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 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 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 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 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 10095. The end of the millennium brings one of the strangest sequences in Scripture. After a thousand years of Christ reigning in person from Jerusalem, with the enemy bound and righteousness enforced, there is a rebellion. Not a small one either. Revelation says the number of the rebels is like the sand of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10060. The new earth is where the Bible actually ends, and I think that surprises a great many Christians. We have been handed a picture of eternity that involves clouds, harps and disembodied souls drifting about in a permanent hush, and then we open Revelation 21 and find a city, a river, trees, nations,…