Will we see our beloved pets in heaven?
THE ANIMALS: God’s Gift to Man
You’ve just lost your friend. He, you now know, meant far more to you than you ever realized while he was alive. No longer will your friend bounce cheerily up to you with his favorite toy in his mouth, or rub lovingly against your leg, seeking no more or less from you than a few words of baby talk and a scratch behind the ear. Your old companion of many years, perhaps a dog you chose from a litter more than a decade ago, has passed away from the ravages of age. Maybe the bright-eyed cat who was your constant shadow when you were doing things of interest has just been hit by a car in the street not far from your front door. Their hearts have been stopped by death, the ultimate fate of every living thing—but your heart beats on sadly within a void that, it seems, can never be filled.
Regardless of where you try to turn your thoughts, no matter how you try to busy yourself, the memories both recent and distant flood your mind and make the emptiness more painful. You remember the enthusiastic greeting that met you when you returned home. You go over in your mind the silly ways your friend reacted to your attentions. Your throat constricts with emotion, and the tears come—whether the remembrances are of the last time you had to use harsh words and corrective measures, or of the sparkling, dancing eyes and happy grins of playful joy the last time the two of you engaged in a mutually favorite game. The thoughts just keep coming.
There comes a time when your friend’s absence becomes less agonizing, the many thoughts and words of consolation having mercifully helped you get past the worst of it. It is a time the injury caused by the awful loss is no longer an open wound, but tender scar tissue that can be abrased open by finding a toy behind the sofa or in a bush along the corner of the fence. At such a moment, you might glance toward that other corner of the yard, where the now down-sifting mound of raw earth disrupts the grass. The thought of your beloved friend lying lifeless beneath the dirt there brings a wince and more tears. You’ve thought about it before, but now you are able to better govern your emotions, enabling you to focus your thoughts for deeper consideration.
What about animals? Do they have spirits?
Is there a Heaven for our dear little animal friends?
Your friend, you remember, would look at you on many occasions when your eyes met, and you knew there was intelligence; there was emotion, feeling, and genuine love in that instant of two-way communication. Many of your human friends, probably most of them—especially those who have no pets—sympathize with your loss. Nonetheless, you sense they consider your deep love for your pet-friend to be perhaps just a bit silly.
“I know it was just like a member of your family,” your human friend might say, uncomprehending. He or she cannot understand that the one you’ve lost is not an “it,” nor “like” a member of the family. Your friend was a member of your family. The feelings, the communications, the understanding that passed between you and your pet-friend had a spiritual quality that transcended mere human-animal contact. You say to yourself in the quietness of that empty place in your heart: “They can’t just die and that’s the end of them.”
This writing admittedly springs from such an empty spot, the author having recently lost as close a friend as one could have. At such a time it is easy, through upset emotional senses, to philosophize—perhaps a better word in this case would be theologize—that I will see my wonderful bulldog friend in a future where time is meaningless and death is unknown. But the thought that Buckley and I can be together again is not, I think, based purely upon blind emotion or sheer wistfulness, an issue my friend Tom Hom has authoritatively addressed in our first chapter. This is not to imply that I believe our animal-friends have spirits or souls in the same sense that human beings have souls. I believe, however, like Tom and many others, that the pets we love so much, with whom we’ve shared such deep feelings of devotion in two-way spiritual communication, can achieve life after death. The animals, you see, were created for us.
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field…(Genesis 2:18-20a).
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26-28).
It is so very important to understand that the animal world was created for us… that our pets exist for the pleasure our love for them gives us.
FOREVER FRIENDS – Dana Neel
Pet lovers … will find great hope and comfort in the realization that our pets are not “things” to be merely counted among the inventory of “earthly treasures” we accumulate.
God uses pets (and in fact all animals) in a number of ways to bring about His eternal purposes during life as we know it on Earth. He can use them to shape our character, to show us compassion, and to provide us with companionship. He can use them to provide us with joy, to teach us responsibility, and to demonstrate unconditional love. He can even use them to physically save someone’s life!
So, considering all that’s wrapped up in our surprisingly complex and obviously God-ordained relationships with our pets, it’s a blessing beyond measure to know that they will continue to be part of His eternal plan for us even after they (and we) die—treasures in Heaven, indeed!
CONCLUSION BUT NOT THE END! — Terry James
… Man’s involvement with the animal—man’s love for the animal world—is the tie that seems to link the Creator with His two distinct created beings, man and animal.
And to repeat further, it is absolutely imperative that we believe God when He says that He gave us—mankind—dominion over the animal kingdom. It is essential to understand and believe that God meant what He said when He saw fit to inform us that He created us, made us, in His own image. Because that truth came from the Creator’s own mind, we can be sure that He intended our ultimate destiny, our life after death, to include eternal powers not unlike His own. To have dominion over a thing is to have power over it.
Remember that the Almighty Creator told us in the book of Ecclesiastes that both man and animal have physical bodies that die and return to the dust. The spirit of man at death goes upward, that is, it never stays with the body that returns to dust. Man’s spirit returns to God because He, the Creator, has dominion, or power, over His creation, man. The spirit of the beast (or animal) goes into the ground to be with the body that returns to dust. But take heart! The important thing to know is that just as man has a spirit, so the animal has a spirit.
The spirit of the animal is obviously different from the soul of man, but the animal, God’s Word says, has a spirit.
God also says, in many instances, that He calls the souls of those whom He loves and who also love Him to return to Him upon physical death. The spirit He gave, He has the power and the right to receive unto Himself again.
God has said in very specific terms that He made man in His own image. He then made the animals, but determined in His omniscience to give man dominion, that is power, over the beasts of the Earth, each of whom has a spirit. God, in His all-knowing will, for His own good purposes, gave man God-likeness, which will reach its full potential only when God and man reunite for eternity.
ls there life after death for our pets?
When we look into the sweet faces of those furry little family members, their wide eyes so trusting, so happy to take in all the love we can give them, can there be any doubt that the love is a mutual thing? Can there be any question that those delightful moments of the loving, understanding come from a thing much more profound than mere physical attraction?
The Creator’s Word tells us: “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him…” (1 Cor. 2:9).
ls there life after death for the pets we love? I’m counting on it!
Fur-Ever Friends by Terry James and Dana Neel is an excerpt from Do Our Pets Go to Heaven?
