19 June 2014 by Eddie Smith-
Cardiologists can tell us what happens to the physical body at the moment of death, persons with near-death experiences may give us subjective reports of their personal journeys into the afterlife, but only the Bible can tell us what happens to our spirit and soul as well as the body at the moment of death.
That’s the conclusion reached by Wallace Henley, after almost 40 years of working with dying people and their loved ones as a pastor. He explores the Bible’s revelation of dying and death in his newest book, Your First Step in Heaven: What Happens Immediately at Death (Worldwide Publishing Group).
As a young man, Henley was a newspaper editor and later aide to President Richard Nixon at the White House. Beginning in 1973, Henley was a senior pastor for 25 years, and has spent the last 12 as senior associate pastor at one of the America’s largest churches—Second Baptist of Houston, with 64,000-members, under Dr. Ed Young.
Henley answered my questions about his new book:
As an exclusive columnist for Christian Post and author of more than 20 books, you write extensively on politics, world affairs, and cultural upheaval: Why did you write a book on Heaven?
“Even though I had opportunity to observe the highest levels of government, I consider the most important work of my life that of caring for people as a pastor,” Henley says. “Jesus told Peter that if he loved Jesus he should tend Christ’s flock. There is no higher call than that—not even the White House comes close.”
The Bible says there is an interval between death and receiving the new body in Christ, yet you say people in Christ put on the new body immediately up their “first step in Heaven.”
The Bible revealed the nature of time long before Stephen Hawking and other physicists started thinking about it. In Your First Step in Heaven we explore the fascinating revelation in the Hebrew and Greek languages of the Bible that help us understand the “now and not-yet.” As I show in Your First Step in Heaven, these terms explain how there is a “waiting” to be “clothed” in the new body on the level of finite time, but an “already” of the new body in infinite time.
Heaven is a realm where there are no tears, no grief, but what about our loved ones who are not there because they never received Christ? Won’t we grieve for them? And if we do, how can Heaven be Heaven?
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