Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 10136. The preterist view holds that most or all of biblical prophecy was fulfilled in the first century, chiefly in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans in AD 70. The name comes from the Latin praeter, meaning past, and that single word tells you everything about the direction of the…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 10133. Whether the new earth is this present planet purged and transformed, or a fresh creation raised in its place, is one of the questions I refuse to settle dogmatically, and I want to explain why at some length. Both readings are held by serious men who take Scripture literally, and both can point…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10132. The eternal state follows the Millennium, and confusing the two accounts for a remarkable number of muddles in popular teaching about the future. They are consecutive periods with different conditions, different populations and different purposes. Once you have the sequence clear, passages that seemed to contradict each other fall into place, and you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10131. The promise that we will reign with Christ is one of the most repeated and least discussed statements in the New Testament. Paul says it, Revelation says it several times, and Jesus said it before either of them, yet you will rarely hear a sermon on it. I suspect that is because it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10130. The tree of life in Revelation 22 stands on both banks of the river that flows from the throne, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, with leaves for the healing of the nations. It is the same tree that stood in the middle of Eden, and its reappearance is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10129. The river of life is the stream John sees flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the New Jerusalem, bright as crystal, with the tree of life growing on either bank. Two verses, and a great deal of Scripture flowing into them….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10128. How there can be joy in heaven while someone we loved is not there is, to my mind, the hardest question in the whole field of last things, and I have never once been asked it as an abstract puzzle. It comes from people with a name and a face in mind. So…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10127. Questions about memory in heaven usually arrive from one of two directions. Either somebody desperately hopes they will remember the people they have loved, or somebody desperately hopes they will forget the things they have done. Both instincts are understandable and Scripture speaks to both. My conclusion, held with reasonable confidence, is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10126. Will we eat and drink in heaven? On the evidence of Scripture I think the answer is yes, and I say that with more confidence than you might expect, because the Bible mentions food in the world to come far more often than most Christians realise. The question is not trivial either. It…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10125. When Revelation announces that God will dwell with His people, it is not introducing a new idea at the end of the Bible. It is closing a circle that opened in a garden, and the sentence is deliberately built out of language God had been using for well over a thousand years. This…