He argues that there will be no meat at this feast. This question, of course, is a minor one, and yet is a disagreement I have with Alcorn’s theological approach in Heaven that I think is worth discussing. This disagreement ought not diminish how grateful I am for Alcorn and his wonderful book. Throughout his book, Alcorn chooses Eden over Pentecost as a picture of what the new heavens and new earth will be.[iii] Scripture points to both (Eden and Pentecost) in picturing the new heavens and the new earth, but when there is a tension between the two, I believe Pentecost points us more faithfully to what the reality will be.

How was your Independence Day celebration? Was the food delicious? Guess what, our feasts are a foretaste of heaven!
Some of the most surprising and revealing passages in scripture are the glimpses we have of the resurrected Christ. In these snapshots, we have brief previews of what our bodily resurrection will look like. In two of these snapshots, we see Jesus eating fish with his disciples.[i] The resurrected Jesus eats? He sure does.
And with our resurrected bodies, we will eat too! One of the most powerful images in scripture of heaven is tucked away in Isaiah 25:6:
On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine – the best of meats and the finest of wines.
That, friends, is a party! I don’t know about you, but the idea that we get to eat for eternity is very attractive to me. Can you imagine all the new types of food we will taste? Exotic dishes we will experience?
I can smell the steak grilling and the bacon sizzling now.
But wait, will there be meat? In his book, Heaven, Randy Alcorn takes up the question of whether we will eat meat in heaven. He argues that there will be no meat at this feast:
Would God call ‘very good’ a realm in which animals suffered, died, and devoured one another? Surely the repeated redemptive promise that one day animals will live in peace with each other is at least to a degree a return to Edenic conditions, though it’s certainly more than that (Isaiah 11:6-9).
If, as I believe, animal death was a result of the Fall and the Curse, once the Curse has been lifted on the New Earth, animals will no longer die… 
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The current culture wants to identify and judge you according to what group you belong to and by your latest mistake, and once you’re labeled, that label sticks. This is a false view. The correct view—the biblical view—leaves room for change through repentance. You don’t identify with your sin; you identify with being made in God’s image. Upon repentance, you become a child of God, and no one is out of God’s reach. You are not your sin. You are not lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning, two-spirit, or any of the countless other ways in which people choose to self-identify. 

Stop teaching your kids they can be anything they want. It’s not true. I have four daughters. The culture wants to tell them they can be anything, including boys. But no matter how hard they try, they will never be boys.
The idea that you can be whatever you want when it comes to sexuality and gender is based on an ancient lie. I say the lie is ancient because it’s the same lie the serpent used to deceive Eve in the garden of Eden: “Did God really say…?” This is the primal heresy, and humanity has been in rebellion against God ever since, thinking our ways are better than his. There’s more, though.
The ultimate battle is always over truth. Here, it’s the truth about the fundamental nature of what it means to be human. This is what’s known as anthropology. Having been heavily influenced by naturalism, our culture would have us believe we’re products of mutation and time. This view ultimately finds its end in the understanding that we are just matter in motion. But if we’re just matter in motion, naturalism can’t offer any transcendent meaning to life apart from what we arbitrarily assign to it.
Undergirded by naturalism, the story authored by the LGBTQIA2S+ culture goes a step further. They would have you believe you find meaning and identity in your sexual desires or gender identity. Not only is this a profoundly shallow view of what it means to be a human being, but also there are victims of this lie. This is evidenced by the rates of drug abuse, alcoholism, depression, and suicides in the LGBTQIA2S+ community. The thing they are searching for—mainly meaning, purpose, and identity—aren’t found where they’re looking.
In response, I suggest we offer a better view of what it means to be human, a higher anthropology. When we lead with a biblical anthropology, we accomplish four things.
First, we establish that human beings are much more than their sexual desires and gender identities. According to the true story of reality, humans are the pinnacle of God’s creation (Gen. 1:26–31), his handiwork, made with a purpose (Eph. 2:10). Sex and gender are part of God’s perfect creation, are intrinsically good, and serve a purpose.
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Across India, the anti-Christian forces are growing stronger by the day, and they have many faces, including a white-collar army of lawyers and clerks who file legal complaints against Christian organizations. They also devise devastating social boycotts against isolated Christians in remote villages. According to extensive interviews, Hindu nationalists have blocked Christians from community wells, barred them from visiting Hindu homes and ostracized villagers for believing in Jesus. Last year, in one town, they stopped people from gathering on Christmas.

