After Life

Despite the prospect of certain death, few of us spend much time probing God's Word to discover what can be known about our existence beyond the grave--or even asking the hard questions...

• If, as we are told at funerals, our loved ones are already in heaven with Jesus, what is the purpose of Christ's Coming and the Resurrection?
• But if we don't go directly to heaven when we die, where are we in the meantime, and what, if anything, will we be doing?
• If Jesus meant to describe a tormenting hell in the story of the rich man and Lazarus, why does he speak elsewhere of body and soul being destroyed in hell?
• If flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, is it reasonable to expect that, like Jesus' resurrected body, our own bodies in heaven will be much the same as what we see in the mirror?
• If Christians are to be raptured before Christ reigns on earth for a thousand years, as popular end-times books would have us believe, is heaven only a fast-lane pit stop before we are suddenly brought back down to earth?

In this challenging, yet highly readable, search of the Scriptures, all these questions and many more are candidly explored with sometimes-surprising results. Special attention is also given to the afterlife beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Roman Catholics.