Wrestling with Doubt: Is Heaven Real? | October 5, 2025

In John 14, Jesus promises he will prepare a place for us in his Father’s house. It’s a beautiful, comforting promise. Throughout the Bible, we’re given glimpses of what that eternal home God has prepared might look like, and yet believing in heaven still requires a lot of faith. After all, no one’s ever gone there and come back!

Continuing our fall series Wrestling with Doubt, Finding Faith, this sermon explores the question, Is Heaven Real? What does the Bible tell us about life after death?

Today’s Scripture readings are Revelation 21:1-6; Psalm 16:1, 7-11; 2 Corinthians 5:1-8; and John 6:35-40.

Here’s the livestream and sermon podcast audio:

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Grace to you and peace from God our Creator, Christ our Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit our Comforter. Amen

I counted this week, and as a pastor, I’ve done 84 funerals. Many of those were for people I knew, but roughly half were for people I’d never met. And the pastoral secret, at least for me, is that it’s actually much easier to do a funeral for someone I’ve never met.

When it’s someone I know, I have all sorts of memories and stories I want to include, and of course, I have my own grief as well, things I wish I would have said to them, and there’s a hole, an empty seat at worship, or an empty slot on my visitation list.

But when a funeral’s for someone I have no personal connection to, all I can do is talk about Jesus. I try to make the service personal and meaningful and include memories from the family, but all I have to offer as a pastor is the Christian hope for eternal life, the promise that God’s love for the person does not end at death, the promise from Romans 8 that “I’m convinced that neither death, nor life…no powers…nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

All I have to offer is the gospel’s promise of heaven.

I believe that promise. I proclaim that promise. But there’s only so much we can say, because the challenge—the reason heaven fits into our wrestling with doubt, finding faith theme—is that the Bible doesn’t give us a clear picture of what eternal life looks like.

It’s not that the Bible doesn’t talk about heaven; the challenge is the Bible has an abundance of images, and they’re not all very clear.

Paul writes in First Corinthians 13, “For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

I love that image. While we’re living in this world, our view of eternity is obscured. Several translations say we “see in a mirror, dimly,” another says, “we see a blurred image in a mirror,” or the King James Version says, “for now we see through a glass, darkly.” We don’t get a map of heaven.

Clearly, as Christians, we believe in eternal life. It’s not the only point of faith, but it’s a pretty big one. And the Bible certainly talks about eternal life.

It starts right in the first few chapters of Genesis. Genesis 5:24 says “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more.” What exactly that means is unclear, but he’s one of two people in the Bible who didn’t die. The other one’s Elijah, who was carried up to heaven in a whirlwind in a chariot of fire.

Those stories don’t tell us much of anything helpful about where Enoch and Elijah go, other than to be with God. But as you keep reading the Bible, you get glimpses of heaven.

Last week, we read about the heavenly banquet in Isaiah 25, where God promises to make a rich feast of rich food and well-aged wines for all people, to destroy the shroud of death and wipe away the tears of all faces. Jesus picks up on this idea when he talks about heaven as a great wedding feast.

Two weeks ago we heard Jesus’ words in John 14 where he promises there are many dwelling places, many rooms in his Father’s house, and he’s going to prepare a place for us. That is 100% the verse I’ve read the most at funeral services. It’s a powerful image.

Other parts of the Bible describe heaven as a peaceable kingdom where the wolf and lamb live together and the calf and the lion feed together.

John of Patmos in Revelation talks about streets paved with pure gold and walls covered with jewels, with God as the light of the city. Those are beautiful pictures, but they’re pretty vague in the details.

I think part of why the Bible has so many descriptions is because our puny little human brains can’t quite grasp the concept of eternal life with God. The Biblical writers get a glimpse of heaven from the Holy Spirit’s inspiration, but they struggle to translate it into words. They don’t have the language, so they describe the best thing they can wrap their heads around, perfect beauty, unimaginable peace.

For a kid, maybe it is ice cream for every meal, or sitting and singing around a campfire. (note that these images come from Bart Millard’s children’s board book I Can Only Imagine: A Friendship with Jesus Now and Forever, which I read for a children’s message in this service.)

In Psalm 23, it’s a beautiful meadow, still waters and green pastures.

It’s almost easier to describe heaven, the new creation, God’s realm in terms of what it’s not.

No more crying, no more tears. No more pain, no more bombs, no more sound of weeping, or infants who live but a few days. No one goes hungry, or has their insurance claim denied. No more political fighting or government shutdowns.

