Heaven Real Review By John MacArthur

Introduction 15An article in the New York Times Magazine chronicled the book’ssuccess:“Heaven Is for Real” was published in late 2010, became a word-ofmouth best seller and has spent 59 (nonconsecutive) weeks as theNo. 1 nonfiction paperback on The New York Times’s best-seller list.Recently the publisher, Thomas Nelson, spun off a children’s picturebook, now also a best seller, with illustrations verified by Colton. Andsometime in 2014, courtesy of DeVon Franklin, vice president of production at Columbia Pictures, who considers his faith “a professionalasset,” a movie version should be released in theaters.7Televangelist T. D. Jakes will coproduce the movie.Another blockbuster book in the same genre is To Heaven and Back,by Mary C. Neal, MD.8 Dr. Neal’s account of heaven is no less jejunethan Colton Burpo’s, and it is even more doctrinally deviant. Releasedat the end of May 2012, this book reached the top of the New York Timesbest-seller list in its first month.In chapter 2, we’ll look a little more closely at the story told inHeaven Is for Real. Then in a series of appendixes we’ll examine Neal’sstory and some other popular books in the same genre. But my pointhere is merely to note the disturbing ease with which imaginary taleslike those gain traction and garner passionate followers among evangelical readers. These are not books any reputable evangelical publisherwould have given a second glance to just twenty years ago. At the moment, however, Christian booksellers are publishing and selling morebooks filled with false visions of the afterlife than all the commentariesand Bible reference works combined.9It may be quite fascinating to read these intricately detailed accounts of people who claim to have come back from heaven, but thehobby is as dangerous as it is seductive. Readers not only get a twisted,Newton, “My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller,” New York Times Magazine,April 27, 2012.C. Neal, To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again(Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2012).9 According to statistics from the publisher, Heaven Is for Real sold more than 7 million copies within 18months of its release (not counting more than a half million copies of the Children’s Edition). To Heavenand Back is on track to exceed that. Don Piper’s 2004 book 90 Minutes in Heaven sold 4 million copies—aphenomenal success that no doubt opened the doors for these later projects. In summer 2012, while twoof those books were still riding high on the New York Times list, The KJV Standard Lesson Commentary wasthe only biblical reference work that even made the top fifty on the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s best-seller list.7 Maud8 Mary

16 Introductionunbiblical picture of heaven from these tall tales; they also imbibe asubjective, superstitious, shallow brand of spirituality. There is no reason to believe anyone who claims to have gone to heaven and returned( John 3:13; 1:18). Studying mystical accounts of supposed journeys intothe afterlife yields nothing but confusion, contradiction, false hope,bad doctrine, and a host of similar evils.Nevertheless, the current popularity of such books shows howhungry people are to hear about heaven. There is nothing inherentlywrong with that, of course. In fact, it is a desire that can be harnessedfor good, as long as we look to Scripture and let God’s Word informour knowledge and shape our hopes.Indeed, it is right and beneficial for Christians to fix their hearts onheaven. Scripture repeatedly urges us to cultivate that perspective: “Ifthen you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above,where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds onthings that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:1–2).“We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that areunseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). “Our citizenship is in heaven,and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20).Such a perspective is the very essence of true faith, accordingto Hebrews 11. Those with authentic, biblical faith acknowledge thatthey are strangers and pilgrims on this earth (v. 13). They are seekinga heavenly homeland (v. 14). They “desire a better country, that is, aheavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God,for he has prepared for them a city” (v. 16). The “city” that verse refersto is the heavenly Jerusalem, an unimaginable place—the very capitalof heaven. It will be the eternal abode of the redeemed. No wonderChristians are intrigued with the subject.The truth is, practically everyone (including the hardened atheist)thinks of heaven, imagines what it might be like, and wishes to be there.God inscribed such a longing into the very soul of humanity. “He hasput eternity into man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The truth of that verseis evident, even in a secularized, skeptical society such as ours.Almost half a century ago, theologian Wilbur Smith (then professor of biblical studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) wrote an

