Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
I Don’t Want to Go to Heaven - Resurrection E1
114 Plays1 year ago
Many Christians hope to leave earth and spend eternity in a disembodied bliss, but the Hebrew Bible describes God’s good creation and his purpose for image bearing humanity within that creation. Has God abandoned his plans for creation? Did death win? Nick and Matt discuss death’s invasion into the Biblical story, God’s work to limit the effects of death, and Hebrew Bible hope that one day, the creator God will swallow up death.
Resources Referenced: A New Heaven and a New Earth by Richard Middleton, The Rationale of the Laws of Clean and Unclean in the Old Testament by Joe M. Sprinkle, Jesus and the Forces of Death by Matthew Thiessen, The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright.
Interlude Music: Hopeful by Nebulae, Mountain Top by Marc Torch
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Resurrection Series
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Reparadine Podcast. Today we start a series of conversations on resurrection. When you pick up the Hebrew Bible, you find yourself sort of surprised to see that the authors don't really seem to believe in an afterlife. Or if they do,
00:00:28
Speaker
Many believers hope that after death they will pass from this earth to an eternal, disembodied, blissful existence in God's presence they call heaven. However, the story of Scripture gives a very different hope—resurrection. In the biblical story, resurrection is the means by which God overcomes death and restores his good creation. It is by resurrection that God restores humanity as his image-bearers in the good creation. Resurrection hope is central to Christian identity—it is central to the biblical narrative. It sets our eschatological hopes, and it should form our ethics.
00:00:59
Speaker
Resurrection hope, however, is not compatible with the popular conception that Christianity is about going to heaven when we die. And I think it's important that our hope for the future be firmly rooted in the story of Scripture.
Role of Death in Genesis
00:01:10
Speaker
To appreciate the importance of resurrection, we'll need to understand the role that death plays in God's story first. In Genesis 2, verses 16 through 17, And Yahweh God commanded the man, You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For on the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die.
00:01:27
Speaker
Unfortunately, Adam and Eve did disobey God, and they died. Death was a major problem. God had spent six days creating his cosmic temple for his glory, filling the land, the sea, and the skies with living creatures. He created humanity to function as his image bearers, his appointed representatives, made to reign and rule over creation, tending the garden and filling the land. Check out our series on image of God if you're interested.
00:01:51
Speaker
Adam and Eve's death is a problem because it unravels God's good work. He reverts his established order back into disorder. Genesis 2 describes how Adam had been formed from the dust and given the breath of life. And in Genesis 3, 19, we see the way the curse of death undoes this good work.
00:02:08
Speaker
You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it, for you are dust, and you will return to dust." Today, people debate whether this passage refers to physical death or to spiritual death. yeah When you look at ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters of this passage, they disagree on how the day works, but they're all in agreement that this is clearly referring to physical death, is that undoing of God's good creation work.
00:02:32
Speaker
Right, because the day could mean like, on the day God created the heavens and the earth, that was a reference to the whole creation event, that all is happening in a day. It's a little bit of a loose term sometime. Yeah, some ancient interpreters point out that Adam died within a thousand years of this curse, and that to the Lord a thousand years is like a day. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Others take it just to mean that on the day that he ate of it, that curse was given, so he was doomed to suffer his mortality.
00:02:58
Speaker
It
Humanity's Fall and Creation's Cycle
00:02:59
Speaker
makes sense either way. So he was certainly doomed to die on the day that he disobeys because he's exiled from the presence of God which sustains his life. the cherubeam guard the way back to the garden so that adam and eve can't what eat of the tree of life and live forever in that state of messed up affairs. That's what the text says. So these are probably actually mortal creatures that need to be in the presence of God in order to sustain their life. So if you disobey God, get exiled from his presence, you don't live as a mortal creature.
00:03:32
Speaker
And that's a problem, because humans had been created to bear God's image, to act as God's representative rulers to the rest of creation. So humanity's fall into death affects all of creation. In Romans 8, Paul describes fallen creation awaiting its restoration.
00:03:47
Speaker
Yeah, he says, For the creation eagerly waits with anticipation for God's sons to be revealed. For the creation was subject subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in order that the creation itself would also be set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God's children. There's always been a puzzling passage to me because it's like why is the creation waiting for humans to be restored?
00:04:14
Speaker
Well, now it's sort of making sense when I properly understand what the image of God means. Obviously, all of creation is then blessed by a proper ruler ruling properly. Yeah, humans were designed for creation and they're an integral part of creation working well to God's glory.
