In Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was terrified when he saw a phantom.
“Who are you?” Scrooge asked.
“Ask me who I was,” the ghost replied.
“Who were you then?” said Scrooge.
“In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.”
In Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2010, Dave Bowman appears in ghostly form. When asked who he is, he replies, “I was David Bowman.”
These are common portrayals of the afterlife, disembodied ghosts—pale reflections of a person’s former self—floating in a nebulous netherworld. But these stories do not accurately reflect what our lives will be like on the New Earth. A central part of our bodily resurrection will be the continuity of our identity. If the eternal Heaven were a disembodied state, then our humanity would either be diminished or transcended, and we would never again be ourselves after we die.
Contrast Jacob Marley’s ghost with Job, who said, “After my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another” (Job 19:26-27).
Contrast the ghost that was Dave Bowman with the risen Jesus, who said, “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 24:39).
Jesus called people by name in Heaven, including Lazarus in the present Heaven (Luke 16:25) and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the future Heaven (Matthew 8:11). A name denotes a distinct identity, an individual. The fact that people in Heaven can be called by their earthly name demonstrates that they remain the same people—without the bad parts—forever.
You will be yourself in Heaven. Who else would you be?
If Bob, a man on Earth, is no longer Bob when he gets to Heaven, then Bob was not actually redeemed and Bob did not go to Heaven. When I arrive in Heaven, however changed I will be, if I’m not the same person I was on Earth—with the same identity, history, and memory—then I didn’t go to Heaven.
If we aren’t ourselves in the afterlife, then how can we be rewarded or held accountable for anything we did in this life? The Judgment would be meaningless. The doctrines of judgment and eternal rewards depend on people retaining their distinct identities from this life to the next.
In Buddhism, Hinduism, and New Age mysticism, individuality is obliterated or assimilated into Nirvana. But biblically, even though we may feel lost in God’s immensity, we will find our identity when we see him. “Whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25).
As our genetic code and fingerprints are unique now, we should expect the same in our new bodies. God is the Creator of individual identities and personalities. He makes no two snowflakes alike, much less two people. Not even “identical twins” are completely identical. Individuality preceded sin and the Curse. It’s God’s plan, and He receives greater glory through our differences.
Heaven’s inhabitants don’t simply rejoice over nameless multitudes coming to God. They rejoice over each and every person (Luke 15:4-7, 10). That’s a powerful affirmation of Heaven’s view of each person as an individual, whose life is observed and cared for.
When Moses and Elijah appeared out of Heaven at the Transfiguration, the disciples recognized them as the distinct individuals they were. When Jesus was resurrected, He didn’t become someone else; He remained who He had been before His resurrection: “It is I myself!” In John’s Gospel, Jesus deals with Mary, Thomas, and Peter in very personal ways, drawing on His previous knowledge of them. His relationships from his preresurrected state carried over. When Thomas said, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28), he knew he was speaking to the same Jesus he’d followed. When John said, “It is the Lord” (John 21:7), he meant, “It’s really Him—the Jesus we have known.”
“‘As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me,’ declares the Lord, ‘so will your name and descendants endure’” (Isaiah 66:22). Our personal history and identity will endure from one Earth to the next. Jesus said that He would drink the fruit of the vine again, with His disciples, in His Father’s kingdom (Matthew 26:28).
In Heaven, will we be called by our earthly names? When it says that the names of God’s children are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life (Revelation 20:15; 21:27), I believe those are our earthly names. God calls people in Heaven by their earthly names—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for instance. Our names reflect our individuality. To have the same name written in Heaven that was ours on Earth speaks of the continuity between this life and the next.
In addition to our earthly names, we’ll receive new names in Heaven (Isaiah 62:2; 65:15; Revelation 2:17; 3:12). But new names don’t invalidate the old ones.
A man wrote me expressing his fear of losing his identity in Heaven: “Will being like Jesus mean the obliteration of self?” He was afraid that we’d all be alike, that he and his treasured friends would lose the distinguishing traits and eccentricities that make them special. But he needn’t worry. We can all be like Jesus in character yet remain very different from one another in personality.
Distinctiveness is God’s creation, not Satan’s. What makes us unique will survive. In fact, much of our uniqueness may be uncovered for the first time. We’ll be real people with real desires, but holy ones. We’ll have real feelings, but feelings redeemed from pride and insecurity and wrong thinking. We’ll be ourselves—with all the good and none of the bad. And we will consider it, in just the right sense, a privilege to be who God has made us to be.
