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Plato's Heaven or Creation's Renewal? Resurrection E3
109 Plays10 months ago
Heaven and Earth - Resurrection Ep 3
Do humans have souls? What is the difference between spirit and flesh? Will the earth be turned into a giant zoo free from humans? Where do the dead go until the resurrection? What is heaven? Matt and Nick discuss the importance of creation in the Biblical story, the mixing of platonism with Christianity, and some of the strange readings of the Bible that occur when we lose sight of God’s plans for restoration.
Resources Referenced: Four Views on Heaven Edited by Michael Eugene Wittmer and Stanley, From Plato to Christ by Louis Markos, The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Interlude Music: Somewhat Elegant by Dye O, A Tiny Spark by Edgar Hopp
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction to Resurrection Series
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Repaired Eye and Podcast. Today is the third conversation in our Resurrection Series.
Misunderstandings of Christian Hope
00:00:05
Speaker
We talk about a lot of misunderstandings that modern American Christians have about future hope, and we straightforwardly critique some of these ideas. We try to re-center the conversation around what the Bible actually describes. I think you're going to enjoy this one, so here it is.
Resurrection vs. Disembodied Eternity
00:00:28
Speaker
Resurrection is central to the biblical story. It's part of God's redemptive response to the invasion of death into his good creation. To be a Christian is to give allegiance to the resurrected Jesus, hoping for the future resurrection of the body. The New Testament and the earliest Christian creeds declare this clearly.
00:00:43
Speaker
However, Christian hope today is often focused on a disembodied, blissful eternity away from earth after death, often expressed as hope in going to heaven. Clearly, something has changed. So we're going to chat about how this happened and some of its effects on us within Christianity. Yeah, let's do it. There is one important clarification I think that needs to be made. It's that not everybody uses the word heaven to mean quite the same thing.
00:01:05
Speaker
Yeah, in fact, I feel like a lot of people use it differently. So when people even say heaven, I need to like ask, what do you mean? So I know where you're at. It's pretty unhelpful because people use it so many different ways. Yeah. So I think the kind of popular understanding of heaven is that it's the eternal state of disembodied bliss away from earth where believers go immediately after death.
00:01:26
Speaker
This popular version of going to heaven is incompatible with the biblical story of resurrection and restoration.
Heaven's Various Interpretations
00:01:31
Speaker
That's what we've been talking about. However, there are a couple other ways that I've seen heaven used. The first is heaven to refer to the temporary intermediate state. It's the place believers go when they die, where they wait the resurrection. ah yeah Yeah, this is pretty common though. When our loved ones pass away, we will very often say they're in heaven, and what we mean is they're with God, wherever that is.
00:01:53
Speaker
Within this view, though, heaven as it currently exists is actually a temporary place for Christians. Okay. The other way I've seen heaven get used is kind of generically for the final state of believers. So where they're in the presence of God. The emphasis here is that heaven is God's space. So with this definition, the end of the biblical story is heaven on earth, or perhaps heaven and earth reunited.
00:02:13
Speaker
Okay, and we could just maybe call that heaven because God is there. Exactly. And I actually think both of these definitions are kind of helpful for reframing the biblical story. I just don't think either one of them is quite using heaven the same way the biblical authors do. Got it. So what we clearly as Christians need to reject is the popular idea of heaven as this disembodied, unearthly, eternal existence that excludes restoration of creation and excludes resurrection of the body.
00:02:39
Speaker
Unfortunately, I think it's this popular understanding of heaven that many people have in mind when they express any hope in getting to go to heaven when they die. I hope that's not the case, but I fear you may be right.
Platonic Influence on Christianity
00:02:50
Speaker
Humans have always struggled, I think, to make sense of the fact that we live in a broken world, a world that so often doesn't seem right for humanity. As C.S. Lewis expressed so beautifully, if I find in myself desires for which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world. The common answer to this conundrum for so many religions and philosophies is simple. The world as we know it isn't right, so humans belong somewhere else.
00:03:14
Speaker
That was Plato's solution. Yes it was. So frequently it's thought that the problem for humans is that they have bodies. They have a mortal coil that the true immortal part of the person needs to shuffle off. Death allows humans to shed the problematic attachment to their material bodies and pass into whatever they were designed for, to go off to where they truly belonged.
00:03:33
Speaker
That's especially prevalent in hymns and and well in in contemporary worship songs too, to be honest with you. Yeah, it shows up all over the place. A lot of world religions hold to some form of a hope in like a post-death paradise or some sort of a nirvana state. A blissful experience freed from the body and all of its desires. Right, because body, body's desire is bad.
00:03:54
Speaker
The Greek philosopher Plato lived a few centuries before Jesus. He described the world we live in as just a shadow of the truth, a crude imitation of the perfection that exists in the non-material world of forms. So the goal of human life for Plato was to ascend to this perfect, eternal, unchanging world of forms beyond space and time, and his ideas have been super influential.
00:04:15
Speaker
He was a pretty smart dude. He actually, I think, had some really incredible insight into humanity. So like virtue, ethics, and righteousness were common topics of debate between Greek philosophers. Some philosophers argued that might makes right. Others argued that a truly righteous man would become successful and wealthy. Plato, however, argued that a truly righteous man would ultimately suffer at the hands of others who would take advantage of him. In Republic, Book 2, he says,
00:04:41
Speaker
the just man will have to endure the lash the rack and chains the branding iron in his eyes and finally after every extremity of suffering he will be crucified the same ideas is played out in Plato's retelling of The Death of Socrates, how he innocently suffered and stood his ground and stood on virtue and didn't take the easy way out, even though he could have been freed, he just had to shut up about what he thought was true, but he stood on the truth and suffered innocently for it and had to take the hemlock.
00:05:12
Speaker
But you're left feeling like Socrates really is this hero figure. His life almost maps onto like the suffering of Jesus of Nazareth that would come obviously a couple of centuries later. So there's something fundamentally like profound and deeply true about his theory of ethics. Yeah, nobody doubts that Plato was a genius with some great insight. But when he described humans, creation, and the goal of human life, his understanding was very different from the teachings of Genesis and of Revelation.