00:04:29
Speaker
Genesis 3, God describes how the fall will complicate and frustrate humanity and its image-bearing. Growing food will be difficult, multiplying will be painful, and there will be enmity between humans and the serpent, one of the beasts. Every aspect of human life will be invaded by the effects of death in the world.
00:04:47
Speaker
The invasion of these effects of death is seen clearly in its impact on human culture. When God created humanity, they were all tasked with ruling and reigning together. But under death's rule, humans turn against one another to preserve their own
Israel's Choice: Life or Death?
00:05:00
Speaker
lives. We've talked about this a lot actually in the power series. Genesis 6, 11, and 12. Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and the earth was filled with wickedness. God saw how corrupt the earth was for every creature had corrupted its way on the earth.
00:05:13
Speaker
The Hebrew Bible tells the story of humanity entering into a cycle where sin causes death and living with death causes sin, this sort of positive feedback cycle that traps humans under the reign of death.
00:05:24
Speaker
Yeah, Romans 5, 12, therefore just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people because all sin. In fact, sin was in the world before the law, but sin is not charged to a person's account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam's transgression. He is a type of the coming one.
00:05:48
Speaker
Thankfully, as the story of Scripture makes abundantly clear, God doesn't give up on His design for creation. He won't let death have the final say. God's creation was good. It proclaims His glory, and the biblical story shows us that He intends to rescue it from death. He will restore what He created good, and He will restore humanity as part of that good creation.
00:06:09
Speaker
So in Genesis 12, God selected Abraham, a man whose body was as good as dead, with a wife whose womb was dead, and promised him offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky. Where death had brought infertility, God would bring life. Paul in Romans 4 celebrates Abraham's obedience and his trust in the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.
00:06:33
Speaker
The law given to Israel was intended to help guide Israel away from their patterns of death and toward Yahweh.
Purity Laws and Life-Death Separation
00:06:40
Speaker
In Deuteronomy 30, the commands for the Israelites are closed with this note about life and death. See, today I have said before you life and prosperity, death and adversity. For I am commanding you today to love Yahweh your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commands, statutes, and ordinances, so that you may live and multiply, and Yahweh your God may bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.
00:07:03
Speaker
But if your heart turns away and you do not listen and you are led astray to bow and worship to other gods and serve them, I tell you today that you will certainly perish and will not prolong your days in the land that you're going into to possess across the Jordan.
00:07:16
Speaker
Israel was called to be a people who followed Yahweh, a people who choose life and are separated from death. This calling to be separate from death is apparent even in the ritual purity system. So within an ancient cultural context, it's clear that much of this system that seems so weird to us today was actually about keeping the effects of death away from the worship of Yahweh. Joe Sprinkle writes about this The purity system arguably conveys in a symbolic way that Yahweh is the god of life and order, and is separated from that which has to do with death and disorder. So, for example, priests had very strict rules against contact with dead bodies. They weren't allowed to attend most funerals because their service in the temple required that they keep themselves separated from death. The food laws set aside specific animals that were considered to be unclean,
00:08:05
Speaker
He writes, Most, though not all, of the unclean animals are somehow associated with death, either being predators and scavengers, or living in tomb-like caves, points out rock badgers. The pig, in particular, in addition to being a scavenger, was associated with the worship of chthonic or underworld deities and or demons among the Hittites, the Egyptians, and the Mesopotamians.
00:08:27
Speaker
Skin diseases were closely associated with death. He writes, the scale disease rendered a person unclean because it made a person waste away like a corpse. Numbers 1212 says, let her not be like a corpse, referring to Miriam's skin disease. Blood and semen were symbols of life in ancient cultures. So he notes that bodily discharges, blood for women and semen for men, may represent a temporary loss of strength and life and a movement towards death.
00:08:55
Speaker
I think it's interesting, the association of skin diseases and bodily discharges with death may help us see the ministry of a later Galilean rabbi in a slightly clearer light. Yeah, I think so, hey. The law's function to separate Yahweh from any association with death was unusual in an ancient world, because it was normal for death to be a key element of religious practice for many peoples. Again quoting Joe Sprinkle, this symbolic system served to separate Yahweh worship from necromancy, spiritualism, and ancestor veneration, since dealings with the dead rendered a person unclean. Even sitting among the graves is condemned.
