Revelation 4:1-4Amplified Bible
Scene in Heaven
4 After this I looked, and behold, [a]a door standing open in heaven! And the first voice which I had heard, like the sound of a [war] trumpet speaking with me, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things.” 2 At once I was in [special communication with] the Spirit; and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with One seated on the throne. 3 And He who sat there appeared like [the crystalline sparkle of] [b]a jasper stone and [the fiery redness of] a sardius stone, and encircling the throne there was a rainbow that looked like [the color of an] emerald. 4 Twenty-four [other] thrones surrounded the throne; and seated on these thrones were [c]twenty-four elders dressed in white clothing, with crowns of gold on their heads.
The Word of God for the Children of God.
Adeste Fidelis. Venite Adoremus. Dominum.
Gloria! In Excelsis Deo! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Amen.
Once John was charged to write the book of Revelation, when he met with the resurrected, glorified Lord Jesus in chapter 1, and having received Christ’s 7 letters to the 7 churches in chapters 2-3, he is given a vision of the throne room of God and commanded to, “Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.”
Not only was John given important information for the Churches, but he was also commanded to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ what was going to happen beyond the current Church age, “after these things.”
After acting as God’s heavenly, High Priest to the Church-age saints and interceding as heaven’s Mediator between God and man, John is shown how Christ will begin to take on His role of Judge, before returning to earth to claim His position as King of kings and Lord of lords.
“I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven,” John writes, “and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me.”
The angel who met John in the prologue was the same angel who accompanied him throughout the entire revelation of Jesus Christ – which the Father gave to His Son… to give to John through His angel.
The apostle John was about to receive a preview of the future, which began with a vision of heaven in chapter 4 and moved to the worship of the Lamb of God in chapter 5.
He saw One seated on the throne which had the appearance of crystal-clear jasper and a blood-red Sardis stone, and John recorded that there was a rainbow surrounding the throne that reminded him of a brilliant green emerald.
Twice he was summoned to, “come up here.”
The same voice which sounded like that of a trumpet in chapter 1, commanded him to join the heavenly host of angelic beings that surrounded the throne of God, by means of a door which was standing open in heaven.
And being, “in the spirit on the Lord’s day,” John was given an amazing insight into the future.. and greater revelation of Jesus Christ the Lamb of God and Lion of the tribe of Judah.
After Christ’s revelation to the Churches ended, John’s vison changed, and he was ushered into heaven – in spirit and in truth.
He discovered that the heavenly scene into which he had been brought, was preparing to unseal a special scroll which had been securely sealed by God Himself with seven seals.
As the heavenly scene unfolded, John discovered that he was witnessing to the precursor of the prophesied judgement on earth – the Day of the Lord which he recorded in chapters 6-19 when the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness.
The sight that John saw during chapters 4-5, were the heavenly preparation for that future time of Great Tribulation, recorded in chapters 6-19, which is to fall on a Christ-rejecting sinful world and which will bring Israel to national repentance and punishment to the God-hating, Christ-rejecting, sinful world.
While John’s body remained on earth, his spirit was translated into heaven where he witnessed a vision of the angelic host that surround the throne of Almighty God – the Ancient of Days.
As he looked, John was introduced to four living creatures who worship God day and night and 24 elders who were clothed in white raiment with crowns of gold on their heads.
The vison of the throne-room of God, the worship of the Lamb Who was slain, and the presentation of a seven-sealed scroll, which no-one but Lamb could break, are all part-and-parcel of the heavenly vision John saw in chapters 4 and 5.
It was after he had received Christ’s revelation to the Church (chapters 1-3) but before the revelation of Christ to the world in His role as Judge (chapters 6-19) when the wrath of God is poured out upon the children of disobedience, that the aged apostle John looked,
“and behold, a door was standing open in heaven, and the first voice which I had heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said to him, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things.'”
In chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation, the focus shifts to a new and powerful story of God’s ongoing mission.
This new section begins with John seeing “a door standing open in heaven.”
This picture surprises us because we know that an open door often extends an invitation to come in.
This is an enticing opportunity to believe because heaven is often considered a place of mysteries that we do not have access to.
For the most part, it is God’s secret—at least from our day-to-day living in this life.
But here Jesus opens heaven’s door.
And in a voice like a trumpet, he welcomes us, saying, “Come up here.”
The invitation promises to reveal “what must take place after this.”
But as John tells the story of walking through heaven’s open door, the future is not the first thing that catches his attention.
Instead, he sees “a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.”