00:05:40
Speaker
So Jews and Christians living in cultures where these platonic ideas were widespread and influential have sought to combine parts of Platonism with their religious beliefs. There were Christian movements that adopted, in fact, a lot of Platonism's teachings, including the assumption that creation and physical material were problems that just needed to be done away with. And this isn't unique to Christianity either. Some Jews throughout the diaspora very much were trying to incorporate their ancient Jewish faith with the thought world of Plato and the Greeks. Yeah, a lot of people have looked at Plato's ideas and said, ooh, I like those. I'm going to find some way to incorporate those with other things, I believe.
00:06:17
Speaker
Or they were just swimming in Plato's world, so to speak, in the Greek world, and then they felt compelled to make their religion compatible with that world. Yeah. Christian movements like Dostism argued that if Jesus was truly divine, then he can't have had a real body. Or Gnosticism taught that humans consisted of an immortal soul trapped in a body freeable through obtaining secret knowledge. These groups were deemed reticule by early Orthodox Christianity.
00:06:42
Speaker
Other Christians have sought to incorporate Platonic ideas while discarding elements that aren't compatible with Scripture, but keeping the truths that are. And I think that's a good thing. It's basically what Christians need to do with any kind of set of ideas that they interact with. However, I think there's been a tendency within Christianity to go a little too far, to start adopting Platonic ideas that actually conflict with elements of the biblical story.
00:07:04
Speaker
Two places where those differences are super clear are in their understandings of creation and of humanity. So in the biblical story, creation is good, but now corrupted. So the hope of the story is for restoration of creation. And in the biblical story, humans are designed to serve a purpose within God's good creation as his representative image bearers.
00:07:26
Speaker
However, in Platonism, creation is lesser. The greater reality is the non-physical world of the forms. So getting rid of the physical is ultimately a good thing. And in Platonism, humans are made of an immortal soul trapped in a physical body. The soul's goal is to leave the physical body behind and move beyond to the better, unphysical world. So how would you try to fit these two together?
00:07:47
Speaker
Yeah, they're rather contrasting in their view of materiality. The one, the Hebrew version, thinks of materiality as God's good creation that has gone wrong but can and will be restored one day. The Platonistic version says all of this stuff probably shouldn't be here in the first place. There's something else beyond this that is actually good and true. This all can go to hell in a handbasket as far as I'm concerned.
00:08:14
Speaker
So let's look at one person who brought some of these ideas together. He was a guy by the name of Pico della em Mirandola, and his oration on the dignity of man written in the 15th century was very influential. It's actually been called the Manifesto of the Renaissance.
00:08:27
Speaker
In it, Pico imagines God addressing humans, saying, We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. So he describes that there are heavenly bodies above, and the beasts of the world below. But humans are kind of like a mixed middle form.
00:08:49
Speaker
a unique combination of body and soul, the telos of creation. He describes humans as an amphibious creature, not fully designed for earth or for heaven, needing to choose whether to ascend toward heaven or descend to earth. This sounds very postmodern individualistic. He describes, in our souls, a dual nature. The one bears us upward toward the heavenly regions, by the other we are dragged downward toward regions infernal.
00:09:18
Speaker
So elements of his understanding don't match what we're being told in Genesis, where humans are unique in their purpose, but they're composed of the same elements as the animals. Yeah, they're all from dust, the animals and the humans. Yeah, humans and animals are all part of God's creation, and their command is to multiply and fill the earth, not seek to leave it behind, as Pico describes.
00:09:39
Speaker
Oh, good point. So once you started with Pico's kind of amphibious version of humanity, it's actually pretty easy to start finding ways that you can kind of match up Christianity and Platonism. So Plato's enlightenment ascent of the soul can be compared to obtaining wisdom through the Torah, maybe to dying to self to become like Christ, or maybe even to justification by faith, as long as you focus on the knowledge and personal internal development elements of Christianity.
00:10:05
Speaker
Then you sort of just rework the final hope of Christianity to be going to heaven, which is kind of like Plato's enlightenment descent, and voila. You've got a version of Christianity that fits pretty nicely with Platonism. There we go. Good job, Pico.
00:10:34
Speaker
So I think it's interesting to think about what elements of Christianity this kind of Platonized version would want to focus on and which ones maybe it would kind of like want to leave behind or focus on less. So a Platonized Christianity would want to downplay the importance of creation and human purpose within that creation. It would want to de-emphasize the history of Israel, Israel's hopes of restoration, right? That's all very physical and worldly. It's in the dirt. No, that doesn't fit quite as neatly with Platonism. Yeah.
00:11:02
Speaker
Platonism would want to emphasize the individual aspects over the corporate ones. It would want to emphasize belief and inward development over ethics and action. It would want to emphasize Jesus' death, because that's potentially a place where his soul leaves his body, but might not want to focus as much on his resurrection.
00:11:20
Speaker
or in his life an embodiment in the world. exactly His ethics, his sermon. Yeah. I mean, you can maybe reframe his life as like, oh, this is part of his enlightenment descent, and then at his death that is completed. But then within Platonism, the resurrection almost feels like going backwards. Oh, yeah, because he gets conjoined to a physical body again. Exactly. Rats. Platonism would certainly want to emphasize a journey to heaven over the restoration of Earth. Any of that sound familiar?
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it sounds a whole lot like American evangelical theology, at least at the popular level. I hope to God that this isn't necessarily being taught at the institution, like the seminary level and stuff like that. But yeah, the popular level, what you see on social media, popular preaching, this is basically the version you get a lot of the time. Yeah, it's easy to just kind of swim in that world.
00:12:10
Speaker
Yeah, the books that are published. Now, if you've got this kind of Platonized version of the story in your mind when you come into the Bible, it's actually easy to start finding ways to make Scripture fit this. It's pretty easy to start anachronistically reading elements of a Platonistic story back into the text of Scripture. Sometimes in places where it kind of doesn't belong if you start looking closely. Do
Biblical Language and Misinterpretations
00:12:31
Speaker
you have an example? Yeah. One good example is the word soul.
00:12:34
Speaker
A soul is understood by many today to be the immortal, immaterial part of a human. Some think having a soul is actually what separates humans from the animals. And if you're reading the creation account in the King James Version, it's easy to get there. Because in the KJV, God creates the living creatures on the land. He creates the living creatures in the sea, the living creatures that fly in the air. And then in Genesis 2.7,
00:12:57
Speaker
Yeah, in the King James Version it reads, and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. So this is the first appearance of the word soul in the King James Version, and it's only used for humans. Hey, I see what they did there. They switched the English word. It's the same Hebrew word behind it. It's nefesh. Yeah. So in Hebrew, this word nefesh is what gets used for all of the animals throughout all of Genesis 1.
