They Mystery of Epiphany

The Bible is full of mysterious goings-on.  In an attempt to make sense of these mysteries, by-gone generations of believers have attempted to explain them in terms relevant to their times.  Unfortunately, those of us following Christ in the 21^st century have not done as well communicating the truths of God’s mysteries to our contemporaries in meaningful ways.  We read the ancient stories and because we cannot begin to fathom the world in which the Patriarchs and David and Jesus lived, we rely on essentially Western European medieval traditions.  Why those?  Because those are about the oldest things that have survived in our Western traditions. When the Bible says there was no room for Joseph and Mary in the inn, most people think of a wooden structure with smoke curling out the chimney and a little wooden lean-to out back for some animals. Tradition even gives us the nasty innkeeper who doesn't appear anywhere in Scripture.  Cattle are lowing and sheep baa-ing – but it’s all a figment of someone’s imagination trying to make the scene relevant to people who kept cows and sheep and lived in chimney structures.

Nowhere in the Christmas story do we find more wonder and more misinformation than in the story of a group of mysterious travelers from the East who come to worship the baby Jesus.   Tradition numbers them as three, but there may have been two or five or ten.  They brought three gifts, but that doesn't mean there were three travelers.  The Constantinian Church of the 4th century transformed them into kings and even made up names for them: Caspar, Balthazar, and Melchior.  Pure imaginative fancy.  Some think the Magi were astrologers or magicians.  What are magi anyway? Matthew simply transliterated the Persian word into Greek because he didn’t have a clue as to who they were.   And what about that star!  Recently planetariums have begun to market the idea that the Bethlehem star was an alignment of planets or stars that appeared in either 6 or 4 BC.  Really?  Is that what led the mysterious Magi?  How do we cut through all the cultural claptrap to make sense of the mystery of Epiphany so that maybe, just maybe we can hear what God is actually trying to reveal to us in these sacred texts?

That word, Epiphany, means shining forth, or manifestation.  The idea seems to be that something mysterious is being revealed.  Jesus is the ultimate revelation of Christmas, the truest theophany of all.  The New Testament Church knew nothing of Christmas.  Easter was the weekly celebration of the first believers.  Epiphany is never mentioned until the last half of the 4^th century when it was a celebration of the Savior’s birth. 

But what does the text actually say?  Matthew 2 begins:

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Judah, during the reign of King Herod, a group of magi (plural for magus) arrived in Jerusalem from the East. They asked around, “Where is new-born King of the Jews. We saw his star arise, and we have come to worship him

Matthew dates the historicity of the events to a time when Herod is still King.  So Jesus had to be born before 4 BC, the date history confirms that Herod died. Herod asked the wise men when the star appeared and they must have said two years ago.  I presume that based on the fact that Herod orders all the children two years and younger slain. So, Jesus was born sometime between 6 and 4 BC.  (I know it sounds strange to say Jesus was born some years “Before Christ,” but the guy who did the first Christian calendar screwed up the dates.  Again, he probably meant well, but …)

 So what are magi?  Here’s one definition:

Magi (/ˈmeɪdʒaɪ/; Latin plural of magus; Ancient Greek: μάγος magos; Old Persian: maguš, Persian: مُغ‎ mogh; Englishsingular magian, mage, magus, magusian, magusaean) is a term, used since at least the 4th century BC, to denote followers of Zoroaster, or rather, followers of what the Hellenistic world associated Zoroaster with, which was – in the main – the ability to read the stars, and manipulate the fate that the stars foretold. The meaning prior to the Hellenistic period is uncertain.

Pervasive throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia until late antiquity and beyond, Greek mágos, "Magian" or "magician," was influenced by (and eventually displaced) Greek goēs(γόης), the older word for a practitioner of magic, to include astrology, alchemy and other forms of esoteric knowledge.

So, the Magi were Zoroastrians from what is today called Iran, then called The Empire of Medes and Persians.  They were not magicians, astrologers, or alchemists.  How do we know?  God's word is clear on the subject.  God hates those who practice these arts. It is inconceivable that God would call astrologers and magicians to come and worship His Christ.  Leviticus 19:31 and 20:6 specifically outlawed the practice among God’s people.  On the basis of God’s clear law, Isaiah prophesies the destruction of Judah for its astrology (47:13-14).

