So, Ive seen another rise over the weekend of people watching this Heaven is for Real movie. So I wanted to share something. If youre watching this movie as a fictional story than ok, theres worse movies that you could be watching instead. So something with a positive story is nice. But if youre watching this movie & accepting it as truth, then you may want to test its validity against what we find in the bible. From what Ive found its more of a colorful exaggeration by a 4 yr old, fueled by his parents attention. There is simply no reason to believe anyone who claims to have gone to heaven and returned. John 3:13 says, “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” [NLT: “No one has ever gone to heaven and returned. But the Son of Man has come down from heaven.”] And John 1:18 says, “No one has seen God at any time.” Four biblical authors had visions of heaven—not near-death experiences. Isaiah and Ezekiel (Old Testamentprophets) and Paul and John (New Testament apostles) all had such visions. Two other biblical figures—Micaiahand Stephen—got glimpses of heaven, but what they saw is merely mentioned, not described (2 Chronicles 18:18;Acts 7:55). Only three of these men later wrote about what they saw—and the details they gave were comparatively sparse (Isaiah 6:1–4; Ezekiel 1, 10; Revelation 4–6). All of them focused properly on God’s glory. They also mentioned their own fear and shame in the presence of such glory. They had nothing to say about the mundane features that are so prominent in modern tales about heaven (things like picnics, games, juvenile attractions, familiar faces, odd conversations, and so on). Paul gave no actual description of heaven but simply said what he saw would be unlawful to utter. In short, the biblical descriptions of heaven could hardly be any more different from today’s fanciful stories about heaven. Lazarus of Bethany fell ill and died, and his body lay decaying in a tomb for four days until Jesus raised him (John 11:17). A whole chapter in John’s Gospel is devoted to the story of how Jesus brought him back from thedead. But there’s not a hint or a whisper anywhere in Scripture about what happened to Lazarus’s soul in that four-day interim. The same thing is true of every person in Scripture who was ever brought back from the dead, beginning with the widow’s son whom Elijah raised in 1 Kings 17:17–24 and culminating with Eutychus, who was healed by Paul in Acts 20:9–12. Not one biblical person ever gave any recorded account of his or her postmortem experience in the realm of departed souls.- christiananswers.net/spotlight/movies/2014/heavenisforreal2014.html discerningtheworld/2012/01/24/heaven-is-for-real-this-story-is-not/
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 17:35:59 +0000