We ll talk about what is justice, how God is going to bring about justice in heaven, and then what heaven will be like. What is justice? Justice in the Bible is very closely tied to two words we see in the Bible a whole lot that we might not understand the deepest meanings of: righteousness, and peace, or as the ancient Israelites called it, shalom. When we think of righteousness, we may think of being godly, or we may even think of the negative term, self-righteous, where someone tries to act godly, but in a way that is showy or seeks to be better than others. Well, godliness does have something to do with it. Maybe the most simple way of thinking of righteousness is doing what is right. But then you have to ask yourself, Well, what is right? That s where shalom comes in. What is right, always according to God, is what brings shalom, or peace. Then what becomes important is knowing what shalom means. Because it means peace, but much, much deeper than we often think of when we think of peace. When I think of peace, I think of nothing for me to worry about. The bills are all paid. I m healthy. I m fulfilled. Family is great. I feel very secure. That is part 2
of shalom, but it s not all of shalom. Shalom is much, much bigger. It is societal; it s communal. In other words, if everything is great with my family, I have no worries, but my neighbor is about to lose his house because he s out of work, that s not shalom. If I feel everything is great in my life, but I have a fellow student who hates going to school because he doesn t have any meaningful friendships, that s not shalom. Shalom has been likened to a fabric that weaves people together and makes us interdependent. And the more thread, the denser the weaving, the more exquisite and the more supportive it is. God is always pushing for more and more people to be included in experiencing shalom. See, it is so easy to focus on me, or us, and lose sight of how broad God wants his shalom and justice to be experienced. We re going to look at a few Old Testament scriptures that show this. By the way, I want to refer to Timothy Keller s book, Generous Justice for some of the key thoughts here. The first one is from Deuteronomy 15, verses 4 and 5: 4 However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, 5 if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. God says this astonishing thing: there doesn t have to be any poor among you. It doesn t have to be that way. And then note two things God says he s putting in place so that there wouldn t be any poor. First, he s giving them land as an inheritance. Back then, land was an absolutely crucial key to both a person s or a family s livelihood but also a society s livelihood, or shalom. Land was needed to grow food for both people and animals. It was a source of water as well. No land meant no livelihood or shalom. Second, God says he s going to give them commands that when obeyed would create shalom. Which begs the question, what were those commands? Here are some examples. There was a law that every three years, all of the tithes, which meant one tenth of everything produced that year like crops, were to be taken to storehouses in the different towns: So that... the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns may come and eat and be satisfied. Deuteronomy 14:29 3
Notice how broadly God wanted people to have an experience of shalom. It wasn t just for the Israelites. God wanted it for the foreigners those who didn t even worship him living among the Israelites. Deuteronomy 15, verses 1 and 2 say that every seven years, the Israelites were to cancel one another s debts. Every 50 th year, any family land that had to be sold in order for someone to make ends meet, that land had to be returned. That 50 th year was called the year of jubilee. Why those laws? So that people wouldn t fall into a cycle of poverty that they couldn t get out of. What was God doing? He was building up a society and a people that were interdependent on one another and that took care of one another s needs. God was creating a society that had safety nets. Now, there were people who didn t follow those laws, and so there were poor people. And so what you find over and over in the Old Testament are comparison statements about who God calls the righteous and the wicked. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. Psalm 1:6 You ll see that over and over in the Old Testament. Who are the righteous and the wicked? In Matthew chapter 25, Jesus tells a series of parables, and they are tied together. He s making a point with them together. And they talk about who find themselves included in the Kingdom of God, which is God s realm of complete goodness now, in heaven now, that he is now building up in our world, and who find themselves excluded from God s kingdom. The second of the parables talk about people who show various levels of faithfulness with what God gives them in life, putting it to use for Gods kingdom, or not at all. The faithful get rewarded, the unfaithful person in the parable is excluded from the kingdom. Do you recall what Jesus calls the unfaithful person? He calls him wicked. In the third parable, people are separated to Jesus left and right based on their faithfulness. Here s what he says to the faithful: 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. 4
What does that sound like? Building up the fabric of shalom. Now, how does Jesus describe them in the parable? The next verse says: 37 Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? Then there are those who aren t faithful. These are the wicked. What does Jesus say to them? 41 Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. Matthew 25:34-37, 41-43 What did they do? They ignored those who are in need. They didn t do anything with what God has given them, income, possessions, time, their very lives, to strengthen the fabric of shalom. One of the top Old Testament scholars today is named Bruce Waltke, who has a very high view of the authority and God-inspiration of scripture. In all his exhaustive research of the Old Testament, here s what he says is meant by those who are righteous and those who are wicked. Righteous persons, Waltke says, are those who willingly disadvantages themselves for the sake of their neighbors, or creation, or God, and the wicked, he says, are those who live for themselves, who live independent of God and neighbors, and who disadvantage others in order to advantage themselves. So now we have this concept of what justice really is: it is strengthening this interconnectedness of human society in which people give preference to the well being of others instead of themselves. And when that happens, there is shalom. Peace that isn t here today and gone tomorrow. Real peace. That brings us to the second big point: how does God bring this justice to heaven? Here s why the Bible storyline is so important. In the Old Testament, and then continued into the New Testament, God is building a society of people who live out righteousness and justice. That is why he chose the Israelite nation and gave them the law. So they could be a righteous people. In other words, a people that turned wrongs into rights. They were to do that amongst themselves, and they were to do that for foreigners among them as well. What was God doing through 5
