“If only we’d known how that holiday would turn out,” muttered the Jones family as they returned yesterday wet and muddy from a week of camping in the West Midlands.
“If only we’d known how that marriage would turn out,” reflected Jenny and Brian as they signed their divorce papers.
“If only we’d known how that evening would turn out,” lamented the family of James Oyebola, who was shot in the back after asking some bar customers to stop smoking.…
This is a hard post to write. If there is one aspect of revealed truth that both saints and sinners wish was not there, it would be the doctrine of the eternal punishment of the wicked. Christians – including evangelical Christians – have become almost completely silent on this point, sometimes from misplaced humility (‘Who am I to speak of such things?’), sometimes from fear of what unbelievers will think (‘Non-Christians have a low enough opinion of Christianity, without alienating them even more with this talk of hell and judgment’), and sometimes from actual doubt as to whether Scripture does actually teach which it appears to teach.…
Using a huge galactic star cluster as a ‘lens’ to observe the behaviour of light from distant stars, Professor Eric Jullo and his associates of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California studied the mysterious ‘dark matter’ that makes up 75% of the universe.
The scientists have come to the conclusion that the universe will continue to expand for ever (rather than, say, collapsing back on itself or going into an endless cycle of expanding and collapsing). …
I’ve been listening to some episodes of the Unbelievable podcast from Premier Christian Radio.
I really like the show. It’s all about getting a discussion going – often between a Christian and a non-Christian – on a particular aspect of belief. The host, Justin Brierley, is a calm and even-handed moderator, and the guests usually behave themselves with courtesy and thoughtfulness.
I appreciated the discussion of ‘The Evangelical Universalist’ between Robin Parry and Laurence M. Blanchard. …
The ultimate destiny towards which all of God’s purposes are moving is ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, Isa 65:17; 66:22; 2 Pet 3:13. Here, we can only know and understand in part, 1 Cor 13:12. However, some things are clear.
The life to come will be:-
1. An embodied life. Just as the new earth will be different from the old, 1 Cor 7:31, so the new body will be different also. Still, our future life will be experienced by the whole person, not by some disembodied spirit, Rom 8:19-25.…
Bishop Tom Wright is a firm and frequent critic (in Surprised by hope and other writings) of the idea that ‘salvation’ equates to ‘going to heaven when you die’.
What, then should we understand to be the meaning of ‘heaven’ in Scripture? Several answers may be given to this question:-
1. ‘Heaven’ can mean ‘sky’, or what we would understand as the rest of the cosmos apart from the earth, Gen 1:1.
2. ‘Heaven’ can mean the abode of God and of those closely associated with God. …
Most of us (writes Tom Wright in Surprised by hope, 206-213) take ‘salvation’ to mean ‘going to heaven when you die’; implying that this present body and this present world will be left behind and the ‘soul’ will fly off to some disembodied existence.
But this view scarcely counts as ‘rescue from death’. Rather, it colludes with death by denying that God’s good creation really is good, and that he intends ‘to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last’.…
We do not subscribe to the myth of progress – the idea, popular in earlier evolutionary thinking, that the world will get better and better. Nor do we believe, with Plato, that we are souls in transit, passing through this illusory world on our way to to something beyond space, time and matter.
The shape of things to come is determined, in biblical thinking, by the threefold story of creation, rebellion, and redemption. We can tell the story of Jesus as the moment all creation has been waiting for:-
Maria Shriver is an award-winning American journalist and author and she is the wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. A practising Roman Catholic, in 2007 she published a book for children called What’s Heaven?
In this book, children are informed that
…Heaven is somewhere you believe in…it’s a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there. At night you can sit next to the stars, which are the brightest of anywhere in the universe…If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven…when your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you up to Heaven to be with him…[and Grandma is] alive in me…Most important, she taught me to believe in myself…She’s in a safe place, with the stars, with God and the angels…she is watching over us from up there…
“I want you to know” [says the heroine to her great-Grandma] “that even though you are no longer here, your spirit will always be alive in me.”
Baghdad, July 30th 1919.
Dear Walter,
I’ve got some very sad news to tell you, last night when down at the river bathing poor old Eric was drowned. You must forgive me for putting it so blunt, but I feel too full up with it to say much about it. We were bathing as usual and poor old Eric went down. We dived with ropes round us and swam about for half an hour but nothing was seen of him. …
