Heaven Is Beyond Your Wildest Expectations (17 page)

T
HE
T
HRONE
R
OOM

The throne room was filled with His own glory, the glory of spectacular God and His beauty and radiance. On the inside of His character was love, and His redeeming characteristic grabbed me and pulled me in like a loving father cares for his child. God Eternal spoke to my soul as if I were the only one. Indeed, if you are His, He will speak to you the very same way one glorious day.

The music became a spiritual display, with a host of angels dancing together around Him, glorifying Him. I understood somehow that it is my inheritance to be playing music to Him, coming to Him, singing to Him, and laying my life before Him. This is what I wanted. I thought I wanted the Father and Jesus, but then I saw in my heart that
He
wanted me to be there, He wanted to show me that
He
was giving me a gift. It wasn’t about what I wanted, but what
He
wanted. I was part of the gift, and I was participating in the song He gave me. The way of Heaven, where there is no fear, is through praising Him.

In the quiet, I could hear voices but I couldn’t see them. Yet I knew there were angels, myriads and myriads of angels. God wanted me to hear this more than see it. I had to hear Him to understand Him. To fall in love with Him, I had to hear Him. My music is part of my salvation. He was my song at first, and then He became my salvation.

Then Jesus took me into a deep blue vault, and I hovered inside it. He came to me and breathed on me—it was like water. It felt so peaceful and warm and tender. He held me inside His heart. Yet it was my Father’s heart. Jesus brings us to the Father. He said to me, “In My Father’s house are many mansions. I am the Way. You wanted to know the Father. If you see Me, you have seen the Father.” It’s not that I saw the Father. What I experienced was the voice and the love and His adoption of me. I knew I was conceived in the spiritual Kingdom under a genuine spirit of heavenly adoption.

He held me inside His heart. Yet it
was my Father’s heart.

He then lifted me up and said, “Whatever I whisper to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what I whisper in your ear, proclaim.” There are hidden places, mysterious places where He has each of us in His heart, and He will speak to each one of us personally. I love to hear His voice. I’d rather have His Spirit and His voice than anything else. We can trust His voice. In His voice is the spiritual virtue, the abundant virtue of His kindness and love. I was engulfed in His heartfelt love, all the virtue of His heart. That’s what you hear when He speaks to you.

The song,
Run, Run into the Son
was still playing, and when it approached that glorious realm, it became part of the flashing and the glory. My song hit the sparkling, and all of a sudden, in that area as big as Heaven, trillions of celestial sounds took my song and turned it into a Spirit-filled symphony. Now I was in a new realm, approaching the love of God. He had given me an original song. Now the Father was embracing me with His glory, and I was entirely overwhelmed and in complete bliss. All I saw was the glory surrounding the Lord, no image of His Person. There were glorious colors and explosive joy. It was absolute joy! As I got closer to the area of the throne, I saw beings and thought they were angels, but I never saw faces. To me they seemed like angels.

A circle appeared in the middle of His glory, then the light faded somewhat. It wasn’t dark, just not as light as it had been. The area where I was standing became quiet and still. Then I felt wind, warmth, and breath like water pouring over me, saturating me. I was being picked up, then I was inside the circle. I heard a voice say, “I love you.” It was at that very moment, I finally knew He was my Father; I understood that He was mine and I was His. He wanted to show me that He knew what I needed—a father—and that I wanted so much to know and see and hear Him as my Father.

I
N
H
IS
G
ARDEN

Within a second after that, I was immediately moved over and placed in a garden—His garden. I saw shimmering water, golden-yellow transparent water, flowing down like liquid sunshine. Pure yellow gold was coming down from above. The entire atmosphere shimmered in golden light, like waves of heat shimmer. It came straight down and into the garden. God had put me in a tree, like a cat sitting on a branch. I had been through absolute bliss and a power transformation. He now wanted me to rest, so He put me in the tree. I watched the light for what seemed like six or seven hours.

Then suddenly I was back in His presence. I found myself thinking,
Do I want to go back?
He must have put that thought in my mind.
Do I
need
to go back? Is this my call and destiny?
He gave me the option because He knew I really wanted to share my experience with people on earth. It was so wonderful that I had to come back to tell people.

He asked me, “Do you want to go back to the earth?” I wanted to say no. I was disenchanted with the whole situation down here, but my response to Him, “I do want to show the earth who You are, what You said, and about this experience.” In a matter of seconds, I was in my bed, sprawled out like I’d been flying. I was very tired. And amazed.

When I finally pulled myself together, I walked out to the living room and picked up my guitar and started worshiping. It was all I could do.