What would a world of perfect justice and peace look like? That’s heaven. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

In fact, the Biblical promise is not that this world ends and we get to go somewhere else; the ultimate promise in Revelation—at the end of the story—is God restores this world to the way it was always meant to be. There’s a new heaven and a new earth. God’s kingdom comes. What is mortal is swallowed up by life. Light dawns on a weary world.

What exactly does that look like? Well, there’s a lot of mystery.

One of the biggest mysteries I wonder about is whether we’re conscious, whether we can see family and friends still on earth. Do you ever wonder that?

Some parts of the Bible describe death as sleep. Daniel 12 talks about those who sleep in the dust of earth awakening on the last day. Ecclesiastes 9 says “the dead know nothing.”

Maybe when you die, the next thing you know is Jesus greeting you on judgment day—and whenever we talk about judgment day, remember that the judge is the one who laid down his life for you, who loves you more than you can imagine. God’s judgment is grace, mercy, and love.

But there’s also a story in 1 Samuel 28 where Saul asks a medium to call up the spirit of the prophet Samuel from the dead. It’s condemned as a great sin, but it does work.

Jesus promises one of the criminals being crucified next to him that he’ll be with him today in paradise—today, not a few millennia later. Jesus also tells a story of a rich man who after death begs to send a poor man named Lazarus back from the dead as a messenger to his family to tell them to live better. It’s only a parable he’s making up to make a point, but Jesus certainly implies the possibility.

Or sometimes people get caught up in debating questions like, in the resurrection of the dead, what will your body be like? How old will you look? Like for children who died, will we see them at some perfect age? If your body’s been wearing out for decades, do you get to be younger? How much younger?

And of course, like so many of the faith questions we wrestle with, we’re not the first ones to wonder. A group of Sadducees once asked Jesus if someone’s been married more than once, who gets to be their spouse in heaven?

They weren’t asking as a genuine question, but trying to make a point because the distinctive thing about Sadducees was that they didn’t believe in eternal life at all. (You can remember that about the Sadducees because that’s why they’re so sad, you see?)

Those kind of questions can be interesting, but ultimately they’re missing the point. We don’t get to know everything about eternal life.

We can’t prove it. Our only option is to accept the mystery, and trust we’ll find out eventually. In all those images of heaven, what’s clear is that heaven means life with God.

And maybe we’ll find out we Christians are wrong and there is no afterlife; we’re just dead when we die. It’s not something that’s provable. (Faith is never certain.)

People have tried to prove it, often by lifting up stories of people who’ve had near death experiences, even medically died and been brought back by doctors. Some have had visions of heaven. Inspiring perhaps, but not enough to prove heaven is real.

Eventually, all we can do is trust in Jesus, the one who says he is the bread of life.

All we can do is trust in the testimony of the Bible and the apostles that Jesus himself was raised from the dead.

All we have to proclaim is the Gospel, that Jesus has defeated the power of death.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says,

“For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died…as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.”

Everything depends on Jesus, and we can’t prove the resurrection.

To hedge my bets a bit, I’m not sure I completely agree with Paul that it’d be the worst thing in the world if we believe in Jesus and it turns out there’s no resurrection.

If we’re somehow wrong, if there’s nothing else, I think I’m ok with spending this life trying to life a life of love, trying my best to serve my neighbors, to make the world a better place. Maybe not as fun as hedonism, but a whole love more meaningful.

As Adam Hamilton says, “I cannot prove the resurrection of Christ occurred, but I can point to the change that happened in the disciples once they had seen the risen Christ. They went from cowering in fear to proclaiming Christ in the streets.”

We have plenty of testimony about Jesus’ resurrection, and once you believe Jesus is alive, heaven’s not a hard next step. But there’s no such thing as definitive proof. Ultimately, you have to make a choice. You can choose to believe the witness of the Gospels that Jesus is alive.

You can choose to live in hope. Or you can choose to reject it.

As Christians, our hope for eternity shapes the way we live now. Believing in heaven doesn’t give us permission to just throw up our hands and say, “Don’t worry, this world doesn’t matter because it’s only temporary.” That’d be ignoring everything else Jesus said and did, all the rest of Scripture.

Instead, believing heaven is real gives us strength to persevere in this world, strength to lift up our neighbors, to take risks for the sake of justice and peace, working to make this world more like God’s kingdom.

At a funeral, in times of loss, in the face of death, it gives us strength to carry on in faith.

Jesus said, “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.”

Do you trust his promise?
Amen

Read more of this sermon series:
– Part one: Is There a God?
– Part two: The Good Book?
– Part three: Who’s In and Who’s Out?
– Part five: Does Prayer Work?
– Part six: Why Do the Innocent Suffer?