00:13:25
Speaker
All of them, yes, you're right. Living nefeshes. And then when the humans created, it's a living nefesh. But KJV uses living creatures when it's animals, and then when it gets to humans, translates this to a different word, the word soul. That's pretty bad. That's pretty disrespectful to the Hebrew Bible. That's some trickiness. Yeah. And if you're reading this in the Greek Old Testament, it's siki. And either way, it's the same word used repeatedly for creatures in Genesis 1. So the nefesh or the siki is not unique to humans.
00:13:52
Speaker
Humans may be unique, but it it is not the nefesh or siki that is the unique part of humans as opposed to animals. Yeah, yeah, it's funny. They're given a unique role, but they're made of the same stuff that all the other living creatures are. Right. And this nefesh or the siki also can't refer to an immortal soul that humans possess because nefesh and siki die a lot in scripture.
00:14:14
Speaker
By definition, they die, basically. Yeah, so like a nefesh or a siki in the Bible is essentially just a living thing. It's a body with the breath of life in it. So in most modern translations, nefesh or siki will usually get translated to simply person or life or living being.
00:14:30
Speaker
In Ezekiel 1820. Not in the King James Version this time. The person who sins is the one who will die. That person there, that's a nefesh. The nefesh who sins is the one who will die. In Leviticus 1714. Since the life of every creature is its blood, I've told the Israelites, you are not to eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood. Whoever eats it must be cut off.
00:14:56
Speaker
The life is referenced twice in this verse. Both times it's nefesh. And then in the New Testament, in Matthew 6, 25, Therefore I tell you, don't worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food and the body more than clothing?
00:15:13
Speaker
So here, when Jesus refers to the life, the life that needs food and drink, he refers to the siki. But when he talks about the body that needs clothes, he uses a different word, soma. So he closes this with, is not the soul more than food and the body more than clothing? And then in Revelation 16, 3.
00:15:32
Speaker
The second poured out his bowl into the sea. It turned to blood like that of a dead person. And all life in the sea died. All life in the sea is the sea key. It's the souls that are dying.
00:15:45
Speaker
Now you're using souls in a way that I wouldn't use souls, right? But that's the point you're making. Yeah, that's that's the point. So clearly, when the Bible uses nefesh or siki, they're not using it to mean the same thing that we tend to use today when we say soul. Right. That is at least to say that the English word soul does not map on one for one with the Greek siki or the Hebrew nefesh. Yeah.
00:16:08
Speaker
So I hear sometimes that Jesus came to save my soul. When the New Testament describes saving a siki, it's not a reference to the immortal part of a person, it's actually the whole person. Right, and save my very life, so to speak. Yeah, that's why most modern translations will usually use life or something like that to translate these words, because it's just a better translation.
00:16:28
Speaker
In fact, in that Matthew passage I read, I was reading out of the Christian Standard Bible, and it did that. It didn't say soul, it said life. And in fact, most modern translations are going to do that because the translators recognize that Siki or Nefesh just refers to life. Now occasionally, even modern translations will still use soul.
00:16:46
Speaker
So I think it's important for readers to see that when they come across the word soul in their English translation, they're not suddenly seeing a separate word that the biblical authors are using for some other immortal, immaterial part. They're using the same word that always gets used for human life. Right. Human life that whatever constitutes a human, as long as that human's alive, that whole being can and is called the siki or the nefesh.
00:17:10
Speaker
And this is not to say that biblical authors can't speak of God's protection or judgment on a siki or a life after death. Obviously not. God's overcoming and reversal of death is a big component of the story of Scripture. right But Scripture doesn't teach that humans are composed of a body with an immortal soul. Or an immortal soul with the mortal body. And the uniqueness of humans does not come from the fact that they possess or are a soul in some unique way. Hmm.
00:17:37
Speaker
This isn't super relevant to what we're doing here, but there's actually a really interesting idiom in John 10.24. The people are wondering whether Jesus is the Messiah and they say to him, how long are you going to lift up our siki? Tell us plainly if you're the Messiah. Lift up our siki here is like an idiom that means keep us in suspense or keep us waiting. How long are you going to pull the souls out of our bodies? I feel like we need to start using that. Come on, I need to know. Stop lifting my soul up here.
00:18:11
Speaker
Another easily misunderstood theme in scripture is the distinction made between spirit and flesh. Paul frequently contrasts the spirit that gives life with the sinful flesh that brings death.
00:18:22
Speaker
If you come into these passages about the spirit and the flesh with a platonic story in mind, it's kind of easy to start imagining that the flesh is the problem because it's physical, and the spirit is good because it's not physical. It's not composed of matter. When scripture does discuss the constituent components of a human, what people are made of, it talks about a body and a breath or a spirit. So in Genesis 2.7, this time not out of the King James Version, yeah Then Yahweh God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. So you take dust, you put some breath or spirit of life into it, and it becomes a living being. We tend to make a really large distinction in English, especially with Christian thinking between spirit and just breath or wind, but those are much closer concepts for the biblical authors. conceptually, yeah, just in the languages that they use. I mean, the most common word in Hebrew, although it's not used in this passage, is ruach. And yeah, same thing with pneuma in in Greek. The words seem to be used a little bit more liberally to refer to maybe different things or or conceptually, they just appear to be a little bit different than our English words, because we have a very clear distinction.
00:19:36
Speaker
between what is a spirit and what is wind or breath. Like, we would not really, in many contexts, confuse those things. Though I will say we have the concept of pneumatics, which is the science and art of using wind technologies. This composition of humans of a body or a flesh with the spirit of life is really clear in Genesis 617.
00:19:59
Speaker
For behold, I am bringing a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die. So to bring death to a person is to bring death to the flesh, which has the breath of life or the spirit of life in it. In Joel 2, 28 through 29.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, famous passage. After this, I will pour out my spirit on all humanity, then your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men will have dreams, and your young men will see visions. I will even pour out my spirit on the male and female slaves in those days. So here where he says, I will pour out my spirit on all humanity. That word for humanity in the Septuagint and then in the New Testament when this passage is quoted is, sarx, it's flesh. So I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.
