The Five People You Meet Before Heaven
We don't have to wait for heaven to get answers to life's questions.
On his 83rd birthday Eddie died in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from an amusement park ride gone bad. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. This is heaven according to Mitch Albom, author of the New York Times bestseller, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.”
If you get the impression that Albom’s heaven is more psychology and less spirituality, you’re right on the money. It’s actually not a place of God whatsoever. In his editorial from the July/August 2004 issue of “Homiletics” magazine, Senior Editor Timothy Merrill comments on “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” explaining that “if God is present at all, he’s more like a Dr. Phil trying to bring people together, because in heaven, it’s still all about you – not about God.”
Ironically, the Bible never promises that in heaven we’ll get all the answers (though we will be given fuller knowledge). Instead, it promises that on earth we receive answers sufficient enough to prepare us for a pleasant afterlife instead of a punitive one. Get it? What’s significant is not that heaven will help us fill in the gaps of our earthly existence, but our earthly existence is a time for us to find the answers we need for a heavenly future. Heaven does not serve earth, but vice versa.
“Seek the Lord while he may be found,” the Bible urges, “call on him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:6). Due to the fact that the moment of your death is the decisive moment when you will meet the afterlife and, the spiritual condition in which you meet the afterlife is the one you will live with for an eternity … the apostle Paul makes things clear. “Be very careful, then, how you live – not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity” (Ephesians 5:15,16). Even Jesus told parables like the ten bridesmaids and recalled the story of the rich man and poor Lazarus to let it be known that we all have the opportunity right now to get our house in order.
Before Jesus began his final journey to Jerusalem to suffer and die for our sins, Moses and Elijah (long dead yet still alive in heaven) met with him on the mount of transfiguration. Their purpose wasn’t to help him figure out his previous days on this earth but to prepare him for his upcoming suffering and death … and triumphant resurrection.
The Bible suggests that five people we meet on this earth have a much greater influence on our eternal destiny than any five people we might meet in heaven. Your parents who introduced you to Jesus at your baptism. The Sunday school teacher who taught you that God is greater than Goliath. Your high school friend still your friend today. Your first boss who taught you much about the business world. The doctor whom God used to save your life. Spouse. Neighbor. Pastor. All networked in a web of interactivity that influences your life under the direction of God’s keeping and care.
Oh, and turn the tables for a second. Of how many webs are you a part and for how many different people? How will the afterlife be different for those people because of your Christian influence? Who are the five people you’ll meet before heaven today? For me … A fellow pastor who shares the joys and struggles of a large congregation. A young couple who just had twin daughters delivered prematurely by emergency C-section. My fifth grade son who “graduates” from a community DARE program and asked me to say a little something at the ceremony but I think the fact that I’m there is more important than what I say. An appointment with my barber, who happens to be my wife. And a group of unchurched guys who all like basketball; we’ll meet for a cold one after the game tonight and I’ll joke with them again that they should come and watch what I do when I only work one day out of the week and they’ll laugh again but just maybe, one of these Sundays, they’ll take me up on my offer.
These are the five (plus a few more) people I’ll meet today before heaven, doing everything I can to fill in the gaps of their spiritual lives so that they will also be five of the people I meet in heaven. Share heaven with five people you meet today.
PRAYER: Heavenly Father, your mansions await us and we long to live in them. Open our eyes, and hearts, and mouths to explain heaven to the people we meet on earth. Give us new opportunities to meet new people every day and show them the joys of believing in Jesus, which include security for life hereafter. And, Father, help us say the right thing and show the right behavior to the five people we meet before heaven today. Amen.