The origins of Zoroastrianism have long been lost to history.  But these wise men were not kings, but more likely priests.  How do we know? What does the Scripture say was their expressed reason for coming?  They came west to find the Jewish Messiah for the express purpose of worship.  Alchemists and astrologers don't worship.  Kings don't worship.  Priests worship.  In its earliest form Zoroastrianism was a religion with remarkable similarities to Judaism. They taught that the Creator God is all good.  Through messengers, called Yazatas, God’s work was made evident to humanity.  Almost all of the original Zoroastrian texts have been lost except a few liturgies.  By the time of the wise men, most Zoroastrians were probably dabbling in the dark arts.  But there were a few who remained loyal to the ancient teachings.  No one knows how the religion started, but it originated some time before the fourth century BC, a time that closely coincides with the time of the prophet, Daniel.  In the 2^nd chapter of Daniel, the prophet earns a high position in the Babylonian government. In fact, King Nebuchadnezzar promoted Daniel and gave him many wonderful gifts. 

The King made Daniel ruler over the entire province of Babylon and placed him in charge of all its wise men (the word translated with the Latin, magi).

                                                                                                (Daniel 2:48)

These magi may have been God-fearing descendants of exiled Israel.  How do we know?  Many Jews stayed in that part of the world even after the exile was over.  Not all returned with Ezra and Nehemiah.  These Persian Jews knew only the Hebrew Torah.  It must have been preserved because we know the wise men knew of a Jewish king heralded by the appearance of a star.  Where does it appear in Torah?  Interestingly in a prophecy made by one of their own countrymen, Balaam the son of Beor.

  The oracle of Balaam the son of Beor,

  And the oracle of the man whose eye is opened,

  The oracle of him who hears the words of God,

  And knows the knowledge of the Most High,

  Who sees the vision of the Almighty,

  Falling down, yet having his eyes uncovered.

 “I see him, but not now;

  I behold him, but not near;

  A star shall come forth from Jacob,

  A scepter shall rise from Israel,

  And shall crush through the forehead of Moab,

  And tear down all the sons of Sheth.   

                                                                                                                (Numbers 24:15-17)

Here was a prophecy of a future Deliverer from God heralded by the appearance of a star. These Persian wise men knew the star they saw no ordinary star.  Stars may guide travelers, but not by moving ahead of them and stopping over a hovel in a sheep town.  They called it a star because any light in the sky had to be a star.  Also, Moses called it a star in the prophecy.  But this wasn't any ordinary sun.  This was the same radiant glory that guided Israel during its Exodus and filled the Holy of Holies of the Temple.  It was the shekhinah, the divine presence of God the Father himself, guiding his faithful servants to the house.  Remember, ancient Israelis believed the lights in the heavens were angels, not planetary bodies such as we might think.

I would like to suggest that these wise men represent the faithful remnant that God preserves (Romans 11:5, et. al.).  The nation of Israel in the time of Jesus is a monstrous monolith of multiplied faithlessness.  Judaism’s leaders are in league with the Romans. They despise the poor. They refuse to believe the Word of God as spoken by the prophets.  Some look for the coming King but have completely politicized the vision. Jesus rejects the Judaism of his time.  He pronounces woes upon the leaders of Temple Judaism (Matthew 23).  He knows they will kill him.  Here is the great mystery of Epiphany -- the wise men represent the true worshipers the Father is seeking (John 4:24). They search the Word.  They await the Messiah.  They obey The Spirit’s leading and, like Abraham, their ancient ancestor, set out on a pilgrimage of faith.  True worshipers, Jesus said, worship in spirit and truth.  The Magi follow the Holy Spirit (the “star”) after taking God at his word (truth).

