“Although these depictions of the afterlife differ, the unifying testimony of the human heart throughout history is belief in life after death. Anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has a God-given, innate sense of the eternal—that this world is not all there is.4”

“What we have assumed about Heaven has reduced it to a place we look forward to only as an alternative to an intolerable existence here on the present Earth. Only the elderly, disabled, suffering, and persecuted might desire the Heaven we imagine. But the Bible portrays life in God’s presence, in our resurrected bodies in a resurrected universe, as so exciting and compelling that even the youngest and healthiest of us should daydream about it.”

“Consider her words: “I think if I could have seen the shore, I would have made it.” For believers, that shore is Jesus and being with him in the place that he promised to prepare for us, where we will live with him forever. The shore we should look for is that of the New Earth. If we can see through the fog and picture our eternal home in our mind’s eye, it will comfort and energize us.”

“Biblical religion . . . views the whole course of history as a movement from a garden to a city, and it fundamentally affirms that movement. . . . Redemption in Jesus Christ reaches just as far as the fall.”

“What God made us to desire, and therefore what we do desire if we admit it, is exactly what he promises to those who follow Jesus Christ: a resurrected life in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ on a resurrected Earth.”

“Religion professor Albert Wolters, in Creation Regained, writes, “[God] hangs on to his fallen original creation and salvages it. He refuses to abandon the work of his hands—in fact, he sacrifices his own Son to save his original project. Humankind, which has botched its original mandate and the whole creation along with it, is given another chance in Christ; we are reinstated as God’s managers on earth. The original good creation is to be restored.”74”

“Christ’s resurrection is the forerunner of our own, and our resurrection is the forerunner of the earth’s.”

“Now, in comparison to both Matthew 17 and Revelation 1, it appears that the risen Christ, before his ascension, was not yet fully glorified. If he would have been glorified, surely his identity would have been immediately apparent to Mary Magdalene (John 20:14), the disciples on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:15-16), and Peter and the apostles when they saw him on the shore (John 21:4). Consider”

“Our enemy slanders three things: God’s person, God’s people, and God’s place—namely, Heaven.29”

“Heaven isn’t an extrapolation of earthly thinking; Earth is an extension of Heaven, made by the Creator King.”

“Our desires correspond precisely to God’s plans. It’s not that we want something, so we engage in wishful thinking that what we want exists. It’s the opposite—the reason we want it is precisely because God has planned for it to exist. As we’ll see, resurrected people living in a resurrected universe isn’t our idea—it’s God’s.”

“When I speak elsewhere in the book of the multifaceted joys of the resurrected life in the new universe, some readers may think, But our eyes should be on the giver, not the gift; we must focus on God, not on Heaven. This approach sounds spiritual, but it erroneously divorces our experience of God from life, relationships, and the world—all of which God graciously gives us. It sees the material realm and other people as God’s competitors rather than as instruments that communicate his love and character. It fails to recognize that because God is the ultimate source of joy, and all secondary joys emanate from him, to love secondary joys on Earth can be—and in Heaven always will be—to love God, their source.”

“Christ is and will forever remain both God (from Heaven) and man (of earth). I”

“I have met no people who fully disbelieved in Hell and also had a living and life-giving belief in Heaven.”

“Inside your body, even if it is failing, is the blueprint for your resurrection body. You may not be satisfied with your current body or mind—but you’ll be thrilled with your resurrection upgrades. With them you’ll be better able to serve and glorify God and enjoy an eternity of wonders he has prepared for you.”

“C. S. Lewis depicts another source of our misconceptions about Heaven: naturalism, the belief that the world can be understood in scientific terms, without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations.”

“The gospel is far greater than most of us imagine.”

“God subjected the whole creation to frustration by putting the Curse not only on mankind but also on the earth (Genesis 3:17). Why? Because human beings and the earth are inseparably linked. And as together we fell, together we shall rise.”

“This place [Heaven] is not an ethereal realm of disembodied spirits, because human beings are by nature physical. (We are also spiritual.) What we are suited for - what we've been specifically designed for - is a place like the one God made for us: Earth.”

“As human beings, we have a terminal disease called mortality. The current death rate is 100 percent.”