1. It is assumed that the eschaton represents a completely new “world.” But is this true? I would argue that it is not. Rather, it seems more accurate to describe the eschaton not as a new “world,” but as a “different stage” or “different state of affairs” within the same world, which should be understand as a complete book starting from creation and continuing through the eschaton. As Dr. Bruce Little has pointed out in his book A Creation-Order Theodicy, “The word ‘world’ primarily refers to the realm of humanity and its culture (See Jn. 3:16; II Tim. 4:10; 1 Jn. 2:15). Therefore, it includes humanity as a whole from the point of creation to the full realization of the Kingdom of God on this earth throughout everlasting.
   
   
2. It is assumed that God could have created free creatures who would not sin. But is this true? Here, I would argue it may not be. For example, when Christians say that God can do anything, most mean that He can do everything that is not logically contradictory with He who is. As God is truth, He cannot lie. Thus, it may not be possible for God to create a world with significantly free moral agents who do not sin. Assuming that God always does His best and therefore this is the best of all possible worlds, it may be concluded that a world “where all God’s free moral agents love and obey Him . . . is not a possible world if moral agents are to have the power of moral choice in nondetermining circumstances” (Little). In God, Freedom, and Evil, Plantinga raises the idea of transworld depravity and argues that if it is true, then all possible worlds would contain moral good and moral evil. In short, God could not create a world in which all moral evil is absent.

Heaven may not be a possible world when you take it in isolation by itself. It may be that the only way in which God could actualize a heaven of free creatures all worshiping Him and not falling into sin would be by having, so to speak, this run-up to it, this advance life during which there is a veil of decision-making in which some people choose for God and some people against God. Otherwise you don't know that heaven is an actualizable world. You have no way of knowing that possibility.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.

As the Christian sees things God does not stand idly by, coolly observing the suffering of his creatures. He enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of seeing his son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. Some theologians claim that God cannot suffer. I believe they are wrong. God’s capacity for suffering, I believe, is proportional to his greatness; it exceeds our capacity for suffering in the same measure as his capacity for knowledge exceeds ours. Christ was prepared to endure the agonies of hell itself; and God, the Lord of the universe, was prepared to endure the suffering consequent upon His son’s humiliation and death. He was prepared to accept this suffering in order to overcome sin, and death, and the evils that afflict our world, and to confer on us a life more glorious than we can imagine.