“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me.

In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.

And where I go you know, and the way you know.”

Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?”

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:1–6)

According to recent surveys, over 65% of people believe in life on other planets. Many believe that earth has been visited in the past by extraterrestrials, and many think those visits are continuing today. Some people believe that these extraterrestrials have contacted us, and have messages for us about how to live in peace and harmony, and if we will welcome them and receive them, they will return and gift us with technology to turn our world into a utopia.

Now there are things we can say about all that, which we would file under the doctrine of angels, angelology, or the doctrine of Satan and demons, demonology. But that’s not our focus today. For the purposes of our time in the Word this morning, I want you to notice how beliefs about UFOs and aliens are in fact, a 21st-century, pseudo-scientific religion. Look at what you have: a belief in beings from other worlds, a belief that these beings have been on our planet, and have spoken to us, a belief that these beings bring a message of a better life or a better world, a belief about their return to Earth. And yet, many of those who believe in UFOs ridicule Christianity and the Bible for claiming that Heaven is a real, other world, containing living intelligences. They ridicule the idea that the Lord Jesus came from heaven, dwelt among us, died, rose and ascended and returned to Heaven, and that He is returning, to take believers to Himself. How strange that they believe in the same kinds of things, but somehow think it is more plausible to believe in gray aliens from light years away than in the Creator God. One thing they cannot deny – they also have a religion, and they have also placed their faith in beings they believe will save the Earth.

But in sharp contrast to the esoteric and occultic nature of the UFO phenomenon, Jesus was a historic, living person, who changed the world with His words and works. Included in those words were teachings about another world, Heaven, about returning to this world, about taking us to that one. We find that in John 14.

We are in the great Farewell message that Jesus gave the eleven apostles once Judas was out the room. Here Jesus teaches the Christian life as it will be for them once He is gone, and consequently, for every Christian after the apostles. He teaches many things in this discourse: the great priority of the Christian life, bearing the fruit of love for God and others, the new position of the Christian life, the Holy Spirit coming to live within, the practice of the Christian life – a life of practical union with Him, and a lot of Trinitarian theology.

Of course, much of the discourse has to do with Jesus now leaving, His departure. We saw last week that the first and best thing that Christians do in His absence is love one another as He has loved us. But Jesus also takes the time to explain where He is going, if He is returning, and how His disciples can get where He is going.

It is not just the eleven who need this. We need to know what our destination is too. Christians live as if there is a Part 2 to this life. What we do and don’t do in Part 1, the life we are now living is radically affected, or should be, by what we believe happens in Part 2. And if there is no Part 2, no Heaven, no return of Christ, then in the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 “we are of all men the most pitiable.” (1 Corinthians 15:19). Heaven is where we have placed our hopes. Eternity is what we are truly labouring for. We need to know about that destination, and its certainty.

Christians can be lulled into a this-world only mentality. We may not say it in the words of the scoffers that Peter quotes, but we might slowly begin to feel that way: “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” (2 Peter 3:4)

But as surely as we believe in the first coming of Jesus Christ, so we believe in the Second Coming. As much as we believe in the creation of the earth, we also believe in the creation of the heavens. So fundamental to our faith is to know where Jesus has gone, if He is coming back, and how to end up with Him where He is.

So here we will have important questions about the future answered as Jesus gives us three comforts about His departure – the place where He’s going, the promise of His return, and the path we must take. Where He is going, if He will return, and how we join Him.

I. The Place Prepared

“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me.

In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

Here are some frightened, distressed, disciples. He has told them He is going, and they’ve just heard that Peter is going to deny Jesus three times that very night. You can picture the wide eyes, and the shaking heads, the fear that they will lose their faith, and lose their way.

So Jesus says to them, literally, do not go on being troubled. This word for troubled means disturbed, shaken, unsettled, like an inward mental storm.

And the way out of fear is always faith. So Jesus says, as you believe and trust in God, so believe and trust in Me, not because Jesus is a separate being from God, but because they are united – the Son indwells the Father and the Father indwells the Son. Extend the trust and hope you have in God to Me, Jesus says.

So what should they trust in? They should trust the words of Jesus. They should trust what He is about to tell them: that He is going to a particular place for a particular reason, that He is returning, and will show them the way. This is not goodbye forever. This is parting for a season.

