It's ironic that good books about how to get to heaven don't make the New York Times bestsellers list.

But erroneous books about heaven do make that list.

The Protestant blogger Tim Chaley's call these heaven tourism books.

And there's been a lot of them in recent years, books like 90 Minutes in Heaven,

to Heaven and Back, and Heaven is for real.

And other books might be called Hell Tourism Books, such as

23 Minutes in Hell, which could have also been about any layover you've had at Newark Airport.

And in today's episode, we're going to talk about what's wrong with heaven tourism books.

But before we do that, if you like these episodes, please be sure to hit the like button and

subscribe in order to get all of our great content. So the main

problem with these books is that they devalue heaven. They take away heaven's majesty and replace it

with a human idea that we speculate about instead of treating heaven as a divine gift that we humbly receive

and hopefully wait for. For example, Don Piper describes heaven as having something like

pearly gates and says of the streets, it was like a city with paved streets. To my amazement,

they had been constructed of literal gold. If you imagine a street paved with gold bricks,

that's as close as I can come to describing what lay inside the gate. But when the Bible uses this kind of imagery,

it doesn't seem as literal as just gates made of pearls and streets made of literal gold.

Revelation 2121 says of the New Jerusalem in heaven, the 12 gates were 12 pearls. Each of the gates made of a single pearl.

And the street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass.

Notice the gates aren't made of pearls, they just are a pearl. And the gold is like transparent glass, which is not like the gold that we know in this world.

This shows that while the Apostle John was given special knowledge about heaven, he wasn't writing

heaven tourism. Instead, he was writing a unique genre of literature about what God revealed

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