Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10129. The river of life is the stream John sees flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the New Jerusalem, bright as crystal, with the tree of life growing on either bank. Two verses, and a great deal of Scripture flowing into them….
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 10125. When Revelation announces that God will dwell with His people, it is not introducing a new idea at the end of the Bible. It is closing a circle that opened in a garden, and the sentence is deliberately built out of language God had been using for well over a thousand years. This…
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…