‘And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God.’

And our subject is the after-death experience and the life beyond. And surprisingly we don’t present this subject often enough or really very often at all. But these are remarkable words. The Apostle John is experiencing a great vision from God and it’s recorded in this way. ‘He carried me away at this point of the vision in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God. And her light was like unto a stone, most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.’ And here is the description of the eternal state.

Now I suppose our subject is touching on a universal human instinct. It is a very remarkable instinct that there is a life beyond. That human beings are not bound to this present experience of life, but that they have spirits and lives that go on into the future. It is, as I say, a remarkable instinct. It is found in every age, recorded age of mankind. It’s found in every land and nation, in literature universally, in all religions, true and false. There is this concept of eternity and life which goes on. Very, very few people manage to cast out of their minds altogether any instinct of eternal life. There are some who are very convinced and committed atheists who put the idea completely out of their minds.

But even in an atheistic age like ours, in this land, the remarkable thing is the polls all universally show that the overwhelming majority of people, and I’m talking about right up into the 90%, believe in a life beyond the present life, even if they don’t think about it, even if they’re not actively religious in any way. So it is a universal human instinct. That is amazing.