A radio preacher, speaking about a Christian woman whose Christian husband had died, said, “Little did she know that when she hugged her husband that morning, she would never hug him again.”

Though the preacher’s words were well intentioned, they were not true. He could have said, “She’d never again hug her husband in this life,” or better, “She would not be able to hug her husband again until the next world.” Because of the coming resurrection of the dead, we will be able to hug each other again—on the New Earth.

Someone might say, “We all know what the preacher meant.” But I’m not sure we really do—or that he really did. I’m not trying to be picky, but we need to carefully reform our vocabulary to express what’s actually true. If we don’t, we will ultimately fail to think biblically and continue to embrace predominant stereotypes of Heaven.

“That’s the last time I’ll ever see him in his body,” a man said of his son who died. No. Because they were both Christians, they will see each other again in their resurrection bodies.

“I’ll never see my daughter again on this earth.” But if she is a believer, and you are, then the statement is wrong. You will see her again on this earth. You and she will be transformed, and the earth will be transformed, but it will still really be you and your daughter on an Earth that really is the same Earth.

We do not just say what we believe—we end up believing what we say. That’s why I propose that we should consciously correct our vocabulary so it conforms to revealed biblical truth. It’s hard for us to think accurately about the New Earth because we’re so accustomed to speaking of Heaven as the opposite of Earth. It may be difficult to retrain ourselves, but we should do it. We must teach ourselves to embrace the principle of continuity of people and the earth in the coming resurrection that Scripture teaches.

Because ethereal notions of Heaven have largely gone unchallenged, we often think of Heaven as less real and less substantial than life here and now. (Hence, we don’t think of Heaven as a place where people will hug, and certainly not in these bodies.) But in Heaven we won’t be shadow people living in shadowlands—to borrow C. S. Lewis’s imagery. Instead, we’ll be fully alive and fully physical in a fully physical universe.

In one sense, we’ve never seen our friend’s body as truly as we will see it in the eternal Heaven. We’ve never been hugged here as meaningfully as we’ll be hugged there. And we’ve never known this earth to be all that we will then know it to be.

Jesus Christ died to secure for us a resurrected life on a resurrected Earth. Let’s be careful to speak of it in terms that deliver us from our misconceptions and do justice to the greatness of Christ’s redemptive work.