00:20:47
Speaker
Death in the biblical story is what happens when the breath or spirit leaves the body. So a living person is what happens when God combines breath or spirit with
Paul's Teachings on Spirit and Flesh
00:20:55
Speaker
a body. Body and breath is a living creature, whether human or animal. And those living creatures are not inherently immortal, but they can live eternally when they're sustained by God's life-giving spirit.
00:21:06
Speaker
This understanding is important when you start getting into Paul and his writings in the New Testament where he describes a tension between living according to God's plans and living contrary to God's plans in terms of a contrast between flesh and spirit. So in 1 Corinthians 5, 5.
00:21:21
Speaker
You are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord. It's easy, I think, if you come into this passage to imagine that he's describing the solution to sin as shedding our sinful, material nature in order to become bodyless spirits. However, if you look more carefully, that's clearly not what Paul or the rest of the New Testament teaches. So his desire for the believers that he writes to is that they're to live according to the spirit, or in the realm of the spirit, right now, in their bodies.
00:21:51
Speaker
in Romans 8, 5-11. for those who live according to the flesh set their mind on the things of the flesh but those who live according to the spirit set their minds on the things of the spirit for to set the mind and the flash is death but to set the mind of the spirit is life and peace for the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to god for it does not submit to god's law indeed it cannot those who are in the flesh cannot please god You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Everyone who does not have the Spirit of God does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
00:22:40
Speaker
So he says that those who have the Spirit of God are currently not in the flesh, or not in the realm of flesh, in other translations. They're in the realm of the Spirit, he says, right now. So clearly, Paul doesn't mean that anyone who has received the Spirit has now become a disembodied ghost.
00:22:57
Speaker
Spirit and flesh are for Paul categories of motivation, right? A fallen flesh is ruled by death, but the Spirit of God brings life. The cure for corruptible sinful flesh isn't to make it non-material. The cure for flesh is that it needs to be made incorruptible.
00:23:13
Speaker
That's interesting. Yeah, Paul wouldn't have complained about his ah thorn in the flesh if he was all of a sudden translated into some ethereal plane upon converting to following Jesus of Nazareth. He wouldn't have talked of his physical suffering and bearing the marks of Jesus in his body if he was just a mere ghost. ah Jesus, in his glorified state, clearly possessed a material body, as the gospel writers make very clear to their readers in Luke 24, 37 through 39.
00:23:43
Speaker
But they were afraid and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And he said to them, why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, have you anything here to eat? And they gave him a piece of broiled fish. And he took it and ate it before them.
00:24:13
Speaker
Not very ghostly of him to do that. Seems like the bodily resurrected Jesus was in fact very bodily. Flesh is not bad because it's physical. The reverse is true too. Spiritual isn't inherently good just because it's not physical.
00:24:29
Speaker
in Ephesians 6, 12. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. So the problem with flesh isn't materiality. The problem is that flesh is sinful and corrupted. It's cursed to die. The solution to flesh's problems isn't to make it non-material.
00:24:54
Speaker
Right. I mean, in this passage, there's evil entities that are, in fact, non-material. Yes. So that won't necessarily get you where you want to go just by achieving ghosthood someday. Yes. You could be a pretty bad ghost. Yes. There are evil spirits in the world. Being spiritual is not inherently a good thing. That's a good point. What flesh needs in the New Testament is to be renewed, to be made incorruptible by the Spirit.
00:25:20
Speaker
This is a radical change. Paul likens the transformation of the body to a seed becoming a tree in 1 Corinthians 15, 35 through 37. But someone will ask, how are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come? You foolish person, what you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or some other grain. And then in verses 42 through 44,
00:25:47
Speaker
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body.
00:26:06
Speaker
I think the obvious question that we want to ask is what will our bodies look like when we're raised from dishonor to glory, from weakness to power, from a natural to spiritual. When we ask this question, I assume the best place to look first is at Jesus' resurrected body. So he was identifiable sometimes. He was still physical, but not limited by the normal limitations of physical bodies.
00:26:29
Speaker
Will ours be just like that? I don't know. I think that's a good question. It's good to ponder. The truth is just that Scripture wasn't always written to satisfy our curiosities. Right, but it does seem like the best starting point for pondering, for considering, for imagining, would be with the body that Jesus of Nazareth had when he was resurrected. And he's called the first fruits. We have no other model to
Embodied Purpose and Creation Restoration
00:26:52
Speaker
go on. And if we go on that model, then yeah, I guess we have a physical body that eats. And it's not like this is just a data point in a vacuum either. Right. When you put that data point within the rest of the biblical story,
00:27:04
Speaker
It becomes very clear that this is exactly what humans were designed for. They were designed as a part of creation. They were given a role within that creation. They were given a home on the earth and a purpose there on the land with their feet in the soil. It's even more than that, because getting back to our conversations we had several months ago about the image of God,
00:27:24
Speaker
The image of God is the defining feature of humans as opposed to the rest of the beasts of the land. And as we explained, the image of God is a vocational call. It is an identifier that identifies humans as those in charge of land managing God's good creation. If humans are no longer embodied life,
00:27:47
Speaker
that have this identity and this role of creation management, then what they are is not a human anymore. And so if you don't have a body, I don't know what you are, but you're not technically, according to the Hebrew Bible, a human.
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah, certainly not in line with God's desire for humanity. Or let's say not a complete human. There's something that's amiss or not quite right yet, which is why, to your point, the resurrection motif solves that problem. The end of the story is a restored physical humanity, physical creation, not an escape from the bodily part of humanity or the physical part of creation. Yeah, don't expect that God's giving up on that desire He had for humanity and creation.
00:28:51
Speaker
It's moving on a little bit. Here's another way that Platonism kind of gets read strangely back into the Scriptures. It's in the destruction of the earth. So Scripture's description of God's judgment on the land are easily taken by some to mean the annihilation of the planet, or even the end of space-time by readers who hope for a non-physical future.
00:29:10
Speaker
You discussed these passages with Richard Middleton, who's researched them at length. The long story short is that the sort of language that gets used frequently by Jewish prophets and apocalyptic authors to refer to coming judgment sounds to us like destruction of the earth. It's not uncommon in Jewish prophecy to describe God's destruction of the earth and the destruction of all humanity, and then to go on to describe God's mercy on humans after that destruction.
