Will there be animals in the new heaven and new earth?

Question 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 creation rather than a demolished one. Where Scripture is silent is on the question people usually mean, which is whether their own dog will be there.

It is not a trivial question, whatever the more severe sort of theologian may say. Children ask it, and so do grieving adults who will not admit it. If God made the animals, called them good, saved them in an ark and includes them in his covenant with Noah, then asking about animals in heaven is a proper theological question and deserves a proper answer.

Start with the kind of place the new earth is

A great deal turns on whether you think the future is a physical, located world or an ethereal one. The Bible is emphatic that it is physical. John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the word for new is kainos, which carries the sense of renewed in quality rather than freshly manufactured out of nothing.

That single point does most of the work. If the eternal state is a spiritual condition rather than a real world, then the question of animals in heaven does not arise. If it is a real world, with a real city, real trees, a real river and resurrected people with real bodies who eat, then a world without any animal life in it starts to look distinctly odd.

I have written more on that in my answer on the new heaven and new earth. Whether the present creation is renewed or replaced is a question I do not press to a conclusion, but its physical character is not in doubt.

The prophets describe a world full of creatures

Isaiah 11:6-9 gives us the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the leopard lying down with the young goat, the calf and the lion together, and a child playing over the hole of the cobra. Isaiah 65 repeats the picture, with the wolf and the lamb grazing together and the lion eating straw like the ox.

Now those passages describe the millennial kingdom rather than the eternal state, and I want to be careful about the distinction. But they tell us something about the direction of God’s purpose. When he restores the world, animals are in it, and their relationships with each other and with humanity are healed rather than abolished.

It would be a strange arrangement in which the thousand-year reign of Jesus contained lions and lambs and the eternal state that follows contained neither. Nothing in Revelation 21 and 22 suggests such a subtraction, and the burden of proof lies with those who assume it. If you want the shape of that kingdom set out properly, see my answer on the Millennium, where these prophecies find their first fulfilment.

So the millennial evidence does not settle the question of animals in heaven by itself, but it makes the negative answer harder to hold. God’s restored world, when we are shown it, has creatures in it.

Creation itself is promised deliverance

Romans 8 is the strongest argument. Paul says the creation was subjected to futility and waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God, and that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption. He describes it groaning together in the pains of childbirth.

The Greek word is ktisis, the created order, and Paul cannot mean only human beings because he distinguishes creation from we ourselves in the following verse. Animals are part of what groans, and therefore part of what is promised liberation. That is not proof of individual animals in heaven, but it is a promise about the animal creation as such.

God’s redemption in Scripture is consistently wider than the individual soul. He is not rescuing a few people out of a doomed world; he is reclaiming a world and putting people in it.

God’s own valuation of animals

The Bible is not embarrassed about God’s care for animals. He feeds the ravens. Not a sparrow falls without him. He puts the animals in the ark and then makes his covenant with Noah and with every living creature explicitly. He rebukes Jonah at the end of his book by mentioning the cattle of Nineveh, which is either a joke or a serious statement about what God values, and I do not think it is a joke.

The law protects the ox and the donkey and the mother bird. The Sabbath rest extends to livestock. Proverbs says the righteous man cares for the life of his beast. This is not a God who regards animals as scenery.

So the question of animals in heaven is not sentimentality intruding on serious theology. The seriousness of the theology is what raises the question in the first place.

Horses in Revelation, and what to make of them

Revelation 19 shows the Lord Jesus returning on a white horse with the armies of heaven following on white horses. People sometimes wave this away as symbolism, and it may well be symbolic, but symbols that involve animals still show us that animals are part of the furniture of the age to come in John’s imagination and in the Spirit’s choice of imagery.

Similarly, the four living creatures around the throne have the faces of a lion, an ox and an eagle alongside a man. The heavenly throne room is not a place where the animal creation has been forgotten.

None of this is decisive on its own, and I would not build a doctrine on a white horse. Taken with Isaiah and Romans 8, though, it fits a consistent pattern, and the pattern points towards animals in heaven rather than away from it. Those who argue for a creation emptied of animal life have to explain why every glimpse we are given includes them. I have never seen that explanation attempted, let alone succeed, and I suspect the assumption comes from a Greek instinct about spirit and matter rather than from anything in the text. See also my answer on whether the earth is renewed or replaced.

Will my pet be there?

Here I have to stop and admit I do not know. Scripture nowhere teaches that individual animals are raised. Animals are not made in the image of God, are not morally accountable, and there is no promise of personal resurrection for them anywhere in the text.

What I will not do is answer a grieving child with a flat no, because a flat no goes further than the Bible does. What I say instead is that God is good, that he knows exactly what that animal meant, and that nothing genuinely good will be missing from the new creation. God is not in the business of impoverishing his people in eternity.

If pressed I would say this. God is entirely capable of restoring a particular creature if it pleases him to do so, and he has not told us whether he will. I am content to leave a good God with a free hand and a long memory.

Two cautions worth keeping

The first is that animals in heaven must not become the centre of our hope. The joy of the new creation is the presence of God with his people, and anything else is a garnish. A believer who is more excited about seeing a spaniel than seeing the Saviour has got the order badly wrong.

The second is that we should not read animal souls back into the doctrine in a way Scripture does not support. Animals have life, they have breath, and they are not human beings. Loving them is right; sentimentalising them into small people is not, and it usually ends with treating actual people worse.

Both cautions are pastoral rather than pedantic. I have met people whose grief over an animal was dismissed harshly, and I have met people whose theology of animals had quietly displaced their theology of persons.

Where I land on animals in heaven

I hold that the new earth will contain animals, on the basis of Isaiah’s prophecies, Romans 8, the physical character of the new creation and the consistent testimony that God delights in what he made. That much I would preach.

I hold that the resurrection of particular animals is not taught and not denied, and that speculation should be labelled as such. That much I would say gently at a kitchen table.

And I hold that all of it is a small footnote to the main promise, which is that God himself will dwell with his people and wipe every tear from their eyes.

So, now what?

If you have children asking about animals in heaven, do not brush the question aside. Take them to Isaiah 11 and let them see the picture God paints. It is a wonderful way to teach a child that salvation is bigger than getting souls to safety.

If you are grieving a companion animal and feeling foolish about it, do not. Grief is the price of love, and God made you capable of both.

And if this whole subject has reminded you that your hope has become rather thin and cloudy, why not read Revelation 21 and 22 slowly this week and let the sheer physical solidity of it work on you?

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah 11:6, ESV