Hills + Valleys | Going Home | 2 Kings 2:1-17 | Week 7

Next week, we will be done with this series on Elijah; we've given seven messages in all. This brings us to the conclusion of this life of the ancient prophet of Israel, Elijah. We saw Elijah burst onto the scene, sort of came out of nowhere. He stepped into the king's palace and made a declaration about drought and a confident call that Yahweh was the King above all kings, the Lord above all lords, the God above all gods. We've traced Elijah's journey over the last few weeks and now we're coming to the end of his journey. The end of his journey is unique. It's not intended to be looked at as normative. Elijah is one of only two people we have recorded in Scripture who didn't die. Enoch is his counterpart in Genesis 5, but Elijah's ending is as strange as his life, in many ways. It comes to an abrupt end where he's taken---spoiler alert!---in a chariot of fire up to heaven. As we read his story, his story conjures up all sorts of questions in our life, at least in my life....questions about what heaven is going to be like.
I think there's this sort of transcendent human longing to figure out what's next. We have people who have these, supposed, experiences of heaven and they write books. A guy named Don Piper wrote a book, 90 Minutes in Heaven, in which he was supposedly in a car accident and died and for ninety minutes spent some time in heaven, came back and made millions of dollars and wrote a book about it. I'm not saying it didn't happen. He very well may have had that experience. In Heaven is for Real, you have this four-year-old boy who dies and goes to heaven and experiences things and learns things he really shouldn't have been able to learn in any other way. His dad wrote a book. 90 Minutes in Heaven has sold over six million copies, Heaven is for Real has sold over twelve million copies since it came out in 2010. I tell you this, not to say you should go buy one of these books to figure out what heaven's like. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I'm just saying somebody's experience is never a great foundation to build your theology off of. I think, we should go to the Scriptures and see what the Scriptures have to say about heaven. If you want to read an interesting book, pick up one of those, but then really hold it up to see what the Scriptures say...