00:09:30
Speaker
So he describes that this purification rituals symbolize movement from death towards life and accordingly involved blood, the color red and spring literally living water, all of which are symbols of life. So while Israel's neighbors incorporated death into their religious practice, Yahweh's desire for his people was that they know him as the creator God, the God who gives life. Their ritual practices were meant to be constant reminders that death is contrary to the creator God's good plan.
Temple as Eden's Reflection
00:10:15
Speaker
That's interesting because even those practices of the ancient Israelites that appear to us to be very similar to the other ancient Near Eastern practices, they're kind of weird. They are kind of bloody. Think of like the sacrificial system. But even the most bloodiest parts of these practices were distinct from the cultures around them in that the focus clearly in the Levitical system is that the perfect spotless animal and its blood that's brought into the presence of God is representative of the perfect spotless life of the animal. It's not as if God wants to eat blood. So even in the most bloody practices, there's an emphasis on life going to the presence of God, making things whole again, not death. Yeah, because that would be totally contrary to that whole system of life and death. You're not supposed to bring any death into God's worship area. It's supposed to be an area preserved for life because he is the God of life. Right, especially when you then consider that animal somehow in some ways kind of representing its owner going into the presence of God. It's like the life of the animal providing a way into the very presence of God. It's not about God being satisfied by some slaughtering event as it was in the other ancient European cultures.
00:11:33
Speaker
So the law given to Israel was intended to direct them toward living more in line with the life-giving God's
Resurrection and Restoration Hopes
00:11:40
Speaker
image-bearing purpose for humanity. So even in a fallen, broken world, there were people called to live a more Edenic life, one in line with God's created purpose for humanity. So the temple was intended to function like a mini Eden. It had a similar design. The humans in it were meant to perform image-bearing functions, and it was a place where God dwelt with humanity. In a world under the reign of death,
00:12:03
Speaker
God had given Israel a small piece of Eden and called them to live in accordance with His life-bringing design for humanity. Deuteronomy 30, 19, I call heaven and earth as witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live. Love Yahweh your God, obey Him, and remain faithful to Him. For He is your life, and He will prolong your days as you live in the land Yahweh swore to give to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
00:12:32
Speaker
The Wisdom of Solomon reflects on this call for humans to turn from death toward God. Wisdom of Solomon 1, 12-16. Do not zealously seek death by the error of your life, or bring destruction on yourselves by the deeds of your hands. Because God does not make death, nor does he delight in the destruction of the living. For he created all things that they might exist, and the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, nor is the kingdom of Hades on earth.
00:13:01
Speaker
for righteousness is immortal, but the impious by their deeds and words summoned it, considering it to be a friend. They wasted away and made a covenant with it because they are worthy to belong to its party." The Hebrew Bible tells, unfortunately, of Israel's disobedience to God's laws. They turned away from the prosperity and life God wanted for them. Isaiah 28 criticizes Israel's leaders for turning away from God.
00:13:27
Speaker
Therefore hear the word of Yahweh, you scoffers who rule this people in Jerusalem. For you said, we've made a covenant with death and we have an agreement with Sheol. When the overwhelming catastrophe passes through, it will not touch us because we have made falsehood our refuge and have hidden behind treachery.
00:13:44
Speaker
The consequences for the nation of Israel in choosing death included losing their land, being exiled away, and suffering the loss of God's blessings. Going into exile for Israel meant they lost the special access they had to God via the Temple. They were removed from the specially designated land they had been given. Their ability to function in the special role they had been given was impeded, and their future as a nation was made uncertain.
00:14:08
Speaker
In short, exile was like a form of death for Israel. But the Hebrew Bible expresses hope that God will save Israel from their patterns of death that led them into exile. Its authors hope that God will reform the nation, turning them away from their patterns of death and back towards life. They trusted that God would bring His people, restored life in the age to come.
00:14:31
Speaker
One of the most interesting pictures of this restoration is in Ezekiel 37. So this is the famous dry bones vision. God reforms the people of Israel, giving them new flesh and breathing into them a new spirit. This is all new creation language. The subject of this vision is clearly about the regeneration of God's covenant people. It's the reformation of the nation, the way he had wanted it to exist. Isaiah 65 hopes for the restoration of Israel as part of a restored cosmos.