00:29:34
Speaker
Zephaniah prophesied about the coming judgment in destruction of the southern kingdom by Babylon in Zephaniah 1, 2 through 3. I will completely sweep away everything from the face of the earth. This is Yahweh's declaration. I will sweep away people and animals. I will sweep away the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea and the ruins along with the wicked. I will cut off mankind from the face of the earth. This is Yahweh's declaration. And then in verses 17 through 18,
00:30:01
Speaker
I will bring distress on mankind, and they will walk like the blind, because they have sinned against Yahweh. Their blood will be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung. Their silver and gold will be unable to rescue them on the day of Yahweh's wrath. The whole earth will be consumed by the fire of His jealousy. For He will make a complete, yes, a horrifying end of all the inhabitants of the earth. But then, later in Zephaniah, he describes that after this judgment, God will restore His people.
00:30:31
Speaker
It ends with Zephaniah 3, 20. At that time, I will bring you back. Yes, at the time I will gather you, I will give you fame and praise among all the peoples of the earth. When I restore your fortunes before your eyes, Yahweh has spoken. So whatever that language of destruction of the earth and destruction of all peoples meant in that first chapter, it still allowed for peoples and an earth to exist in that promised restoration described at the end of the book.
00:30:56
Speaker
Right, I guess the whole bit about I will destroy all humanity from the face of the earth didn't mean I will destroy all humanity from the face of the earth. It's kind of interesting. I mean, this dynamic happens actually a lot, as you noted, in prophecy and in apocalyptic literature.
00:31:13
Speaker
where our modern Western ears, especially when it's conjoined with the says the Lord, we're thinking like, oh, this is literally got to happen, right? Well, not so fast. According to that manner, mode of speech, one could say genre. That was a common way to, I don't know, exaggerate the point, paint a bigger picture in order to like create a stark contrast.
00:31:40
Speaker
the Hebrew prophets, the seers of apocalyptic literature, and apparently Yahweh himself in these Thus Says the Lord passages is perfectly comfortable using this language that I wouldn't use if I was writing an article in the New York Times. Here's one more example that I think is interesting. So in 1st Enoch 1, 6-8,
00:32:01
Speaker
The high mountains will be shaken and fall and break apart, and the high hills will be made low and melt like wax before the fire. The earth will be holy, rent asunder, and everything on the earth will perish, and there will be judgment on all. With the righteous he will make peace, and over the chosen there will be protection, and upon them will be mercy." And then in chapter 10, 17-19, he says,
00:32:22
Speaker
Then all the earth will be tilled in righteousness, and all of it will be planted with trees and filled with blessings. And all the trees of joy will be planted on it. They will plant vines on it, and every vine that will be planted on it will yield a thousand jugs of wine. And of every seed that is sown on it, each measure will yield a thousand measures, and each measure of olives will yield ten baths of oil. So clearly the description that the earth will be wholly rent a thunder, and everything on the earth will perish,
00:32:49
Speaker
does not indicate that God has abandoned his plans for creation and is ending space-time.
Apocalyptic Language and Theological Interpretation
00:32:54
Speaker
Right, it's a mode of speech that we would do well to get familiar with because it's a mode of speech used by these Hebrew authors all the time. Yeah, it it does feel strange to me and it will probably feel a little strange to me for my whole life.
00:33:05
Speaker
It's almost like I'm reading ancient authors from another culture or something like that. Like you're reading someone else's literature. What are the chances that that's what you're doing? Exactly. I think it's interesting, writing after the New Testament was a guy named Josephus, and he described Rome's destruction of Jerusalem. You can see that he has the same kind of tendency to describe events with language that seems fantastical to us.
00:33:27
Speaker
So in the Jewish Wars, when he describes destruction of the city, he says that the whole city ran with blood to such a degree that the fire of many of the houses was quenched with these men's blood.
00:33:38
Speaker
Right, there's no way that's actually true, and that's not his point. Right. In fact, he's writing at a time where other people who witnessed the events were still alive. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't think other Jews reading his description of the blood pouring through the city and putting out fires were saying, hey, Josephus, that's not an accurate description of what I witnessed. You're an unreliable witness. fact-checked. Exactly, yes. They didn't snopes him and say, no, this is untrue. They understood that this type of language is used to communicate something that doesn't represent exactly what you would have seen if you were standing there at the time. But it's kind of like a, oftentimes a ah theological interpretation of these important events, but the cosmic language, the grandiose language, the exaggeration is used to help the reader understand that bigger things are in play here than just the mere destruction of this town. And it's effective. You read this literature, read Revelation, for example, and it's effective.
00:34:39
Speaker
you sit there and you feel a little bit shaken as you're reading these texts. Like, what on earth? This seems incredible. It's kind of scary. And that's what it's supposed to be. Yeah, it it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck when I read these passages. Yeah. But the point is that we shouldn't now from our worldview say, Oh, well, this is clearly evidence that God is abandoning the plan or the rest of scriptures spell out.
00:35:02
Speaker
We've said this before, probably two, but in an age before video media, this is one of the ways that you inspired people's imaginations. I mean, they didn't have stranger things that you could binge on Netflix and feel the goosebumps and the exploration of the complex world of evil. And they didn't have that avenue to explore. And so they use this apocalyptic language, this exaggerated sort of speech in their literature. I like that you described it for us like ancient literature version of CGI, yeah the ability to describe something beyond what a normal person would be able to see or create.
00:35:54
Speaker
Alright, so one more way that platonic worldview influences our reading of Scripture is in passages that speak of things being prepared in heaven for believers are sometimes taken to mean that believers should hope for going to heaven. So certainly Jesus ascended to heaven, but the Christian hope is that Jesus and everything prepared for us there will come here one day.
00:36:14
Speaker
Right. In my conversation with Dr. Middleton, we actually discussed this very passage in Acts 3 21. Heaven must receive him until the time of restoration of all things, which God spoke about through his holy prophets from the beginning. Moses said, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers. You must listen to everything he tells you and everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be completely cut off from the people.
00:36:39
Speaker
An idea like having citizenship in heaven is sometimes taken to mean that that's where we should expect to go. So in Philippians 3, 20 through 21. Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of his glorious body by the power that enables him to subject everything to himself.
