When he was still just a young man, Jonathan Edwards wrote out a series of resolutions and among them he included these words: “Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.” Edwards saw value in thinking about death, and not just death in the abstract, but his own death and the circumstances which might surround it. Martin Luther would have agreed that this was a good idea. He wrote, “We should familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance and on the move.”

I guess this may sound morbid to some and especially so in a culture in which we flee from death and live in denial of its power and inevitability, but I have to throw in my lot with those giants of the faith. I try to make books on death a regular part of my reading diet and find that they always challenge me.

Death is the subject of Mike Wittmer’s little gem of a book The Last Enemy. This is a realistic, powerful and hopeful book. He gets right to the point and begins like this:

You are going to die. Take a moment to let that sink in. You are going to die. One morning the sun will rise and you won’t see it. Birds will greet the dawn and you won’t hear them. Friends and family will gather to celebrate your life, and after you’re buried they’ll return to the church for ham and scalloped potatoes. Soon your job and favorite chair and spot on the team will be filled by someone else. The rest of the world may pause to remember—it will give you a moment of silence if you were rich or well known—but then it will carry on as it did before you arrived.

Death will, indeed, take us all. The world will move on and we will be gone. But, of course, death is not the end which means that each of us needs to be prepared to face it and to face what comes beyond its dark door. This is what Wittmer seeks to do in this book, to prepare us to face death with hope and strength and confidence.

Is it bad form to review a book I was involved in publishing? Perhaps so. Either way, I intend to do just that this morning. Many months ago I read a draft of Grieving, Hope, and Solace by Albert Martin, a book that was subsequently published by Cruciform Press (of which I am a co-founder). It wasn’t until this weekend that I thought to read the final product that had emerged after the editing process. I was so blessed by this little book that I just had to let you know about it.

Grieving, Hope, and Solace, as you probably surmised from the title, is a book about death. More particularly, it is a book about Christians and death. The book arose from a question Albert Martin grappled with following the death of  Marilyn, his wife of 48 years: “Although in many ways she had been taken from me incrementally during her battle with that wretched disease, the reality of the finality of death and the radical separation it effects swept over me. A few moments later, as I picked up her lifeless body, I found myself asking the question--What precisely has just happened to Marilyn? What has she experienced, and what is she experiencing now? Immediately I knew that if I would grieve as I ought, I had to be able to answer that question out of the Scriptures with absolute certainty.” 

He knew that one whole chapter of his life had closed and that the Lord was now calling him to something new. Whatever that new thing was, he wanted to glorify God in it. “I felt very keenly the pressure of 1 Corinthians 10:31, ‘So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do [including grieving the loss of a godly wife], do all to the glory of God.’” Even in his grief he wanted to honor the Lord.

As a lifelong preacher he set himself to the task of preparing sermons that would search out and explain what the Bible teaches about death, about what his wife was experiencing and about how he was to react in his grief. The sermons formed the basis for this book, though I am glad to say that it does not read like a sermon series. It is, in fact, a wonderful little book that is packed full of hope and faith and gospel.

Sunday, August 27, 2006, the sun beats down steadily but not oppressively on the streets of Pamplona. It's a lazy Sunday afternoon in Spain, the kind of day siestas were made for.

The traffic on the streets--if you can call the occasional car "traffic"--is also lazy, relaxed and unhurried, with one exception. A silver van speeds down the avenue, pausing only briefly before shooting through a red light.

In the back of the van a young girl is spread out across the seat, her head cradled in her mother's arms. "I need you to breathe, Allison!" the woman says. "Keep breathing!" But Allison is breathing, the deep breathing that's past sleep, the coma from which she will not wake up. Or perhaps she has already awakened; perhaps, somewhere between the house and the hospital, her soul slipped away from the presence of her panicked parents and into the calm presence of her Father.

The sun shines on a lazy afternoon in Pamplona as the girl's parents speed down the road toward the end of their world.

So begins Luke Veldt’s Written in Tears. That young girl was Allison Veldt, Luke’s thirteen year-old daughter. This book is a journey through the aftermath of that sudden, shocking, unexpected death. Left reeling after Allison died, Veldt found himself looking for answers and for comfort in the words of the Bible. Despite being a pastor and church planter, a man who knows his Bible well, he was still surprised by what he found in God’s Word. As he says in the opening pages of his book, “It took the death of my daughter for me to begin to understand the love of God.”

After Allison’s death, Veldt turned to Psalm 103 and he read it again and again. He read it every day for more than a year. And through that psalm he experienced God’s presence. This book, a short but powerful little volume, shares many of the lessons the Lord taught him through his grief.

Embarking on a short tour of the afterlife is all the rage, it seems. Don Piper got it started with 90 Minutes in Heaven, a really bad book that sold millions of copies. Then there was 23 Minutes in Hell, another bestseller and another awful book. And now hot on their heels comes Heaven Is For Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. It’s currently sitting atop the New York Times list of bestsellers and has over a half million copies in print. I wonder if I'm the only one who finds it a mite suspicious that now that these books are selling like proverbial hotcakes, more and more people find that God wants them to tell their stories of heaven and hell. Probably not.