Some people think the reference to the Magi coming to “the house” indicates a great period of time has passed.  That’s not necessarily true.  These events must take place before Herod dies which isn’t far off.  The place where Jesus was born was a grotto, an overhang of limestone.  Go to Israel today and you will see these in all the excavations.  Sometimes a simple wooden or stone structure extended from the entrance and was called the house.   Mary and Joseph were probably given the warmest and most private place available that holy night.  Jerusalem was packed for Passover.  But in a few weeks, the crowds would be gone, and Joseph and Mary and Jesus could come inside the simple house. 

 So, it seems reasonable to conclude that these priests were people familiar with the Torah.  They knew God would send a King and show a star in Jacob, the nation Israel.  They came to Jerusalem because they assumed the Jewish King would be born in the capitol city.  But they didn’t have the whole story.

King Herod was deeply disturbed when he heard this, as was everyone in Jerusalem. He called a meeting of the leading priests and teachers of religious law and asked, “Where is the Messiah supposed to be born?”

“In Bethlehem in Judea,” they said, “for this is what the prophet wrote:

‘And you, O Bethlehem in the land of Judah,

are not least among the ruling cities of Judah,

for a ruler will come from you

who will be the shepherd for my people Israel.’”

Then Herod called for a private meeting with the wise men, and he learned from them the time when the star first appeared. Then he told them, “Go to Bethlehem and search carefully for the child. And when you find him, come back and tell me so that I can go and worship him, too!”

After this interview the wise men went their way. And the star they had seen (when they were) in the east guided them to Bethlehem. It went ahead of them and stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were filled with joy! They entered the house and saw the child with his mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasure chests and gave him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Herod, hearing about the possibility of a rival King, is upset and paranoid.  Herod was not a Jew, but an Edomite.  He didn't know much about the particulars of Jewish prophecy, but he knows that every Jew in his domain is looking for the arrival of Israel’s Messiah and rightful King.  Herod tried to appease the Jews.  He refused to eat pork.  But he was so ruthless he had two of his sons murdered.  There was a saying in Rome that it was better to be Herod’s pig than his son.

 Herod calls the Jewish scholars together and asks where the Messiah is to be born.  And the amazing thing is they know exactly where.  The Prophet Micah (5:2) foretold it.  Herod tells the wise men to go to Bethlehem and search for the child (he’s probably too sick at this point to do it himself). 

Another clear meaning of the mystery of Epiphany is the complete reliability of God’s Word for the journey.  By it he guides and assures and speaks to those who reverence him and seek to know his will.  God seldom talks to atheists.  I sometimes wished He did more often.  But God has given unbelievers everything they need.  His providence provides for their happiness and health and prosperity.  But his special grace and covenant mercies are reserved for a specific people, known only to him, in all nations and among all kinds of religious practices, a people for His own possession (1 Peter 2:9). 

Another Epiphany mystery: the gifts the Magi brought.  Why those gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh?  These were unusual gifts for a baby.  You can read all kinds of symbolism into the meaning of these gifts, get all carried away with subjective, esoteric spiritual meanings.  But the plain fact behind this mystery is that this little family is going to need money.  What happens immediately after the magi return home by a different route?  That very night, Joseph is warned in a dream to flee for their lives to Egypt.  That costs money, a lot of money.  These people aren't wealthy; we know Joseph and Mary were poor from the offerings they make when returning to the Temple (Luke 2:24). 

So here is another meaning of the mystery of the Epiphany: God will provide for anything and everything He calls you to do.  It was true for the Magi who were protected from the cunning schemes of an evil king.  It was true for Mary and Joseph who had everything they needed just in time.  When God is in a thing, miracles of providence multiply.  If you are short of money, get on your knees and repent; ask God where he can use you.  Don’t do it to get the money; do it to obey the King and you will be given everything you need. 

Life is a great journey that leads some to wealth, power, and corruption, and leads others to humble service, worship, and faithfulness.  The mystery of Epiphany is that God guides some by his Word, provides all that we need to obey Him, and intends to rescue from this world a faithful remnant of grace-redeemed people.