00:37:02
Speaker
So it's interesting, this is written to people in Philippi, which was a Roman colony. So it meant that there would have been a lot of citizens of Rome living there. Having Roman citizenship came with benefits from Rome. It designated a sort of special relationship. However, being a citizen of Rome did not mean that you expected to get to go visit Rome someday or go live there in the future. So likewise, believers are currently citizens of heaven because our identity is in Christ and we're awaiting the return of our Savior from there. Right. Some of the New Testament authors also use this language of being ambassadors. An ambassador does not live, typically it does not spend all their time in the home country. They are, by definition, out in the field representing the home country. And the Christian hope for ambassadors is not to return back to heaven one day, but it's that hope that Jesus will bring all of those things that have been prepared for believers to earth one day as part of this restoration.
00:38:00
Speaker
And our role as ambassadors is to speak of and to proclaim that gospel proclamation that there is a kingdom and a king on the throne that is greater than all the powers of the world. And he's bringing his kingdom here. As N.T. Wright says, we don't build the kingdom of God, we build for the kingdom of God.
00:38:21
Speaker
In Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, which if you look closely is clearly referring to the sky and the land. He appoints the lights in the dome to oversee the sky, and he places humans on the land. They're tasked with ruling the creatures of the land and the birds of the sky. They were also told to multiply and to fill the earth. God interacted with humans in the garden where he made them. There's nothing in the Genesis account about humans traveling to the heavens because God designed them to live as his image bearers on the land.
Heaven in Scripture vs. Modern Interpretations
00:38:50
Speaker
Right.
00:38:50
Speaker
When you look at Isaiah 65, it describes a new heaven and a new earth. Again, it's a new sky and a new land where restored humanity lives on the land. Again, there's nothing about humans traveling to the heavens. So when you see in Revelation 22, where it describes the new heaven and the new earth, again, it's a new sky and a new land.
00:39:08
Speaker
The New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth, and God dwells with his people there. So just like in Genesis and Isaiah, there's nothing about humans traveling to the heavens. God's design for humanity was always to be creatures of the earth.
00:39:23
Speaker
That's another one of the ways that the English word heaven is used a lot differently than the way the biblical authors would have used the word. And Heber thought that Shema'im was up there where the stars are. And they seemed to think that it was a solid dome with stars lodged within it. And the stars were very often thought to be like angelic spiritual beings, kind of rulers sometimes, luminaries.
00:39:47
Speaker
In the New Testament, Uranus would be maybe somewhat similar. It very likely wasn't this conception that we have when we say heaven as some space either well beyond this physical universe where God dwells or some other plane altogether.
00:40:04
Speaker
It likely would have referred to that which was above them, what we would just refer to as sky. And so when we read heaven in the Bible, it's a little bit complex, but it does seem that the biblical authors are probably thinking sky and then sky can then be used as a stand-in for the place that God dwells.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah. And its simplest definition is just what you see when you look up. Exactly. Which I think brings in some of that complexity because heaven gets used by Christians in theological discussions to mean a lot more sometimes than it does in the Bible. Right. That was my only point. And I think sometimes people use heaven in ways that is actually really helpful. It can help people better understand the biblical story. But we've got to be careful when we're reading through Scripture that we don't start taking all of these other ideas we have about heaven from our kind of theological conversations. or philosophical ones, or... Yeah, and start downloading those into the text of Scripture, because we can start to really misunderstand the story that's being told there. Yeah. When you look closely at language in Revelation, the description of the New Jerusalem is clearly symbolic in some sense. We obviously need to be careful not to start pressing this stuff for too much literalness. If the Revelation passage was the only passage that described an eternal state for believers on earth, I'd be the first to say we should be careful about trying to draw specific conclusions.
00:41:20
Speaker
But the coming of God in the New Jerusalem to Earth is closely connected to the story of the whole Bible. It's founded on the hope that God will restore the heaven and the earth, the land and the sky that he created. Humans existing on a restored earth isn't a surprising new twist in Revelation. It's the fulfillment of the design and restoration hoped for throughout the whole biblical story. And as such, it is incompatible with the platonic hope.
Platonic Ideas in Christian Eschatology
00:41:47
Speaker
Yeah, you can't mix this vision of restoration in the Bible with the Platonic idea that the goal of humanity is to leave earth behind and attain some sort of disembodied heavenly existence. Throughout Church history, many believers have sought alternative or extra endings to the biblical story of God's restoration that try to make Platonic ideas and the story of the Bible kind of fit together, sometimes really awkwardly.
00:42:11
Speaker
Yeah, we Protestants like to make fun of the concept of purgatory, a place of refinement so that you can someday attain to that which is immaterial and eternal up there. Yeah, but unfortunately, if you look at a lot of Christian history, our history, you start to see that a lot of Christians have done similar kinds of weird things where they twist the language of Scripture to make it fit some other story.
00:42:34
Speaker
Irenaeus, he thought of the new heaven and the new earth as being quite similar places, but some Christians were rewarded by getting to live in the new heaven while others had to remain on the new earth. Kind of like a special reward for the ones who'd been really good. Origen thought of the earth as a temporary place that souls would live until they could arise to God in heaven. He sees a very platonic goal for humanity.
00:42:57
Speaker
Augustine said that believers will be exalted to a heavenly abode, though he was careful to clarify that it was still physical in some sense for him. Luther didn't get into a lot of detail, but he thought believers leave time and enter God's eternity immediately after death. They go into a state where they won't desire food or wine and they won't do any labor. They're merely satisfied by contemplating God. Humans not doing labor. So by definition, then not being human, does the human vocation and task is to do labor for God's creation? I think so. He's clearly not being driven by that biblical idea of the image of God.
00:43:33
Speaker
I'm going to quote Michael Whitmer regarding John Calvin's belief about heaven and earth. He said, John Calvin insisted that our present bodies will rise again. Nevertheless, despite his emphasis on the physicality of our end, Calvin consistently privileged its spiritual components. He said the Old Testament prophets described our destiny in physical terms only because they could not find words to express that spiritual blessedness.
00:43:57
Speaker
So when Isaiah speaks of new heavens and a new earth, he's referring to the reign of Christ by whom all things have been renewed. He's not speaking about trees or beasts or the order of the stars, but the inward renewal of man. Sounds very platonic. It very much is. If you're going to try to find a way to fit that vision of the new heaven and the new earth into a platonic worldview, that's kind of how you would have to do it.
