Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10176. What kind of resurrection body will believers receive? Paul was asked a version of that question by the Corinthians in a slightly sneering tone, and rather than dismissing it he gave us the fullest chapter on the subject in the Bible. The answer he gives is neither a ghost nor a repaired version…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08126. Whether angels rebel again is one of those questions that sounds like idle speculation until you notice what is sitting underneath it, because the person asking is rarely curious about angelic politics. They are asking whether heaven is safe. If a vast company of angelic beings could fall once, what stops the same…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8025. The idea that we become angels when we die is everywhere, and I have heard it spoken at gravesides by people who meant every word of it kindly. Films use it, greeting cards use it, and well-meaning relatives tell grieving children that Grandma has her wings now. Scripture teaches something different and, I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10169. The location of heaven has been a live question ever since Yuri Gagarin came back from orbit and reported that he had not seen God up there. It was meant as a joke against believers, and it landed only because a great many people, Christians included, had a vague idea that heaven was…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10167. Can those in heaven see what is happening down here? It is one of the most frequently asked questions in any pastoral ministry, and it is almost never asked out of curiosity. It is asked by a widow, or by parents at a graveside, and behind it lies a longing to know whether…
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 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…