FINDING OUR WAY HOME
THAHIR SAHAB JAMEL was a Sunni Arab in his early twenties, living with his mother and three brothers in the village of Hawija in northern Iraq. He made a decent living, working on a farm. He had been a teenager in 2003 when American-led forces invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein. During the American occupation, the country had remained unstable and torn by conflict and terror attacks. After the American withdrawal in 2011, violence and unrest surged throughout the country.
But Thahir Jamel was concerned only with keeping his job and providing for his mother and brothers. He didn’t care about politics.
One day a stranger named Salam came to visit him. The man spoke with intensity and passion about the Sunni Muslim religion. “You must join the struggle,” Salam said. “You must become a [jihadist] and help bring down the Shia government. We’re going to raise up the caliphate and fulfill the ancient prophecies.”
Jamel found Salam’s recruitment speech appealing. This man was calling him out of his humdrum existence and into a struggle that would give his life meaning and purpose. So he left his job and family, and he joined a movement that was practically unknown at the time but would soon become the world’s most-feared army of terrorists—an army known as ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He pledged his allegiance to the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
He soon began training with other recruits in their early twenties. His trainers were battle-hardened soldiers in their forties and fifties—men who had served in Saddam Hussein’s army, men of cunning, cruelty, and bloody experience. They talked about taking over the nation of Iraq, killing the “infidels” [non-Muslims] and evildoers, and establishing a caliphate ruled by Sharia law, based on the Quran. The caliphate would control the economy and would seize revenue from captured oilfields. The leaders talked about expanding the caliphate far beyond the borders of Syria and Iraq. They would retake Palestine and spread north into Europe, south into Africa, and east into Asia. Infidels would submit to the Islamic State—or be destroyed.
Jamel rose in the ranks, becoming an emir (a lord or commander), with a level of responsibility roughly equivalent to a captain in the army. He was placed in charge of a company of seventy fighters. His mission was to carry out brutal attacks in the battle-scarred, oil-rich region around Baiji, on the road between Baghdad and Mosul. Jamel’s ISIS forces rolled up a string of impressive victories, helping to spread the caliphate across northern Iraq.
For a year and a half, Jamel and his company of terrorists waged war against civilians and soldiers, slaughtering “infidel” men, women, and children without the slightest pang of conscience. He and his men took part in public beheadings and other grisly executions of civilians in order to keep the populations in the villages in submission. He turned over many civilians to his ISIS superiors, knowing they faced the most horrifying tortures imaginable, followed by brutal execution. He carried out the orders of the Islamic State without question. Some of those orders were issued by Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself.
In May 2016, Jamel and some of his men were arrested by government police in a village near the northern city of Kirkuk. As I write these words, Thahir Sahab Jamel awaits trial for his crimes. He may receive life in prison—or death by hanging.
Handcuffed, his face covered by a mask, Jamel gave an interview to an American news agency. He claims he now regrets his crimes. “It haunts me that I am responsible for killing many people,” he says. “We killed them for nothing.”
The head of the police force that captured Jamel says that all captured ISIS fighters express regret, but there’s no way to know if they are sincere or not. They all seem to develop a conscience the moment they are arrested.
Thahir Jamel once believed he would die a martyr’s death, but now he fears eternal damnation. “At the beginning, ISIS told us we would all go to heaven,” he said. “Now that I am in prison it means I am going to the fire. I am going to hell.”1
My heart breaks for this man’s victims—but my heart also breaks for Jamel himself. He was so deceived by the false ideology of political Islam that he left his job and family to become a soldier of the caliphate. Thahir Sahab Jamel is just one young man among thousands who have been lured into the death cult of ISIS. Promised heaven, he became a soldier of hell. Made an emir of the Islamic State, he became a barbarian.
As we have seen, there are many more barbarians where he came from. They are coming. In fact, thousands are already here.
Remember, as I explained in chapter 1, I am not using the term barbarian as an exercise in name-calling or insults. I have chosen this word carefully because it has a specific meaning. A barbarian is a person who is not part of our civilization, who wants no part of our civilization, and who seeks the conquest and destruction of our civilization, just as the Visigoths sacked the city of Rome.
I don’t blame the barbarians for doing what barbarians do. I hold the church responsible for not doing what the church was established by God to do. And I believe God will hold the church accountable for failing to be the church, and for peddling an adulterated and false “gospel.”
