The Glory of Heaven (Second Edition)

The Truth about Heaven, Angels, and Eternal Life

John MacArthur

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781433538711
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

If you're going to call it "home" for eternity, don't you want to know what it's like?

Our pictures of heaven range from comical to curious, mystical to fictitious, with bits of biblical truth thrown in. But if heaven is our future, and we are to be living with an eternal mindset in the present, a Hollywood scriptwriter's interpretation of the afterlife just won't suffice. Quite simply, we need to know more about what lies ahead for the sake of what lies in front of us today.

In this newly updated and expanded edition, pastor John MacArthur takes us through the pages of Scripture, exploring the wonders of heaven and the truth about angels and eternal life while addressing current debates and issues. Come along with this best-selling author for an in-depth look at every Christian's future—heaven, our eternal home.

8

The Heavenly Host

Our study of heaven would not be complete without giving some attention to the angels.

Angels are a familiar presence in popular culture these days. Beginning at least in the early 1970s with the sudden rise of the New Age movement, various myths, superstitions, and occult ideas about angels began to come into mainstream fashion. A couple of extremely popular television series, “Highway to Heaven” (1984–1989) and “Touched by an Angel” (1994–2003) helped fuel the explosion of interest. Hollywood has further stoked the obsession. Literally dozens of major motion pictures featuring stories of angelic visitations have been made over the past three decades or so. Angel artwork, angel figurines, and angel jewelry are all immensely popular and quite commonplace in greeting card shops and gift boutiques. A colleague of mine describes a store near my home. Their entire inventory is nothing but angel merchandise:

About an hour’s drive from my office is a New Age establishment that bills itself as “the world’s largest Angel store.” The shelves there are well-stocked with paintings, statuettes, and New Age books ostensibly teaching people how to communicate with angels. They also have a large selection of gewgaws called “shelf angels”—porcelain figurines designed to sit on the edge of a shelf—mostly winged women and cherubic toddlers sporting diminutive angel-wings of their own.¹

Countless books about angels and tales about encounters with angels are being written and published. Most of them have strong New Age or occult overtones. A recent search for “angels” in the book category on Amazon.com turned up more than 80,000 results. (A search for “angels” in all categories at Amazon.com yields more than half a million listings.) Angels are big business.

The most popular books seem to be those that purport to instruct readers on how to recognize and communicate with angels. Some of the best-selling books in the genre are Where Angels Walk: True Stories of Heavenly Visitors² (a book that has spawned at least fourteen sequels, many of which have seen sales figures in the millions); Angels 101: An Introduction to Connecting, Working, and Healing with the Angels;³ How to Hear Your Angels;⁴ Angelspeake: How to Talk With Your Angels;⁵ and Your Angel Journey: A Guide to Releasing Your Inner Angel.⁶

Communicating with angels is serious business, according to books like these. One mega–best seller on this subject for the past two decades is a book called Ask Your Angels.⁷ According to the promotional material issued by the publishers, “The authors [of Ask Your Angels] show us how we can draw on the power of angels to reconnect with our lost inner selves and to achieve our goals, whether they be better relationships, healing an illness, or recovery from addiction.” Supposedly this book will teach the reader “how to align with the angelic energy field and learn to talk with your angels.”

Here are some other verbatim quotations from various publishers’ comments about their guidebooks for communicating with the angelic realm:

Through the easy techniques presented in this book, you can learn to access and attune to beings such as guardian angels, nature spirits and elementals, spirit totems, archangels, gods and goddesses—as well as family and friends after their physical death. Also reveals which acupressure points stimulate your intuitive faculties, how to protect yourself from lower-level discarnates, and how to conquer fears of the unknown.

Everyone has a Spirit Guide or guardian angel who assists him in keeping on a chosen Karmic path. [This cassette tape] helps you get in touch with yours.

[You can learn to] contact your guardian angel and be receptive to the angelic realm in your daily life. Learn how to attune to the higher frequencies of Spirit, to be more aware of angels and nature spirits, and to communicate with these loving beings in order to develop a deeper appreciation of our own place in Creation.

[This book] enables us to begin to open our hearts to these joyful and comforting protectors, so we can raise our consciousness to a new dimension.

All the pieces in this unique collection stress the cooperation between humans and angels in the creation of our inner life and even of nature. The reader experiences a rich and variegated view of these ancient, elusive spirits that have inspired us for so long.