Introduction 17excellent book on heaven in which he lamented the decline of interestin heavenly things and a corresponding preoccupation with worldlythings. It was the late 1960s. Decades of modernist rationalism had leftmainline churches spiritually bankrupt. People of that generation wereenjoying a level of material prosperity their parents and grandparentsnever dreamed of. The public and the media were obsessed with politics, sports, entertainment, and other earthly things—and perhaps lessconcerned about spiritual matters than any generation in history.Wilbur Smith began by noting that “only two really significant volumes on Heaven have been published in the last quarter century.”10 Hisbook’s first chapter was titled, “The Repudiation of the Idea of Heavenin Modern Thought.”11 He cited some well-known shapers of modernphilosophy, including Friedrich Nietzsche, who boasted that his philosophy had finally killed God, and Karl Marx, who declared that theproper role of philosophy is to abolish religion and establish the truthof this world. He also quoted Vladimir Lenin, who cited Marx’s famousdictum “Religion is the opium of the people.” Lenin then likewiselabeled the hope of heaven “a spiritual intoxicant, in which the slavesof capital drown their humanity and blunt their desires for some sortof decent [earthly] existence.”12Smith then went on to demonstrate how most fields of modernthought are overtly hostile to the very concept of heaven. Science, forexample, has no means to investigate anything beyond the naturalrealm. Unfortunately, many scientists draw the false corollary that thenatural realm is all there is. Philosophy, says Smith, “never did have aplace for Heaven.” (He quotes philosopher Alfred North Whitehead,who wrote, “Can you imagine anything more appallingly idiotic thanthe Christian idea of heaven?”13) Worst of all, modern theology, influenced by liberalism and rationalism, also abandoned the concept ofheaven, joining other branches of modern thought in labeling it “superstition, a myth, an outworn concept.”14Today intellectual Sadduceeism is even more virulent (and certainlyM. Smith, The Biblical Doctrine of Heaven (Chicago: Moody, 1968), 7.17.Ibid., 19.13 Ibid., 21.14 Ibid., 22.10 Wilbur11 Ibid.,12

18 Introductionmore shrill) than when Smith made those observations. Worldlinessand materialism have become the hallmarks of postmodern culture.And yet it is rather amazing that all those trends combined have notmanaged to quell the human longing for heaven’s glory and faith’sassurance. Although people have been told relentlessly by the intellectual elite that there is no spiritual reality, that they evolved out ofsome primordial slime, and that they have no future in eternity—theyknow better. God has indeed put eternity in our hearts. Heaven is real,and it is human nature to long to be there.The heart of our study together in this book will be an in-depthlook at what the Bible says about heaven. No matter what one thinksabout or wishes to imagine about heaven, the reality is different andbetter by magnitudes. You simply cannot gain a better understandingof heaven than we are given in Scripture—especially not from someone else’s dreams and near-death experiences. In the words of CharlesSpurgeon,It’s a little heaven below, to imagine sweet things. But never think thatimagination can picture heaven. When it is most sublime, when it isfreest from the dust of earth, when it is carried up by the greatestknowledge, and kept steady by the most extreme caution, imagination cannot picture heaven. “It hath not entered the heart of man, thethings which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Imaginationis good, but not to picture to us heaven. Your imaginary heaven youwill find by-and-by to be all a mistake; though you may have piled upfine castles, you will find them to be castles in the air, and they willvanish like thin clouds before the gale. For imagination cannot makea heaven. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it enteredthe heart of man to conceive” it.15What God has revealed in Scripture is the only legitimate place to geta clear understanding of the heavenly kingdom. This is a point wewill come back to repeatedly: the Bible is our only reliable source ofinformation about heaven. I want to show you why it is misleadingand dangerous to probe and dissect people’s near-death experiences,as if they could give us some important truth about the afterlife thatwe are lacking from Scripture.15 CharlesH. Spurgeon, The New Park Street Pulpit, 6 vols. (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1856), 2:20-21.

