There you shall be kissed by your beloved Saviour.  You shall be allowed to put your arms around Him as you tell Him you love Him. There it won’t be as if loving Him from a distance. There you will be with Him and He will be with you; and He who has loved you with an everlasting love will go on loving you. He who has borne with you through all your sin and failure and faithlessness will still love you when in heaven you are no more faithless and sinful.

The Bible teaches us that before the return of Christ there is a bliss that our souls will enjoy in the presence of Jesus, but that bliss is not the full glory to come when God makes a new heaven and a new earth.
What will it be like?  I want to name 5 things that will characterize the heaven to come.
First, there will be an end to everything that is evil.

No more aches and pains,
no more weakness and tiredness,
no more disease,
no more brokenness or disability,
no more confusion or memory loss,
no more wicked perversions,
no more haters of God,
no more idol worship,
no more heresy,
no more blaspheming the precious name of Jesus,
no more weariness in worship,
no more hard heartedness in praying,
no more rebellion,
no more dishonesty and stealing,
no more anger or disappointment or misunderstandings or broken relationships.
no more covetousness, but only contentment.
no more sadness and tears, but only joy.

Second, perfection.  What I have already described may sound like perfection, but in heaven there will be something more than the absence of all that is wrong.  Our bodies and our souls shall be made perfect. Right now “eye hath not seen or ear heard the things which God had prepared for them that love him.” Our eyes can’t see, but then we will be able to see.
Think for a moment about what it will mean to have glorified bodies. A blind man can be told about the beauties of God’s creation.  You can tell him, for example, about a sunrise, and about the beauty of spring. Similarly you can tell him about mountain ranges, prairies, flowing rivers and waterfalls; but you can’t make him see. So what if one day he could see? Then he would understand in a way he could never before.
Or think about the deaf man who can’t understand the beauty of music, and so with sign language you try to help him understand. But he can’t understand unless you can make him hear.
In heaven there are things we will see with eyes that can see. There we will hear with ears that can hear. Such a change will come over us that it will be like a blind man given sight and like a deaf man able to hear. We shall hear perfect heavenly music with perfect ears.  We shall see heavenly sights with perfect eyes. It won’t merely be that heaven shall be many thousand times more glorious than this world, but there our bodies will have the capacity to take it in and enjoy it.
Third, knowledge.  When you have found something that interests you you love to learn.  The process of discovery and accumulating knowledge is wonderful. But all of it pales beside the knowledge of Christ!  You take up your Bible, and its wonderful how it leads you into a great knowledge of your beloved. In those moments perhaps you say to yourself, “O His mouth is sweet.” Sometimes as you have meditated on the truths of Scripture, and as you have turned your eyes and thoughts toward heaven
you have caught a glimpse of Christ.   And seeing Him by faith you were overcome by joy.
Richard Baxter asks, “Christian when after long gazing heavenward, thou hast got a glimpse of Christ, dost thou not sometimes seem to have been with Paul in the third heaven… and to have seen what is unutterable?  Art thou not with Peter ready to say Master it is I good to be here… Didst thou never look so long upon the Sun of righteousness till thine eyes were dazzled with his astonishing glory?  Did not the splendour of it make all things below seem black and dark to thee?” He then added, “But, This knowledge which have given you such heights of joy and wonder  is as nothing to what you shall know; it scare in comparison of that deserves to be called knowledge…”
In heaven you will know things you can’t now imagine. Here you have been scratching the surface of the riches and the majesty of Christ, and you have called it excellent. But then you shall learn what knowledge is.
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When we create our identities by our own individual fiat rather than receive our identities from God’s words of life, we create counter-creations, fictional worlds which have no correspondence to what is real and true and good. The great misconception, however, is that Christians affirm that God hates us, when in reality it is that God hates our hatred of the good words he has spoken. The great irony of holding that God’s speech is hate speech is that such disdain for God’s word is hatred for the only words which present the world to us as it actually is, who we truly are, and how deeply we are loved.