So what is the place Jesus is going to? He calls it, My Father’s house. The abode of God. This is a reference to Heaven. Jesus says, in my Father’s household are many mansions, rooms, or dwelling places. The KJV and NKJV translate this word as mansions. The reason for that is that the old Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, translated the original Greek word monai into the Latin word mansiones, which in Latin means lodging place, abode, room. Our English word descended from mansiones is mansions, which now means grand sprawling thirty-room palaces. And because of this English translation whole industry of nineteenth-century hymns about Heaven sprung up, singing about how Heaven will be all about us enjoying our colonial, palatial mansions.

But the word is monai in Greek which means dwelling places. It’s close in meaning to the important word in this chapter: abide. Now, when we read Revelation 21, we find out that the dwellings truly are royal and glorious and spacious beyond reckoning. But the point Jesus is making is not a point about luxury, but a point about space, room. My Father’s house has room enough for every one of you to come and live. No one left behind.

And to assure them, Jesus adds, if this were not the case, I would have told you. I care about your destination, and I care about you knowing and having assurance of where you are going.

So if Jesus’ disciples have homes waiting for them in God’s home, why must Jesus go? Can’t He stay until everyone is ready to go, and then everyone goes together? He tells us at the end of verse 2. “I go to prepare a place for you.”

Jesus must go now because He must make preparations to receive them. How does he do this? Why must He do it? Well, the problem has to do with evil and fallenness. People think that God will bring people into His house out of sheer sentimental niceness. But the Bible reveals a God who will not allow one imperfection into His presence. 1) Our sin keeps us from being in God’s presence. 2) Our fallen bodies could not handle the glory of Heaven.

“Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption.” (1 Corinthians 15:50)

Well, the first and greatest way is through His atoning work. In grace, He has come to pay the price for our sin and imperfection, making it possible to eliminate sin in our hearts and bodies.

By Jesus’ death on the cross, He pays for sin, gives us new natures. He makes it possible for any sinner to ever be fit to go to Heaven. His resurrection guarantees us new bodies. By ascending and sitting at God’s right hand as our High Priest, He guarantees the endurance of our faith.

But Jesus’ preparation extends to not only eliminate sin in His people, but secondly, in the universe as a whole. His ascension means He rules now in heaven, and will one day return to the Earth to set up His kingdom. After 1000 years, it will culminate in a Final Judgement, and a final purging of all evil from God’s creation. The Heaven and the earth will be new. Now there will be a place truly fit for human dwelling: a place, like the original Eden, made for the delight of man to dwell together with God. A place with no evil within us, and no evil outside of us.

What will Heaven be like? I can give you five characteristics the Bible reveals.

• Heaven is a place, and will one day unite with the new earth to be the very throneroom of the universe, the capital city of the cosmos.
• Heaven is a place with both rest and responsibility. We will work, and enjoy reward.
• Heaven is a place of family, as Edwards called it, a world of love, where the best human relationships are enjoyed in the fullness of family and friendship.
• Heaven is a place of exquisite beauty, the beauty of holiness.
• Heaven is the manifest presence of God, where we will see His face and enjoy the unutterable bliss of seeing God.

Where is Heaven? “Heaven appears in Scripture as a spatial reality that touches and interpenetrates all created space.” – J I Packer. We often think of Heaven as the place beyond our universe. It may very well be that our universe is contained within the greater reality of Heaven. Imagine heaven being a large circle, and inside that circle is the cosmos, and inside that cosmos is the earth. It is both beyond the edge of the physical universe, but also around it, beneath it, inside it.

How is it that God is in Heaven if He is omnipresent? The Bible teaches that though God is everywhere, He also manifests His presence in particular and special ways for His people to know and enjoy Him. Heaven is that very place. There God is, manifest as He has been to angelic eyes, but now manifest as the God-Man dwells there forever.

Warren Wiersbe, “When He was here on earth, Jesus was a carpenter (Mark 6:3). Now that He has returned to glory, He is building a church on earth and a home for that church in heaven.”

Perhaps their fear and anxiety is beginning to abate as they see the beauty of where Jesus is going and why. Now this explanation of the place He is going and why brings us to a promise that He makes.

