Heaven will be a place of continuous learning, growing, and development. By nature, humans are finite, and that is how it always will be. While we will have an incredible capacity to learn, we will never come to the end of learning. Knowing everything would be more like Hell than Heaven. We need progress, we need hope, and we need to look forward to knowing something new tomorrow that we don’t know today. Mystery is the food of the mind. If we truly said “I have seen everything” as Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, we would conclude as did the author of Ecclesiastes that “all is vanity.” Only omnipotence can bear the burden of omniscience. Only God’s shoulders are strong enough to carry the burden of infinite knowledge without losing the joy.

Here’s a couple of things you should think about when you think about the notion of whether Heaven is going to be boring. To begin with, we will never in Heaven come to the end of exploring our Creator. Imagine finally beginning to get a handle on how God is one in nature and three in person, or how Jesus can at once be fully God and fully man. Imagine exploring the depths of God’s love, wisdom and holiness. Imagine forever growing in our capacities to fathom his immensity, immutability, and incomprehensibility. And to top it all off, the more we come to know Him, the more there will be to know.

We also will never come to an end of exploring the Creator’s creative handiwork. The universe will literally be our playground. Even if we were capable of exhausting the “new heaven and new earth”, God could create brand-new vistas for us to explore.

One final point, we in heaven will never come to the end of exploring fellow Christians. Our ability to appreciate one another will be enhances exponentially, and it will always express itself more freely and in more diverse ways. Imagine being able to love another human being without even a tinge of selfishness.

Well will Heaven be boring? Absolutely not! We will learn without error––but make no mistake about this, we will learn, we will grow, and we will develop. I forgot who said this but someone made a great analogy when they said, “We in Heaven will remain like the tiny figures in a Chinese landscape, small subjects in an enormously larger objective world.” Far from being dead and dull, heaven will be an exhilarating, exciting, experience that will never come to an end. Now if that’s true we should fix our eyes not on passing vanities but rather on eternal verities. We should have an eternal perspective.

For further information on this topic, please see my Complete Bible Answer Book, and my new CD or DVD resource Heaven: What is it? All available at our website of www.equip.org

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Complete Bible Answer Book

In truth there is little warrant for delighting in this alleged discrepancy. Indeed an array of resolutions rules out Bart’s dogmatic declaration that these passages stand in contradiction.

First, at the risk of pressing the text into a wooden literal labyrinth it should be noted that the words “all the livestock” are qualified by the phrase, “in the field.” (Ex. 9:3) As such a consistent literalist ought to suppose that all other livestock would be spared.

Furthermore, it might credibly be argued that the word “all” can be used in less than an exhaustive sense. For example, when Scripture tells us that all the people of Jerusalem went out to John the Baptist (Mark 1:5) no ones supposes that every single person without exception went to see the prophet. Likewise, when broadcasters gush that “everyone was following Tiger Woods during this past Masters,” I seriously doubt that anyone supposed that no one was following the leaders.

Finally, while the solutions offered above are more than sufficient, a range of other solutions can be deduced. For example, it’s quite plausible that the Egyptian slave owners having lost their horses and their donkeys would have absconded with some of the livestock of the slaves.

The bottom line is this: it is more than a little baffling that Bart would want to hang his hat on such a tired old canard. The Bible and Christian doctrine is under assault. To help equip you I’ve developed a new resource called Memorable Keys to Essential Christian D-O-C-T-R-I-N-E. It’s available at our Website at www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.