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: 6 minutesQuestion 10086. What happens to children at the rapture is one of the questions I am asked most often by parents, and it is almost never asked out of curiosity. It is asked with a catch in the voice, usually late in a conversation, by a mother or father who has just realised what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10079. Can we know when Jesus will return? The short answer is no, and it comes from His own lips rather than from any caution of mine. “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36). That ought to…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10078. The Olivet Discourse is the sermon Jesus preached on the Mount of Olives during the last week of His earthly ministry, recorded in Matthew 24 and 25, Mark 13 and Luke 21. It is the longest block of teaching about the future that we have from His own lips, and everything else in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10077. The birth pains Jesus mentions in Matthew 24 are the opening troubles of the end times: false messiahs, wars and rumours of wars, famines and earthquakes in various places. Having listed them He says, “All these are but the beginning of the birth pains” (Matthew 24:8). The image is deliberately chosen and it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10076. The role of Israel during the tribulation is central rather than incidental. That seven-year period is not primarily about the nations, the beast or even the judgements. Jeremiah calls it “a time of distress for Jacob,” and Daniel says the seventy sevens were decreed about “your people and your holy city.” Once the…