              

Christmas Perspective

 Sometimes I think we get things all turned around.  Christmas – happy, happy, happy!  Good Friday – sad, sad, sad.  Christmas – let’s deck the halls!  Good Friday – strip the altar bare.  We do this because we see everything from our own perspective, the perspective of flesh.  Birth – yay!  Death – boo!  

But were we to see this from God’s perspective of spirit, the picture would be quite different.  The Incarnation was God’s death sentence.  Christmas was God’s consignment to death row, as John Piper says.  That’s why the outcast shepherds were given the sign of a baby wrapped in grave cloths (strips of cloth) and lying in a manger.  A manger was not a wooden crèche as depicted by St. Francis.  The manager was a stone trough in the grotto that served as a sheep pen.  The sign was a baby that looked like a corpse laid out on a burial slab.  The Son’s love for the Father was so great he didn't resign himself to death – he embraced it as his mission from the very beginning.  

From God’s perspective, Christmas was much harder than Good Friday.  Christmas was the descent from glory into hell’s dungeon. Good Friday was the victory over death and Hell.  Christmas was Heaven’s 9/11; Good Friday was the Fourth of July, prisoners set free, rebels given a kingdom.  Christmas is Mary not telling everything she knows.  Good Friday is Mary at the foot of the cross.  Christmas is the distraction of sight and song and crowded inns.  Good Friday the lonely epiphany of redemption planned from the foundation of the world.  The angels sang on that first nativity announcing the invasion of rebel space; on Good Friday all heaven proclaimed the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.  Christ burst from the tomb for nothing in this time-space continuum could hold him.

I will, of course, be happy this Christmas as I hope you will be.  But in these dark and uncertain times when evil rears its ugly head at Sandy Hook like some modern Herod rampaging through Ramah, do not listen to the godless decrying the helplessness of deity.  God has prevailed.  God accepts the blame for that part of his providence that causes suffering; God confines himself to death row at Christmas; on Good Friday God let’s himself be slaughtered as the Ultimate Innocent to not only identify with us, but to purchase a people who accept the grisly sacrifice of Calvary and truly wonder at the spirit-love that is Christmas. 

A New Perspective on the Baptism of John (Acts 18:23- 19:7)

Paul arrives back in Antioch after the second missionary tour and then it seems to my reading he leaves again after a relatively short time. He retraces his route travelled in the second tour, over the mountains into Galatia, revisiting the churches he had helped plant on his first trip: Derbe, Lystra to Iconium, all in sequence Luke tells us. Paul comes to Phrygia where he probably visited the Bereans before going on to Ephesus.  Luke tells us the reason for the trip was to help the believers in those regions to stand fast (episthrizon).  This indicates something had arisen which threatened to upset the peace and unity of the Asian and Greek churches.  

What was the possible threat to which Paul was responding? Luke either didn’t know or he uses the account of the conversion of Apollos in which he alludes to the problem.  Apollos was a Jew native to Alexandria, Egypt.  He is described as a man of great learning and eloquent speech. Apollos arrived in Ephesus about the same time as Paul.  Apollos is a kind of evangelist, able to incite great passion and fervor talking about the Messiah of the Old Testament Scriptures. We are then given this detail at the end of verse 25; “he knew only the baptism of John.”  

What does this mean? It’s apparently important enough that Aquila and Priscilla take him aside and school him in Apostolic Christianity. Paul goes so far as to require his re-baptism.  Is Paul primarily concerned about baptismal liturgy is there something more important going on here?   

Apollos knew about the ministry of Jesus. Luke writes in 18:25 that he had been “catechized” in the way of the Lord so that he was able to speak and teach about Jesus.  For Paul, the problem was that Apollos and the disciples with him knew nothing about the Holy Spirit (19:2), although they are described as very fervent in their own spirit (18:25). Apollos had evidently never been baptized as a Christian, or if he had been baptized, there was something irregular that was important enough for Paul to require him to be re-baptized.  He had only received the “baptism of repentance” (19:4). 

What was Apollos teaching? When Paul preached about Jesus the Messiah, the Jews tried to kill him.  But Apollos is welcomed in the synagogues of Ephesus (18:26).  How could these itinerant preachers talk so correctly about Jesus but not infuriate the Jews? 