Introduction 19I also want to show you what Scripture teaches about heaven,angels, and the afterlife. And together we will see that what the Biblesays about these things is indeed sufficient—because we know Scripture furnishes us with everything we need to know to be equippedfor every good work (2 Timothy 3:17). There’s nothing any eyewitnesstestimony could reliably add to that.As we study what Scripture teaches, you’re going to see that God’swritten Word does in fact give us a remarkably full and clear pictureof heaven and the spiritual realm—but there are still many questionsthe Bible leaves unanswered. We need to accept the boundaries Godhimself has put on what he has revealed. It is sheer folly to speculatewhere Scripture is silent. It is sinfully wrong to try to investigatespiritual mysteries using occult means. And it is seriously dangerousto listen to anyone who claims to know more about God, heaven, angels, or the afterlife than God himself has revealed to us in Scripture.When Scripture commands us to fix our hearts on heavenly things,it is teaching us that our focus should be on Christ, and on the trueheavenly glory—not that we should immerse ourselves in fantasiesabout the heavenly life. Colossians 3:2—“Set your minds on things thatare above, not on things that are on earth”—is simply another way ofphrasing the first and great commandment: “You shall love the Lordyour God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all yourmind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).No matter how much they might obsess over what heaven is like,people who fill their heads with a lot of fantastic or delusional ideasfrom others’ near-death experiences have not truly set their minds onthings above. If the inerrant biblical truth God has given us is the onlyreliable knowledge about heaven we have access to (and it is), then thatis what should grip our hearts and minds. That, I hope, is the singlemost important message you will get from this book.Now let’s see why the Bible’s account of heaven is so much betterthan the dreams and speculations of the human mind.

1Heavenly HashI know you have thought about heaven and imagined what it might belike. Everyone does. The hope of life hereafter is intrinsic to humanthought. Together with our innate moral sense, our love of beauty, andour inclination to worship, our fascination with heaven sets humansapart from animals. All those characteristics stem from the fact that weare spiritual creatures, made in the likeness of God. That is the very thing thatdefines humanity itself and sets our race in a unique position aboveall the rest of creation (Genesis 1:26; 5:1; James 3:9). God himself “hasput eternity into man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).In other words, the atheistic assertion that the end of this lifemeans the end of one’s existence is contrary to human instinct. It isfundamentally inhuman—a denial of the human spirit.Scripture expressly teaches that humanity was created with a native awareness of God. “What can be known about God is plain to them,because God has shown it to them” (Romans 1:19). A literal translationof the Greek text would be, “Something about God is clearly knownwithin them.” Humans have an intuitive sense of God’s existence. Weknow something about his nature. God himself created us with thatknowledge built in. And we sense our ultimate accountability to him.To supplement that innate knowledge, God has put his glory ondisplay for us in everything he has created. “His invisible attributes,namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that havebeen made” (Romans 1:20). That’s why no matter where we look inthe vast universe, we see manifestations of God’s wisdom, power,

22 The Glory of Heavenand greatness. Look through the most powerful telescope toward theouter edges of the universe, and you will be overwhelmed by infinite grandeur beyond your comprehension. Look at a drop of pondwater through the finest microscope and you will likewise see intricate wonders that declare the inexpressible majesty and inexhaustibleskill of our Creator. Either perspective—and every point of view inbetween—plainly reminds us of what we already know in our heartsand consciences: we were made by an unimaginably glorious God, andhis plan for us is infinitely more expansive than this short earthly life.All the atheist propaganda in the world cannot (and never will)eliminate humanity’s innate knowledge about God, silence the testimony of creation, muzzle the human conscience, stifle that sense ofeternity in the human heart, or quell our longing for heaven.That explains why every major religion and every significant culture in the history of the human race has had some notion of perfectparadise—nirvana, Elysium, Valhalla, Utopia, Shangri-La, or whatever.But it doesn’t explain why everyone seems to imagine heaven a little differently. Even those who claim to have been to heaven disagree amongthemselves about what it is like. If God built eternity into the humanheart, why do different people have such different ideas about heaven?Paradise LostThe answer to that question lies in the sad truth that we are fallencreatures, tainted with sin and guilt. Sin affects our thinking, our desires, our imagination, and most of all, our understanding of spiritualthings. We cannot even reliably discern our own hearts: “The heartis deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” ( Jeremiah 17:9).So while we intuitively sense the reality of heaven and are drawnto it, we also perceive our own fallenness and guilt. It is significantthat the first thing Adam and Eve did after they ate the forbiddenfruit was desperately try to cover their own nakedness and hide fromGod (Genesis 3:7–11). Their profound shame overwhelmed even theirsense of God’s wonder, so their instinct as fallen creatures was to tryto evade God. By all that is rational and sensible, they ought to havebeen drawn to him, enthralled with his glory, and engulfed with love

