This week on Things Unseen, our theme has been the four last things, the traditional topics

in the Christian Church for the Sundays in Advent.

And today we've come to the third of these four things, death, judgment, and now heaven.

And I can almost hear a corporate sigh of relief, because it's been a week of heavy reflections

and there's still one more to come.

But today the clouds part, the sun shines, glory appears, heaven is our theme. And who doesn't want to go to heaven?

Actually, I think that's a more searching question than we might at first think. What do I mean?

Well, years ago, I was driving some distance at home in Scotland to speak at a weekend conference,

and as I was listening to BBC radio

in the car, I was surprised to discover a programme about heaven. And of course it attracted my interest

immediately. And so for the next 30 minutes, I listened to a series of interviews with very well-known

personalities who were all asked the same question.

What do you think heaven will be like? And I began to notice a consistent pattern in the

replies. It was the same in every single interview. It wasn't what was said. It was what was

never said. Not even once. Not even once in all the

descriptions of heaven did anybody mention the presence of God. I was reminded of the words of the

Samist. God is not in their thoughts. But I thought this is a staggering illustration.

If you don't want God at the center of your life now, then you'll not want Him at the

center of the world to come.

The person who lives without God naturally imagines a heaven without God.

But as we'll see tomorrow, a future world without God can't possibly be heaven.

The program I was listening to was an illustration of a puzzle we often encounter. Why do people

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