The Only Thing That Matters Is Heaven: Rethinking Sin, Death, Hell, Redemption, and Salvation for All Creation

By Terrell Carter

Is heaven a place, somewhere we go? Is it a future goal, attainable only after this life ends?

Pastor and educator Dr. Terrell Carter looks at this issue with a pastor’s heart and a scholars precision, looking at what the Bible teaches us and how this might relate to how we live, act, and worship today. In the process, he introduces readers to such theological terms as Kingdom of Heaven and Kingdom of God. Why a kingdom? Read this book to find out.

In each chapter of this book you’ll learn something new about how the Bible speaks about heaven and the afterlife. You’ll read the parables of Jesus on this topic with a new vision. You’ll find things in the book of Revelation that you might have been missing. And you’ll find all this in an easy to read style.

This book is a good, quick read for those who are in hurry for an introduction, and it provides a sound basis for a short study on heaven, the afterlife, and life on earth in the meantime for a small study group.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Energion Publications
• Release date: Jul 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781631994036

Terrell Carter

Terrell Carter is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and Director of Contextualized Learning at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kansas. He is the author of Walking the Blue Line: A Police Officer Turned Community Activist Provides Solutions to the Racial Divide (2015) and Machiavellian Ministry: What Faith-filled Leaders can Learn from a Faithless Politician (2015).

Book preview

When Thy Kingdom Comes, I Will Go

My father was a sergeant in the army. He entered the army when he was 18 years old. He did it because my mother was pregnant with me and my twin brother. As teenagers, we would ask him how he liked being in the military. He would tell us that he hated it. There were several things about the military that he didn’t like. One of the main things was reveille. Reveille is the general term that most military branches use for getting up in the morning. It comes from a French word that means to wake up or to rise.

In the military, reveille is usually not a fun experience. The point is to get soldiers to wake up and come to attention in the quickest manner possible. My father would tell me and my twin brother that it can be hard to get young military cadets out of bed and up and ready to face the world early in the morning. So, the personnel responsible for reveille would have to be very creative in the ways that they tried to wake up my father and other soldiers.

The wake-up call could come by someone playing a bugle or banging on drums outside the barracks or near the flag posts. If a certain group of cadets was extremely hard to wake up, commanders would bang on the barrack walls, or walk into the actual barracks and bang pots together. This usually included someone yelling at the top of their lungs and using multiple expletives and other colorful words. Most of the language used would not be fit for general conversation, but hopefully you get the point.

Our father hated his experiences in the military. But there was something funny about him. He kept some of those unfortunate practices from his military life and used them to try to motivate me and my twin brother while we were in high school. As much as he hated reveille as the way to wake him up, he seemed to love using it to wake us up in the morning. If we stayed in bed one minute after our alarm clock went off, he would slap our bedroom door, and throw it open so the door hit the wall.

He scared us awake every single morning. Sometimes he would change it up and add some variety. Some days he would slap the door loudly, run into our room, and yell Get up! Sometimes he would bang things together. If I didn’t know better, I would think that he got up early every morning and stood outside our bedroom door just to see if we would oversleep so he could scare us. For someone who hated having it done to him, he sure seemed to get a lot of joy out of doing it to us. Derrell and I couldn’t wait for the day that we moved out so we could wake up like normal human beings.

But, there’s something else that’s funny about all of this. When my son Malik was a teenager, I did to him what my dad did to us. Malik was proof that there’s something within teenagers that requires them to sleep through the sweet soft voice of their parents urging them to awake and see the beauty of a new day. When Malik slept through his alarm or was having a hard time getting up in the morning, I would bang on the first-floor hallway door and yell up to his bedroom on the second floor Get up, boy! If he was having an extra difficult morning, I would throw something up the stairs into his room so it would hit his wall and wake him up.

As an adult, I understand my father’s intentions now. There was work that needed to be done. The sooner we got to doing it, the sooner we would be done. We couldn’t sleep all day and miss school, or