Hebrews 10:19-22 “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.”

Have you ever toured the White House? I once went as a chaperone for my daughter’s class. It was a bit of a disappointment. You get to walk through some hallways, a dining room, and a room for receiving guests. Then you are back out the door–no trip to the Oval Office; no peak at the living quarters or the Lincoln bedroom. These are exclusive locations limited to the President’s family, staff, special guests and visiting dignitaries.

Have you ever watched the Master’s Golf Tournament on television? In order to play on the course, you either have to be a professional golfer invited to the tournament, or one of only 300 members of the club who can join only by special invitation and pay tens of thousands of dollars in dues to belong. Otherwise, you are out of luck. It’s an exclusive place.

Perhaps no place on earth was ever as exclusive as the innermost room in the temple in Jerusalem, the “Holy of holies” or “Most Holy Place.” Three hundred and sixty-four days a year no one was in that room but God. It was his throne room on earth, the place where he promised to be present with the nation of Israel to hear their prayers and bless them. No one had the idea that the Lord was somehow contained by that room, or confined to that room. Everyone understood that God filled the universe. Still, he had chosen this perfect thirty-foot cube as the place where his grace and power would be present for Israel.

The remaining one day in the year the High Priest entered that room to sprinkle the blood of sacrifices on the ark of the covenant–first for himself, then for the people. He was the only one who could do this. The rest of the world’s population was required to stay on the other side of the curtain that separated this room from the rest of the temple.

This was intended as an elaborate and extended object lesson. It teaches us that our sins disqualify us to be in God’s presence. The man who lives in the White House is no better than I am. Neither are the members of Augusta National Golf Club. But the difference between me and the God who lived in the Most Holy Place is so great that it defies illustration.

“Who may stand in God’s holy place?” David once asked in a psalm. “He who has clean hands and a pure heart” he answers. But our hands are filthy, and not just because of all the germy surfaces we touch. These hands hit and hurt when they should help and heal. They take and keep when they should give and share. They reach and grasp for what they should reject and avoid. And that’s just the hands. The heart? That is polluted with desires that would mingle our spiritual sewage and toxic waste with God’s pristine and perfect stream of gifts and blessings. The heart prefers the sewage.

Until we have some grasp of the extent of the sin that disqualifies us from God’s presence at all, we won’t appreciate the privilege Jesus our Great High Priest has given: “confidence to enter the Most Holy Place.”  

The Most Holy Place in the Jerusalem temple, where God lived with his people and blessed them, ceased to exist when that temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. It has never been rebuilt. But that is not a problem.

Why find God in a building, a little room, sort of an outpost for God’s presence, when Jesus has given us direct access to the throne room in heaven? That is the real “Most Holy Place.” We enter this throne room in spirit. By faith we find everything the Jewish high priests found in the temple and more. We stand in the presence of the one and only God. He loves us as his very own people. He promises to answer every request we make. He empowers us to live meaningful lives full of value and purpose. He transforms even our deaths into a doorway to life that never ends.

Like the high priests of old, we come into the Most Holy Place carrying the blood of a sacrifice. But it is not a goat that died to get us in. It is the blood of Jesus himself. His death pays for the sins that should otherwise exclude us.

Like the priests of old we step through a curtain separating our world from God’s. But it is not made of cloth. It is Jesus’ own body, God made flesh, where our two worlds meet. And in Jesus this “curtain” no longer emphasizes separation, but entrance. He is the way through, the way in. He gives us access to the most exclusive place and privileges in the universe.

John 3:18 “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

Judgment Day is still in the future. On that day God will begin the public trial of mankind. He will present the evidence, good and bad, for each human being. He will pass sentence. The verdict will be final. There is no court of appeal from that court.

That trial isn’t so much for God as it is for us. He already knows every individual outcome. We, and everyone else who ever lived, will be the ones learning for certain where each stands at the last judgment. Jesus tells us that as far as God is concerned, we are all living under our verdict right now. As people who believe in God’s Son, you are living under his love in your salvation every day. But anyone who does not believe “stands condemned already.” Such people are simply killing time until the final sentencing.

Yet, so long as there is life, there is time to come to faith and change God’s verdict. So what stands in the way? So many people who know what is at stake, who know who Jesus claimed to be and what he came to do, resist believing in him. Jesus gives us a little peek into their hearts: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God” (John 3:19-21).

People fear what the truth of Jesus will expose about them. That’s not just those who are guilty of some scandal. Most of Nicodemus’s colleagues among the Pharisees lived externally moral lives. Yet Jesus exposed the corruption inside of them–selfishness, lovelessness, arrogance. Two years later he was warning them, “If you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins.” They didn’t want to be common sinners in need of God’s grace and Jesus’ saving work.