From the time our first parents, Adam and Eve, chose to go their own way instead of God’s way, human beings have reaped the consequences of their rebellion: they were exiled from the Garden. When Israel chose spiritual adultery over faithfulness to God, the consequences were the same: they were exiled from the land God gave them.
Today, as the church chooses to go its own way instead of lifting up the pure, unadulterated gospel of Jesus Christ, we are facing a different kind of exile that is coming our way—terrorism. Our secular political leaders, in their greed and ignorance, have invited the barbarians into the City of Man.
If God’s hand of protection has been removed from us, it’s because we in the church, in our disobedience to God, have left the gates of the City unlocked.
HOPE FOR CIVILIZATION
There is a way back to God. There is a pathway to blessing for the church and for our culture. It’s the pathway of God’s truth. It requires us to turn away from the spiritual and moral relativism that pervades our culture. It demands that we be faithful to the pure and simple truth of the Christian gospel.
Even during the Babylonian Exile, there was a faithful remnant. There was a small but committed nucleus of believers who refused to compromise God’s truth.
When the government of King Nebuchadnezzar ordered all of the people—both the Babylonians and the captive Hebrews—to worship the king’s image, almost everyone obeyed. But a faithful few—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—refused the order, preferring the fiery furnace over sin.
And when King Darius of Persia ordered that no prayers be offered to any god or person except himself, Daniel remained faithful to God and dared to refuse the order. The king sent Daniel to the lions’ den, but God blessed Daniel and shut the mouths of the lions—and God blessed Israel because of Daniel’s faithfulness.
Just as there has always been a faithful remnant in Israel, even while the nation was in exile, so there is a faithful remnant in the church today. Those godly believers are daily on their knees, praying that God would restore the church and heal the nation. They speak out, they fast and pray, and they tell others the good news, even as the world is collapsing all around them.
God has commanded us to live faithfully and pray earnestly for the welfare of the city of our exile—in our case, the City of Man, Western civilization. Jeremiah wrote, “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7). Even though the City of Man is secularized and ungodly, it is our temporary home while we await our eternal home, the City of God, the New Jerusalem. If we bless the City of Man by our faithfulness to God and by our witness for Him, then we will trigger a hunger in the people around us for the good news.
THE PURE GOSPEL
After we clear away all the falsehood, error, and ignorance of the Emerging Church, the Prosperity Gospel, the Social Gospel, and all the other counterfeit “gospels” of our time, what is the absolute truth that remains? Jesus Himself gave the simplest formulation of the gospel when He told the Pharisee Nicodemus, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
The apostle Paul also gave a simple four-part outline of the gospel in his first letter to the church at Corinth. I have indicated each of those four parts with a bracketed number in bold type:
Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: [1] that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, [2] that he was buried, [3] that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and [4] that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Corinthians 15:1–8)
Let’s look at each of those four parts of the gospel:
Part 1: Jesus died for our sins.
Part 2: Jesus was buried.
Part 3: Jesus rose again on the third day.
Part 4: The resurrection of the Lord Jesus was verified by many witnesses.
Paul tells us that this is the gospel message in a nutshell. This is the essence of the good news.
A number of essential truths are implied in those four parts of the gospel. For example, the reason Christ died for our sins is that we are sinners and incapable of saving ourselves. And the reason Paul twice says “according to the Scriptures” is because Old Testament prophecy stated clearly that God’s Anointed One, the Messiah, would have to die, would have to be buried, and would be raised again—and those prophecies establish the Lord’s credentials as the promised Messiah (see, for example, Psalm 16:10 and Isaiah 53:8–10).
The reason it’s important that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was verified by witnesses is so that no one can justifiably say that the resurrection is a mere “narrative” or “comforting myth.” The resurrection of the Lord Jesus is a historical fact. Anyone who denies any of four parts of the gospel—the Lord’s death, His burial, His resurrection, or the verification of the resurrection by witnesses—denies the gospel and is a false teacher.
We must not subtract any of those four ingredients from the gospel. We must not add any unbiblical doctrines or practices to that gospel.
FOCUS ON JESUS CHRIST
In chapter 1, I described a number of movements that have sometimes replaced the purity of the gospel with the political notions of either the Religious Right or the Religious Left, or the economic and sociological theories of the Social Gospel, or the greed and distorted theology of the Prosperity Gospel, or the universalism and “post-evangelical deconstructionism” of the Emerging Church.