Heaven’s open door has us standing before the throne of all thrones, from which everything in heaven and on earth is loved and cared for.
Still today, the Holy Spirit opens heaven’s door wide so that we can visualize, believe, this scene and let its story encourage us to live by faith in Jesus today.
Considering Reasons to Believe in Heaven
Let us strive to remember that the one who reads, hears, and takes to heart this amazing revelation is blessed.
“Blessed is he that reads, and those that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein, for the time is at hand.”
Believing in Heaven …
“Heaven is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark.” –Stephen Hawking
I’m afraid of the dark.
If we are talking about the endless kind of darkness which offers us no light anywhere, no hope ever, and nothing but nothingness, who among us would not panic at the thought of that?
I expect people like Mr. Hawking simply find the idea of Heaven too good to be true, and thus conclude that it must be a product of man’s delusional yearning for “pie in the sky by and by.”
And yet, there are solid reasons for reasonable people to believe in the concept of a Heavenly home after this earthly life.
Here are some that mean a lot to me.
By no means is this list exhaustive.
It’s simply my laymen’s thinking on the subject.
The God who made us created us with a longing for Himself and a satisfaction in nothing less. {Ecclesiastes 3:1-22}
When we get to Heaven, we will finally be satisfied, but not until then.
“I shall be satisfied with Thy likeness when I awake” (Psalm 17:15).
“I go to prepare a place for you,” said our Lord. “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:3).
If it were not so, I would have told you.
Jesus said that.
I believe Him.
I choose to believe.
1. Jesus Believed in Heaven
In fact, He claimed to be a native.
The Lord said to Nicodemus, “No one has been to Heaven except the One who came from there, even the Son of Man.” (John 3:13). No one knows a place like a native.
Jesus told the dying thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43).
So, wherever we go when we die, it’s a paradise.
True, He left us a thousand unanswered questions on the subject, but what He told us is pure gold.
For instance, when He returns, the dead in Christ accompany Him (I Thessalonians 4:14).
It appears that our eventual destination is somewhere different from the initial, intermediate place called “Paradise,” but we should have no trouble leaving the details to Him – after all, we can trust the One who died for us.
2. Scripture consistently teaches the existence of Heaven.
We must not let people get by with saying the Old Testament knew nothing of Heaven.
“I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” said David in everyone’s favorite psalm.
Or this one: “As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I will be satisfied with Thy likeness when I awake” (Psalm 17:15).
Job said, “My Redeemer liveth and at last shall stand upon the earth; yet even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God; whom I myself shall behold, and whom my eyes shall see and not another” (Job 19:25-27).
Neither must we cave to those who say the only way to understand such verses is to get inside the mind of the one who said those words originally, as if what they said is determinative and authoritative.
Peter said the prophets said more than they understood and even angels could not fathom some of these things. (I Peter 1:12).
3. I believe in Heaven because I believe in earth.
It’s so wonderful.
There is nothing else like it in the universe.
Suppose we lived in some distant world and all we knew was the planets we have seen–the barren, rocky planets that are molten in the day and frigid at night, those covered with acidic clouds or endless hurricanes–
and if someone told us about earth, with its steadiness, its atmosphere, its lovely scenery and its plant life and the richness of its minerals and a thousand other delights, we would find it hard to believe.
And yet here it is.
We are residents of this amazing planet.
We take the earth in stride because it’s all we know.
4. There has to be a heaven to even up the earthly hell God’s most faithful sometimes endure for Jesus’ sake.
Those of us who are “carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease,” to use Isaac Watts’ unforgettable image, have little idea of the price some have paid for their loyalty to Jesus Christ through the centuries.
Many live under oppressive regimes in our day, punished for doing nothing more than meeting in someone’s living room to worship or giving a friend a Bible.
I’m tempted to say “God owes them, big time,” but I don’t believe I want to be presumptuous or blasphemous.
“God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love that you have shown toward His name in having ministered to the saints, and in still ministering” is how Hebrews 6:10 puts it.
If God were not to reward the faithfulness of the most loyal, it would be sin on His part.
After all, “this momentary light affliction is working for us an exceeding weight of glory far beyond all comparison” says 2 Corinthians 4:17.
5. Every caterpillar/butterfly testifies to our heavenly future.
Suppose we could inform that caterpillar crawling across a leaf of the glorious future just ahead of him (it?).
Would that humble creature believe he (it) would someday have gorgeous wings and flit through the sky?
So, why do we have such difficulty believing in the destiny God has planned for and promised to His own?
