Most Popular Episode of 2022: ’Going to Heaven’ vs. Resurrection, the New Heavens, and the New Earth (J. Richard Middleton)

In case you missed it, this was our most popular episode of 2022. We hope this conversation encourages Christians with the biblical hope of the resurrection and the age to come.

What happens to you when you die? Many Christians picture eternal life as spending time in an ethereal heaven with God, either immediately after death as a disembodied spirit or after a "rapture" of Christians. Books and films, made by and for Christians, have promoted this idea of the afterlife.

Dr. J. Richard Middleton wants to challenge this particular view of the Christian afterlife. What happens immediately after we die does not much matter to the biblical authors; they concern themselves with proclaiming the hope of the eventual resurrection and preaching the Kingdom of God. In this episode, he discusses common words in our theological vernacular—spirit, soul, resurrection, hell, heaven, etc.—and challenges us to rethink them through a biblical lens. The story of the Bible is not the story of what happens between death and resurrection, but the story of the "redemption of the world."

Dr. Middleton is Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis at Roberts Wesleyan College. He specializes in the Christian worldview, Christianity and postmodernism, Old Testament Theology, and eschatology. His most recent book is A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology.

Show notes:

• 0:00 Introductions, N.T. Wright, and the redemption of the world
• 3:48 Reactions to debunking the rapture
• 4:57 "What happens to you when you die?"
• 7:59 God's glory entering the world
• 10:45 Spiritual versus physical
• 13:24 The hope of the resurrection
• 16:42 Believing you go to heaven when you die
• 18:32 Purgatory, limbo, and the grave
• 21:03 Resuscitation versus resurrection
• 25:20 The resurrection, final judgment, and hell

Show notes by Micah Long

Credits for the music used in TBM podcast can be found at: hebraicthought.org/credits.