Apollos knew that John the Baptist had identified Jesus as the Messiah.  Apollos knew the Lord’s parables and teachings.  He probably had a general knowledge of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.  He may have been familiar with some of the early written sources circulating in the growing Christian movement.  But I think in his presentations, he played down some things and emphasized others so as not to create a problem with the Jews.

 In Acts 22, we may find a clue to how Apollos could talk about Jesus in the Jewish synagogues of Europe without raising their ire.  This is the account of Paul in Jerusalem facing a mob of angry Jews who have been incited to riot on the basis of false charges (Acts 21:27-31).  These rioters are not teachers and elders, but ordinary people.  Notice how Paul speaks to them as a pious Jew.  The mob listens as he establishes his Jewish credentials: born a Jew, taught by the greatest Rabbi of the age, zealous toward the law, a persecutor himself of these “people of the Way” (22:3-5).  He relates his vision of Jesus on the Road to Damascus and how Ananias,  a man devout in the law and of impeccable reputation among the Jewish community in Damascus (22:12), says, “The God of our fathers has shown you that you should know His will and see the Just One and hear the voice of his mouth.”  That’s Old Testament language.  Ananias tells Paul to be baptized for the washing away of sins (the baptism of repentance) and call on the name of the Lord (22:16).  Paul next sees Jesus in the Temple itself.   So far, the crowd is OK with all this.  But when Paul says his mission was to go to the Gentiles, the mob erupts and tries to kill him (22:22).

The message of Paul that riled up the Jews was not that Jesus was the Messiah, but that the Gentiles were being accepted by God.  The Jewish God was supposed to hate Gentiles and force their submission to the Jewish King of the World.  I think Apollos talked like Paul; using Jewish circumlocutions from the Old Testament to speak of the Servant of God.  Like Paul in Acts 22, I imagine Apollos probably played down the cross (a stumbling block for the Jews) and spoke of miracles that proved Jesus was Messiah; that he was resurrected from the dead, and had been last seen ascending into heaven with the promise that he would return.  For Jews this meant the end of the world, the establishment of a Davidic King on the throne of Israel, the elevation of Jews in a new world order, and the Gentile world beating a path to the Temple.  John’s preaching had a strong ethical and moral component. Stop cheating. Start sharing. Get your house in order! Now is the time to change! The Greek word for change is metanoia – translated in our Bibles as “repentance.”  Let me suggest that Apollos and many others in that part of the world had left the comforts of home to travel throughout Europe warning about the end of the age.

This resonated with Europeans.  Soothsaying was at the heart of European mystery cults, fortune telling, predicting the future. No wonder European Jews listened intently to these learned men unpack the prophecies of Daniel and Ezekiel in light of the Messianic ministry of Jesus.  But you had to be initiated into the meaning of the symbols if you were going to understand them. You had to have the code-breaking gnosis – insider knowledge. To join the insider group you submitted to the baptism of repentance; you committed yourself to be ethical and morally pure.  Christian Gnosticism became a major heresy in the church by the end of the first century, abandoning its apocalyptic message and creating metaphysical myths about the divine and human nature of Christ.  But this is an early Gnostic movement that Paul has set out to combat on his third tour in the middle of first century.  Like dispensationalists of our day, these Old Testament scholars unpacked the meaning of apocalyptic signs and prepared people to escape the fiery Day of Judgment.  Their message was so urgent that other doctrinal issues paled in comparison.

The Ministry of the Holy Spirit

Baptism for Paul was about much more than repentance.  It was about receiving the Holy Spirit as the sign and seal of your Covenant relationship in Christ.  What is the story of Acts if not the Gospel of the Holy Spirit?

Apollos did not know about the Gospel of John in which Jesus tells his followers about the coming of the Paraclete (John 16:5ff.).  This word is translated so many ways: Comforter, Counselor, Helper, and the most ridiculous of all, The Friend.  Paraclete literally means, “one called alongside.”  It was a legal term for your defense attorney.  Jesus said the reason he had to leave the world was so that the Paraclete could come (John 16:7).  The Paraclete is the Holy Spirit, the Binding Agent of Father and Son that will bind you to Jesus.  The ministry of the Holy Spirit is four-fold, Jesus said.