The sacred season of “Pride,” the month-long panoply of indulgence and identity, recently came to a close. Through it all, many Christians have remained publicly steadfast to orthodox commitments to biblical sexuality.
In America, we saw the campaign to establish “Fidelity Month,” which sought to honor commitments to marriage vows, the family, and one’s community. We also witnessed Christians confidently expressing their convictions through Target boycotts, calling out BudLight, and lending support to a US Supreme Court case which sided with religious liberty over the LGBTQ movement’s tyranny of conscience.
But even as Christians must remain bold in their public witness, we should take seriously the questions our society often raises against our faith. Our testimony to a lost world can never merely be, “God’s word is right, and you are wrong. So repent!”
This is always essential, but we should also take seriously the deeply existential questions about whether the Christian faith is actually true, good, and desirable. Then we must offer good-faith arguments not only for why God’s words are actually true, but also demonstrate compelling reasons why they are both believable and present a way of life in the world that is actually inhabitable and leads to flourishing. Such is the task of apologetics for the Christian faith.
Are God’s Words Hate Speech?
In the wake of a month in which our whole culture is hyper in-tune to issues of gender and injustice, one timely question we need to take seriously is, “Are God’s words actually hate speech?” If what God has spoken is perceived to marginalize, deadname, or nullify someone’s chosen pronouns, surely those words must be hateful, right?
Many today certainly think so. In a society enthralled with self-pronounced identity, any limits on what one can desire or attain is deemed an injustice. So, it is no surprise that what God has spoken is quickly discarded as hateful and beyond the pale of what polite society can tolerate. In a plot twist which would be deeply ironic if it were not so shocking, many in our society have turned to Satan—whether they actually believe in him or not—because he offers complete affirmation of one’s desires and self-expression.
In the rest of this article, let us consider what God has spoken, if he is indeed hateful, and how we Christians might speak God’s words of life in a world of death.
The Subjectivity of Hate Speech
Hate speech is notoriously difficult to define. We all tend to have a sense that it is wrong to be hateful towards someone else. But what does it mean to hate something, and do we each have a right not to be hated for the way that we are or the things that we do? A simple definition might be that hate involves disdain or severe disapproval towards something. But are such sentiments themselves always wrong? In certain cases, it seems clear that there are things we should indeed hate, like the killing of innocent persons or taking advantage of the vulnerable. God himself, who says he is truly loving, hates these things (Prov. 6:12-15).
The great debate of our times seems to be not whether to hate, but what to hate. Our culture ironically tends to express great hatred towards perceived bigotry or religious intolerance. In such instances, we do not seem to be ridding society of hate so much as we are flipping the script on those that we think are showing hatred, by choosing to actually hate them ourselves.
Opposing what many today identify as hate speech does not involve true tolerance, but rather demanding everybody get with the program and accept only the sanctioned beliefs of good and evil. So, identifying something as “hate speech” is often just a veiled moral judgment of our own that we do not like what someone else is saying about us.
So, what about when it comes to what God has said? Does God hate me when he says things that I think cannot possibly be true or good? We might perceive such words as hateful, but are they really and how can I tell?
Our culture has devised a disastrous stalemate, in which the standoff between our own self-perceptions of what is hateful and whether God’s words are actually hateful in reality cannot be arbitrated. We have so elevated the individual as the supreme source of moral good and meaningful identity, that nothing can trump the self. Our mantras show this is so: “You do you” and “Be true to yourself” or “Live your truth.”
It seems that the only way forward is to invite the skeptic to step into the world God’s words create and see for themselves if there is life and love within it.
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This passage belongs to the coming of the kingdom, but it is emphasizing a certain aspect of this kingdom that comes in various stages. And part of this kingdom is judgment, particularly judgment upon Jerusalem and the nation of Israel. In light of this, the most plausible understanding of this passage is that it is a reference to Jesus coming in a form of judgment upon Israel—specifically in AD 70. Jesus repeatedly foretold the judgment that would befall Israel in the Gospel of Matthew (21:1-22; 21:28–22:14; 23:29-36; 23:37–24:1),[21] and it seems that this fits that theme. Jesus is referring to the fact that He would come and bring destruction upon the nation that rejected Him.