00:44:22
Speaker
in the 17th century. Many believed that earth would be restored for the plants and the beasts, but that humans wouldn't live there. They would go live in heaven with God. So quoting Whitmer again, The majority took the new earth literally. They believed that our present world would be renovated rather than annihilated, but not for us. The saints are destined to live forever with God in the third or highest heaven, and we will look down upon the restored earth and delight in it as a monument to God's glory, wisdom, and power.
00:44:50
Speaker
The new earth might contain plants, fish, birds, and beasts, or it might not, but it will definitely not have people. It will be essentially a national park with a no trespassing sign. Beautiful to look at, but not for use. Might I propose that the common through line with all these Christian writers throughout the ages is that they forgot about the Hebrew Bible. They forgot about the Old Testament's hope.
00:45:15
Speaker
they forgot about their Jewish roots, a very Jewish Jesus, and they instead plugged in the Jewish story to the Greco-Roman Platonistic story. yeah Now, more recently, a defining characteristic of the dispensational system was the distinction between God's heavenly people, the church, and God's earthly people, Israel. These kinds of platonic ideas are prevalent today. It's been a while since I've walked into a Christian bookstore, but I remember shelves of books about heaven, usually with pearly gates floating on the clouds on the covers.
00:45:48
Speaker
The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren says, we're not completely happy here because we're not supposed to be. Earth is not our final home. We were created for something much better. And he's just paraphrasing Lewis there. But that's the kind of thing that would not be unusual to hear within Christian conversations. That's, I think, a pretty standard idea within our thinking today.
00:46:07
Speaker
Yeah, John MacArthur, another popular preacher, says, we lose down here. The obvious inverse is that up there is somewhere where we are vindicated or win. And that's not at all to say that we don't suffer loss. We don't take up our cross and follow Jesus down here. But again, the down here part is the misunderstanding. It is down here where God wins. If by down here, you mean the physical creation.
00:46:36
Speaker
The new heavens and the new earth are down here. That's where God wins. That's where God restores. And that's what God loves. Yeah, that's central to the entire story.
00:46:53
Speaker
Is this really all that important? What are the practical impacts of having a future hope that's more platonic maybe than it is biblical sometimes? The most obvious problem is that it messes with our ability to read and to be inspired by the scriptural story God gives of his restoration for his good creation. If you cut off the beginning and ignore the end of the Christian story, it's pretty easy to kind of yank the bit in the middle out and make it fit a sort of platonic story. Now, obviously, Christians are not going to literally cut out the beginning and ending of our Bibles, but from a narrative perspective, we do.
00:47:28
Speaker
When we talk about creation or eschatology, we're much more likely to focus on specific questions we have rather than to look at their place within God's story. When we read Genesis, it's easy to focus on modern conversations around evolution and the age of the earth. When we read Revelation, it's often through the lens of specific arguments over eschatology timelines.
00:47:48
Speaker
There's a lot of good things worth discussing in Genesis and Revelation. I think a good contextual study shows that the author of Genesis intended to teach God's creation of his good universe for his glory and human purpose within that creation, God's intentions to redeem what he created good. And it's clear that like many other authors of scripture, John was tuned into this story that began in Genesis, and Revelation describes its culmination There's plenty of wisdom to be gained from the beginning and the end of our Bible. We have to make sure that we don't lose sight of the big story they tell, because that's the story we're living in.
Death, Ethics, and Resurrection Hope
00:48:23
Speaker
If our debates are centered around all the wrong questions or all the questions that the biblical authors certainly weren't envisaging, then we will be busy talking about the Bible, but we won't be talking about biblical hope and biblical wisdom as we're sidetracked with our modern and sometimes very often postmodern Western and English debates. Debates about science and nuclear warfare and the end of the world.
00:48:53
Speaker
Yeah, questions that very clearly the biblical authors could not have had on their minds. right These are not the questions they were trying to answer. Here's another practical effect of this. It's in how we deal with death.
00:49:06
Speaker
It's comforting to think of our deceased loved ones as having gone home. We easily slip into describing death as just a portal to heaven, sometimes even a blessing. We can imagine, like a good Platonist, that upon death, their soul is released from entrapment in the body. We can actually start to turn death into a good thing. As Christians, I think it's important that we recognize that death is a terrible corruption of God's plan. It's an enemy to be defeated. We look forward to the day when death is destroyed and we get to make fun of it.
00:49:34
Speaker
It reminds us that we still live in a world that is groaning for a much needed restoration. We should grieve death. Thankfully, we don't grieve like those who don't have any hope. The hope that we have is resurrection. We hope for the day when creation is restored and we're raised into our resurrected bodies.
00:49:50
Speaker
It's through this knowing that death is ultimately defeated that we can live without the fear of death, even seek to glorify Jesus in our death. But that doesn't make death a good thing. It means we know that it isn't permanent. Its power and effects in the world will be reversed, undone, through resurrection. When we change death from our enemy to a sort of portal to Jesus, this can have huge impacts on our ethics.
00:50:15
Speaker
If death isn't all that bad, then maybe killing isn't all that bad. If killing isn't all that bad, then maybe anything that's not as bad as killing, well, that certainly isn't all that bad either. It's pretty easy to see how all these behaviors become more easily justified once we've started this shift. This is the sort of logic used historically by the church to justify the slaughtering and enslaving of other people. right yeah It can become really easy to relativize our ethics as long as our actions can be justified with a going to heaven mindset.
00:50:44
Speaker
Yeah, famously, the slave owners in the antebellum South would preach to their slaves and would talk about how their woes would be over in the suite by and by. There's a solution to your problems, but it's not me liberating you or treating you well. It's you get to go to the good place when I work you to death. To your point, historically, viewing death as merely a portal to get to the good place, to get to Plato's world of the forms that we now call Jesus's bosom, that's just been used to justify atrocities throughout the ages.
00:51:22
Speaker
I hate to even say this, but I personally had a conversation with somebody who was entertaining the idea that it may not be so bad that the United States military kills a certain number of this particular ethnic group in the Middle East because they'll probably grow up to be terrorists. And if infants and children go to heaven when they die, then of course it's better to off them than to let them grow up to be terrorists.
00:51:49
Speaker
And people don't usually say that out loud, but sometimes that is kind of lurking in the background of the conversation where it seems like that's kind of where people's headspace is as they seek to justify militaristic objectives and atrocities that are committed in the name of national interest or national defense. Yeah.
