Animals in Heaven

Where do our pets go when they die, do they get into heaven? Do animals have souls?

Animals will certainly be part of the earth’s fauna right through the Millennium, as we saw earlier in an earlier post on this subject. Isaiah 11, 1-10.

However, I have never come across any suggestion in scripture that animals have souls which can survive death.

The Bible does attribute “nephesh” to them, the Hebrew word meaning life, in the sense of a living soul, with a mind, but this does not of itself mean that their “mental personality” will continue after death, as we are repeatedly told ours will.

God’s decision in Genesis 1 26, after he had made the animals, was to make a creature “in his own image” which was us. (So the previous creatures, the animals, weren’t “in his image”.)

Ecclesiastes 3 11 says God has set eternity in the hearts of men. Perhaps this is part of the “image” of the Eternal God which is in us.

Once the Millennium ends, we are told that the Earth and Heavens will be dissolved in a fiery explosion, (2 Pet 3 10) and a new Heaven and Earth will be formed. I have never found any reference about this time which mentions the existence of animals, so if they are there – well, we aren’t being told.