American founding father Ben Franklin wrote a rather famous letter just weeks before his death. In it he confessed his doubts about Jesus’ divinity and general disinterest in the topic. When he died, he confessed, the question would be answered for him. No doubt he wasn’t more concerned about Jesus in life because that would have meant confronting his many affairs and promiscuous lifestyle, among other things. How many multitudes today don’t simply avoid the light because that would expose and overturn a belief system or lifestyle that is comfortable and cozy with our culture’s broken moral code?

“But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light…” because they can take credit for being so good and superior themselves? No, “so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” We have to give credit where credit is due. Faith in Jesus brings real change in those who believe. But any good that comes to light is God’s own work in us, evidence of faith, not a reason to think we don’t need to be saved by God’s one and only Son.

I need what Jesus is giving: not just advice, not a vague sense of inspiration, not a solution for some trouble spot in my life. I need rescue from sin. I need the love of God. I need a life that never ends. That’s why God gave his one and only Son, and why we believe in him.

John 3:16 “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. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

A church leader from a century ago called the God who sent poisonous snakes into the Israelite camp “a dirty bully.” Apparently he missed the part about Israel criticizing God, and the Lord arranging for them to be saved. Too much emphasis on morals, and God becomes the Gestapo or a terrifying Judge. Too much emphasis on practical living, and God becomes a glorified personal trainer or divine customer service representative.

When dying people see the God who saves them, then he becomes Love personified.  “God so loved the world,” Jesus says. “This is how much God loves you.” If you want to know how he really feels about you, if you want to know what he is really like, this is where you see his heart. In terms of love he is something immeasurably more than a devoted friend, an adoring and attentive parent, a faithful spouse and passionate lover, though he uses all those pictures to illustrate his love. No one else’s love ever duplicates the One who saves those who believe.

He gave his one and only Son. That sounds noble and genuinely affectionate at first, but perhaps not unique. Have you ever seen Saving Private Ryan? A woman sends four sons into combat in World War II. Three of them are killed in the war. The Department of Defense commissions a squad of soldiers to find the fourth brother and send him home before he becomes a casualty as well. Several men in this squad die in their attempt to carry out this mission. So the bereaved mother in this story, partly based on true events, gives up three sons to save others from Nazi oppression, and members of the squad give up their lives to save a fellow soldier. History and literature are full of examples of people giving up their lives, or people they love, to save others.

There are a number of differences we might point out, but this one is the key: In no other case I know was death a part of the mission. It was an unhappy side effect. It was a known risk. But it wasn’t the purpose for sending them. In the movie, in every other case I know, the hope is that everyone will make it back alive.

God sent his Son, his one and only Son, into the world to die. That was the plan from the beginning. He must be lifted up on that cross for his plan to work. What we needed was someone to die in our place, a payment for our sins. Anything short of Jesus’ death, and no one is saved. So God gave us his Son, because he loved us this much. No one will ever love us more. His love made the ultimate sacrifice to save those who believe.

John 3:14 “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”   

I took my car to my mechanic because I spotted a little puddle of antifreeze on the garage floor. The car wasn’t overheating. I suspected a hose might need to be replaced. An hour later he calls me and tells me I need over a thousand dollars worth of repairs. The radiator is leaking. The water pump is shot. Those weren’t the answers I was looking for.

One night a man named Nicodemus went to Jesus to get a few questions answered. He wanted to understand better who Jesus was. “We know you are a teacher from God,” he said. “No one could do these miraculous signs unless God were with him.” Nicodemus himself was regarded as a knowledgeable person of faith. “You are Israel’s teacher,” Jesus called him. But what Jesus tells the man is a challenge to his entire faith. His Jewish heritage, his Biblical knowledge, isn’t enough to save him. Nicodemus needs a second birth. He needs to be born of the Spirit. He needs to lay aside his religion based on externals and put his faith in Jesus if he wants eternal life. Those weren’t the answers Nicodemus was looking for.

But this is the information Nicodemus truly needed to know. Jesus starts with a picture Nicodemus could understand. “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” Jesus’ picture suggests that the real problem is worse than people think. When Israel grumbled about the free food the Lord had been feeding them in the desert, the Lord sent poisonous snakes into their camp, and they were biting people, and some of them were dying. When the people repented, God had Moses make a snake of bronze, put it on a pole, and anyone who looked at the snake with faith in God’s promise was healed. It was a matter of life and death.