00:52:09
Speaker
One other place that platonic ideas can manifest heavily is in focus on the intermediate state, the belief that, well, that's what heaven is. If yeah you go by the counterpoints for views on Heavenbook, hoping to find out what happens right after death, you're going to be disappointed. In his introduction, Michael Whitmer says, many Christians make an eschatological mess by blurring together the various stages of the afterlife.
00:52:31
Speaker
Theologians typically avoid such confusion by distinguishing God's promised future for individual believers into the intermediate state and the final state. The Bible says little about the intermediate state, except that we are with the Lord. He says this book is not about the intermediate state, but about the final state. Where will Christians live forever? He notes, in fact, that the title of the book may not be ideal. He says the term heaven is commonly associated with our disembodied, ethereal, otherworldly existence that begins the moment you
Intermediate State and Final Hope
00:52:59
Speaker
die.
00:52:59
Speaker
it's not the best word to associate with our final state. Right, it's already based on ah probably an incorrect premise. Yeah, it's funny. They're writing a four views book about like the Christian final hope, and they're not even quite sure what to call it. Right. We settled on heaven. Because heaven's been so hijacked by these other Platonistic type of ideas. Yes.
00:53:22
Speaker
They should have just had four views on the final future hope of Christians and just let it be super wordy. And that would be like also a critique of the way Christians have started to use heaven over the years. Maybe. If you had left it to just the contributors, I'm guessing that's probably what would have happened.
00:53:39
Speaker
Baker Academic or whatever is like, yeah, that's not gonna fly. We gotta shorten that bad boy up. If they want to sell any copies. So what happens between death and resurrection? That does matter. It is a pressing question. We all face it. I mean, because we all have loved ones who've passed away, and we do want to know, even though they may be resurrected in the future, and that's what we hope for ultimately,
00:54:04
Speaker
I would still kind of like to know where that leaves them now. That's a natural question, I think, and it's a fair one. Yeah. And there are passages that many look to as providing clarity on the intermediate state. They look at Jesus telling the thief on the cross, today you will be with me in paradise. They look at the parable of Lazarus and Paul's mentioning in Philippians that upon or maybe in his death, he will be with Jesus. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. and However you look at it, that's not enough to build a confident or a robust understanding of the intermediate state from. Sure. In fact, the general agreement among scholars regarding the intermediate state is that it's not very important within the New Testament. So within a world where people wondered about what happens after death, the hope clearly expressed by the Jewish and Christian scriptures are about what happens when death is undone, when creation is restored. Right.
00:54:56
Speaker
In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul does address concerns over those who've died, and his answer is, don't worry guys, those who've died, or those who are asleep as he calls them, will be resurrected so that they can meet Jesus in the air and accompany him at his arrival to earth. In other words, those who are in the quote-unquote intermediate state, the hope for them is the coming of Jesus and the resurrection in the end. Yeah. That's what he says. and Check out our Rapture episode where we talked all about this.
00:55:25
Speaker
Yeah, his answer to this question of the intermediate state is not to describe that existence in cheery, happy language, but it's just to go, oh, well, we're looking forward to the resurrection. This lack of description regarding human experience between death and resurrection in Scripture shouldn't surprise us. In fact, given the Judeo-Christian worldview where humans are created as embodied creatures with a purpose connected to creation, the idea of a disembodied existence is at best not ideal.
00:55:51
Speaker
Right, Paul in 2 Corinthians 5 describes that quote-unquote intermediate state as a state of nakedness. You are not who you are intended to be. Things aren't complete. So whatever state that is, we argue about whether people are conscious before they have a resurrected body, et cetera, et cetera. And those are all interesting and things to think about, for sure, and they're pressing.
00:56:14
Speaker
Paul describes that state as not complete until resurrection. Then the hope is achieved. Then our loved ones will be restored to their place. Then we will reunite with them. Then there will be the new heavens and the new earth in which God is dwelling with all of humanity again. Yeah. When you start looking at different ideas about what exactly happens in this intermediate state, you see a wide variety because there's just not a ton of detail about a given in scripture.
00:56:42
Speaker
Right, so some will propose like a soul sleep, some will propose an intermediate body or something so that there's some level of consciousness. We probably don't even need to solve all that, or certainly not in this episode. I don't even know if we need to have a really hard opinion on that, to be honest, so long as the true biblical Jewish Christian hope is maintained.
00:57:02
Speaker
Yeah, if I had to guess what someone experiences at death, I would probably guess that the next thing they experience is resurrection. If, however, when I die, I meet Jesus and he tells me that I'm floating around with him like a ghost until the resurrection, I mean, that'll be cool too. Sure. It just just won't ultimately matter relative to our true hope in restoration, in resurrection, and in life everlasting.
00:57:22
Speaker
Right, and our only point here in this episode I think is just to say it would be backwards to start thinking that that state of affairs is the final hope state of affairs.
00:57:34
Speaker
That's actually not good. That's not biblical. Do not do that. So whatever your theory is, may it not be your final hope as a believer in Messiah Jesus.
Conclusion: Restoration and Resurrection
00:57:44
Speaker
Yeah, let's never forget our true hope. God's restoration of all things through Christ. May we look forward to the day when we get to live with creation and with God bearing his image the way we were always meant to. Revelation 22, 1 through 5.
00:58:00
Speaker
Then He showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, down the middle of the city's main street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing 12 kinds of fruit, bearing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, and there will no longer be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and His servants will worship Him.
00:58:24
Speaker
They will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. Night and day will be no more. People will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun because the Lord God will give them light, and they will reign forever and ever.
00:59:03
Speaker
As we look forward to a new year, we want to express thanks to everyone who's listened to the Repaired Eye and Podcast in 2024. We're excited for what we have coming up next, and we hope the podcast continues to be beneficial to our listeners in both Bible study and theological formation.
00:59:19
Speaker
As always, the podcast is produced by Nick Payne and Matthew Westlake. Theme music is provided by Posthumorous. Interlude music for this and every other episode is obtained by copyright from Epidemic Sound. Find links to the specific artists and songs in the show notes of each episode. Follow our YouTube channel and reach out to us if you want to ask any questions or if you want to suggest topics for future episodes. Much more to come next year, God's blessings on everyone, from the Reparedine podcast.