00:15:01
Speaker
For I will create new heavens and a new earth. The past events will not be remembered or come to mind. Then be glad and rejoice forever in what I'm creating. For I will create Jerusalem to be a joy and its people to be a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people. The sound of weeping and crying will no longer be heard in her.
00:15:19
Speaker
In her, a nursing infant will no longer live only a few days, or an old man not live out his days. Indeed, the one who dies at 100 years old will be mourned as a young man, and the one who misses 100 years will be considered cursed. People will build houses and live in them, and they will plant vineyards and eat of their fruit. It's such a beautiful vision of the nation living without all these effects of death that corrupt humanity. Isaiah 25, 6-8.
00:15:44
Speaker
On this mountain, Yahweh of armies will prepare for all people a feast of choice meat, a feast with aged wine, prime cuts of choice meat, fine vintage wine. On this mountain, he will swallow up the burial shroud, the shroud over all the peoples, the sheet covering all the nations. When he has swallowed up death once and for all, Yahweh God will wipe away the tears from every face and remove his people's disgrace from the whole earth for Yahweh has spoken.
00:16:13
Speaker
The Canaanite god of death, Mot, was depicted as a voraciously hungry deity. He was the god of death who hungrily swallows life. But Isaiah depicts Yahweh as doing the opposite for his people. He says Yahweh will swallow up death forever.
00:16:29
Speaker
These prophecies look forward to God's reversal of death's work, his rescuing and restoring his people. Although the Hebrew Bible is full of hope that God will resurrect the nation of Israel,
Death vs. God's Design
00:16:40
Speaker
it usually describes death for individuals simply as the end of their life. So even the dry bones vision of Ezekiel 37,
00:16:48
Speaker
that describes bones reassembled, given flesh, and the breath of life, it tells us that the bones are the nation of Israel. For a nation to be remade doesn't require that any of its deceased citizens be raised from the dead. It just means that the descendants would be regathered into a nation and restored to the land, as the prophecy hopes for, that the nation which was once in a sense dead would be made alive again. For individuals, death is the end. Those who've died are no longer able to worship Yahweh,
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, Psalm 115-17, it is not the dead who praise Yahweh, nor any of those descending into the silence of death, but we bless Yahweh both now and forever. Alleluia. Ecclesiastes 3, 19-21.
00:17:29
Speaker
For the fate of the children of Adam and the fate of the animals is the same. As one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath. People have no advantage over animals since everything is futile. All are going to the same place. All come from dust and return to dust. Who knows if the spirits of the children of Adam go upward and the spirits of animals go downward to the earth?
00:17:50
Speaker
I've seen that there's nothing better than for a person to enjoy his activities because that is his reward. For who can enable him to see what will happen after he dies? Life in the Hebrew Bible is clearly preferable to death. Even though there are all kinds of problems with life in this fallen state. Humans are mortal, they have limited access to God, and their ability to bear God's image properly is impeded, life is still better than death. God's design for humanity is to live in creation.
00:18:17
Speaker
Death ends the human ability to seek and worship God. If you search for all the passages in the Old Testament that talk about any sort of rescue from death, most of what you'll find is hope for God to preserve life, or thanking God for preserving life, protecting the authors from death.
00:18:34
Speaker
Even that passage in Isaiah that we read, the grand hope for the future when Yahweh makes all things well is what? Very long life. It's like the old guy will be much older than 100. Yeah, Psalm 6820.
00:18:49
Speaker
Our God is a God of salvation, and escape from death belongs to Yahweh, my Lord. psalm one sixteen verse three The ropes of death were wrapped around me, and the torments of
00:19:22
Speaker
It would be easy at this point to want to skip forward to the parts about bodily resurrection, but actually think it's really important to sit and think about this worldview of the Old Testament authors for a little bit. So the Hebrew Bible describes death as working against God's good design. Life is a gift from God, a gift to be enjoyed and used for his glory. The Hebrew Bible teaches that life should be lived in accordance with God's instructions, seeking the type of life he designed humanity for, a life free from the detrimental effects of death.
00:19:51
Speaker
God protect me from death, protect me from Sheol is the cry of the Old Testament. God's purposes for humanity are for what they do alive
Daniel 12 and Bodily Resurrection
00:20:00
Speaker
here on this earth. Death in the Old Testament is the end of that life for humans. The urging of the Old Testament authors is to seek a long life of bringing glory to God, seeking to live free from these corrupting effects of death.