The authors teach you nine specific ways your personal angel protects you, how to call out to your guardian angel, and how to get your angel to answer your cry for help and assistance in matters big and small. You’ll also find out about the Angelic Hierarchy and learn the actual language of the Angelic Kingdom!

Shows us how to co-create with the angels and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Specific exercises and meditations help you communicate with angels who are waiting to be invited into your life!

Inspiration from the angels and Muses is always available. Along with writing and art exercises, the reader will explore the angelic realm through guided journeys, focusing on mandalas, knowing how to use the seasonal forces, learning how colors influence us and how the angels use color and light as their own language. Case histories of how many people became aware of their creative talents when they began playing with the angels are included.

Offers a complete method for bringing the healing light of the soul, the Solar angel, and the angelic healers into the physical body. Taught in workshops for the past eight years, these easy-to-learn processes have helped thousands to heal and upgrade the cells in their body. The healing angels will work with whatever healing path or healing treatment you are now using. Includes a chart of healing questions, colors, and images for use with specific illnesses.

By utilizing a combination of your birth sign and a specific colored candle, you can obtain the magic and wisdom you want in life by calling upon the angels. This book contains many spiritual secrets that will guide the reader to success and power.

Much of this, of course, is little more than occult divination, sorcery, and typical New Age mysticism. Everything we have said about the dangers of mystical inquiry into the realm of the dead applies equally to deliberate attempts to consort with spirit beings. Both activities are occult practices, even if garnished with Christian language and embellished with biblical proof texts. Either kind of investigation into the spiritual realm opens a person up to serious demonic deception.

Indeed, I have no doubt that some who claim to commune with angels really have been able to establish a link with angelic beings—though not in the way they seek. Scripture warns us plainly that Satan and his messengers often appear as angels of light (2 Corinthians 11:13–15). In other words, demonic beings take advantage of the gullibility of people who are actively seeking to communicate with the spirit world. What they are doing is pure shamanism, and it exposes them to all the horrible effects of the black arts. I know people who have been drawn into serious demonic bondage by these practices, and Christians should be strongly warned against such inquiry.

Unfortunately, the evangelical response to these trends has been weak. There is, of course, a plethora of books from evangelical publishers featuring mildly Christianized tales of angelic encounters, enthusiastically recounting “Real-Life Stories about Angels” and glowing tales of Christians who claim to communicate regularly with angels. As usual, evangelicals are addicted to following the world’s fads. Unfortunately, this one poses some particularly serious hazards.

As 2 Corinthians 11:15 suggests, “it is no surprise” when a demon disguises himself as a good angel. Furthermore, despite the prevalence of stirring tales about angelic interventions (angels who rescue missionaries from cannibals and similar tales), there is no way any of these stories can be verified—except for the biblical ones. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an angel whose invisible hand mysteriously steadied you when you were about to take a tumble down the stairs. But it means you cannot possibly know for sure whether it was an angel or not. We do know for sure that it is God whose providence preserves us from various disasters. Whether in a given instance he employs angels as his instruments or not, God is the One who should be the focus of our praise and gratitude, not the angelic beings.

Scripture does teach that some “have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2). And for that very reason we are instructed to show kindness and hospitality to strangers. But the language of Scripture indicates that these incidents are rare, and the key to understanding this verse is the word unawares. The verse is describing people who have hosted angels without knowing it. It is certainly possible, according to Scripture, that you might play host to an angel. But in all likelihood, if that occurs, it will be without your knowing it. Nowhere does Scripture encourage us to have an angel fetish, to look for evidence of angels in everyday life, or to have such an expectation of entertaining angels that we imagine them in every serendipitous encounter.

The tales that fill today’s rendezvous-with-angels books are unverifiable stories—extraordinary displays of divine providence, perhaps, but not necessarily authentic accounts of angelic intervention. The whole fixation is of questionable value. Certainly it is causing far more spiritual harm than good.

What Does Scripture Say about Angels?

In early 1995 I clipped an article from Moody magazine that analyzed the angel craze. It included some interesting statistics that gave some measurements to the rapid growth of interest in the subject. The publishing statistics at the time were stunning, showing explosive growth in the number of books about guardian angels, angelic communication, and so on. Of course, those statistics, amazing as they were, would be dwarfed by today’s numbers.

But one line I highlighted in the article was a quotation from Moody Bible Institute theology professor Ed Glasscock, who stated, “The Bible never really explains angels. It just makes casual references to their activities.”⁸ That is absolutely true. Gleaning our information solely from the biblical data, we...