One of the more challenging passages in the New Testament is Matthew 10:23, where Jesus tells His disciples:
When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. (ESV)
This verse is rooted in the context of Jesus sending out the twelve. So the question arises—to what time was Jesus referring? There have been a variety of exegetical conclusions made about this passage, and the purpose of this article will be to look at the different understandings and provide our own analysis of the text.
Contextual Background
Matthew 10:23 places us in the middle of Jesus’ Galilean ministry. In the beginning of chapter 10, Jesus commissions the twelve disciples and sends them out by twos to minister without Him. They are given instructions not to go outside of Galilee or the Jewish people (Matthew 10:5-6).[1] The purpose for the restriction to only the Jewish people, the “house of Israel” (οἶκου Ἰσραήλ), seems to be redemptive-historical.[2] Jesus limited the disciples’ mission for a time, but He Himself went deliberately to the Gentile areas in order to prepare His disciples for their later universal mission.[3]
The content of the disciples’ message was the proclamation of the kingdom of heaven by which they would call men to repentance and confirm their message by various signs and wonders (Matthew 10:8). They were to be supported by those to whom they ministered, and they were not required to bring additional provisions for their journey. Jesus instructed them to bless the houses that welcomed them but to shake the dust off their feet when they were rejected. Those who would reject them were unworthy of the gospel of the kingdom, and the disciples did not have to cast their pearls before such swine.[4]
In Matthew 10:16-23, Jesus expands His discussion not only to the immediate mission, but to the universal mission of the church. In this text, He prophetically warns His followers of the severe opposition and rejection they will face. They will be delivered over to the courts, flogged in the synagogues, and dragged before governors and kings to bear “witness before them and the Gentiles” (10:18). These prophetic warnings were amply fulfilled in sacred church history (Acts 4:1-22; 5:17-41; 6:12-8:3; 12:1-19; 16:19-40; 21:27-28:31), as well as later church history. Jesus encouraged the disciples to not worry in those times because He would give them the Holy Spirit who would speak through them. They would not be left without a comforter and guide. The Spirit of God would empower them to proclaim the gospel boldly. Jesus’ discussion on division within families (Matthew 10:21-22) describes a scene where things get progressively worse, where followers of Christ will be pressured from all sides to deny the Christ. And it is here in this immediate context that we come upon this peculiar text where Jesus tells his disciples that they will not finish going through the towns of Israel until He comes (10:23).
Different Interpretations of Matthew 10:23
In his commentary on Matthew, D. A. Carson lists at least seven different interpretations of this passage. It is not our purpose here to interact with all of them but to briefly survey some of the most popular views.
First, there are some who have advocated that Jesus is simply telling the disciples that they would not go through all of the cities until He came back to them. In other words, Jesus was referring to the moment that He would rejoin them after the immediate mission.[5] However, this view is problematic at least for two reasons. First, although Jesus discusses the immediate mission of the disciples in 10:6-15, verses 16-22 discuss a broader scope of mission. These verses include persecution and other themes that suggest a time beyond the immediate mission of the twelve. To place verse 23 back into the discussion of the immediate mission is to misplace it contextually. Second, to follow this line of reasoning (that verse 23 is a reference to Jesus’ rejoining the disciples after the immediate mission), then it is hard to see how verses 16-22 of chapter 10 are fulfilled. There is little, if any, evidence to suggest that the disciples faced extreme persecution during that mission.[6] The flow of the context, and the fact that no indication of persecution took place during this time, renders this view unlikely.
Second, others have interpreted this “coming of the Son of Man” as a reference to Jesus’ public identification as the Messiah at the resurrection. John Calvin connected Jesus’ coming to His aiding the disciples in their mission to Judea by the power of the Holy Spirit.[7] It is true that Jesus does discuss His “coming” through the work and power of the Holy Spirit—particularly in the Gospel of John (see John 14:18; 16:16, 22). However, this view does not seem to be the best interpretation. It does consider the persecution to some degree, but it fails to address the urgency in the text—“truly I say to you” (ἀμήν γάρ λέγω). In addition, the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples at Pentecost, which occurred before much of the persecution of the disciples took place—effectively arguing for the opposite of what Matthew 10:23 says, that persecution would come first and then the Son of Man would come. Finally, it is important to note that the person of the Holy Spirit is not a major theme in the Gospel of Matthew, thus making this interpretation less likely to be correct.[8]
A third and prominent view of this passage is to look at it from a future eschatological perspective, so that in some way Jesus was referring to His second coming. Some advocates would actually see a double fulfillment, in that Jesus was speaking in a form of prophetic shorthand. There is certainly some warrant for this interpretation because we have numerous examples in the Old Testament prophets of this kind of prophecy.[9] However, just because there are examples of double fulfillment does not mean that every passage in question must be viewed in this way. It is difficult to infer that this is the case here. For one thing, Jesus is speaking to the disciples and their experience when they are enduring persecution.
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