I’ve just finished reading a novel by Randy Alcorn entitled Deadline. I’d heard of Alcorn previously and was told he was good, but now I can say from personal experience that the recommendation was accurate.
Alcorn has an ability to write from a thoroughly Biblical perspective about the reality of heaven while simultaneously reflecting the reality of earthly life. I won’t make this a review of the plot of the book or of his writing style, but I do want to provide an excerpt that struck me as wondrously concise in its description of the unreality of the “broad way that leads to death.”
In this excerpt, an angel is explaining to a man newly arrived in heaven just what the problem is with the majority of mankind. I love how he expresses it. This excerpt may seem a little long, but if you patiently read and meditate on it, I believe you will grasp its value.
You come from a world where truth is obscured, shrouded, reinterpreted. The father of lies dominates, and the world order has become built around lies, which are mistaken for truths because the majority believe them, as if the universe were a democracy and truth subject to a vote. Men choose to believe certain things because they find them flattering, comfortable, and popular. But truth is seldom any of these. . . .
Men take their favorite lies and make them sound grand and noble by calling them “truths.” But they cannot be truths, because they have been invented by men, and men have no power over truth. Truth by its nature prevails, and lies by their nature wither in truth’s eternal fire. Every untruth, every half-truth, every pretense—no matter how fashionable and widely believed—shall be shown for what it is, declared a lie in the sight of all men for all time. . . .
Heaven and hell are the high stakes that give meaning to life on earth. Man denies the stakes are real. He says all life’s roads lead to the same place, and that therefore it makes no difference which road men choose. But the truth remains the truth, unimpeded by the lie. The roads lead to very different places, opposite places, to infinite joy or infinite misery, to unimaginable glory or unimaginable tragedy. That is why a man’s choice of roads could not be more important. . . .
In the darkness, men can shine flashlights on a sundial and make it tell any time they want. But only the sun tells the true time. The flashlights are the changing and fleeting opinions of men. The sun is the eternal Word of God. Only God makes truth. Men either discover it or fail to discover it. They either interpret it rightly or interpret it wrongly. But they have no power to make truth or change it. For truth is no man’s servant. Ultimately, the truth must become each person’s friend or his enemy, his master or his judge.
May God’s truth prevail in your life.