II. The Promise Shared

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.

Since I am going ahead of you to make ready for you, naturally I will return to fetch you. The image here seems to be that of a Jewish husband who would go to the father of the bride’s home, fetch her and bring her to his own home.

At the end of this discourse, Jesus is praying for how much He desires this: “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17:24)

Here is the great doctrine of the Second Coming in three ideas:

1. I will come again,
2. I will receive you to Myself,
3. So that where I am, you may be there too.

Jesus will return to the earth. He will actually and literally take believers with Himself. The result will be living together in the house of the Father, the city of our God. Union, eternal dwelling together in unbroken fellowship.

So, we naturally have a lot of questions. When does this happen? How does He receive us to Himself?

The when is withheld from us. In fact, He says in Matthew 24:36:

“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.”

If we knew when, we would treat the day of His return the way South African motorists treat speed traps when they know where they are.

How does He come back? There is more than one way He comes in this Discourse. On the simplest level, Jesus will come back to them at the Resurrection. In another way, He will come back to them in the Person of the Holy Spirit. “for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” (John 14:17–18)

But here, Jesus means something more. He means returning the way He ascended. When Jesus ascended, we read that angels appeared to the disciples and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11)

How did He ascend? Personally, visibly, and bodily. So He will return personally, visibly, and bodily.

When He does, He tells us that He will receive His people to Himself. In fact, He will take to Himself two kinds of believers: believers who have already died, and believers who are still alive.

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.

Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17)

This doesn’t mean that believers who die go into some unconscious state of soul-sleep. No, Jesus told the thief on the cross that he would be with Jesus that day in Paradise. The immaterial part of a believer goes into the presence of God. But at His return, the first thing Jesus will do is raise the bodies of those believers who have died: the dead in Christ will rise first. He will return with them, and re-unite their souls and spirit with their now-glorified bodies.

The second thing He will do is mysterious and wondrous: He will catch up, the Latin word is rapturo, living believers, and translate them into resurrection bodies. Paul calls this a mystery – a previously unknown sacred secret:

Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—

in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. (1 Corinthians 15:51–52)

He will fetch us to accompany Him, to be with Him. That much all Christians agree on.

But from there, it becomes harder to place all the events. Is this the Rapture or is this the Second Coming? Some believers think the Rapture, the catching up of believers, and Christ’s return to the Earth on the mount of Olives are different events, separated by a period of tribulation on the earth. Other believers think that the Rapture and the Second Coming are the same event.

This particular text doesn’t solve that issue for us, our best clues are in 1 and 2 Thessalonians and in the first chapters of Revelation. However, there is one fact in this text that does shed a bit of light on the debate. It is the fact that the Lord says when He comes, He receives believers to Himself into the Father’s house. He does not say anything about bringing them to the earth, or to Jerusalem, but to the Father’s House, directly. That doesn’t settle the debate, but it is an important fact.

It is comforting to know the place Jesus is going to and preparing, and it is even more comforting to hear Him promise to come and fetch believers. But how will we know that we are one of the ones He will fetch?

III. The Path Declared

And where I go you know, and the way you know.”

Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?”

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Thomas was the sort of fellow who in our day would have ended up as an engineer or a scientist. He was always practical, logical, empirical. He’ll be the fellow doubting the Resurrection until he sees Jesus with his own eyes.

Jesus says in an encouraging, affirming way, “You know the destination, and so you know the directions, the path, to get there.” And Thomas, says, “No, we don’t know where you’re going, how can we know how to get there?”

Thomas doesn’t mean, “We don’t know what Heaven is” or “we don’t understand the meaning of the Father’s house”. He likely means, “we’ve never seen it”, “we’ve never been there”, so how can know how to get there?

Jesus answers with the famous verse, I am the way. I am the path, I am the directions, the route, the vehicle, the transport that will get you to the Father’s house.

Why is He the way, the path to the Father’s House? Because He is also the truth and the life. He tells you the truth about God, and He gives you eternal life.

Later on in this book, Pontius Pilate is going to dismiss Jesus with a sceptical question when he says, “What is truth?” Answer: truth was standing right in front of Him. Jesus is the embodiment of everything real and right. If you want to know what reality is, no lies, no deception, no distortion, it is Him. He is the ultimate Prophet who tells us what is.

