As a leader who works with teenagers, I am familiar with tough questions about God and the Bible. Students are always looking for answers, questioning everything. All this spiritual curiosity is a great thing. However, there are two temptations I have to work really hard to avoid: 1) giving pat answers from the Bible as if it were a quick reference of answers to spiritual questions, and 2) preemptively giving answers to questions that no one is really asking.
Unfortunately, in Answers to Your Questions about Heaven, David Jeremiah falls into both of these traps on multiple occasions. I estimate that only about fifty percent of this book is really useful for those who are seeking answers on this subject.
Jeremiah holds a premillennialist view of the end times, which is completely fine. Except that he follows the same prescribed path of cherry-picking verses to paint a “complete” picture of heaven that many premillennialists follow to paint a comprehensive picture of the end times. In the process, he ignores the narrative, symbolic, and poetic context of many verses, and treats prophetic writings like a series of sound bites from a fortune teller instead of unique genre of biblical literature.
He also makes the bold, and not-really-accurate claim that premillennialism is the oldest end-times view. The historical reality is much more complex than that, and here the simplistic nature of this answer book becomes really apparent.
The book is organized like a FAQ page, with questions stated and brief answers given. In his effort to be comprehensive yet fast-paced, Jeremiah veers into over-simplification and proof-texting. He also raises and attempts to answer questions that few people wonder about beyond those who really “nerd out” on eschatology. For example, who cares about heaven’s “light source?”
There are some bright spots in this book. The section on angels and demons is good and many will find it useful. Also, the sections entitled “Won’t Heaven Be Boring?” and “What about the Children?” are really helpful as well.
I can’t say I can recommend this book on its own merits. Maybe I could recommend it as one piece of a larger study on heaven, but on its own it could potentially do more harm than good. The narration of the audiobook version by Bob Souer is only so-so. He sounds like a text-to-speech program sometimes and paired with the trite nature of the answers this book often provides, it all comes across as lifeless and robotic.
Please Note: This audiobook was gifted as a part of the Christianaudio Reviewers Program in exchange for my unbiased review of this work. This has in no way influenced my opinion or review of this work. More information can be found about this and other Christian audiobooks at christianaudio.com.