The other day I had posted to my Facebook a page for people to write a comment about what fears, beliefs, or questions they may have about Heaven. I did not expect such a small response, Basically I only received 2 questions from one person. The first is one I think most people have and that is “will my pets be in Heaven” the other is basically about seeing a former spouse after being remarried. The idea would be would running into your former spouse be an awkward situation? I had thought most people would have said something like how boring they thought Heaven would be. It goes with the the Billy Joel song Only the Good Die Young. In this song Billy sings the lyric “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. The sinners are much more fun”.  Here he is making the claim I want to hang out with the sinners because they enjoy life so much more. In today’s society, for some reason, declaring someone a sinner means they are going to Hell. If this, in our thinking, is true than Hell is going to be one happening place since that is where all the sinners will be. Not to get on too much of a side bar but this is such a lie. First everyone is a sinner no matter how good they are painting themselves to be. But we all know not everyone is going to Hell so there has to be more to this story than I am covering here. For brevity and to get back on track, that “rest of the story” would be Jesus Christ. I can get into this a bit more at a later time but this is not the point of this post.  One last idea as to not give you the wrong idea about Heaven and Hell. Hell is a place of complete absences of anything and everything you’d enjoy. No water, no relationships, no food, no relief from pain, no rest, no color, no comfort, no hope. Heaven is so much better and it is my hope to paint a picture of how amazing Heaven will be.

My hope in this is that Heaven would be someplace you’d want to go to and not see it as a never ending church service. This leads me to the questions proposed earlier. Will our animals be in Heaven and basically what will my former marriages be like? First off this is based on the Christian idea of Heaven as depicted in The Bible. I know there are many ideas out there on what Heaven is or even that there is no Heaven or Hell. Again this is not the point of this blog to debate the validity of Christianity, The Bible, or the legitimacy of Heaven or Hell.  So please keep this in mind when reading and please if you have any comments or questions feel free to leave them below.

First will there be animals in Heaven? This seems like a pretty easy and straight forward question. However it is a debate that has been around for a long time. It comes from the idea that people are the only ones with a spirit and that there is no mention of animals in Heaven (outside of Jesus riding a horse for example). This reasoning would lead many people to dread or not even want to go to Heaven. I mean how fun can a place be where there is no horseback riding, snuggling with your favorite cat or dog, or enjoy the bright colors of the fish swimming around a coral reef for example? At least for me this would be a very boring existence and one I would want to not really want to be a part of. But I believe there are some verses we can look at to see what was God’s heart when He started this whole thing? First let’s look at creation as described in Genesis. Here we see God creating everything the air, sky, planets, seasons, animals, and people. At the end of creating all this God said after each day “it was good” and after creating people He said “it is very good”. In fact most people do not realize this but there was only one aspect of creation God said was not good and that was the fact man was alone so He created woman for the man. After He created woman than He said “it was very good” (this will be important for addressing the next question). My question is why would God ever declare something good but yet destroy its existence? This, of course is including animals. I have heard people claim that sin has corrupted things so bad that it is going to cause God to have to start over this is why The Bible uses terms like “new heaven and new earth” because the old heavens and old earth has passed away. In this way animals are just the byproduct of the corruption and will not be a part of the new heaven and the new earth. However I disagree with this line of reasoning. I do not believe that an al mighty God who has claimed everything as good would allow anything be corrupted so bad that He would forced to start over. In a way this is saying Satan is in someways more powerful than God (this might be something he would like us to believe but it simply is not true). In this idea I would compare it to a person buying a used car (the analogy breaks down very early but its the best one I can think of). When we buy a used car this car has been restored, might have a warranty still, runs like new and even has a lot of the same features a new car would. In fact when we buy it we will say we bought a new car because the car is new to us. However it was only restored to new like condition. There are still shades of the old car but the crumbs and dirt and clinking motor is gone. That is what, I think, The Bible means by “new” not so much a new as in start over from scratch kind of new creation, but a restoration to the way things were when God said “this is very good”. Besides this our overall existence is meant for worshiping God. I can’t even imagine what kind of worship I would have for Him if I were ever able to take a horseback ride down a white sandy beach as the sun was setting. How could I be able to do this without the horse? So absolutely I believe without any doubt our animals will be with us in Heaven.

The next issue posed was more along the lines of marriage and how we might react when seeing a spouse who had died and we have remarried. I think this could also be expanded to exes in general and the awkwardness we think we might feel when running into the first spouse. Something I found interesting in Genesis is that God created a woman for man. To me this suggests that God designed us to need each other. He designed us to find fulfillment in each other and relationships that we could not get from any other created being. It is a given that our primary focus will be to worship God when we are in Heaven it will be also important that we are with each other as well. Also what is interesting to me is that the idea of marriage was not introduced until after sin entered the world. marriage did not happen between Adam and Eve. I guess this is a funny thought because who else was around for them? But marriage was invented by God as a way to protect the woman in the relationship. Even today without that piece of paper a man could leave a woman and chances are really good she will be the one that looses out in the deal. God gave us marriage as a way to protect women from men who want to just leave her on a whim. So in Heaven, with sin being destroyed, there will not be a need for marriage. In this sense our relationship roles will change and as a group we will be married to Christ. We will each still have aspects of us that make us unique and there will be people who we would want to spend more time with than others. Our friendships will continue and our relationships will continue. With the idea of sin wiped away and the slight change in roles in these relationships there will be no awkwardness when seeing people who has gone before us no matter what the circumstances were. In fact we will be overjoyed in seeing these friendships rekindled. I had the unfortunate event of seeing my dad go to war in 1990. He was gone for 13 months. I remember being upset because I did not understand why he had to go. I was angry that he left his family and I. One would think when he came back I would have still been upset and would want to tell him how much he hurt me. But when I saw him step off that bus and was able to hug him for the first time in over a year all of that melted away and gave way to the love I had always had for him. In the same way when we see those in Heaven we have had a relationship in the past, no matter how short or long, those negative feelings will undoubtedly melt away and give way to the love we will have for one another. It will be like the biggest family reunion we will ever see and who is married to who will not matter because we will be married to Jesus (please do not let that get weird. there are just somethings we can not completely explain right now).