Life Is Short. Eternity Is Long.
Every person you have ever met will exist forever. The neighbor you wave to, the coworker you eat lunch with, the child you tuck into bed: each one will live somewhere for all eternity. Few truths should shape the way we live more than this one.
Scripture names two destinies and no third. Daniel foresaw that many that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt (Daniel 12:2). Jesus said the lost shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal (Matthew 25:46). If heaven is real, hell is real. The same Lord who promised the one warned us of the other.
We believe that when a believer dies, he goes at once to be with Christ, and when an unbeliever dies, he goes to a place of torment to await judgment. After Christ's thousand-year reign and the great white throne judgment, God will make a new heaven and a new earth. The redeemed will live there forever in glorified bodies, and God Himself will dwell with them. All who reject Jesus Christ as their Saviour are already condemned to an eternity in the lake of fire.
The final, unending condition of every person after the last judgment: the redeemed with God in the new heaven and new earth, and the lost in the lake of fire.
Where will you spend eternity, and how can you know?
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For Deeper Study
- HeavenAmazon Randy AlcornA popular, Scripture-filled study of the intermediate state, the resurrection body, and life on the new earth. Alcorn argues that the new earth will be this present creation renewed and glorified, an interpretation we believe best fits the biblical evidence. Readers should distinguish his biblical arguments from his imaginative descriptions of what eternal life may look like.
- The Glory of Heaven: The Truth about Heaven, Angels, and Eternal LifeAmazon John MacArthurA pastor's careful walk through what Scripture says about heaven and the believer's hope, written against speculation and sentimentality.
- Whatever Happened to Hell?Amazon John BlanchardA thorough, readable defense of everlasting punishment that answers universalism and annihilationism, with a foreword by J. I. Packer.
- Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal PunishmentAmazon Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson, eds.Evangelical scholars answer universalism and annihilationism from the Old Testament, Jesus, Paul, and Revelation. More technical than the others.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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The Final Judgment
Every person will stand before Christ: believers at His judgment seat to receive reward, and unbelievers at the great white throne after the thousand years.
Open Doctrine