We could define truth as that which corresponds to reality. What is really real and then communicated in propositions or in some other way.

Jesus is not my truth, or your truth. Jesus is not a truth. Jesus emphatically states He is the truth. In philosophy, we speak about the norming norm, which means the measuring stick used to make all other measuring sticks. Until 2019, there was a specially protected, golf-ball sized ball of platinum kept in Paris called the International Prototype of the Kilogram. It was the kilogram from which every other weighing device was to be calibrated. It was the norming norm. This is how Jesus relates to truth. He is the fullness of what is. Paul says He is the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And John called Him the Word: God’s communication to us. He is God’s greatest sermon, God’s complete message to us.

Of course, that includes the afterlife. People may say, “We can’t know what happens after we die.” Jesus is your absolute best chance of knowing. If He, the One who said He came from Heaven and was returning there, cannot tell you, then no one can. If He is wrong, or lying, then we are truly in the dark. But as it stands, Jesus told us a lot about Heaven, and told us even more about Hell. He told us about the future, about His return, about events in the last days. If He is the truth, then He is the way to escape Hell, and come to the Father’s House.

He is also the life. He is the living Bread that nourishes not just your body, but your soul forever. He is the resurrection and the life, the One who will defeat death, and bring resurrection bodies to those who trust in Him. He is the meaning of life, and the one who brings life and life more abundantly to those who receive Him. If you believe what He says is the meaning of life, and you accept Him as your life, then you have found the path to the Father’s House. He is the way, because He is the life.

Living in the 14^th century was a monk known as Thomas a Kempis. He wrote these timeless words about this verse:

“Without the way there is no going; without the truth there is no knowing; without the life there is no living. I am the way which you must follow; the truth which you must believe; the life for which you must hope. I am the inviolable way; the infallible truth; the interminable life. I am the straightest way; the sovereign truth; life true, life blessed, life uncreated.

If you remain in my way you shalt know the truth, and the truth shall make thee free, and thou shalt lay hold on eternal life.”

In fact, the early Christians were known by the title “the Way”. In the book of Acts, it was the earliest term that was used to describe Christians, used six times. Perhaps that’s because after the coming of Jesus, the exclusivity of the way is now clear.

Jesus makes it very clear: no one comes to the Father, no one makes it to the Father’s house, except through Me. We call this the scandal of particularism. It seems scandalous, offensive to others to hear that there is a particular way to God, and only that way saves. But this is not something that Christians invented. Jesus said these words. Earlier in the book, Jesus said, “I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.” (John 10:9). He said, “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13–14)

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells us why: “All things have been delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.” (Matthew 11:27)

So the early disciples preached this exclusivism:

“Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)

“For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus,” (1 Timothy 2:5)

That’s because up to the time of Messiah coming, there was a certain latitude and broadness extended to the nations. Paul seems to suggest this when he preaches to the pagan Athenians, and says, “Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.” (Acts 17:30–31)

Men always needed to be saved by the grace of God through the atoning work of Christ. And that cross was able to work both backwards and forwards in time, saving people born before the cross and after it. But until the time of Christ, the content of faith was less defined, more broadly in the Creator God and His provisions. But once Christ has come, and been raised from the dead, the world now has the ultimate public witness of who God is and what He demands. Men must trust in the One man who has changed our world more than any other man.

He is the path to Heaven. The path is a Person. Trust in Him as the truth about the world, as your very life, and you will be on the Way to the Father House. Whether you are alive when He returns, or whether you go to Him by ending your earthly sojourn, He will take you to Himself that where He is, there you may be also.

God is gathering a family that will one day live in union with Him. One day, the new heaven will be on the new earth, and we will live with Him forever. Before then, several events must happen. But Jesus leaves no doubt in our minds that Heaven is where He has gone, Heaven is where He will be returning from, and Heaven is where He will take us. And He also leaves no doubt that He is the exclusive way to the Father’s House. No one comes to God apart from the mediator between God and man.

So, which faith for you? UFOs or the Lord Jesus? Both claim to be from another world, telling us how to go to another world, and promising to return. I choose to trust the Man who had power to calm storms but surrendered to a Roman cross, who left His own tomb empty, and went to Heaven before eyewitnesses.