Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10124. There is no temple in the New Jerusalem because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple, and once you grasp what a temple was for, that sentence stops being a puzzle and becomes the point of the whole Bible. John gives us the reason in the same breath as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10123. John writes that there will be no more sea on the new earth, and for anyone who loves the coast that sounds less like a promise and more like a threat. I have been asked about this verse by fishermen, sailors and small children, and the question is always the same underneath: is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10122. The prison of Tartarus is named exactly once in the whole Bible, in a single verb tucked into 2 Peter 2:4, and it refers to the place where God has confined a particular group of fallen angels until judgement. One verb, one verse, and a good deal of careful thinking required. Most English…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10121. The fire of Gehenna is the image Jesus reached for whenever He spoke about final judgement, and it comes from a real valley on the southern edge of Jerusalem with a very ugly history. Understanding that valley is the shortest route into understanding the warning. Eleven of the twelve New Testament uses of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10120. The realm of Hades is the New Testament word for the place where the dead are held between dying and rising, and it is not the same thing as the lake of fire. That single distinction clears away most of the confusion people carry about this word, and it is worth getting straight…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10109. The fear of eternal boredom is one of the most common reasons people quietly decide they do not want heaven, and I have some sympathy with them, because the version of heaven they are rejecting would indeed be tedious. An endless church service on a cloud, with harps, is not what Scripture promises…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10107. There will be no marriage in heaven in the sense of new marriages being contracted or existing ones continuing as legal and exclusive unions. Jesus said so plainly, and I am not going to soften it. What I do want to argue is that this is not the loss it first appears, because…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10119. Sheol and Hades are the Old and New Testament words for the realm of the dead, and they cover the same ground. Sheol is the Hebrew term, used sixty-five times, and the Greek translators of the Old Testament almost always rendered it with Hades. So when we ask what Sheol is, we are…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10118. Abraham’s bosom is the expression used in Luke 16 for the place of comfort where the righteous dead waited before the resurrection of Jesus. The ESV renders it Abraham’s side, which is closer to the picture Jesus was drawing, and the picture is of reclining next to Abraham at a feast rather than…
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…