Pictured here is the church in Heaven, the people who have come to God from every nation. What is this vast company like, and how did they gain access to Heaven? What is the ‘fountain’ of salvation? And why do many people never find it?

And I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth for the first Heaven and the first Earth were passed away and there was no more sea and I John saw the holy city New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband

And our subject is the destination of life. Now many people have no interest at all in the afterlife. They’re completely unconcerned. There may be a fear of death, apprehension about death that’s biologically natural, but there is no concern about the afterlife. Now that in itself is unnatural, which is somewhat unusual – there have always been people who are unconcerned about death but not on the scale of the present day. The last 100 years has been a steady movement towards the discarding of any understanding of or belief in the afterlife. It’s unnatural and it’s strange because human beings have a strong instinct about the afterlife.

King Solomon of old expressed this in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and he says ‘God has set (what the Hebrew says is) eternity in our hearts’. Actually our King James version translates it as ‘the world’, but it’s almost universally agreed now that that’s not quite the right way of rendering the Hebrew word, but ‘eternity’ is the translation and the Hebrew uses a word which means ‘that which is veiled from sight’ is in our hearts.

God has set in our hearts that which is concealed. In fact it can be rendered most literally: ‘that which is the vanishing point has been set in our hearts’ and it’s a clear reference to eternity after time.

Eternity. Well that is an instinct that everyone has – it’s easy to prove. We were talking about this not many weeks ago, but in every culture around the world the afterlife is represented in some form. People think about it, it’s natural to human beings. Well, there is no rational explanation about that, except that it is a God-given instinct written in the constitution.