Jesus tells us that he himself, the “Son of Man” had to be lifted up as well. In his case it wasn’t a pole, but a cross on which he was lifted. The bronze snake was just a statue that hung there, but Jesus hung on the cross to die. Again, it was a matter of life and death, “…that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” In other words, without him being lifted up, and without faith in him, there is no eternal life. There is eternal death. That’s not the problem, nor the solution, Nicodemus expected to learn about when he came to see Jesus that night.

But none of the answers to any of his other questions would make any difference if he didn’t know this answer to this problem. The same is true for us. Jesus is the answer for sin. He is the answer for salvation. He is the answer for death. Put your faith in him, and no matter what else you may wonder about in life, no matter what else may happen, eternal life is waiting in the end. Question answered. Problem solved.

1 Corinthians 1:22-24 “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Christ crucified may be mocked. It may be rejected. It may be neglected. But it hasn’t lost its power. The night I went to see Mel Gibson’s movie about Jesus’ crucifixion, The Passion of the Christ, after it was over, the only sound in the theater was the muffled sobs of people weeping. The impact was unlike anything I had ever seen at the movies. Reports around the world told of criminals turning themselves in after seeing the movie and being led to repent.

The presentation of Christ crucified doesn’t have to be so dramatic for the cross to work its power. Pastor Curtis Lyon wrote a book on Christian counseling called Counseling at the Cross. In it he describes the process of taking people on a personal trip to the cross, walking them through details of Jesus’ suffering, talking them through the truth that Jesus carried their sins to that cross, paid the full penalty for their sins there, left nothing unaccounted for, that all was forgiven, the reconciliation with God was complete. He describes one woman paralyzed by fears and consumed by anxieties created by her feelings of guilt. Even with heavy prescription medications she could not sleep. After Pastor Lyon took her on a personal trip to the cross, she finally, fully processed what it meant. She was so immediately relieved that after months with hardly any sleep she fell asleep right in his office and had to be carried home.

This power isn’t limited to new Christians. Christ crucified is preached to us in our baptisms. “All of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death,” Paul writes the Romans. It is preached to us in the Lord’s Supper. “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes,” Paul writes later in this same letter to the Corinthians. My wife once came home after a midweek service in Lent and told me that for the first time she can remember she was able to sing the hymn My Song Is Love Unknown without getting choked up. Why is that so hard to do? This hymn walks us through the scene at Jesus’ trial and cross. Because “To those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks,” the cross is still, “Christ the power of God and Christ the wisdom of God.” It is still a power that feeds and grows our faith.

Focusing on that death makes perfect sense. “For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.” There is seemingly nothing more foolish or weak God could do than become a man and die. Yet no greater power or wisdom has ever been unleashed on the world than Christ crucified on the cross. It has canceled every sin. It has reversed the effects of death. It has crushed the power of the devil. It has changed more hearts and won more followers than any other message ever preached. It has moved millions to forsake everything they owned, or go to prison and death with songs of praise on their lips.

How? All for the love of the one who loved them even to death on a cross. That’s its power. That’s what saves.

1 Corinthians 1:18-21 “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’ Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.”

One reason for sticking with the preaching of the cross is that those who find it foolish are perishing. It is not as though they have an alternate plan that works just as well. Christ crucified leads to life. Everything else leads to death. It’s that simple.

So why do people find the cross foolishness and prefer their own way? Have you ever tried a fad diet or weight loss product? Certainly you are aware of them. In the 1920’s Lucky Strikes cigarettes advertised themselves as a way to stay slim. In 1946 Marion White wrote a book touting ice cream as the key to losing weight. I can’t tell you how much I wish she were right. In the 1950’s Domino Sugar company ran a campaign claiming that consuming their sugar was better way to stay trim and slim than eating fresh fruit. Why do people go for this stuff? Because they don’t hurt. It’s more fun, even if it doesn’t work. Even if it leads to death.

In one way, people might suspect that the preaching of the cross is the easy way to life. Jesus dies for you. But it seems too easy, and it means admitting such horrible things about ourselves. Letting Jesus take our sins to the cross means admitting that we have sin, and that we are too weak and incompetent to take care of the problem ourselves. It means accepting that people are bad, not good, including me. People would do almost anything to avoid trading their dignity and their positive self-image for the cross of Jesus Christ and all that it says about us. So they write it off as foolishness, even if it kills them.

Then they try to dress up their own foolishness as smart. Much of our world has the idea that the only things we can know for certain are the things we can observe. One of the Indiana Jones movies has the hero teaching in a college classroom. In his lecture he tells his students. “Archeology is the search for fact. If it’s truth you are looking for, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.” You see, facts are real. Truth is an abstract concept, something people debate, something you can’t be sure about.