Heaven Is For Real is written by pastor Todd Burpo and it tells the story of his son Colton who, at age 4, visited heaven. His visit came while he was on the operating table after suffering a burst appendix. He told his parents his story several months later and his parents then waited 6 or 7 years to record it in a book. That book has shot to the top of the charts, resulting in many of you sending me emails to ask, "Have you read it?" So I went ahead and read it. Because that's the kind of guy I am.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that this is not a good book. What I want to do here is offer a very brief review and then I want to tell you why you can legitimately dismiss this book and all the others like it, because I think that's where many of us feel the tension--what gives me the right to dismiss another person's experience?

I've already given you the broad outline. Colton dies (or something close to it) and visits heaven for an unknown period of time. He returns to his body and over the months and years that follow tells his parents about his time in heaven. He tells about spending time with Jesus, about meeting the sister he never knew he had, about fluttering around with wings, about the pearly gates, and on and on. Along the way you'll get descriptions of Todd's various afflictions and you'll read the fine details of Colton's battles with constipation and the great relief he experienced passing gas. Riveting stuff, this.

Every one of Colton's experiences, or very nearly every one, follows a pattern. He tells his father some little detail. His father experiences a gasp or feels his heart skip a beat. “I could hardly breathe. My mind was reeling. My head was spinning.” A Scripture verse comes to dad's mind that validates the experience. Colton gets bored and runs off. Repeat.

Questions matter. They can help you to grow deeper in your knowledge of the truth and your love for God--especially when you're dealing with the harder doctrines of the Christian faith. But questions can also be used to obscure the truth. They can be used to lead away just as easily as they can be used to lead toward. Ask Eve.

Enter Rob Bell, a man who has spent much of the last seven years asking questions in his sometimes thought-provoking and often frustrating fashion. And when he's done asking, no matter what answers he puts forward, it seems we're only left with more questions. This trend continues in his new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, where Bell poses what might be his most controversial question yet:

Does a loving God really send people to hell for all eternity?

The questions you probably want answers to as you read this review are these: Is it true that Rob Bell teaches that hell doesn't exist? Is it true that Rob Bell believes no one goes to hell? You'll just need to keep reading because, frankly, the answers aren't that easy to come by.

How he asks the question is just as important as the question itself. "Has God created billions of people over thousands of years only to select a few to go to heaven and everyone else to suffer forever in hell? Is this acceptable to God? How is this 'good news'?" They say that the person who frames the debate is going to win the debate. That is especially true when the debate is framed in this way, through these particular questions. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. No offense, and no pun intended.

The Toxic Subversion Of Jesus' Message

Bell begins the book with surprising forthrightness: Jesus' story has been hijacked by a number of different stories that Jesus has no interest in telling. "The plot has been lost, and it's time to reclaim it." (Preface, vi)

A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better.... This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear. (ibid)

You may want to read that again.

It really says that. And it really means what you think it means. Though it takes time for that to become clear.

That the Bible advocates and even commands the enforcement of the death penalty seems almost like it should be beyond controversy. The dignity God gives to humans, created as they are in his image, demands the utmost penalty for those who would recklessly and deliberately destroy life. Yet controversy abounds with many of those who profess Christ insisting that a God of love and justice would never endorse the use of this ultimate human punishment.

I suppose it was inevitable that, with a bestselling book describing an author's "90 Minutes in Heaven," one would soon follow detailing a journey to hell. Sure enough, Bill Wiese follows Don Piper's 90 Minutes in Heaven with his own 23 Minutes in Hell. And interestingly, if you visit Amazon.com you'll see that you can get a deal if you buy both of these books together. Clearly they are being read and appreciated by the same audience.

Already more than a year has passed since Terri Schiavo died. Though her story is well known and was the subject of near-constant media coverage, I will repeat the most important points. In 1990, Schiavo, then 26, collapsed in her home and experienced both respiratory and cardiac arrest. She was in a coma for 10 weeks and was subsequently diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Her husband Michael was determined to preserve her life and to seek therapy to increase her quality of life. But after successfully suing a doctor who had failed to properly diagnose bulimia before her collapse, he had a sudden change of heart. While he was awarded over a million dollars, most of which was for Terri’s medical care and therapy, he did very little for her. In 1998, once it became legal to do so, he petitioned a court to have Terri’s feeding tube removed. Terri’s family (the Schindlers) fought desperately to keep her alive.

We know of three people, from Scripture, who were privileged to see heaven. All of these men, Stephen and the Apostles Paul and John, were alive when they were given a glimpse of the wonders of heaven. Don Piper, a Baptist pastor, claims to be a fourth, though unlike the other three, he first had to die. Returning home from a conference, Piper’s car was crushed under the wheels of a truck. Medical personnel declared him dead at the scene of the accident. But ninety minutes after this accident, a pastor, waiting at the scene, was told by God to pray for the dead man. He did so, and Piper immediately returned to life. For the 90 minutes that his body lay lifeless inside the car, Piper claims to have been in heaven. He now carries with him memories of paradise and in 90 Minutes in Heaven, a book which has sold over 500,000 copies, he seeks to encourage other Christians with a description of our eternal home.

Safe in the Arms of God is described on the cover as “truth from heaven about the death of a child.” In this short, but intense book, John MacArthur answers the question of what happens to children - those unborn, stillborn, or youngsters - when they die. This is a question that has perplexed Christians since the days of the early church. While most Christians have held the view that their children are in heaven, the majority have believed that without being able to adequately defend their position. In this book MacArthur provides a Biblical examination of the issues and ultimately provides a satisfying answer.

In this short review I will not examine the issue itself, but MacArthur’s handling of the issue.