If being a “secondary issue” means it’s not essential to someone’s salvation, then it is certainly secondary. However, it is not secondary if by that we mean unimportant.

Christ proclaims from his throne on the New Earth: “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5, ESV). It’s not just people who will be renewed but also the earth and “all things” in it. Do “all things” include animals? Yes. Horses, cats, dogs, deer, dolphins, and squirrels—as well as the inanimate creation—will be beneficiaries of Christ’s death and resurrection.

Years ago, knowing our children were coming, Nanci and I prepared a place for them. We chose the room, picked out the right wallpaper, decorated and set up the crib just so, selected the perfect blankets. The quality of the place we prepared for our daughters was limited only by our skills and resources and imaginations.

A few years ago I was a guest on Desiring God’s Ask Pastor John podcast. In this episode, host Tony Reinke and I discuss the question, “What age will I appear in Heaven?” The following is a lightly edited transcript, and you can also listen to the audio of our conversation.

In what form will we be when we see God? Will we be ghostly spirits, floating about? No, we will be resurrected human beings, standing and kneeling, walking and talking, praying and worshiping and laughing, eating and drinking in our new bodies. As Job cried out, “After my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

In this video clip, Randy Alcorn and Greg Laurie talk about having an eternal perspective and how our belief in the life to come should affect us in the day-to-day. 

In this video clip, Randy Alcorn and Greg Laurie talk about what we can expect when we get to Heaven, what we might wear and what we might eat.

God’s people are aliens and strangers, looking for a country of their own. This world, as it is now, under the curse, isn’t our home. But one day not only we but the earth itself will be remade. That earth, the New Earth, will not only be a place made for us but the place we were made for.

In my book Heaven, I share how years ago, Nanci read me letters we’d never before seen translated, written in 1920 by her grandmother Anna Swanson to her family in Sweden. Anna suffered severe health problems. While she was in Montana, cared for by relatives, her husband, Edwin, was in Oregon, working and caring for their seven children day and night.