Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10105. The New Jerusalem is the city that God has prepared for his people, described at length in Revelation 21 and 22, coming down out of heaven from God to the new earth. I take it as a literal city with real dimensions and real materials, not as a picture of the church dressed…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10104. Will there be animals in heaven and on the new earth? I think the biblical answer is yes, and I say that not to be sentimental but because the prophets describe the coming kingdom as a world full of living creatures at peace, and because the new earth is presented as a restored…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10103. Soul sleep is the teaching that the dead, believers included, pass into a state of complete unconsciousness at death and know nothing at all until they are raised at the last day. On this view there is no experience between dying and rising, so that the moment of death and the moment of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10102. When believers die they go immediately into the conscious presence of the Lord Jesus. There is no interval of unconsciousness, no holding area, no process of purification and no delay until the last day. The soul and spirit of the Christian are at home with the Lord from the moment the heart stops,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10101. The intermediate state is the condition of a person between the moment of death and the resurrection of the body, and Scripture presents it as conscious, personal and, for the believer, immediately in the presence of the Lord. It is called intermediate because it is temporary. It is not the end of the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10100. The lake of fire is the final and permanent place of judgement for Satan, for the beast and the false prophet, and for every person whose name is not written in the book of life. I want to say that plainly at the start, because this is one of those subjects where people…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 10099. The second death is Revelation’s name for the final state of everyone who dies without saving faith in Jesus. The phrase appears four times, all in that one book, and John defines it for us so that we are not left guessing. The lake of fire is the second death. That is the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10098. If the first resurrection is the raising of the blessed, the second resurrection is its opposite number. It is the raising of everyone who has died without saving faith in Jesus, and it takes place at the end of the thousand year reign, for one purpose. They stand before the Great White Throne…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10097. The first resurrection is named only once in Scripture, in Revelation 20, and yet it carries an enormous weight of meaning. John sees those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, says they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years, and then adds, “This is the first…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10096. Gog and Magog appear in two very different places in Scripture, and a great deal of confusion comes from assuming they must be the same event. Ezekiel devotes two long chapters to an invasion of the land of Israel by a coalition led by Gog of the land of Magog. Revelation 20 uses…