INDORE, India — The Christians were mid-hymn when the mob kicked in the door.
A swarm of men dressed in saffron poured inside. They jumped onstage and shouted Hindu supremacist slogans. They punched pastors in the head. They threw women to the ground, sending terrified children scuttling under their chairs.
“They kept beating us, pulling out hair,” said Manish David, one of the pastors who was assaulted. “They yelled: ‘What are you doing here? What songs are you singing? What are you trying to do?’”
The attack unfolded on the morning of Jan. 26 at the Satprakashan Sanchar Kendra Christian center in the city of Indore. The police soon arrived, but the officers did not touch the aggressors. Instead, they arrested and jailed the pastors and other church elders, who were still dizzy from getting punched in the head. The Christians were charged with breaking a newly enforced law that targets religious conversions, one that mirrors at least a dozen other measures across the country that have prompted a surge in mob violence against Indian Christians.
Pastor David was not converting anyone, he said. But the organized assault against his church was propelled by a growing anti-Christian hysteria that is spreading across this vast nation, home to one of Asia’s oldest and largest Christian communities, with more than 30 million adherents.
Anti-Christian vigilantes are sweeping through villages, storming churches, burning Christian literature, attacking schools and assaulting worshipers. In many cases, the police and members of India’s governing party are helping them, government documents and dozens of interviews revealed. In church after church, the very act of worship has become dangerous despite constitutional protections for freedom of religion.
To many Hindu extremists, the attacks are justified — a means of preventing religious conversions. To them, the possibility that some Indians, even a relatively small number, would reject Hinduism for Christianity is a threat to their dream of turning India into a pure Hindu nation. Many Christians have become so frightened that they try to pass as Hindu to protect themselves.
“I just don’t get it,” said Abhishek Ninama, a Christian farmer, who stared dejectedly at a rural church stomped apart this year. “What is it that we do that makes them hate us so much?”
The pressure is greatest in central and northern India, where the governing party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is firmly in control, and where evangelical Christian groups are making inroads among lower-caste Hindus, albeit quietly. Pastors hold clandestine ceremonies at night. They conduct secret baptisms. They pass out audio Bibles that look like little transistor radios so that illiterate farmers can surreptitiously listen to the scripture as they plow their fields.
Since its independence in 1947, India has been the world’s largest experiment in democracy. At times, communal violence, often between Hindus and Muslims, has tested its commitment to religious pluralism, but usually the authorities try, albeit sometimes too slowly, to tamp it down.
The issue of conversions to Christianity from Hinduism is an especially touchy subject, one that has vexed the country for years and even drew in Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, who fiercely guarded India’s secular ideals. In the past few years, Mr. Modi and his Hindu nationalist party have tugged India far to the right, away from what many Indians see as the multicultural foundation Nehru built. The rising attacks on Christians, who make up about 2 percent of the population, are part of a broader shift in India, in which minorities feel less safe.
Mr. Modi is facing increasing international pressure to rein in his supporters and stop the persecution of Muslims and Christians. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a government body, recommended that India be put on its red list for “severe violations of religious freedom” — a charge the Modi administration strongly denied.
But across India, the anti-Christian forces are growing stronger by the day, and they have many faces, including a white-collar army of lawyers and clerks who file legal complaints against Christian organizations. They also devise devastating social boycotts against isolated Christians in remote villages. According to extensive interviews, Hindu nationalists have blocked Christians from community wells, barred them from visiting Hindu homes and ostracized villagers for believing in Jesus. Last year, in one town, they stopped people from gathering on Christmas.
“Christians are being suppressed, discriminated against and persecuted at rising levels like never before in India,” said Matias Perttula, the advocacy director at International Christian Concern, a leading anti-persecution group. “And the attackers run free, every time.”
“They Want to Remove Us From Society”
Dilip Chouhan sits in an office behind a copy shop in the small central Indian town of Alirajpur, meaty arms folded across his chest. Above him stretches a poster of a tribal warrior. Mr. Chouhan is part of a growing network of anti-Christian muscle.
Just the mention of Christians makes his face pucker, as if he licked a lemon.
“These ‘believers,’” he said, using the term derisively, “they promise all kinds of stuff — motorcycles, TVs, fridges. They work off superstition. They mislead people.”
Mr. Chouhan lives in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, which this year passed an anti-conversion law that carries prison sentences of up to 10 years for any person found guilty of leading illegal conversions, which are vaguely defined. Energized by this law, Mr. Chouhan, 35, and scores of other young Hindu nationalists have stormed a string of churches. Some of the raids were broadcast on the news, including footage of Mr. Chouhan barging into one church with a shotgun on his back.
He said he wore the gun on his back simply out of “fashion,” and a senior police officer in that area said there would be no charges. Instead, as happened with the Indore episode, several pastors in the ransacked churches were jailed on charges of illegal conversions. Police officials declined to share their evidence.
Mr. Chouhan says his group, which uses WhatsApp to plan its raids on upcoming church services, has 5,000 members. It is part of a constellation of Hindu nationalist organizations across the country, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., as well as many members of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or the B.J.P.
“The B.J.P. is really into this issue, big time,” said Gaurav Tiwari, a party youth leader in Madhya Pradesh.

His B.J.P. comrades in the neighboring state of Chhattisgarh recently conducted several anti-Christian marches during which they belted out: “Converters! Let’s beat them with shoes!” In September, they did exactly that: A throng of young B.J.P. workers from the same chapter barged into a Chhattisgarh police station and hurled shoes at two pastors and beat them up — right in front of police officers.

“I slapped that pastor five or six times,” bragged Rahul Rao, a 34-year-old contractor and officer holder of the B.J.P. youth cell. “It was immensely satisfying.”
In this case, police officers have charged Mr. Rao, who was bailed out by other B.J.P. members. But in many cases, the authorities take the mob’s side.
A recently leaked letter, from a top police official in Chhattisgarh to his underlings, reads: “Keep a constant vigil on the activities of Christian missionaries.”
Another leaked document, from a district administrator in Baghpat, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, last year denied Christians the right to celebrate Christmas at a church. And just a few weeks ago, an esteemed Hindu priest presented, in public, with B.J.P. leaders sharing a stage with him, his remedy for those who try to convert others: beheading.

Christians in states such as Kerala and Goa, which have large historic Christian communities, face much less persecution, if any at all.
But in tradition-bound rural areas where Christians are a tiny minority and community means everything, the pressure is intense.
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