Greg Laurie shares Gospel message, discusses afterlife with Jordan Peterson: 'Heaven is for forgiven people'
Pastor Greg Laurie recently offered a clear presentation of the Gospel and the hope of Heaven to psychologist Jordan Peterson in a wide-ranging conversation addressing faith, personal loss and the universal search for purpose.
Nearing the close of the nearly two-hour-long interview with Peterson on “The Jordan B. Peterson” podcast, Laurie, the 71-year-old pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, reflected on the loss of his son, Christopher. The 33-year-old died in July 2008 in an automobile accident, a day Laurie has called the “worst” of his life.
“As a Christian, I believe I'll see my son again because he believed in Jesus,” Laurie told Peterson. “He won't be in Heaven because I'm his dad. He'll be in Heaven because he put his faith in Christ and he had that relationship. He's a part of my future as well. So that gives me hope. But also, I realize that God can allow these things in our life. I don't know why. I can't explain it. I don't even try to explain it.”
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Peterson, author of We Who Wrestle with God, connected Laurie’s testimony to the biblical narrative, noting that grief, though painful, affirms the value of life.
“The depth of your grief is proportionate to the magnitude of your love,” he said. “So you might say, ‘Well, how could God constitute a world made such that a child could die? And then you think, 'Well, if you have a child, and the child dies, and you grieve, the grief is an indication of the magnitude of the loss.' So the fact that you grieve, that's a testament to the value of life, even though it's truncated.”
Laurie went on to say that he believes in the afterlife, adding: “I believe in Heaven, and I believe in it more than I've ever believed.” He described Heaven not as an abstract concept but as a real and tangible destination, shaped by promises from Scripture.
“I've always been a student of Heaven as a Christian, and the Bible speaks so much of Heaven, but when my son went to be there, I wanted to know more about it," he explained.
"As you read the Bible, you realize that Heaven is a real place for real people to do real things. Jesus said, ‘I go to prepare a place for you.’ And Heaven, in the Bible, is pictured as a city. It's pictured as a country. It's pictured as a paradise. The Bible tells us we'll eat in Heaven. We'll be reunited with loved ones in Heaven; we'll be active. And then, one day, Heaven comes to Earth, and what we call the millennium, Heaven and Earth become one. I believe strongly in that.”
In response, Peterson said he struggles to reconcile earthly moments of transcendence with the promise of eternity. "How do you reconcile, in your own mind, the insistence that part of the Christian moral pattern is to perfect the world and to raise the material up to the heavenly with the notion of the afterlife and immortality?” he asked.
Laurie pointed to biblical narratives as a source of clarity; Paul, in 2 Corinthians, spoke about being “caught up in the third Heaven,” while Jesus promised the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” — a word translated like the “Royal Garden of a king,” the pastor said.
“Paul went there, and he came back, and then after that, he said, ‘I have a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better,’” Laurie said. “Ever since that moment in this life, he had homesickness for Heaven. So coming back to my son, I can't explain it, but I would say this: when he went there, I feel like a part of me went there too.”
“I believe when my son left this world for the next world, and that tragic automobile accident, that he was taken by angels into God's presence, and I believe that I will go there too,” Laurie continued. “It's faith that's in my heart.”
Reflecting on his journey, Laurie emphasized that faith often becomes most tangible in the face of suffering.
“God made a lot of promises,” he said. “I’ve put those promises to the test, including the worst thing of all, to lose a child. And I've seen how God had come through for me. If He hadn't come through for me after my son died, I would have given up preaching, for sure. Why carry on? But He came through for me.”
Laurie concluded the interview with a clear presentation of the Gospel: “Ultimately, when everything's said and done, what's more important than the afterlife? What's more important than where we spend it? According to the Bible, I believe there's a literal Heaven, a literal Hell, and I believe we choose in this life where we will spend the afterlife,” he said.
The pastor said the reason he’s going to Heaven is “not because I've lived a good life, because I failed in many ways, but because Christ laid His life down for me on the cross.”
“Coming back to Abraham, and what a picture, the son was willing to go and be sacrificed by the Father,” Laurie said, referring to Genesis 22. “[Isaac] knew what was going on. ‘Hey, Dad, where's the sacrifice?’ ‘My son, God will provide for Himself a sacrifice.’ But Isaac made that sacrifice too. The Son Jesus made that sacrifice for us because He knew there was no other way that we could reach God, no other way we could satisfy the righteous demands of God. So Heaven isn't for good people, as it's often said. Heaven is for forgiven people.”
Following the interview, Laurie described Peterson as “one of the great minds of our generation” who has a “deep interest and love for the Bible.”
“I really appreciated how he let me tell my story. In the process of telling it, I was able to share how Jesus Christ has changed my life and what it means to come into a relationship with Him,” Laurie said.
While Peterson often discusses Christian theology, biblical stories and the moral and cultural significance of Christianity, he has not explicitly identified himself as a traditional Christian. He once wrote that, “The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization, of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil.”
In a September interview with The Christian Post, the 62-year-old author warned that the embrace of identity politics by some churches is a dangerous shift away from the core teachings of Christianity and poses a threat to the integrity of the faith, particularly for younger generations who might be more vulnerable to cultural trends.
But even conservative Evangelical churches are not immune to problems, Peterson said.
“There's no shortage of bad actors as well in the Christian community of the sort that the atheists tend to object to,” he said. “The fundamental problem with religious enterprise is that it can be captured by the psychopathic narcissists, and that's what you see in the Gospel story. Christ is persecuted most intensely by the Pharisees, the scribes and the lawyers. […] The Pharisees are religious hypocrites who use religion for their own self-aggrandizement. That's a real danger in the religious enterprise, and especially the more Evangelical forms of Christianity have been prone to being overrun by self-serving charlatans. That's a problem.”
Peterson advised Christians to be grounded in skepticism — not of faith itself, but of those who would misuse it. "By their fruits, you will know them," he said, stressing that the Scripture verse is useful when determining whether religious leaders are genuinely committed to the faith or merely using it for their own purposes.
“You have to pay attention to the fact that not everybody who says ‘Lord, Lord is going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,’” he said.
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com