The biggest difference between all of these false “gospels” and the one true gospel of Jesus Christ is who is the focus of each gospel. In every false “gospel,” the focus is on us, on our political views, on our well-being, on our view of the biblical narrative, on our observance of rites and rituals, on our own good works, on our own opinion of God’s character, on our own emotional experiences, or on our own positive thinking. In the gospel of Jesus Christ, the focus is on Jesus—His death, His burial, His resurrection, the prophecies about Him, and the witnesses who verified His resurrection.
All false “gospels” are human-centered. The one true gospel is Christ-centered.
In the one true gospel, even the hope of heaven is focused not so much on us and our enjoyment of heaven, but on the fact that we will be in heaven with Christ. He is “the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End” (Revelation 21:6). And because Jesus is the First and the Last, and the focus of all creation, all the false religions of the world try to dethrone Him and remove Him from the picture.
No religion has done a better job of dethroning Jesus and inflicting spiritual blindness on its followers then the religion of Islam. Remember the attack on the Catholic priest in Normandy in July 2016? The two Muslim teenagers slashed the throat of an eighty-five-year-old priest, then told a pair of horrified nuns, “Jesus cannot be God and a man.” Barbarians like these would not hesitate to kill us for saying that Jesus is the Son of God.
The Christian gospel places the Lord Jesus at the center of everything. He is the focus of our hope of heaven. He is “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). He is the reason we are not afraid to live—and not afraid to die.
We who know Jesus as our Lord and Savior belong to the City of God, even though we are sojourners in the City of Man. We are on earth as ambassadors of heaven. And an ambassador never forgets his home country. We have been sent to the City of Man to call others out of that city and to invite them into the City of God. We are here as witnesses to represent Jesus. We are here as salt to preserve society and keep it from corruption. We are placed here as light to illuminate society and point the way to God.
If you have never received Jesus as your Lord and Savior, I plead with you to flee the coming judgment. Flee the wrath of God by running into the loving arms of God. Flee eternal death by choosing eternal life. Receive the free gift of salvation that Jesus offers you by grace through faith in Him.
Look heavenward. Fix your eyes on the prize. And what is the heavenly prize? The City of God, the New Jerusalem.
Why do so many believers lose sight of their eternal hope? Why do so many Christians take their eyes off the prize of their heavenly dwelling place, the City of God? I believe we lose sight of our eternal habitation for five reasons.
We Have a False Perception of Heaven
There are many distorted images of heaven in our culture, keeping us from desiring the wonderful heavenly city Jesus has prepared for us.
Ted Turner started the first twenty-four-hour cable news outlet, amassed a $10 billion fortune, and married a movie star—but he doesn’t want to go to heaven. Why? Because he has a false perception of heaven. “I can’t see myself sitting on a cloud and playing the harp day in and day out,” he once said.2 In spite of his vast wealth and accomplishments, I pity him.
Nowhere does the Bible tell us that heaven will involve sitting on a cloud, playing a harp for eternity. Or singing choruses. Or wearing halos over our heads. Or any of the other odd notions people have about heaven. The reality of the City of God is far beyond our ability to describe or imagine. That’s why the Bible gives us only brief glimpses of the heavenly reality. If we could see heaven in its true splendor, believers would jump off of skyscrapers to get there.
Think of the most beautiful scene you’ve ever witnessed, combined with the most exalted feelings of wonder you’ve ever felt—then multiply that a billion times over, and you might begin to approach the reality of heaven. As Paul wrote, “… as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’—the things God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Paul had a truer understanding of the wonders of heaven than almost anyone who has ever lived, That’s why he wrote, “I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body” (Philippians 1:23–24).
False perceptions of the New Jerusalem will lead us to take our eyes off the prize. The more accurate our expectation of heaven, the more we will desire and seek it.
The Pressures of This Life Eclipse Our Vision of Heaven
The problems of our daily lives can steal our heavenly focus. When all we can see are the financial problems we must solve, the angry boss we must face, the family crises we must deal with, the emotional wear and tear we must endure, the suffering and death of our loved ones—all of these pressures eclipse our vision of heaven.
No, we mustn’t neglect our responsibilities in order to stare heavenward. It’s right that we shoulder our responsibilities, meet our obligations, and live faithfully as good stewards. It’s right that we show compassion to loved ones and shepherd those who depend on us.