But maybe you see a problem. What are you going to do about God? How are you going to know about him? He doesn’t sit still for people in a laboratory, and you can’t dig up his bones. You won’t see sins under a microscope, and the scientific method can’t explain what happens when they are forgiven. The Hubble Telescope can’t see all the way to heaven, and no space probe will ever find it in the universe. This is why “the world through its wisdom did not know him (God).” And a world that is locked in to human observation and science as the only way of knowing is bound to find the idea of God foolish, much less the preaching of Christ crucified.

There are ways of knowing things that don’t have anything to do with what goes on in the classes or labs at some university. There are things we know that don’t come from text books or experiments. Life isn’t something anyone has ever seen, not life itself. We see living things, we know we are alive, but the thing that makes us live, that force or power that separates us from the rocks or the elements on the periodic table–that defies observation.

Love is one of the most interesting things in all the world, and people study it a lot. Some scientists can tell you about hormones and chemicals and nerve connections in certain parts of the brain. But do you believe for even a moment that love is just a mechanical reaction, an illusion produced by chemical and electrical processes going on inside of you? You know that there is something more going on inside your personhood.

And God hanging on a cross isn’t the conclusion of someone’s PhD dissertation or years of government funded studies. The world finds it foolish in every way. But we preach it anyway. We know it’s true. It is God’s saving wisdom.

Job 1:20-21“At this Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.’”

What sets God’s people apart is not that we have become unfeeling. That would be a bad thing. Tearing your robe and shaving your head were ancient ways of expressing grief. Like crying, which Job likely also did, they were ways of releasing the sad emotions. It bothered Job to see all that he had worked so hard for, his little agricultural empire, disappear in a day, and rightly so. That is no criticism of him. It pained and grieved him that his ten children were dead. Because he loved them, this was right.

Before I conduct a funeral today, I often remind the grieving family that their tears are not a bad thing. They honor the dead. They are a reflection of the love they shared. They say good things about the relationship that has been lost, if only temporarily. They tell the truth. Losing people we love is supposed to feel bad. The same goes for the lesser losses we suffer in life: a failed business, a lost job, stolen property, homes destroyed by storms or fire. God doesn’t expect us to be happy about such things. He didn’t make us rocks and stones. We have hearts, and we are made of flesh.

But Job didn’t wallow in his sadness, staring at his losses and nothing else. He redirected his attention to God. He looked at the greater relationship in his life, and in worship he let God help him with his perspective and renew his hope.

First, worship gave Job a better view of himself and his condition. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart.” We come into the world without this huge collection of stuff, and we will leave our whole pile behind when we go. It wasn’t ours in the first place, and it isn’t ours to keep. Sooner or later, we have to let it all go. And yet God manages to feed us, and keep us warm, and keep us alive.

More important, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” The Lord gave. From Creation to Judgment Day, from the opening verses of Genesis to the closing prayer of Revelation, this is the God we see. He is the Lord who gives. The central concept of all Christianity is not morality or obedience or goodness. It is the gift-giving love of the God who made us, and then saved us. We call it “grace.” “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life,” Jesus told Nicodemus one dark Judean night. “The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Paul wrote the Christians in Rome. These are some of God’s gifts. And while they may not entirely remove the loss we feel at sad times, they certainly help us to get some perspective. Even what “the Lord has taken away” does not remove his gifts, just some items he lent us for our short journey on the way home to him.

As the grateful recipients of God’s gifts, we learn to cope with our losses by turning to worship and praising God for them. It’s what we do at a truly Christian funeral, not one of these sad memorials that do nothing but tell stories about the deceased and make us dwell on what we lost. I’m talking about a service where we sing “Amazing Grace” and mean it, where the preacher directs our eyes to the cross, and the empty tomb, and the peace of heaven and the promise of bodies raised again from the dead.

It is what we do week in and week out, when, after another week of “Life is pain,” we gather with our family of faith to be encouraged, and to hear that our sins are forgiven, and to meet our Savior for a little taste of his grace in his supper, and to be sent home with God’s blessing ringing in our ears.

God has given these coping tools to each of his sons and daughters by faith. Put them to use like Job, and you will find reason to praise God even in the midst of pain or loss.

Job 1:13-15, 18-19 “One day when Job’s sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother’s house, a messenger came to Job and said, ‘The oxen were plowing and the donkeys were grazing nearby, and the Sabeans attacked and carried them off. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only who has escaped to tell you!’ … While he was still speaking, yet another messenger came and said, ‘Your sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother’s house, when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the four corners of the house. It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!’”

