PART 3: The Truth About HELL So far, I have covered the word aionios translated eternal and how it does not mean never-ending and the word gehenna translated hell and how it does not mean an eternal torture chamber. Now I will discuss the myth of the immortal, eternal soul. Our consciousness is completely interconnected with our physicality. Our consciousness is not separate of our physical bodies. If we are hit hard enough on the head, we are knocked unconscious, and though in this state, (such as in a coma) it is possible to experience an altered state of consciousness such as in a dream-state, it is still due to activity within the physical brain. If we experience brain damage, our consciousness, our mind, our will, our emotions, is severely effected and damaged. In the Genesis account of the creation of man, it is said God formed us from the dirt and then breathed the spirit of life into us. We have always been a fusion of material and spiritual and there is no separating that fusion. For humans, our consciousness includes our soul, which is mind, will, and emotion, all of which are intimately connected to and enabled by our physiology. The spirit is the divine breath of life that awakens our consciousness, the energy infused into us to make us living aware beings. We are not spiritual beings who happen to have physical bodies, that is Gnostic. We are fully spiritual and fully physical beings. It’s how we were created, it’s how we were from the beginning. Throughout the Scriptures, death is seen as the enemy, not a door to another life. For this reason, the Messiahs work would include conquering death and bringing the hope of resurrection and immortality to light. King David declares that though death is an enemy, it will not have the last word, and prophecies that Gods Messiah would triumph over it, “You will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let Your Holy One see decay.” -Psalm 16:10 So are humans not immortal? Humans were made immortal, we were meant to live forever and be eternal reflectors of God. But once we fell, immortality was precisely what we lost, as we became subject to the curse of death through sin. It’s kind of like this, a branch that is disconnected from the vine will whither and die. From Genesis to Revelation, we are shown how God is bringing about redemption and conquering sin and death by reuniting us to himself. Throughout the Scriptures, immortality is commonly seen as something attained by rightness with God and by the Gospel. Nowhere does it infer that we are immortal beings in our sinful state. That is the exact thing sin undid, our immortality, and so we became mortal beings that die. “In the way of righteousness there is life; along that path is immortality.” - Proverbs 12:28 “To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.” - Romans 2:7-8 “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: Death has been swallowed up in victory. - 1 Corinthians 15:54 “This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” - 2 Timothy 1:9-10 In the Old Testament, the view of what happened after death, such as in Ecclesiastes and Job, was the insistence that all of the dead go down to Sheol, whether good or evil, rich or poor, slave or free man (Job 3:11-19). Sheol was not a developed idea, it simply meant the grave, the unseen realm of the dead, in which there was no consciousness at all. All who went to Sheol, which was every human being, were called “rephaim” which means “shades, entities without personality or strength. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, “There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in sheol.” -Ecclesiastes 9:10 King David said, “No one remembers You when he is dead. Who praises You from the grave?” -Psalm 6:5 You can see now the Hebrew understanding of death to be a murky, vague state of non-awareness, like a deep sleep. And the Scriptures (especially in the New Testament) over and over compare death to a deep sleep. The concept of an immortal, eternal soul separate from the body does not come from the Scriptures but from Greek philosophy, particularly from Plato. For example, in Platos Myth of Er he depicts disembodied souls being sent underground to be punished after death. This pagan mythology about the afterlife did somewhat influence Jewish belief during the intertestamental period and it began being speculated on that there was an intermediate state that the soul went to upon death while it awaited resurrection. In this idea there was a compartment of sheol for the good and a compartment in sheol for the bad. Theories began being hypothesized about the difference between these two compartments, such as the good were in God’s presence and the bad were suffering. The point is however, the early Christian church believed this was an intermediate state and believed in bodily resurrection in the age to come, they didn’t believe in an immortal soul apart from the body. As shown earlier, Paul wrote that God alone had immortality and that immortality and eternal life were attainable through Christ. Greek culture had a significant influence on the church as the centuries progressed, and slowly through the centuries you see bodily resurrection unto immortality being replaced with the idea of the souls of the righteous going off to heaven and the souls of the wicked going off to hell. This was not due to Hebrew or Scriptural belief though, but because of the influence of pagan mythology. Pretty soon after that, these bodies and this creation had nothing to do with the redemption story anymore and it was entirely replaced with the heaven/hell scenario. Before Greek influence, the Judaic afterlife was defined as follows: “All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.” (Ecclesiastes 3:20) For this reason, they had the hope of resurrection. For example: Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise, awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust, for thy dew is as the dew of light, and the earth shall bring to life the shades (Isaiah 26:19); and And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting (olam) life, and some to reproaches and everlasting (olam) abhorrence (Daniel 12:2). Immortality has been brought to light and made attainable through Christ, but it is not attainable without Christ. This reality has been subject to futility because of sin, and every human being dies as a consequence, which is “Sheol”, and the Greek term “Hades” is roughly the equivalent, even though there is a lot more mythological baggage tied to “Hades” because of its pagan roots. Aside from a divine intervention, “Sheol” is a permanent state. The Messiah is Gods intervention, the undoing of death, the salvation of the human being, the restoration of the creation back into oneness with God, and the bringing of immortality back to light. Jesus was not eternally tortured for our sins, but rather he died for our sins. That was the ontological result of falling short of God. The wages of sin is death. This is the reason for the hope of the resurrection at the end of the age, and it is why Christ had to defeat death for us. It is why Christ says, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies.” (John 11:25) Through Christ, and in the transformation of reality and humanity in the coming age, those who are being made compatible with the divine nature by transformation through Christ will be raised back into consciousness in incorruptible bodies. God called this creation “good” when he made it, and his intention was never to throw it out as garbage. Humanitys fall caused the creation to be subjected to frustration, but humanities redemption will cause the creation to be liberated into glory. It has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. (2 Timothy 1:10) Immortality and eternal existence is only for those who gain it through Christ. In the Bible, we are told that human immortality is a gift from God to those who partake in the divine nature; it is given in the resurrection, and involves a whole, embodied person within the cosmos. Those who stubbornly choose to go the way of sin and disconnection from God may finally utterly perish, for they have rejected the only source of life and ground of being. This is why it is said, “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.” What is death? Go look at a corpse. A person breathes their last, their brain shuts down, and they become no longer conscious. Their body eventually turns to dust and they are no more. Thats death. That is literal the ultimate wages of sin. Scripture compares death to sleep, because most often in sleep we are in a state of complete unconsciousness. The thing about death is that people have not been able to accept that death is the end, they have tried to retain human meaning by saying that somehow apart from our body, our soul is immortal and goes on to eternally exist somewhere else. This is understandable that humans try to figure out how to retain their meaning, but this is avoiding the tragedy of death, and why Jesus had to come and conquer it. Death is the ultimate mockery of all meaning, and of God’s purpose for the human being within his good world. Death is the enemy. We were not meant to be disembodied souls in some kind of other reality. We were created as whole physical/spiritual beings in this good cosmos. God purposed us to be bodily creatures in this physical universe. When we die, we die. Our spirit, which is the life energy from God, returns back into God. Paul seemed to go with a developed idea of Sheol where for the righteous there was an ethereal intermediate state where “to be absent of the body is to be present with the Lord” but still said that those who had died were “sleeping” in comparison to the glorious embodied resurrection that we await. The soul, which is to say the mind, will, and emotions, is infused with our bodies. Our bodies and souls need each other to operate in their full glorious potential. The soul animates the body and the body provides the means through which the soul finds expression and experience. For this reason, Jesus came to conquer death by becoming our sin, becoming our death, and resurrecting physically. For this reason Jesus is the resurrection and the life, and promises us a future bodily resurrection into immortal bodies and eternal life in the age to come. This is the blessed hope. The reason the second death (lake of fire) is symbolized by fire is because nothing short of fire can express the finality and complete and utter end of a thing. We all see what fire does in our world, it completely incinerates a thing to ashes. Fire is the only thing in our reality that can express the final and permanent death, or end of being, of those who reject the very source of being. And yet it is still simply death, which is the wages of sin. “The Word seems to me to lay down the doctrine of the perfect obliteration of wickedness, for if God shall be in all things that are, obviously wickedness shall not be in them. For it is necessary that at some time evil should be removed utterly and entirely from the realm of being.”—St. Macrina the Blessed However, there is also an even greater hope that was being developed and entertained in Scripture, one which many of the early fathers fully believed, and we will get to that soon.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 23:00:01 +0000
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