6. I believe in Heaven because the alternative belief is in despair.
“I would have despaired had I not believed I would see the goodness of God in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13).
This world, by the way, is not the land of the living, but is the land of the dying.
The “land of the living” is just over the next ridge, immediately following our final breath here.
Jesus said, “Because I live, you too shall live.”
Who among us has not grieved at the thought of never seeing a precious loved one again, as we have left the cemetery.
The alternative to faith is despair.
7. I believe in Heaven because some of the best people who ever lived believed in Heaven.
Pick up a Bible and read it ….
A whole lot of formerly ordinary people from literally all walks of life had come to faith in God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit long before I was ever even told there was a God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. [Hebrews 11, Hebrews 12:1-2.]
8. I believe in Heaven because I believe in hell.
Luke 16:27-28Amplified Bible
27 So the rich man said, ‘Then, father [Abraham], I beg you to send Lazarus to my father’s house— 28 for I have five brothers—in order that he may solemnly warn them and witness to them, so that they too will not come to this place of torment.’
There has to be a hell.
I don’t like to think much about hell.
But I have to because God’s Word teaches about it.
The plain truth is that hell is real, and real people go there forever.
Several times in the Gospels we read Jesus was grieved when people turned away from him–grieved because he knew they were walking down the road that eventually would lead to hell.
The message Jesus brought is simple: Unless you turn and put your trust in me, you will die in your sins and face an eternity without me.
In Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus, we see the rich man begging for a little relief from his suffering.
Father Abraham explains that this kind of relief is not possible.
The rich man then turns his attention toward his brothers who are still living.
“Then I beg you … send Lazarus… Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.”
Notice a short time in hell turned this unbeliever into a motivated evangelist.
In a sense the rich man is saying,
“Someone has got to warn people that hell is real and that real people go there.”
How tragic that the man in this story found out too late.
What’s it going to take for you to become motivated?
Pray God’s grace, not his wrath, will fill your heart with a passion to save the lost.
9. I believe in Heaven because it’s a great incentive to responsible living and compassionate everything.
Skeptics will point to the shallow sayings of some believers that for the Heaven-bound this world does not matter, and that improving life on Earth is just so much arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Those who say such are wrong, their thinking unbiblical, their teachings are misleading.
We have great responsibilities here in this life, and it’s not just to get people to (ahem) “pray the sinner’s prayer” so they can go to heaven.
We were commissioned to make disciples, a far bigger thing.
“The heavens are the heavens of the Lord,” says Psalm 115:16, “but the earth He has given to the sons of men.”
We are stewards of this planet, and thus answerable to Him.
I’ll go so far as to say those who are working to give the planet clean air and pure water, safe streets, are also doing the work of the Lord in their own way.
10. I believe in Heaven because of reasons I’m yet to discover.
There is so much more.
As some have said, we are “hard-wired” to believe in God and likewise in Heaven.
I willingly accept that and see it as residue of the creation.
The God who made us created us with a longing for Himself and a satisfaction in nothing less.
When we get to Heaven, we will finally be satisfied, but not until then. “I shall be satisfied with Thy likeness when I awake” (Psalm 17:15).
“I go to prepare a place for you,” said our Lord. “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:3).
“If it were not so, I would have told you.”
Jesus said that. I believe Him.
I simply choose to believe.
God, the Father …
God, the Son …
God, the Holy Spirit …
The Revealed Word of God …
The Resurrection ….
In Heaven …
In the name of God, the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit,
Let us Pray,
Heavenly Father, thank You for the book of Revelation and for the greater insight and understanding it gives us into the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus, of what is to take place after He comes to take the members of His mystic Body to be with Himself, and how we should live in this present age. I pray that You would bless me as I read and take to heart all that is written in this final book of Scripture. Thank You that You are the eternal and immutable God Whose plans and purposes can never fail. Thank You for the Cross of Christ and His glorious Resurrection, which secured for us an eternal inheritance, by faith. I pray that all I say and do would give glory to You and that one day I may cast my crown before His feet. Thank you for all Your goodness and grace to me and to all men. This I pray in Jesus’ wonderful name.
Adeste Fidelis. Venite Adoremus. Dominum.
Gloria. In Excelsis Deo. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Amen
Loving God, Living God, Loving Hope, Living Hope, Loving Living Life His Way! "Many things are possible for the person who has hope. Even more is possible for the person who has faith. And still more is possible for the person who knows how to love. But everything is possible for the person who practices all three virtues." - Brother Lawrence (1605-1691), Practicing the Presence of God (1692). 