Will Our Pets Be In Heaven Waiting For Us? A Meditation on Creation

If you, like me, love dogs and cats, you’ve probably wondered what happens to them when they die. This question was again in my mind yesterday as our beloved black Lab, Twister, died of a ruptured spleen.

He was such a handsome black Lab. This was taken on the Friday before his passing late Monday.

We rescued Twister when he was five after his master, who used him as a gun dog and mostly kept him in a crate when not hunting, went into the hospital for a routine operation and never came out. Twister was in a kennel for more than a month before we were told about him by a friend from church.

When we first met, Twister came around a corner in the kennel office, surveyed the room in which there were five or six people, then made a beeline to me and jumped up with his front legs on my chest. It took about two nano-seconds for Twister to win my heart and me to say “we’ll take him.” He loved Claudee the same way. What a wonderful blessing he was to both of us.

That smiling face in the foreground is Twister, my sweet Buddy-Boy. RIP.

Twister was our fourth Lab and every one of them had a distinct personality of likes, habits and oddities. Our cat, Cuddles, was also one in a million in terms of her personality.

And Gomer, my rambunctious Heinz 57 Lab/Shepherd/Lord-Knows-What when I was a kid growing up in Oklahoma, well, God only made one Gomer. Same with Caesar the black cat who insisted on sleeping with me under the covers. Such blessings in my childhood.

I don’t know the definitive answer to the question of what happens to animals when they die. I do think it’s too easy to become merely sentimental, or apathetic, even dismissive, about them.

The most common opinion in our secularist, scientific materialist culture is likely that, like we humans, nothing happens to them, they die, they are gone, back to the dust from which they came.

After all, as Richard Dawkins writes, “the universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

I think the consensus opinion is very likely quite wrong for two reasons. First, God is a purposeful creator. Don’t forget that Genesis tells us the Lord made the animals before He made Adam and that He tasked Adam with naming the animals. They were in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, so it stands to reason that when God restores His original perfection that the animals will also be there.

And second, it seems self-evident that scientific materialism cannot explain the origin of human emotions like joy, grief, and all the rest. Chemicals and forces do not think or laugh or cry. We do those things for a reason. And don’t forget in whose image we are all made.  Think about that the next time you laugh or cry.


 

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10 Comments

  1. Radcraft on September 21, 2021 at 11:13 am

    I have to believe that any heaven worthy of the name will include all those we love.

  2. JuanitaThompson on September 21, 2021 at 11:27 am

    I know scripture says nothing about the animals going to heaven. I also know God loves His creation and everything in it even more than we do. We’ve had, and still have, critters that we love and care for. They break our hearts when they go. I hope they’ll be in heaven when I get there. All of them. Even the ones I never met. I’m so sorry about Twister. He was, and is, a very good boy. ❤

  3. Robert L Clippard on September 21, 2021 at 11:30 am

    “God will prepare everything
    for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he’ll be there.”
    Billy Graham
    – [ ]

  4. Johanna Hopkins on September 21, 2021 at 12:32 pm

    Yes, Twister will be there. I recommend the book, “Cold noses at the Pearly Gates”. They were created before sin came into the world. And since sin brought death, the animals were not created to die.

    • Mark Tapscott on September 21, 2021 at 12:59 pm

      Thanks, Johanna, that accords with my own thinking this morning.

  5. R. G. Newbury on September 21, 2021 at 12:34 pm

    “”If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” ― Will Rogers

  6. Courton Voorhies on September 21, 2021 at 1:31 pm

    This discussion reminds me of one of my most favorite Twilight Zone episodes, “The Hunt”, in which Rod Serling concludes the tale thusly:

    Narrator: Travelers to unknown regions would be well-advised to take along the family dog. He could just save you from entering the wrong gate. At least, it happened that way once – in a mountainous area of the Twilight Zone.

  7. James W Burke Jr on September 21, 2021 at 4:42 pm

    Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.

    John Galsworthy — Memories

  8. Lorin Johnson on September 24, 2021 at 4:58 pm

    There are horses in heaven…Jesus will ride one in the end times. I don’t see why there wouldn’t be other animals.

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