R.C. Sproul: Can We Enjoy Heaven Knowing of Loved Ones in Hell

Romans 8:23-30

The purpose of predestination is that be conformed to the image of Christ. We are elected in Christ, for Christ, to end up in conformity to Christ. 

Three reasons why we worry now about our future happiness if we discover that friends, relatives or maybe even spouses aren't there. It's because we don't understand these three things: 

1. We don't know who God is.  
We don't know and can never comprehend what is means that God is Holy. Holiness is so foreign to our experience that we have almost no grasp on the character and the nature of God. We are so baffled by His holiness, that we can catch ourselves trippin and consider His holiness offensive. This is due to a lack of scriptural study and expository preaching. 

2. We don't know who we are.
We fail to grasp about ourselves of the heinousness and incomprehensibly evil nature of sin. Sin is a regular part of the human experience, it's natural to us. It is in our nature. Psalm 51:5 Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. this is so much a part of our nature that we'll say "To sin is human, to forgive is divine. Since sinning is part of being human, then God is obliged to forgive us, He is understanding!" WE DO NOT KNOW WHO WE ARE. 

3. We don't know what Glorification means.

When we think about heaven, what provokes our thinking? What do we look forward to? What does it offer us? What we should be looking forward to is a complete and eternal absence of sin. In the High Priestly prayer (John 17), Jesus prayed about glorification. He prayed about His Father being glorified, exalted, honoured, being treated accordingly to His glory. Jesus even prayed for Himself that He'll have the glory that He had with His father from the beginning restored to Him after His earthly humiliation. But it's not just that the Father and Son will be glorified but that the final chapter in our redemption will be our own glorification (not the same as exaltation, we can't be raised to the same deity as God). Glorification is the finalisation and consummation of our sanctification. When we're saved God is at work within us shaping, molding, conforming us to the image of Christ. That work will not be finished until our sanctification is perfected. 

Between sinners and God is a great separation/chasm that separates the righteousness of Christ from sinners. All the advances in sanctification we can make whether it would to be serving in Church or evangelising would not make us much closer/farther to God than the worst of sinners. While Christians are being sanctified and the unrepentant are doomed for hell, the difference between them in terms of distance from God is negligible. There's still a huge distance between us and sinless Jesus. Monstrous sinners we can relate to, not God.  However when we're glorified God counts us as approachable to Himself. We are no longer with sin, and are conformed to the character of our saviour.  Until our glorification, our thoughts and ambitions have far more in common with the worst of sinners than we do with the glory and exaltation of Christ. Once sin is removed from our life we'll be able to love God with our everything, our affection and attention would be undivided toward to God's holiness. 

It's hard to imagine for us to enjoy heaven without loved ones because we find it hard to imagine life without sin. Sin being as self centred as loving people created by God more than God Himself. God demands that He be regarded as Holy. The righteousness of God, the manifestation of His holiness, scripture tells me that one day  I'll be so consumed in the glory of God that I will rejoice in His judgement of the unjust. We're not there yet, but for us Christians, that is our destiny.