Movie Spoiler for the film - HEAVEN IS FOR REAL. The movie opens in Lithuania, with a young girl starting to paint a portrait. The story then shifts to Imperial, Nebraska where Todd Burpo (Greg Kinnear) is installing a garage door for a warehouse.
Based on a bestselling book by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent, "Heaven is for Real" tells the story of how Burpo's 4-year old son, Colton (Connor Corum) visited Heaven and lived to tell of its pleasures. Colton didn't actually die; he was just under some really good anesthesia during an appendectomy.
In pastor Todd Burpo's book, he recounts that his son Colton saw Lucifer in Heaven. He said that Satan was not yet stuck in Hell and that there was a war in Heaven where all the angels (including Todd) would need to fight.
The description continues: “Told by the Colton's father often in Colton's own words, the disarmingly simple message is that heaven is a real place, Jesus really loves children, and to be ready ... there is a coming last battle.” The Hollywood movie version may not include that ominous note about the coming apocalypse.
During the interview, Colton describes seeing the coming Armageddon while he was in Heaven. He says that he saw his dad fighting in the battle as one of the "good people" who were going against the "bad people."
It is primarily God's dwelling place in the biblical tradition: a parallel realm where everything operates according to God's will. Heaven is a place of peace, love, community, and worship, where God is surrounded by a heavenly court and other heavenly beings.
Kramarik is a self-taught painter and says that Jesus spoke to her when she was four years old, encouraging her to draw and paint her visions. She began to draw at the age of four, was painting at six, and began to write poetry at seven. At the age of 8 years old, Akiane painted Jesus.
For many scholars, Revelation 1:14-15 offers a clue that Jesus's skin was a darker hue and that his hair was woolly in texture. The hairs of his head, it says, "were white as white wool, white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace.”
Emmanuel Segatashya was a pagan farm boy with no schooling and no religious education. He was raised a "dirt-poor" peasant, and had hardly left his farm before his visitation and subsequent agreement with Jesus to tell his messages. The very first message that Segatashya clearly understood was a request.
Colton sees the painting and his jaw drops. He tells his dad that painting is of the Jesus he saw in Heaven. The movie then ends with title cards saying that Todd is still the pastor of the church in Nebraska, the Burpo's have had another son, and Colton is now a teenager, but Cassie says he is no angel.
The Lithuanian painting girl who appears at the beginning and ending of the movie, played by Ursula Clark, is based on the real-life Akiane Kramarik (born in July 9, 1994, in Mount Morris, Illinois), a girl who affirmed to have experienced an NDE and to have met Jesus in heaven.
In the end, Kawakami's Heaven morphs into a clutch of questions that have been lingering at the back of the narrator's mind since the beginning. The past and the future merge at the end, blocking the future as Kawakami presses the readers into the present.
According to the Biblical account, the Holy Spirit visited Simeon and revealed to him that he would not die until he had seen the Christ of God.
According to the Gospels, Mary, a virgin betrothed to Joseph, conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit – and therefore Christians consider Jesus the Son of God. However, most Christians understand Joseph to be a true father in every way except biological, since Joseph was the legal father who raised Jesus.
In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene found the tomb empty and informed Peter. She then saw two angels, after which Jesus himself appeared to her. In the evening, Jesus appeared to the other followers, followed by another appearance a week later.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
WE LEARN in the New Testament that Jesus ate fish from the Sea of Galilee, and, after the resurrection, that he even cooked fish and bread over coals for himself and his disciples (John 21.9). “We certainly know that Jesus ate clean unpolluted fish almost every day of his life,” Colbert concludes.
This looks like one of those unanswerable questions, but it turns out that the Mormons – and the leaders of the American "Prosperity Gospel" movement – believe they know the answer: God is about 6' 2" tall.
There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are explicitly called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus' appearance in the Old or New Testaments.
Genesis 18:1-3 explained that God appeared to Abraham as a man, and in Ezekiel 1:26-28, it's a similar scenario: “And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above ...
In fact, the Bible indicates we will know each other more fully than we do now. The Apostle Paul declared, "Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). It's true that our appearance will change, because God will give us new bodies, similar to Jesus' resurrection body.
7. The reunion of believing loved ones. When Paul writes to believers who grieve the loss of a loved one, he offers them this comfort: “We who are still alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:17, emphasis mine).
According to Dr. Mortimer, heaven lay within the sun as a vast globe, “at least 500,000 miles in diameter.”
The Gospel of Matthew (2:1–12) speaks of Magi, or wise men, who followed a star from the East to Bethlehem in search of a newborn king. There they found Mary and the baby Jesus and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.