34 The New Heavens and New Earth

What is heaven? Is it a place? How will the earth be renewed? What will it be like to live in the new heavens and new earth?

According to Scripture, there is a difference between “heaven’, and “the New Heaven and New Earth”.

What most casual observers think of as “heaven” is really a temporary or intermediate place where the souls of believers will be with God before the final resurrection of their physical bodies. The “New Heaven and New Earth” on the other hand, is the final state of existence in eternity, where believers, their souls reunited with their resurrected bodies, will enter into the full enjoyment of life in the presence of God forever.

We are in the final unit of Grudem’s Bible Doctrine, and are considering events that will happen in the future, as foreseen in Scripture. The study of future events is often called “eschatology,” from the Greek word eschatos, which means “last.” The study of eschatology, then, is the study of “the last things.”

Anyone who reads the Bible on a regular basis has begun to develop a “theology” of who God is and what he has revealed of Himself to man down through history. But is it organized to the point where you can confidently say “this is what the Bible teaches” on a particular topic, or do you just base your beliefs on random verses that could well be misunderstood because they are taken out of context?

My confidence in going out to share the Gospel with strangers comes largely from my study of “Systematic Theology”, which I’ll define as learning what the whole Bible teaches us about a given topic. I’m confident that I’m not misrepresenting God as revealed in his Word, and I’m confident when people make unbiblical claims about God that challenge my own beliefs. I’m increasingly amazed by the consistency of the Bible, written by so many human authors but without contradiction, that I can only conclude it was written by divine inspiration.

I’ve gained so much personally from my systematic study of theology that I’m teaching a 34-week class on it at church, based on Dr. Wayne Grudem’s books “Systematic Theology” and “Bible Theology”. I’m excited to dig deeper personally as I prepare the outlines and lessons, and I want to take as many people along with me on this journey as possible. So I am recording the class and posting the videos to my YouTube channel, and making downloadable PDF chapter outlines and audio recordings available on a Google Drive folder as well.

Care to join me? Links to my YouTube channel and shared resources are as follows:
Video: YouTube.com/c/JeffReiman
Shared Resources folder: https://tinyurl.com/yxy2kb56