00:20:15
Speaker
Middleton says the negative picture of the afterlife is confirmed by the use of language associated with Sheol to describe a life that has been invaded by death, a life that does not manifest the flourishing and shalom that God intends. This worldview can maybe seem a little simplistic.
00:20:32
Speaker
we might be tempted from our perspective to call it a little unspiritual since it's so focused on bodily life. However, I think this worldview is deeply rooted in the belief that God created everything good and that humans have a role to play in that good creation. This worldview is shaped deeply by the creation account in Genesis.
00:20:54
Speaker
To sum up, the Old Testament gives clear expression that God's desire for individuals and for the nation of Israel is that they live here and now in accordance with God's good design. Now, that isn't quite everything that the Hebrew Bible has to say about God's dealing with death. There is a text that offers clear hope that God's restoration of His people will include their bodily resurrection from the dead. In Daniel 9, after recalling God's faithfulness in saving Israel from Egypt, we get Daniel 9, 17-19.
00:21:25
Speaker
Therefore, our God, hear the prayer and the petitions of your servant. Make your face shine on your desolate sanctuary for the Lord's sake. Listen closely, my God, and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations in the city that bears your name, for we are not presenting our petitions before you based on our righteous acts, but based on your abundant compassion. Lord, hear. Lord, forgive. Lord, listen and act. My God, for your own sake do not delay, because your city and your people bear your name.
00:21:53
Speaker
Daniel 12, 1-2 describes his vision of this hoped-for restoration. At that time, Michael, the great prince who stands watch over your people, will rise up. And there will be a time of distress such as has never occurred since the nations came into being until that time. But at that time, all your people who are found written in the book will escape. Many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life and some to disgrace and eternal contempt. Those who have insight will shine like the bright expanse of the heavens and those who lead many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever. This passage is really interesting because it takes an expected hope from the Hebrew Bible that the God will rescue Israel from the exiled state, and it adds a very clear expectation that this restoration of the nation will include the bodily resurrection of individuals, the reversal of death. So as death returns humans to the dust, Daniel describes them as awakening from the dust of the earth.
00:22:52
Speaker
So this is widely acknowledged in scholarship to be the first explicit resurrection doctrine in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Yeah, there are some other passages in the Hebrew Bible that sort of feel like they might be about hope of rescue from after death. Authors in a lot of other passages use rescue from Sheol language or rescue from death to describe prolonging life. It's hard to be certain if any of those are actually talking about a rescue from beyond death.
00:23:18
Speaker
This passage in Daniel is the first one
Second Temple Jewish Thought on Resurrection
00:23:20
Speaker
that's super clear. In fact, this Daniel passage is so clear about this hope of resurrection that many have sought to explain it as an idea that must have come into Judaism from elsewhere, like Zoroastrianism or borrowed from the Baal cycle.
00:23:33
Speaker
Hmm, interesting. Because there's not that much to precede it in the Hebrew Bible itself. Maybe just a couple of scant passages. Yeah, you get just kind of like hints and maybe hopes and like questions. Can God save people from beyond death? And then then Daniel 12 passages like boom, it's gonna happen. He's gonna resurrect his people as part of the restoration of the nation. That is interesting, yeah.
00:23:53
Speaker
So while some have argued that this idea must have come into Judaism, Antirite argues that this resurrection hoped for has roots in Hebrew scripture. So he says, The belief in resurrection, we find in Daniel 12, 2-3, is the surprising but comprehensible result of the bringing together of two other beliefs. So the first belief, Israel's ancient belief that her god Yahweh was the creator god, and that human life reflecting his image meant bodily life in the world, not disembodied post-mortem existence.
00:24:22
Speaker
And the second idea is that Israel's exile was to be seen as the punishment for sin, and the belief that exile reached a kind of climax in the fate of the martyrs. Yahweh's answer to his people's exile would be metaphorically life from the dead, and Yahweh's answer to his people's martyrdom would be literally life from the dead.
00:24:42
Speaker
Ah, yes. So for God to not only be faithful to the nation that he loved and called, but to be faithful to the individuals that make up that nation who have been martyred on his behalf, he would not only revitalize that nation, but his love would also lead us to think that he would revitalize those individuals that make up the nation.
00:25:05
Speaker
Exactly. It's like all those hopes and that belief in God's good creation come together and this ends up being kind of the logical outworking of all of those ideas. Yeah, Wright is really good on this. One of the best, one of the greatest in the third book of his magnum opus, The Resurrection of the Son of God. He has an extended section on this.
