Can You Change Your Mind?

When someone gets to heaven, do they still have a choice to be able to turn away from God as satan did and other fallen angels? And if so, would that mean satan will always have a kingdom of fire and torment but won’t have access to heaven for temptation etc… after the world has ended?

You ask about someone who gets to heaven, so I’m going to assume we’re talking about Christians here.

When a Christian dies, they are immediately, consciously, with Jesus in his throne room. Jesus called this “Paradise” to the dying thief.

Of course they do not at that time have bodies.

There are three things that make us fall into sin, “the World, the Flesh and the Devil”. At the point of death all three things cease to have any effect on us. We are not in the world, we do not have flesh, and the Devil has no authority where we are.

So we pass from a state of being able to sin to NOT being able to sin. Everything which comes into the mind of God for us to do, we will obey completely. He will rule our every moment.

If we had not given God our conscious permission while we were alive, it would be unjust for him to impose this on us, but we become Christians by surrendering to God in this very way, so it is not only just, it is also our own desire that it should be so.

This continues for us after the Rapture and on into the Millennium and beyond, because at the Rapture we get our new resurrection bodies, which are untainted by sin and powerful enough to never fall. Remember what we get is to be like Jesus – “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is”.

So that is one half of the question – we WON’T sin.

The other half is what happens to satan – will he have a kingdom.
The answer is “no”.

Revelation 20 shows that the end of the Seven Year Tribulation period is effectively the end of any reign that satan will ever have.

He is captured and bound for the thousand years of the Millennium, and though at the end of that time he is released again, it is only to provide the final legal evidence that he is irremediable (he cannot be put right), because he goes and tries to deceive the nations again and turn them against God.

He is then thrown into the “Lake of Fire”. We don’t know what that means, but it is certainly a place where he is held permanently, and unable to have any power whatsoever.

All this, you will see, gives the lie to those cartoons and popular myths, which imagine the end times as God ruling in a nice place up above, and satan ruling his own nastier kingdom down below.

It won’t be like that. The place of the ungodly dead will not be ruled by satan, and neither he nor his fallen spirits will have any influence there. God’s will will be done there, as it will be in the rest of the new heavens and new earth.

God rules! We rule with Him! Satan doesn’t!