All Dogs Go To Heaven

Anyone who has owned a pet that died has probably wondered, "Will I ever see my pet again?" Well, perhaps the Bible offers some hope for all you pet owners out there.

In the Apostle Paul's letter to the Corinthians, he goes to great lengths to correct false beliefs about bodily resurrection. In the midst of Paul's discourse, it seems as though he implies bodily resurrection of animals! Read the passage below:

³⁵ But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” ³⁶ How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. ³⁷ When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. ³⁸ But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. ³⁹ Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another.
1 Corinthians 15:35-39 (NIV)

Paul stresses the point that we need to die before we can be resurrected, and that the bodies we will be given will be according to the "kind of seed" that was planted, or the "type of flesh" that we have. He doesn't include "black-skinned, red-skinned, or yellow-skinned" in his examples of the sorts of flesh there are.... instead, he lists human flesh along side that of animals, birds, and fish!

It's far from an explicit teaching on animal after life, but when taken in combination with testimonies of near-death experiences in which people have seen their pets in heaven, it makes the probability pretty likely that we will surely one day be reunited with our dearly beloved animals.