Satan labors to give people an inaccurate view of heaven.

Jesus told the dying thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43). The apostle Paul said that to die was to be with Christ (Philippians 1:23), and to be absent from the body was to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).

I came to know my friend Jim Harrell after Jim read my book Heaven. (That's me on the left, then Jim, then his good friend Vince, when I visited the Harrell home in Wheaton, Illinois, less than three months ago.)

The New Testament reflects much more specific revelation from God of the afterlife. Yet there are some strong Old Testament indicators, though not nearly as many.

Every reference in Revelation to human beings talking and worshiping in Heaven prior to the resurrection of the dead demonstrates that our spiritual beings are conscious, not sleeping, after death.

Unlike God and the angels, who are in essence spirits though capable of inhabiting bodies (John 4:24; Heb. 1:14), man is by nature both spiritual and physical (Gen. 2:7).

All these questions are addressed in Randy Alcorn's book Heaven (Tyndale, 2004). Most of them have clear, though not comprehensive, biblical answers. The others that don't have clear answers can be intelligently speculated upon, based on what Scripture does tell us.

Three weeks before she died, eleven-year-old Ann Kumm told her younger sister exactly what she wanted for her funeral.  And she had told others she wasn’t afraid to die. She knew where she was going.

When I first answered this question a few years ago, a friend was holding her eighteen-month-old son in her arms, waiting for him to breathe his last. She was praying over him, reading Psalms aloud, trying to comfort and prepare him—and herself—for what was to come.