Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10116. Scripture says nothing directly about near-death experiences as a category, and that silence is itself instructive. What the Bible gives us instead is a settled account of what happens at death, a firm warning about deception, and a clear statement that we already have everything we need in the written word. Those three…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10114. The beatific vision is the theological term for the promise that the redeemed will see God face to face, and that this seeing will be the source of their endless happiness. The word beatific simply means happy-making, and the idea rests on a handful of texts that promise us sight of God rather…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10113. We will have free will in heaven, and we will have far more of it than we do now, but we will never sin. Those two statements only look contradictory if we have accepted a definition of freedom that the Bible never uses, namely that being free means being permanently poised between good…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10105. The New Jerusalem is the city that God has prepared for his people, described at length in Revelation 21 and 22, coming down out of heaven from God to the new earth. I take it as a literal city with real dimensions and real materials, not as a picture of the church dressed…
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: 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: 6 minutesQuestion 10063. Are there degrees of reward in heaven? Scripture answers yes, and it does so often enough that I am always a little surprised how rarely the subject is preached. We are so anxious to protect grace from any hint of earning that we quietly drop a whole strand of New Testament teaching about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10062. What will we do in heaven? I suspect the reason so many Christians secretly dread the question is that the picture they inherited involves an endless church service with no coffee afterwards. Somewhere between medieval art and Victorian hymnody we acquired the notion of clouds, harps and a permanent expression of mild vacancy….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10061. Will we recognise each other in heaven? I am asked this at gravesides more than anywhere else, usually by someone who has just watched a coffin lowered and needs to know whether the person they loved is gone from them for good. It is not an idle question about the furniture of eternity….