1.       The Spirit convicts people of sin; the Spirit acts through the proclamation of the Gospel to effectually call those who belong to Christ.

2.       The Spirit mediates the righteousness of Christ to the elect; the Holy Spirit awakens faith, regenerates hearts, justifies completely the sinner, and becomes the spirit of adoption.

3.       The Spirit judges the worldlings, lets them know of the coming wrath and the emptiness of life apart from God (John 16:8).

4.       The Spirit enables us to know the will of God and do it (16:13).

So, without knowledge of the Holy Spirit and the inner assurance of his presence and power in the believer’s life, one can only question the authenticity of their Christian calling.

I do not think it coincidental that it was at this point on his third missionary tour that Paul wrote his great theological treatise to the Romans, with its emphasis on the believer’s life in the Holy Spirit, imputing the righteousness of Christ by faith alone, and not by works.  “Justification by faith through Christ alone” is the watchword that exposes the error of this cult. 

Is the baptism of repentance still around today? Has it pervaded our congregations? Any group that emphasizes human tradition more than the Holy Spirit, that chokes on the name of Jesus preferring to speak only about “Christ,” quotes the Scriptures as duty rather than as grace, administers sacraments as though they possess magical power in and of themselves thus denying the work of the Holy Spirit to impute the righteousness of Christ to the individual believer and overcome sin, or any group that teaches human devotion as a substitute for grace cannot be authentically Christian.  We can know what Jesus said and not be a Christian.  We can be baptized and not be a Christian.  We can be devout and not be a Christian.  But you can’t be a Christian and be unsure about your salvation, ignorant of the Holy Spirit, uncaring for the will of God, or primarily focused on yourself. 

What Happens When We Die: Part 5

     Many of the popular ideas people have about hell do not come directly from the Bible, but from the Roman Catholic Church’s mis-translations of Greek into Latin and the resultant interpretations of those texts into word pictures designed more to frighten people into becoming converts than to foster discipleship.  The Roman Church’s teachings about the afterlife must always be taken with caution given the many historical abuses of Popes and bishops in either trying to intimidate compliance or raise money. The Roman view of hell is that after death unbelievers and other assorted non-Catholics will be judged and sent to the fires of hell where they will be mercilessly tortured forever.  Hell as eternal torture is believed and taught not only by Roman Catholics, but by many Protestant fundamentalists.  There is nothing more repugnant to the Western mind, whether believer or unbeliever, nothing more illogical and cruel than the idea that a loving God could condemn people to eternal punishment and suffering based on a single decision or even the span of a short lifetime. A sadistic view of judgment goes against everything Western Civilization has taught about justice, fairness, and love.  Not surprisingly many Christians reject the Roman teaching about hell. Some try to remain faithful to the Bible while others just ignore Scripture as irrelevant and superstitious.  Some argue that hell is temporary and redemptive, or hell, if it exists at all, is a quick and total annihilation; still other humanitarians teach only the most horrible people, like Hitler and Stalin and Genghis Khan, populate hell.  What mistakes in translation did the Roman Church make and how does our picture of hell change in light of correcting those ancient errors?  What can we know about what we call “hell” but which the ancients called by many different names? 

     The King James version of the Bible perpetuated many of the Roman translation errors, lumping several very separate and distinct words all under the single word hell; among these are sheol, Gehenna, Tarturus, and Hades.  We’ve already examined the Hebrew word, sheol.  Sheol is nothing like the Roman Catholic picture of hell.  Sheol originally meant pit or grave.  When the Old Testament said someone went down into sheol, they were simply being buried in a grave.  During the Babylonian captivity, the Jews were influenced by Assyrian myths of afterlife.  Sheol evolved into a place of shadowy, murky existence; nothing about torture or punishment or reward.  When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, the Septuagint regularly used Hades to translate sheol.  In early Greek thought Hades was almost identical to sheol, the shadowy world of the dead thought to be under the ocean floor – the deepest pit imaginable.  During the 400 years between the Old and New Testament periods, Jewish rabbis, influenced by Greek philosophy, began to debate that Hades might be a place of punishment and destruction. The picture of suffering in Hades is chronicled in the Apocryphal book of Enoch.  The Pharisees believed that Hades was a kind of Purgatory in which the dead awaited the resurrection, some to eternal life and some to eternal destruction.

