Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10117. The biblical paradise is the place of God’s presence, pictured as a garden, where the righteous dead are at rest and where the tree of life stands. The word appears only three times in the New Testament, and each occurrence adds something: Jesus promises it to the dying thief, Paul is caught up…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10116. Scripture says nothing directly about near-death experiences as a category, and that silence is itself instructive. What the Bible gives us instead is a settled account of what happens at death, a firm warning about deception, and a clear statement that we already have everything we need in the written word. Those three…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10115. The doctrine of purgatory teaches that those who die in a state of grace but with unforgiven venial sins, or with temporal punishment still owing, undergo a purifying process after death before entering heaven. It is not biblical. It rests on a text outside the canon, on inferences from passages that will not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10114. The beatific vision is the theological term for the promise that the redeemed will see God face to face, and that this seeing will be the source of their endless happiness. The word beatific simply means happy-making, and the idea rests on a handful of texts that promise us sight of God rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10113. We will have free will in heaven, and we will have far more of it than we do now, but we will never sin. Those two statements only look contradictory if we have accepted a definition of freedom that the Bible never uses, namely that being free means being permanently poised between good…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10112. The marriage supper of the Lamb is the wedding feast celebrating the union of Jesus and his church, announced in Revelation 19 immediately before he returns in glory. The bride is the church, the Lamb is the Bridegroom, and the feast marks the point at which the long betrothal is finally consummated in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10111. Scripture names five heavenly crowns promised to believers: the imperishable crown, the crown of rejoicing, the crown of righteousness, the crown of life and the crown of glory. They are given at the judgement seat of Christ, they are rewards for service rather than payment for salvation, and they end up back at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10110. The Bema seat is the judgement seat of Christ, where believers will stand to have their service assessed and rewarded. It is not a trial to determine whether we are saved. That question was settled at the cross and received by faith, and no Christian will ever face it again. What happens at…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10108. When Paul writes that all Israel will be saved at Romans 11:26, I understand him to mean the ethnic descendants of Jacob who are physically alive at the Second Coming of Jesus, turning to their Messiah in a national conversion at the end of the Tribulation. It does not mean every Jew who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10106. The Bible teaches that a one world religion will exist during the Tribulation, that it will centre on the worship of the beast and be enforced by the false prophet, and that it will be destroyed before the return of Jesus. It is not a conspiracy theory bolted on to Scripture. It is…