I was watching a movie the other night, with my dad, and the main character was sitting in a lovely grove of tree, and it looked so beautiful, and I looked to my dad and asked him, “Dad, do you think they’ll be places like that in heaven?”

He replied, “Hmm, I think so.”

It worries me that he didn’t say with certainty, “YES!”

I remember picking peaches one time, and it was so beautiful in that grove of trees, eating fruit from the trees. I was enjoying myself so much, that I thought, “I hope heaven is like this.”

When I mentioned it to my grandma, she replied. “Like what?”

“Just like this, with the sun and the trees, and the birds singing.”

“Don’t be silly,” was her response.

col.klink wrote:

I keep hearing Christians and [“Heaven” author] Randy Alcorn complaining about how many people think is a place with lots of clouds were everybody has wings and plays harps. Does anybody actually believe that? Are people really that stupid?

[. . .] I’m disturbed when people say Christians believe that and teach it to children.

I don’t know of anyone who takes that description literally — even “fundamentalist” Christians aren’t nearly that silly. Instead, it’s mostly the idea of being “absorbed into God” or floating around in some kind of super-spiritual, nonmaterial, timeless state of being, that’s often advocated, or at least perceived in the back of Christians’ minds.

Take, for example, the following really-spiritual-sounding-but-un-Biblical statements:

• There will be no time in Heaven.


• In Heaven, everything will be made plain to us and our spiritual eyes will be opened instantly.


• Heaven will be totally unlike anything we’ve ever imagined, but somehow we’ll really like it anyway.

These elements are directly cited in many Christian books about Heaven. Alcorn, for example, cites dozens of excerpts from titles, and then — easily — shows from Scripture how false they are, mostly based on the false presumption that the current Heaven — the place believers go when they die — is the same as the future Heaven; some theologians, trying to be all “spiritual” and not knowing it, just bypass the whole New Earth part.

Recommended Heaven by Randy C. Alcorn

Do Animals Have Souls?

When God made the animals, he made “the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:25 [NIV]). Animals were important in Eden; therefore, unless there's revelation to the contrary, the principle of continuity suggests that they'll be important on the New Earth.

Like humans, animals were formed from the ground. “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air” (Genesis 2:19). When God breathed a spirit into Adam's body, made from the earth, Adam became nephesh, a “living being” or “soul” (Genesis 2:7). Remarkably, the same Hebrew word, nephesh, is used for animals and for people. We are specifically told that not only people, but animals have “the breath of life” in them (Genesis 1:30; 2:7; 6:17; 7:15, 22). God hand-made animals, linking them both to the earth and humanity.

Am I suggesting animals have souls? Certainly they do not have human souls. Animals aren't created in God's image, and they aren't equal to humans in any sense. Nonetheless, there's a strong biblical case for animals having non-human souls. I didn't take this seriously until I studied the usage of the Hebrew and Greek words nephesh and psyche, often translated “soul” when referring to humans. (Nephesh is translated psyche in the Septuagint.) The fact that these words are often used of animals is compelling evidence that they have non-human souls. That's what most Christians in the past believed. In their book Beyond Death, Gary Habermas and J.P. Moreland point out, “It was't until the advent of seventeenth-century Enlightenment . . . that the existence of animal souls was even questioned in Western civilization. Throughout the history of the church, the classic understanding of living things has included the doctrine that animals, as well as humans, have souls.”

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that humans and animals are different. Humans continue to exist after death, but that may not be the case for animals. However, to do justice to Scripture, we need to recognize that people and animals share something unique: They are living beings. Because God has a future plan for both mankind and Earth, it strongly suggests that he has a future plan for animals as well.

Alcorn, Randy, Heaven (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 2004), 374.

Recommended Heaven by Randy C. Alcorn

The next time you hear someone say, “We can't begin to imagine what Heaven will be like,” you'll be able to tell them, “I can.”

-- from the back cover of Heaven by Randy Alcorn

In setting the stage for a deep theology of Heaven, then further thrilling studies — and some conjecture — about what it will be like in this incredible realm, Alcorn realizes many will think, Well, what about 1 Corinthians 2:9?

[A]s it is written:
“No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him”

1 Corinthians 2:9 (NIV)

For this, Alcorn highly recommends reading on to verse 10:

— but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.

1 Corinthians 2:10 (NIV)

It seems the ESV translates it more effectively:

[A]s it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”--

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

1 Corinthians 2: 9-13 (ESV)

“The context makes it clear that this revelation is God's Word (v. 13), which tells us what God has prepared for us,” Alcorn writes (page 19). “After reading a few dozen books about Heaven, I came to instinctively cringe whenever I saw 1 Corinthians 2:9. It's a wonderful verse; it's just that it's nearly always misused. It says precisely the opposite of what it's cited to prove!”

Another highly popular Biblical myth-conception, debunked — I just love it when that happens. Clearly, Heaven will imbue things that are wildly beyond our imaginations, but that doesn't at all mean it will be so otherworldly that it resembles nothing on Earth. Satan wants to get us thinking that way about death, Alcorn writes — so much so that even many Christians are either fearful about or bored with the idea of the splendors of the after-world!