But all of the good and important things we do should be done with one purpose in mind: to serve the Lord and to attract others to the Savior. Let’s use the pressures of this life to enlarge our witness for Jesus. As we face problems and pressures, let’s do so with Christlike grace, perseverance, and love. May the light of God’s character shine through us as we face our struggles and temptations.
My beloved friend, this world is desperate to know God and to find a realistic hope of heaven. This world hates us and mocks us—but God calls us to forgive and love our enemies with the love of Jesus. He calls us to bless when others curse us, and to do good to those who hurt us. When they breathe the curses of hell against us, we pray that God will draw them to heaven.
The pressures of this life can tempt us to take our eyes off the prize. But if we view this life through the eyes of Jesus, even our worst days will be illuminated with the light of heaven.
The Allure of This Life Blinds Us to the Unseen Reality of Heaven
Because of our nature, the things we see with our eyes get our attention. The visible world tugs at our thoughts and emotions. As the saying goes, “Out of sight, out of mind.” So we spend little time thinking about the wondrous—but unseen—realities of heaven.
Our secularized culture tells us that “heaven” is just a fairy tale—a myth we tell ourselves because we can’t face the finality of death. If we can’t see heaven, or experience it with any of our other senses, then it must not be real.
As a result, many people today think that heaven is make-believe—and equally tragic, they think that make-believe is reality. People become so involved with their favorite TV shows, computer games, movies, or novels that fictional characters become more real to them than actual people.
I once heard of a soap opera in which one of the lead characters was killed off. No, the actor didn’t die—just the fictional character. Fans of the soap opera were devastated. The production company was flooded with thousands of sympathy cards and floral bouquets. These fans were grief stricken at the “death” of a make-believe person. On some level, I think those grief-stricken fans must have been unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.
But far more tragic are those people who fail to recognize the reality of heaven. The Word of God is clear: If we want to live in heaven in eternity, then we must place our trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. If we want to invest in eternity, then we must risk everything on Him, knowing that only what we give to God will be waiting for us in heaven—and we will reap our reward with interest!
The Apostasy and Worldliness of the Church Muddles How We Think About Heaven
Go to any church, select a parishioner at random, and ask, “What are your spiritual goals in life? What are you doing to accomplish God’s purpose for your existence on earth?” I think you may be shocked at the answers.
“Spiritual goals?” you might hear. “I’m not sure what you mean. I have financial goals. I have goals for my retirement. I have goals for traveling and playing a lot of golf. Is that what you mean?”
Christians in the early church had very simple goals. They lived and worked to glorify God and to spread the good news of Jesus Christ far and wide. They didn’t plan for retirement. They planned for eternity.
The number one priority for most Christians today is happiness. For the early church, every believer’s priority was holiness. Whereas the early church practiced self-sacrifice, the church today practices self-satisfaction. The early Christians risked all for Christ; Christians today try to eliminate all risk from their lives.
Early Christians glorified God. We gratify the self. Early Christians counted it a privilege to be martyred for Christ. We act like martyrs whenever we are mildly inconvenienced.
We need to recapture what it means to dare great things for God. We need to revive an old-fashioned zeal for the holiness of God. And we need to set spiritual goals for becoming more like Christ and for laying up treasures in heaven. Let’s be less worldly and more otherworldly. Let’s keep the vision of the New Jerusalem ever before us.
False Teaching Leaves Us Ignorant and Deceived About Heaven
Many pastors have quit teaching about heaven and hell. They focus on whatever themes are popular—successful living, improving your relationships, repairing your self-esteem, and other human-centered subjects.
We in the ministry have an obligation to major on what the Bible majors on, and the Bible has a lot to say about heaven and hell. If we refuse to talk about what the Bible continually talks about, we are not teaching the full counsel of God, and we are not being faithful to the authority of God’s Word. And we’re cheating those we’ve been called to shepherd.
Some ministers who call themselves “evangelicals” refuse to preach the good news. This is ironic because the word evangelical comes from the Greek word evangelion, which means “good news.” Any minister who refuses to teach that the Lord Jesus Christ is “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6) should stop using the label “evangelical.”
A number of years ago, I visited with a minister from a mainline denomination. I told him that I preached Jesus as the only way to God the Father. He actually found that message—the gospel message—infuriating. He looked at me with anger and frustration and said, “How arrogant of you to say that Jesus is the only way to heaven!”
