Our goal is not to be caught up to Heaven. Our goal is to attain immortality. Immortality has to be attained by keeping God's commandments.

The only people who will attain immortality are those who persist in doing good, that is, in keeping God's commandments, by pressing into Christ each day, presenting our body a living sacrifice.

Today's teaching that on the basis of taking the "four steps of salvation" we will be caught up to Heaven at any moment is false doctrine. It is ruining the moral character of the Christian churches. Let God's faithful leaders abandon this mythology, pointing out to their flocks the damage done by such a notion.

Satan will do anything to keep us from pressing into God, from keeping God's commandments. Satan and death are our enemies. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is physical death. All other enemies must be destroyed before immortality can be gained by us.

Let us not be among those who are living casually, supposing eternal life is a legal position they have gained by an initial declaration of belief in Jesus Christ.

Eternal life consists of the attributes we have listed above. It is a quality of life, not a legal state of endless existence.

Immortality is that which was lost in the Garden of Eden and which we can recover by pressing into the living Jesus, being changed in personality and behavior until we exhibit the characteristics of eternal life.

Evangelical theology has been built on an eternal foundation, the Lordship and atoning blood of Jesus Christ. On this sure foundation has been constructed a structure that is not nearly as eternal, not nearly as scriptural.

The careful scholar can notice the inroads the philosophy of Humanism has made into Christian thinking. But it appears the major contributor to the doctrinal disaster has been the philosophy of Gnosticism, with its emphasis on the residence of the inward, spiritual nature of man in the spirit world.

In our day the influence of Gnosticism has all but destroyed one of the central goals of our redemption, which is the physical resurrection from the dead of our human body. The fact that Jesus Christ came forth from the cave of Joseph of Arimathea as a firstfruits of what we can expect has not maintained its place as an integral aspect of the blessed hope of the Christian Church.

The Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which is the good news that the material creation shall be brought into the glorious liberty of the children of God and redeemed human beings will stand once again on the earth in bodies of flesh and bones, has been converted to a mystical rise of spirits to mansions of gold, acres of diamonds, golden slippers, and harps in the spirit Paradise.

Of all the truths in need of being restored to Christians, none is more important than the scriptural fact that their daily conduct is determining the kind of resurrection they will attain, and it is their resurrection to life on the earth that is their destiny, not mansions in the spirit world.

It is only as we are filled with the eternal Life of God that we are eligible for immortality, for endless life in the marvelous flesh and bones body which God has given to mankind and, as far as we know, to no other of the kinds of creatures He has brought forth. (from Life and Immortality)