Resources by Topic: Heaven

Last month I had a conversation over Zoom with Steve Silver of Men’s Golf Fellowship. Steve’s wife Sandy went to be with Jesus last December, just three months before Nanci died. We can both understand each other’s pain of loss, but also the intense anticipation for and comfort of Heaven now that our wives reside there.

At a celebration for his new book, The Promise of the New Earth, Randy shares some thoughts about grief and the eternal Heaven (the New Earth), and answers some questions related to the book.

We long for a return to Paradise—a perfect world, without the corruption of sin, where God walks with us and talks with us in the cool of the day. Because we’re human beings, we desire something tangible and physical, something that will not fade away. And that is exactly what God promises us.

Dead people don’t come back and tell us what they’ve experienced. But we can know some things based on the Bible’s explanations. We don’t just disappear after we die. We live on in another location.

In September Randy spoke over Zoom with Steve Silver of Men’s Golf Fellowship. Having both lost their wives during the last year, they shared grief experiences and spoke about Heaven and the great hope it holds.

In my dialogues with lifelong evangelicals, I’ve found that a surprisingly large number apparently believe they will spend eternity as disembodied spirits. I sometimes ask, “You do believe in the resurrection, right?” 

It wasn’t an accident that Jesus was born into a carpenter’s family. Carpenters are makers. God is a maker. He’ll never cease being a maker. God made us, His image-bearers, to be makers.

A reader recently asked me, “What do you mean by ‘hyperimaginative’ in this sentence in Heaven: ‘Discussions of Heaven tend to be either hyperimaginative or utterly unimaginative’?”

Randy Alcorn spoke with his son-in-law, Dan Franklin, about 2 Corinthians 5:1-5. They discuss the question of how physical the present Heaven is, and is it possible that there are transitional or intermediate bodies there?

In July, Randy Alcorn was a guest on Chris Fabry Live. He and Chris talk about his book Heaven, his wife Nanci’s passing, what Nanci is experiencing now and Randy’s journey of grief and loss. 

The truth is that while we are told many things in Scripture about Heaven (as Randy explains in his book), there are some details we are simply not given. We have to go back to what we do know for sure from God’s Word.

We know that people in the present hell are already suffering even though the resurrection hasn’t happened yet, just as people in the present Heaven experience pleasure even before the resurrection (Psalm 16:11).

Because there will be continuity from the old Earth to the new, it’s possible we’ll continue some of the work we started on the old Earth. I believe we’ll pursue some of the same things we were doing, or dreamed of doing, before our death.

We’ve probably all heard it said, “This world is not our home.” I used to say it, too. It’s true, but it’s a half truth.