     Jesus confirmed Enoch’s vision of hell as a place of punishment.  Jesus used the word Gehenna when referring to the awfulness of hell.  Gehenna literally means “valley of Hinnom.” It was the ravine just outside the southwest walls of Jerusalem.  Jews regarded the place as sinister and cursed.  Before David renamed the city and made it his capitol, Jerusalem was known as Jebus.  It was the center of worship to the deity Molech.  The Jebusites sacrificed children to Molech in the Hinnom Valley.  Even some of Israel's most wicked Kings (Ahaz and Manassah) reinstituted child sacrifice in Gehenna to placate foreign gods.  The ground was forever cursed by this unspeakable idolatry.  The only gate on that side of Jerusalem was the Dung Gate where refuse was carted out and dumped in the ravine.  Although there is no contemporary evidence of it from Jesus’ time, in the middle ages Gehenna was used as a body dump for strangers and criminals. Because of its association with the worst forms of idolatry, Jews and Muslims would have considered Gehenna a very evil place.  Isaiah concludes his book with an allusion to Gehenna.

And as they go out, they will see

    the dead bodies of those who have rebelled against me.

For the maggots that devour them will never die,

    and the fire that burns them will never go out.

All who pass by

    will view them with utter horror.                          Isaiah 66:24

When Jesus talks about Gehenna in the Synoptic Gospels, he uses Isaiah to talk about the seriousness of sin.

“But if you cause one of these little ones who trust in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone hung around your neck.  If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It’s better to enter eternal (aion) life with only one hand than to go into the unquenchable fires of Gehenna with two hands.  If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It’s better to enter eternal life with only one foot than to be thrown into Gehenna with two feet.  And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. It’s better to enter the Kingdom of God with only one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into Gehenna    ‘where the maggots never die and the fire never goes out.’

                                                                                                                                (Mark 9:42f.)

     Let’s look at this text in some detail.  Notice the context of harming children (little ones), associating Gehenna with its original awful history of child sacrifice.  Roman doctrine uses these verses to affirm that Jesus thought of hell as eternal suffering?  He may have indeed, but it’s interesting to me that most believers do not take the first part of the verse literally in which Jesus talks about the benefits of self-mutilation, but take the words about hell as doctrine. Taken literally, Jesus says it’s the maggots that live forever.

     Let’s look at another text in which Jesus talks about suffering in Gehenna used by the Roman Church as a proof-text of eternal sadistic torment. It’s the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus found in Luke 16.  In a great reversal of the prosperity gospel of first century Judaism, the poor man is carried to Abraham’s side (bosom) while the rich man suffers in Hades.

The rich man died and his soul went to Hades. There, in torment, he saw Abraham in the far distance with Lazarus at his side. The rich man shouted, ‘Father Abraham, have some pity! Send Lazarus over here to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue. I am in anguish in these flames.’ (vs. 23-24)

Later in the story Hades is again called a place of torment (v.28).  Is hell the main point of the parable?  My own thinking is that Jesus borrows from a well-known story, perhaps used as part of the rabbinic debate about hell.  Jesus never used people’s names in his stories.  Lazarus and Dives (that was the rich man’s name in these stories) may have been as familiar to Jesus’ listeners as stories we hear about someone dying and meeting St. Peter at the gate. We don’t take that literally (well, if you do, you shouldn’t).  We know it’s a story, probably a joke, about getting into heaven.  The point of this story is not primarily to teach about Gehenna, but to affirm the sufficiency of Scriptures for salvation.  

       Other word pictures Jesus used to describe Gehenna are found in Matthew 8:12 and repeated in 22:13.