Heavenly Hash 23and delight in his presence. Indeed, they were all those things—untilthe moment they disobeyed. But sin radically and instantly changedeverything, and they irrationally tried to hide from the very Onewhom they most needed, the one true God who alone deserved theirlove and devotion.All of humanity has been engaged in the same futile exercise eversince. We’re born with a sinful bent. We feel the shame of our guilt. Weknow we are undeserving of God’s benevolence. We are innately awareof (and alarmed by) his almighty power and infinite wisdom—andthose truths are permanently written across creation lest we forget.We know we would have no valid argument or defense against therighteous wrath of the Almighty if we were summoned to stand alonebefore him in a court of perfect justice. “No creature is hidden fromhis sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whomwe must give account” (Hebrews 4:13). So fallen people inevitably tryto suppress and twist what God has revealed to them (Romans 1:18).The more people silence that innate knowledge of the Godhead,the more spiritually confused and wantonly sinful they will become.Romans 1:21–25 traces the descent of human depravity:Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or givethanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and theirfoolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools,and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resemblingmortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. ThereforeGod gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchangedthe truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creaturerather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.Don’t miss the fact that when people deliberately suppress theirknowledge of God and reject what he has revealed about himself, theydo not normally deny the existence of God completely. Instead, theyinvent a god of their own who is more to their liking. The false worshiper realizes he cannot totally eliminate that inborn knowledge ofGod’s existence without sacrificing some of his own humanity, so heopts instead to concoct a lesser god out of his own imagination, moresuited to his personal tastes. Some crassly worship mere creatures

24 The Glory of Heaven(even “birds and animals and creeping things”). Others make idols ofstone or venerate fictional characters from human mythologies. Mostnowadays simply envision a personal deity that is little more than areflection of themselves. They may pretend—and even convince themselves—that they are paying homage to the God of Scripture, but inreality they are worshiping self. All of these are sinful forms of creature worship. One is no better or more sophisticated than the other,and none of them is any better than rank atheism.In fact, false religion quite often turns out to be a more grotesqueand more emphatic denial of the one true God than staunch atheism—because of the way man-made religion systematically twists andreimagines every spiritual truth.What people believe about the afterlife is particularly susceptibleto the corruption of false religion. People who invent their own godsmust likewise invent their own heaven. That has suddenly become avery fashionable pastime, even among people who claim to believe inthe God of the Bible.Castles in the CloudsSeveral extremely imaginative accounts claiming to describe whatheaven is like are currently riding high on the best-seller lists, and thepace of such publications seems to be increasing. Fanciful lore aboutpeople’s mystical visits to heaven (or hell, in some cases) constitute anew and fairly large category in publishing today: travelogues for theafterlife. Tim Challies, prolific evangelical blogger and book-reviewspecialist, refers to the new genre as “heaven tourism” and says this:Travelling to heaven and back is where it’s at today. DON PIPER spentninety minutes there and sold four million copies of his account.COLTON BURPO doesn’t know how long he was there, but his traveldiary has surpassed 6 million copies sold, with a kids’ edition accounting for another half million. BILL WIESE obviously booked his trip onthe wrong web site and found himself in hell, which did, well, hellishthings to his sales figures. Still, 23 Minutes in Hell sold better than if hehad described a journey to, say, Detroit, and he even saw his book hitthe bestseller lists for a few weeks. There have been others as well, andtogether they have established afterlife travel journals as a whole new

Heavenly Hash 25genre in

One of the most talked-about books of 2011 was Heaven Is for Real, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent.6 The book recounts four-year-old Colton Burpo’s vision of heaven (as told by his father to Ms. Vincent). Colton claims he visited heaven during surgery a!er a burst appendix nearly took his life. His stories