I looked at him with sadness. “Your false teaching,” I said, “misleads people all the way to hell. Your false teaching confuses even professing Christians. I didn’t invent the idea that Jesus is the only way to God the Father. Jesus Himself said, ‘No one comes to the Father but by me.’ It would be arrogant for me to contradict what the Lord Himself has said.”
I pleaded with this man and begged him to accept the claim that Jesus made about Himself—to no avail. Years ago, when I had that conversation, the teaching that there are many roads to God was rare even in mainline denominations. Today, such teaching is rampant. Apostasy and false teaching are everywhere, pervading even many so-called evangelical churches.
There can be little doubt that the spread of apostasy is preparing the world for a one-world religion and the rise of the Antichrist. Jesus said, “At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people” (Matthew 24:10–11). We are already seeing these signs come to pass.
The world is moving quickly toward the end times. You and I are called to say, as the writer to the Hebrews wrote, “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14).
“YOU’RE NOT HOME YET”
I am a joy-filled Christian. I love my life as much as you love yours. I love serving the Lord in this life. I love serving God’s people through the spoken and written word. I love my family, and I dearly enjoy spending time and blessed fellowship with them.
But I know I’m just a sojourner in this world. Every waking moment, I am looking forward to the City that is to come, the City of God. And my longing for that City grows more and more each day.
I once heard the story of Henry Clay Morrison, who was considered one of the great preachers and evangelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1910, he took a trip around the world by steamship. At every port the steamship docked, Dr. Morrison would organize evangelistic meetings and preach the gospel to thousands of people. According to his count, more than ten thousand people made decisions for Christ during that journey.
Dr. Morrison’s trip took him from New York through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific, through the Indian Ocean, all the way to Africa. While docked in Africa, the ship picked up a world-famous passenger and his entourage. That passenger was none other than Theodore Roosevelt, the former president of the United States. Just days after leaving office in March 1909, President Roosevelt had set off on a yearlong African safari known as the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition—and now the former president was returning to the States.
The steamship crossed the Atlantic, and for Dr. Morrison it was a miserable voyage. The Roosevelt Expedition monopolized the ship, and there were sections of the ship that were off-limits to regular passengers like Dr. Morrison.
Finally, the ship pulled into New York Harbor. At the dock, the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City were on hand to greet the returning president. A band played and thousands of people thronged the wharf. Dr. Morrison watched as President Roosevelt stepped down the gangplank to thunderous applause. Then he stood on a platform and gave a speech, which received another ovation.
Years later, when he talked about this experience, Dr. Morrison admitted that he felt a bit envious and a bit sorry for himself. “Where had President Roosevelt been? What was he doing?” the evangelist asked himself. “He was over in Africa, shooting water hogs.”
As Henry Clay Morrison stepped onto the wharf, there were no crowds, no brass bands, no dignitaries to greet him. No one waved flags for him; no one applauded; no whistles blew. Dr. Morrison didn’t even have a friend or relative to greet him.
He picked up his heavy suitcases, walked alone to the train station, and bought his ticket for the trip to his hometown. He later recalled his thoughts as the train pulled out of the station and rumbled down the tracks. “I could not help but contrast the homecoming of Roosevelt with my own,” he said. “God had privileged me to lead ten thousand souls to Christ on that trip—yet there I was, without a soul to meet me. Nobody welcomed me—nobody cared!”
Then a new thought occurred to him, a thought that seem to come from God Himself. And Dr. Morrison found himself saying aloud, “I know why no one was there to meet me. I’m not home yet! I’m not home!”3
And so it is with you and me. We spend our lives following Christ, serving Christ, preaching Christ, sharing Christ—and sometimes we wonder if it’s worth it. No one seems to notice. No one seems to care. Other people seem to get all the acclaim, all the wealth, all the success—and what do we have to show for serving Christ?
We mustn’t forget that we are still standing on the wharf in the City of Man. We shouldn’t expect a welcoming committee and brass bands. We’re still on our journey.
We’re not home yet.
When we finally reach the New Jerusalem, then we’ll be home. Then we’ll be in the City of God forever. And when we arrive, we’ll receive a greater welcome than we could ever imagine. The Lord Himself will be there—and He will acknowledge all our sacrifice, our labor, and our devotion.
And after a lifetime of serving Him, we’ll finally hear the words we’ve been longing to hear: “Well done, good and faithful servant! … Come and share your master’s happiness!” (Matthew 25:21, 23).
Keep believing. Keep serving. It won’t be long.
Just wait till you get home!