all that? He was incrementally advancing what he will one day bring to full completion, and that is, building his kingdom here on earth. Do you know that when God makes the new heavens and earth, it s an extension of what he s been doing all along through his people? What does this mean for us? It means we constantly need to look for where there is a breakdown of shalom and see what we can do about it. In a way, we are constantly being judges ourselves. Not being judgmental, but judges, where we look for what is wrong and seek to make it right. Great example of this there s a story of New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia back during the Great Depression. Sometimes these stories appear as urban legends, but this one originated when he was in office, when it could actually be disputed, so it s likely true. Sometimes Laguardia would preside over court in New York. One cold, cold day they brought an old man before him, who had been charged with stealing a loaf of bread. The man said that his family was starving; he had to do it to survive. It was the Great Depression. La Guardia sighed, but he said, "I have to punish you. The law makes no exception. I have no choice. I sentence you to a fine of $10." Now back then, of course that was a lot of money that the man didn t have. LaGuardia knew that, so he then reached into his pocket and said, "Here's $10 to pay your fine." He put the money in his hat and then said, I now charge everybody in this court room fifty cents for living in a town where a man has to steal bread to feed his family. Mr. Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant." $47.50 was then collected and given to this old, starving man. God wants to make us righteous. And according to the storyline of the Bible, that doesn t mean we finger point at others and talk about how morally wrong they are and how we are right. That means to look for a breakdown in shalom and do something about it. For ourselves to sacrifice and rally others to sacrifice to make some wrong right. So consider where you see a breakdown of shalom, in all of your arenas of life home, neighborhood, school, office. Where do you see the fabric shalom breaking down, and what can you do about it? Let s reread Isaiah 65:17 and 18 again: 6
17 See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. 18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. Did you catch that key line God is making a people who will be a joy. Here s what that means in life now, God s desire is to make you into a person who increasingly is a joy to others, now and then in heaven. This is really, really important. God now creates you to be a kind of person that increasingly, even if it is in small increments, works for the shalom of others and not just yourself. And then, in heaven, you will continue to live that out and be a joy for others. In other words, the heart transplant that you receive that gives you compassion for others, that happens now. It doesn t happen after you die. And you can read verse after verse that points to that. And one example of that is the parables that Jesus tells in Matthew 25 we looked at. Jesus didn t tell the wicked, You failed to have compassion, so let me renew your heart for others before you enter into your kingdom inheritance. He said, You failed to show compassion; now away from me. So let me ask you a question, are you becoming a person who more and more seeks the welfare of others, even at the expense of your own welfare? I want you to think about what heaven will be like. Here s the third point. What will heaven be like? Now that we know what righteous means, we know that one of the things we can expect heaven to be like is we will be a part of this shalom fabric that supports all people, that gives preference to others, that puts others first, that serves others, that seeks the honor of others above seeking our own honor. That totally rejoices when something wonderful happens to someone else when that same wonderful thing might not happen to me. If that doesn't sound all that great to you, you probably won t want to be in heaven. Your heart in heaven will be an extension of the heart you are cultivating for yourself now. What s the best way to cultivate a heart for others now? It s by considering one thing. A lot of people find fault with God because of the wrong in the world now. Or they use that as evidence that God must not be real. There s so much injustice that happens, God either isn t that great, or he isn t real. There s another way to look at it, though. There is one thing that vindicates God, that makes him look so dazzling bright. Yes, there is injustice in this world, but God so loved the world, he became subject himself to the injustice. He said, I m going to judge this unjust 7
world, and here s how: I, the creator of all that there is, will let the full force, the full arsenal of injustice beat on me. See, we all are unjust. We all have this self-centered heart. And Jesus says, I ll die, I ll let the injustice of this kill me, so that it won t kill you. God didn t immunize himself from injustice. He took it all upon him. So he could forgive you and give you a new, clean heart. The way to grow in your compassion for others is to think so deeply about this beautiful God of ours who took all the injustice upon himself, so you could be saved. And he s in the process of making things right. And one day, it all comes in full. Do you love justice? Has your heart been renewed? If you love justice, then do justice. If you don t love justice, the kind that leads you to sacrifice, then realize, that s God s way, and it will always be God s way, and we can fully expect that to be our way in heaven. And he ll renew your heart if you will give your life to him. Amen. 8