Your doorbell rings. You open the door and find two strangers handing out pamphlets. They ask if you know whether you will go to heaven when you die. You know where this is heading, but you go with it and say, “How can I know I am going to heaven?”

Depending on the religious tradition, they will tell you how you can know, or tell you that no one can know. If they are from an Evangelical Christian tradition, they will tell you that if you believe in Jesus, you can know that you are going to heaven, and they might use (or misuse) 1 John 5:12-13 to support their claim.

It’s interesting that people today want to know how they can get into heaven. In earlier ages, people were very interested in where they could get into heaven. The idea that there is a portal – or portals – into heaven is very old.

Even today, there are numerous places on the planet that are reputed to be gateways into heaven. In China, for example, there is the Tianmen Mountain, with its enormous opening that appears to lead into the heavens. There is a Hindu temple in Bali that features the picturesque “Gates of Heaven.” Tourists travel from around the globe just to see it.

The ziggurat mentioned in Genesis 11, known as the Tower of Babel, was likely constructed to be a gate of heaven. The idea that humans could advance upon God, could enter his space unbidden, is a powerful idea. Those who control the gate of heaven can control humanity—just think of the churches and religious leaders who have appointed themselves the gatekeepers of heaven. No wonder God intervened to put an end to the construction project.

Later in Genesis, the patriarch Jacob has left home in a hurry. He has deceived his father, infuriated his brother, and worn out his welcome. He is on his way to visit relatives in Paddan-Aram, about 450 miles to the northeast. After traveling about fifty miles, he makes camp near the ancient town of Luz.

Jacob finds a flat rock to use as a pillow, and as he sleeps, he has a vivid dream. (If I slept on a pillow like that, I suspect I would have dreams too.) In his dream, he sees a ladder (or better, a staircase) reaching into heaven. On those stairs are angels ascending and descending, and from the top of the stairs God speaks to him.

When Jacob awoke, it was with a sense of awe. He said to himself, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” He had stumbled on a portal into the heavenlies. He set up a marker for himself, and named the place Beth-El – “House of God.”

Humanity has always been fascinated with the idea that there are gateways on earth that lead into heaven. That fascination showed up again in the 1990s, and the results were tragic. Marshall Applewhite left his post as a music teacher at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and then met Bonnie Nettles, a nurse who was deeply interested in the occult. The two of them launched a religious movement that became known as “Heaven’s Gate.”

Early on, Applewhite and Nettles taught that people could transform themselves into immortal, extraterrestrial life forms by practicing a kind of asceticism. They described this transformation as the next step in evolution. Applewhite and Nettles represented themselves as the bodily vehicles of extraterrestrial beings with superhuman knowledge.

After Nettles died of cancer, Applewhite shifted his teaching. Instead of ascending to the next level of evolution through asceticism, they would ascend via a spacecraft. The Gate of Heaven was to be the Starship Enterprise—or something like it. Of course, only those who were following Applewhite’s lead would be qualified for transport.

When the Hale-Bopp comet came near to earth in the mid-1990s, Applewhite claimed that a UFO hidden in the comet’s tale was coming to take away his followers. He revised that teaching later, saying that only the spirits of his followers would be able to ascend, and so it would be necessary for everyone in the group to free themselves from their bodies, i.e., commit suicide. The group posted the following message on their website just prior to the mass suicide: “Hale-Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate … our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion… We are happily prepared to leave ‘this world’ and go…”

Jesus also used the language of heaven’s gate. He did not suggest the gate into heaven was fixed locally at places like Beth-El or Tianmen Mountain. He presented himself as the gate of heaven (or better, the gate into life). “I am the gate,” he says in John 10:9; “whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief” – think of Marshall Applewhite – “comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

In language intended to evoke Jacob’s experience at the “gate of heaven,” Jesus told the disciple Nathaniel, “I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

Today, people talk about how to get into heaven. The ancients talked about where to get into heaven. But there is a better question than “How?” and “Where?” We should be asking, “Who?” Who can lead us into life? Who can bring us to God?

Jesus is the one who grants access into God’s grace (Romans 5:1). The Greek word for “access” is “prosagōgē.” The prosagōgāse was the powerful official who had authority to grant men and women access to the king. The Bible presents Jesus as the prosagōgāse. He is the “door into life,” the true “gate” of heaven, the one who suffered “that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18; Hebrews 10:19-21).

The Gate of Heaven is not a place, like the temple at Pura Luhur Lempuyang in Bali. It is not a thing, like Marshall Applewhite’s hidden UFO. It is a person.

Jesus answered, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (1 John 14:6)