All Things New (or, 'Do Our Pets Go to Heaven?')

Hopefully we can all agree that the redeeming act of Christ is not only about saving individuals from their sins, and so allowing them to avoid Hell and one day go to Heaven. We are on the right track if we add that the resurrection allows those ‘saved’ individuals to enter into “the fullness of life” and to “have life abundantly”, to walk with Christ and have a personal relationship with Him, to have Christ dwell in their hearts through the Holy Spirit, and so on. But even that is not the end of the story. What more could there be, you ask?

I think that the inability for people to see beyond this stage is due to an obsessive focus on the individual, which blinds them to the real meaningfulness of the resurrection. Yes, Christianity is about the individual. But it is not only about the individual – and to fixate purely on the individual is, in my opinion, to miss the awesomeness of Christianity, and the significance of Christ. You see, redemption concerns not just you, not just me, but everything. Every. Single. Thing. The planet. The Universe. Existence itself.

This is quite clear in the Bible, which begins with God creating the Universe. The Garden of Eden was what creation was supposed to be like. Sin tarnished that perfection, and as a consequence, everything changed – not just individuals, who would grow old and die, suffer the pains of childbirth, and so on – but creation itself. There would be diseases and natural disasters; animals would kill each other for food; and so on. We all know the next chapter in the play - "for God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son..." Normally, we think of "the world" as mankind, but actually the Greek word here is kosmon - i.e., the cosmos, the universe, everything. Accordingly, Christ’s work of washing away our sins does not just make each one of us a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17); it also makes all of creation new.  “He who sits on the throne” declares this outright in Revelation 21:5 (emphasis added): “Behold, I am making all things new.” That includes you and me, who will inherit the ‘spiritual bodies’ of Christ. But it also includes the rest of creation. Animals will no longer eat each other for food, for example – “the wolf will lie down with the lamb” (Isaiah 11:6). Yes, there will be a “new heaven and a new earth”; but notice that in Revelation 21 the New Jerusalem “comes down out of heaven” and descends to the Earth, as opposed to us being carried away to some faraway place.

Alas, we must wait until the preordained time for this renewal to be fully completed. Acts 3: 19-21 (emphasis added) expresses it thus: “Therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord; and that He may send Jesus, the Christ appointed for you, whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time.” Until then, just as humans still must engage in arduous labour and suffer the pains of childbirth, so too “the whole creation” is “subjected to futility” and “groans and suffers the pain of childbirth” (Romans 8:19-23). That groaning is the expression of not only pain, but also the eager expectation that one day we will experience “our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body”. In like manner, “creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God”, when it will be “set from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Notice the wording of this final quote – creation will enter into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. Just as man’s sin led to the corruption of the rest of creation, so too man’s redemption will lead to the restoration of the rest of creation.

We painfully long for eternity because God has “written eternity into the hearts of men” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). But He has also written eternity into the Universe itself, which “declares the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). The Universe is not only inconceivably vast and complex, but moreover continues to expand. Now, the expansion of the Universe is not like the expansion of a balloon, because that is merely a displacement of space – the balloon takes up space that already exists. The expansion of the Universe is not like that – rather, it is the expansion of space itself. Why would God create such a massive Universe – one which continues to expand – if everything were just about us? Why not just make the Earth (perhaps along with the sun, moon, and other ‘celestial bodies’ essential to life on Earth, in a version of the teleological models of astronomy prevalent in medieval times)? It is because (I would think) creation is an expression of God’s eternal, unfathomable, and absolute glory, which existence itself literally cannot contain. Although we are “made in His image”, the Universe contains His fingerprints. What makes us ‘special’ is not that we are eternal and everything else is temporal; rather, it is that we, unlike other creatures, have the ability to behold God’s eternal glory, and marvel. It is man, in fact, that is responsible for the corruption of the world (by which I mean 'creation') - we do not need to be saved from the world; rather, the world needs to be saved from our sins.

I think that one reason that the significance of Christ's redemption becomes obscured (and belittled) in modern Christianity is that Jesus is seen as a person whose existence began at approximately 30 years BC with the virgin birth. It is relatively indisputable that Jesus was God; for example, when He came to earth, he identified Himself with the “I AM” of the Old Testament (John 18:6). In fact, however, Jesus was there right from the start – from the creation of the Universe. In Genesis 1:26, God declares, referring to the plural Trinity “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness”; in John 1:3 we learn that “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.” Furthermore, just as Jesus was there in the beginning, so too He will be there in the consummation of all things: in Revelation 22:13, Jesus identifies Himself as “the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last” (Revelation 22:13).

The redemption of Christ is therefore woven into the fabric of creation. An extensive passage from Colossians 1:15-20 (emphasis added) sums this up best:

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”

This association of "things on earth" and "things in heaven" is particularly germane. It implies that Heaven is not some 'never never land'. As C. S. Lewis has remarked in Mere Christianity, our lives in this world contain traces of both Heaven and Hell. After all, God’s original design was for us to live forever on the Earth. Hell, meanwhile, was not even part of the picture – that was created for Satan and the rest of the demons. The redemption of Christ, therefore, should return us to that original Heavenly design (this is not the place for a discussion of Hell, but it should be clear that the non-human parts of creation, which have not sinned, cannot be judged in the same way as the human parts). In fact, the idea that Heaven is 'somewhere else' may have derived from the constant Biblical reference to 'the heavens', which in fact refers to 'the sky' - not to Heaven itself (this is an uneducated speculation, however).

With this in mind, I would like to go on a tangent of sorts to address a question that many of us have probably asked at one point or another – “do our pets go to Heaven?” The traditional response is that animals do not have souls, let alone spirits, and so no, they will not go to Heaven; rather, they will fade away into oblivion like the rest of creation (this response is usually coupled with the remark that it won’t matter, because our affection will be completely directed towards Jesus). But therein lies the flaw of this response – the rest of creation will be in Heaven, because it will be restored, precisely because of Jesus. So yes, I would say that of course our pets will be in Heaven, along with all that is good about creation (and more – a lot more). After all, is this really so outlandish? Isn’t it equally bizarre that our intangible souls should somehow depart from our tangible bodies and find their way to some other-dimensional Heaven? Isn't the Resurrection itself equally fantastical? (This reminds me of the old argument that Christianity is false because it includes miracles, which disobey the 'laws of nature'. Well, duh...)

In his book the Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis suggests that just as we are raised in Christ in the End, so too animals may be raised in us (or at least the animals to which we have had a relationship, such as our pets). Later he even “ventured the supposal” that even “a great deal even of the inanimate creation is raised in the redeemed souls who have, during this life, taken its beauty into themselves” Indeed, he suggests that this “may be the way in which the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ are formed.

“Of course”, as Lewis admits, “we can only guess and wonder.” But the point of this post nevertheless remains: Jesus came not only to save people from their sins, but also, and in so doing, restore all of creation to its original design.