Dr Paul Allen

There are more significant questions beneath this question, making this an essential issue to many. As we move toward an answer, here are three pivotal concerns behind the question that can help us understand why this gnaws at many people’s hearts. 1. What do we mean when we talk about heaven? Generally, when people think about heaven, they refer to what theologians more appropriately call “the intermediate state.” When a believer in Christ dies, their soul leaves the earth, and they go into the presence of Jesus until the second coming of Christ. Here, we are liberated from physical pain, sin, the presence of evil, and all effects of the fall. We shall see the face of Jesus and experience unfettered communion with him. We will be, ideally, euphorically and eternally happy. The intermediate state, though, is temporary. At the second coming of Christ, we will descend with Jesus to the earth, where heaven will become a place on earth. At that point, the resurrection of the dead will occu...

Of all the misconceptions we have about Heaven, which is the most destructive? That’s a difficult and important question to tackle. Once, while preaching about the New Earth, I cited passages about feasting together in our resurrection bodies. Afterwards, a veteran Bible student asked if I believed we would eat and drink in the afterlife. I told him yes since Jesus said so. Visibly shaken, he replied, “Engaging in physical activities in heaven sounds terribly unspiritual.” Standing there with a body God promised to raise, he was repulsed by the thought of living forever as a physical being in a material world. And he’s not alone. Many Bible-believing Christians would die before denying the doctrine of the resurrection—yet they don’t fully believe it. I’ve dialogued with lifelong evangelicals who don’t understand what resurrection means. They really believe they will spend eternity as disembodied spirits. God’s revelation concerning the resurrection and the New Earth—our forever home—el...

“For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.” ( Isaiah 65:17 ) There is a glorious future awaiting the redeemed. Although God ’s primeval creation of the heavens and the earth is eternal (note Psalm 148:6 , etc.), these are now groaning in pain under the effects of sin and the curse. When the Lord returns, they will be “delivered from the bondage of corruption into . . . glorious liberty” ( Romans 8:21 ), and God will make them all new again, with all the scars of sin and death burned away by His refining fires ( 2 Peter 3:10 ). There are four explicit references in the Bible to these “renewed” heavens and Earth . In addition to our text, which assures us that they will be so wonderful that this present earth and its heavens will soon be forgotten, there is the great promise of Isaiah 66:22 : “For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, saith the LORD, so shall your seed a...