Commentary

Bill was adopted when he was only days old, and something always seemed to be missing inside him. He longed to know God as his Father even before he knew he was adopted. God took this young man who knew what adoption is in human terms and showed him the reality of what it is to be adopted by God—to be made fully His own, to be thoroughly and completely His, and to be entirely “home” and where he belongs. Bill knows now that his love for music is God’s gift to him so that he might participate, even on the earth, in the magnificent glory of worship that permeates Heaven continually. The Bible says that
“God richly supplies us with all things to enjoy”
(1 Tim. 6:17)—so the giftings, abilities, and talents He has given us to enjoy are motivated by His personal love for us. And nothing will bring us more satisfaction and enjoyment than what brings God glory. Jonathan Edwards is quoted to have said, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” To be in God’s presence is to enjoy God and be fully satisfied in Him.

God allowed Bill to experience in the heavenly realm far beyond what most of us envision of Heaven. To speak with Bill is to speak with someone who has seen ultimate reality and knows it must function by love and truth. Bill’s experience lifts us out of our earthbound images of Gentle Jesus with the lamb in His arms and causes us to see Him as entirely able to sovereignly take care of the affairs of planets and nations, while also caring for His own flock who are His—no matter what the challenge. He is our great Savior, Lord, and Lover of our souls.

Bill’s experience gives us new revelation of the majesty of the humility of Jesus that He would leave behind all that is His in Heaven to take the place of a crucified Man so we could one day be with Him in all His glory. God took Bill to Heaven and allowed him to experience the enormity of His lordship in the universe, and His cosmic energy as the Almighty. He witnessed the absolute authority of God who sustains all that exists with the word of His power. That power extends to your own life. From the midst of all that overwhelming power flows the immeasurable tender, all-encompassing love of God that He showed to Bill in the most personal way, making Bill aware that God wanted to have him close to Him more than Bill ever wanted to know God as his Father. Imagine, the omnipotent God oh so tenderly loves you!

Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, indeed everything that is in the heavens and the earth; Yours is the dominion, O Lord, and You exalt Yourself as head over all
(1 Chronicles 29:11).

About Bill Smith

Bill is a lover of God and a musician who writes and produces his own CDs of “Realms of Glory” in heavenly music. He shares the love of God in an effective prison ministry and wherever God leads him to bring blessings and His presence.

C
HAPTER
10

EXPERIENCING HEAVEN,
EXPERIENCING HELL

Richard Eby, MD

Richard Eby was a baby who should never have been born. His mother was found to have no reproductive organs and was declared barren. But being a woman of great faith, she prayed a prayer like Hannah’s prayer in First Samuel chapter 1 and asked for a son. Soon she found herself pregnant and dedicated the baby to Messiah’s use. But six months into the pregnancy, the fetus died and she miscarried. The obstetrician was about to declare the fetus dead, after some fifteen minutes, when the baby gasped and began to breathe. He grew up in a home of great faith, believing that if he needed help, Jesus was there to supply it. But then at age 60, his life was snuffed out in a second.

A week after my 60
^th
birthday, while cleaning out the attic, I was about to take a heavy carton downstairs and outside to the trash when a small voice told me to drop the box off a second story balcony so I didn’t have to carry it all the way down. Thinking it was the Lord’s voice, I quickly went to the balcony. As I leaned against the railing, it gave way and I plunged two stories to the cement sidewalk below—head first.

The eggshell of my skull completely broke apart and broke the large blood vessel of my brain; my eyes popped out; and then my body ricocheted into a bush. I bled out from the blood vessel and was a bloodless corpse hanging upside down on a bush when they found me. I was dead on impact, but the emergency medical technicians had to take me to a hospital to legally declare me dead. It was ten hours before there was any evidence of life.

Immediately, upon dying I experienced no pain because there is no pain in death. There is an immediate transfer to the spirit body, which is what keeps our physical bodies alive. But when the spirit separates from the physical body, the separation is called death. It’s the release from all suffering, sorrow, and all grief and pain—if you go immediately to Heaven, that is. We have a natural instinct to want to stay alive. If we were without a fear of death, we and animal life in general, would self-destruct. But that is eliminated once we are dead.

Everything changes when your life on earth is over. There is no time between the moment of death and where we arrive—either in Heaven or in hell. Instantly, with a thud, I arrived at a place that was so ecstatically loaded with love, I knew it was Heaven, though I didn’t know
where
in Heaven at first. Heaven is so blissful that it is beyond human description. To be in Heaven is to be released from all physical difficulties that our bodies register upon the mind.

I was instantly in Messiah,
in Him.