00:25:24
Speaker
So, although Daniel clearly expressed that God's restoration of Israel would include bodily resurrection, not all Jewish groups during the Second Temple period believed in resurrection. There wasn't widespread agreement on which writings were Holy Scripture, so some didn't include Daniel. Like we see in the New Testament, the Pharisees believed in resurrection, but the Sadducees didn't.
00:25:42
Speaker
And among those groups who did believe in resurrection, there were different beliefs about who would get resurrected. The Daniel 12 passage that describes the resurrection just says that many are multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth while awake. So some understood resurrection as a reward for the most righteous and a punishment for the most wicked. You're kind of just kidding. Select groups. Just the really bad and the really good. Most people die like a dog, but if you're really good, you get resurrected. If you're really bad, you get resurrected to eternal contempt. Some groups believed that everyone would be resurrected. Some Jews started mixing ideas from Greek philosophy about the soul and afterlife with Jewish beliefs. Now we're getting into familiar language.
00:26:22
Speaker
Platonism was a Greek philosophy that taught that humans consisted of an immortal soul trapped in an earthly body. The goal of this soul is to leave the body and travel away to the non-physical world of the forms. So, obviously, aspects of Platonism clearly contradict the Jewish story of the Creator God who had created a good creation, but that didn't
Messiah's Resurrection and Christian Hope
00:26:40
Speaker
stop some Jews from trying to combine their religious beliefs with Platonism.
00:26:44
Speaker
So they reimagined the promised blessings of God as something to be experienced in a post-death disembodied afterlife rather than through a bodily resurrection. Some Jews maintained hope in the future resurrection and incorporated Greek ideas into their understanding of the intermediate state, right that time between death and the resurrection. So they imagine that after death, the righteous would hang out in something like Plato's world of the forms for a while and then get resurrected back to a restored earth. There's a wide variety of beliefs regarding what happened after death and then what happens after life after death.
00:27:16
Speaker
What happens after life, after death? Got it. Some Jews pondered regaining access to the Garden of Eden. It's called Paradise in the Septuagint. Middleton writes,
00:27:28
Speaker
various second temple jewish traditions thus developed about the inaccessibility of paradise and the tree of life these traditions centered on the idea that god took the garden or paradise up into heaven and removed it to the top of a high mountain in the sky or the heaven or at the ends of the earth in order to guarantee it's continued inac accessibility and until the last day when it would be revealed upon the earth. So like the New Jerusalem garden coming down from the heavens to the earth again, something like that? Very similar, yeah, the same kind of imagery used in the New Jerusalem as of Paradise. Maybe those cherubim guarding the way to the garden got bored and so God's like, alright, you guys are off duty, I'll just take this whole garden up to the sky.
00:28:08
Speaker
decided to give him a break. So all of this is really interesting. But honestly, for most Jewish groups during the Second Temple period, afterlife and resurrection were not the most important topics. So for most Torah keeping, temple functions, interactions with the empires of the world, and national independence were the more pressing issues. Those were the real concerns of the day. Right. I mean, those are the concerns that litter all of the Second Temple Jewish writings.
00:28:33
Speaker
Now, there was one strange Jewish sect that we've got to talk about because they got obsessed with the resurrection. The sect was one of the groups that formed around somebody who was claiming to be a messiah, and like many of those others who claimed to be messiahs, he was put to death as a political rebel.
00:28:49
Speaker
Usually, most groups just ended when their claimed messiah died. However, this Jewish sect made the wild claim that their messiah didn't stay dead. They claimed that the future resurrection they were hoping for had already started in the resurrection of their messiah. Not only did they claim that their messiah had been resurrected from the dead, they also claimed that he had ascended and was seated at God's right hand from where he ruled and would return one day in judgment.
00:29:17
Speaker
So followers of the sect, they wrote crazy things about their executed messiah like this. They said, but God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. They claimed that this messiah had destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light. They described this messiah who through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God and power by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord. Oh no, I know why that sounded so familiar.
Teaser for New Testament Resurrection
00:30:24
Speaker
Next time on the Repaired Eye and Podcast, we continue our conversations, this time focusing on the New Testament idea of resurrection and what it means for Jesus of Nazareth's followers to be people of resurrection hope. Thank you again for listening to the Repaired Eye and Podcast.