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 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…
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 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 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….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 05044. The relationship between brain and soul becomes intensely practical the day someone you love starts to disappear behind dementia, a stroke, or a brain injury. The face is familiar, the body is present, and yet memory, personality, and recognition seem to be draining away. What is actually happening to the person? Is the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 05042. Human longevity is one of those subjects where the Bible’s early chapters startle the modern reader, and the questions they raise deserve straight answers. Methuselah lived 969 years. Adam reached 930, Noah 950. Yet within a few generations of the flood the numbers collapse, until Moses can write of seventy or eighty years…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5028. Body and soul belong together; that is the short answer to the body and soul question, and almost every error on this subject comes from pulling them apart. Some treat the body as the whole story, so that man is a biochemical machine and the soul a comforting fiction. Others treat the soul…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3062. The other resurrections of the Bible are far less famous than the empty tomb, but they are worth knowing well: nine raisings by my count, spread from the days of Elijah to the ministry of Paul. People genuinely dead were genuinely restored to life, and each account is told with the Bible’s characteristic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3061. Christianity stands or falls on bodily resurrection, and Paul says so without blinking: ‘if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:17). Yet ask around, even in churches, and you will find remarkable confusion about what resurrection actually means. Is it the…