Job’s story reminds me of a line my Russian history professor kept repeating through the course. “Just when you think it has gotten as bad as it can get, it gets a little worse.” One man can’t finish telling his bad news before the next one comes and interrupts him with more. At first, it might be hard to imagine how anyone could suffer a more painful day of loss than Job. His suffering seems extraordinary.

But what happened to him was less rare in the scope of his loss and depth of his pain than we might wish. To quote from Wesley, the hero of one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Maybe we won’t suffer loss as bad as Job’s. Maybe we will suffer worse. My point is, that’s not what makes the suffering of God’s people extraordinary. Many, many people suffer more than we do.

No, while our suffering, real as it might be, is mostly ordinary in terms of its scope and depth, it is extraordinary in terms of its purpose. As people of God, our suffering has meaning and purpose that cannot be applied to everyone. Here we have to pick up some of the context of Job’s story I did not read before. Do you remember why the Lord let this happen to him? Satan came to God and questioned Job’s godliness and faithfulness, denied it really. He accused Job of being a fair-weather fan. The only reason he was so good is that God had blessed his life so richly. “Strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face,” the devil claims. So the devil has a purpose in our suffering. He wants to see us fall. He wants to ruin us spiritually.

That being the case, should it surprise us when so many of the ungodly people in our world do so well? The world’s wealthiest are not Bible-believing Christians, by and large. The celebrities and the business moguls are rarely people of faith. They live and talk like the spiritually dead people they are.

This all makes perfect sense. The devil has no reason to make their lives uncomfortable, other than to satisfy his twisted pleasure in human suffering. He doesn’t need to ruin these people spiritually. They are already ruined. He is happy to encourage them on their present path toward hell. So let’s not envy them, or worse yet, aspire to be like them.

God’s purpose, however, makes our suffering extraordinary. He allows it for our good. In Job’s case, the Lord was actually defending Job’s sullied reputation. He let him suffer to let his faith and witness shine. At first, we see, that faith shined brightly.

More than this, the Lord uses our suffering to train and discipline his people. By discipline we mean more than the kind of “correction” a parent applies to a child though pain of one sort or another, a divine spanking. Sometimes that is involved as well. But this is discipline more like the kind a coach uses to train his players. Or think about the child learning to ride a bike. The training wheels were necessary at first. Eventually, they become a crutch and get in the way of improvement. They may mask the level of mastery our cyclist in training has achieved. So off they come.

The many blessings with which the Lord had surrounded Job in his life were like training wheels for his faith. It was time to take them away, and see how far Job’s faith had come, and let it grow and strengthen without the soft life that propped it up before. This is what makes our suffering extraordinary as God’s people. God is working great things for us, even when the suffering tests our limits. It is why, even at its most difficult, the life we lead is an extraordinary life.

2 Kings 2:11-12 “As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha saw this and cried out, ‘My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel.’ And Elisha saw him no more.”

People don’t like to talk about death. They don’t even like to use the word. We avoid saying things like, “My father is dead.” We find ways to say it more softly.

When I make hospital calls, I come to remind the person in the bed that God loves them, in spite of the disability of the moment. We talk about God’s promises and power. We pray for healing.

But the day comes when that conversation has to change. It is increasingly clear, or likely, that the patient isn’t going to go home well. We have entered the last stretch of this earthly journey. The finish line is close. We can’t pretend. The time has come to prepare our dying friend to face death well. The time has come to prepare their family and friends, too.

As you may know, there are two people we know of whom God took directly to heaven alive. One of them we have here. Elijah never died. God took him body and soul in the whirlwind. Elisha and the fifty prophets watching from across the Jordan river saw the miracle.

We might think, “But when the people we love die, there is no miracle to see.” It is true there isn’t anything miraculous to see with our eyes. Labored breathing, a slowing heartbeat, the death rattle, and then utter motionlessness–these are far too ordinary, depressingly unmiraculous things to see at the end.

But if we see with eyes of faith, if we believe what Jesus tells us, the angels come. The soul, the real personality of our limp and lifeless friend, steps out of that body, free and unaffected by the years of physical decay, and the unwholesome appetites of a heart infected with sin. A door opens between earth and heaven. The angels carry that soul into the presence of believing friends and family, some who made the trip many years before. Jesus himself is there, with his Father, keeping that soul safe until the day he returns to restore the body and unite it with the soul again.

That is a miracle. And it happens every time a believer goes home. And we can see it in our hearts, if we can’t see it with our eyes, because Jesus gives us eyes of faith. See it, believe it, and you will face death like God’s servants Elijah and Elisha, and uncountable others the angels have carried home.