“…throw them outside into darkness (or outer darkness) where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

     This idea of weeping and teeth gnashing is interpreted also as tortured suffering by the Roman Church.  But does Jesus mean the hideous sadistic pictures painted by Dante and the medieval church?  Gnashing of teeth is used in the Old Testament not to picture torture, but as a symbol of mocking rage  (Psalm 112:10).  Jesus is telling us the unrighteous suffer immense sadness and grudging regret.

      The book of Revelation amplifies the picture of hell's destruction, introducing the “lake of the fire” into which Satan, the Beast (spirit of Empire) and the False Prophet (false religion) are thrown (Rev. 20:10) as are Death, Hades, and those whose names are not found written in the Lamb’s book of life (v.14).  The unholy trinity of Satan, Beast, and False Prophet are said to be tortured forever in the lake of the fire, but for Death and Hades and those not the elect, their dip in Fire Lake is called the Second Death. This seems to point quite clearly to an end of judgment.

       The Apostle Paul never uses Hades or Gahenna but speaks of “destruction.”  He writes in his earliest letter about the sudden and unexpected destruction upon the wicked when Christ returns (1 Thess 5:3, 2 Thess. 1:9).  In Romans 9:23 he discusses God’s patience with those destined for destruction under his wrath.

       As expected it's the teaching of Peter on "hell" that most captures the imagination of the Roman Church.  Contrary to the Apostle’s Creed, Jesus did not descend "into hell."  This rendering is based on another mistranslation and interpretation of 1 Peter 3:19-20.  

                 Christ suffered for our sins once for all time. He never sinned,
                  but he died for sinners to bring you safely home to God. 
                  He suffered physical death, but he was raised to life in the 
                  Spirit. So he went and preached to the spirits in Hell 
                 (literally, Tarturus)—those who disobeyed God long ago when 
                 God waited patiently while Noah was building his boat. 
                 Only eight people were saved from drowning in that terrible flood.

The Roman Church infers from this verse that while he was in the grave, Jesus proclaimed the Gospel to the Old Testament faithful, totally ignoring the clear New Testament teaching that Abraham was saved by his faith in Christ (Romans 4:3).  It is to preserve their doctrine of hell that the Roman Church teaches you are saved by religious works.  Peter uses a unique word for hell, Tarturus, often translated prison.  It was the Greek equivalent place name of Gehenna, a place of suffering for the dead. A better interpretation of this text  based on a better translation is that the Spirit of Jesus preached in the days of Noah through Noah to souls who are now in the place of sufferings. 

      The biggest problem with the Roman doctrine of hell is the translation by Jerome of the Greek into the Latin Vulgate of the time-related Greek words aion and aionian.  Jerome translated these as eternal or everlasting. His translation spoke of everlasting torment. Greek-speaking Jews of the first century used the word aion and its cognates in two ways depending on context.  In many newer translations of Scripture you will see the more literal and correct translation of the word as “age,” like our English word eon which is derived from it.  So when the New Testament speaks of eternal or everlasting destruction, the context is critical to understanding whether we are dealing with something bound to a specific eon or something that, like God, exists forever. This means one might translate "everlasting destruction" as "an age of destruction," indicating a definite period of time.

         Sincere students of the Bible may come to different conclusions, but here are my best efforts to make sense of Scripture and our newest insights in cosmology.  All humans will be resurrected, some to eternal life with God and some to everlasting destruction.   I've already written that those "in Christ" have been declared righteous by the Father, and have been nurtured by the Holy Spirit during their entire pilgrimage on earth. They are already regenerate and sanctified, meaning their eternal life had already begun before death.  In the same way a mother on crack gives birth to a sickly child, so the person who has rejected God and/or not received the nourishment of sanctification throughout his nephesh-psuche life comes into resurrected life less able to thrive.  As stated previously, I understand time and eternity as having to do with dimensions and speed.  I do not understand all the mechanisms about how these things work.  I have to speak in metaphors because our words are inadequate to describe these singularities, but I believe the unregenerate person upon death is not able to go as fast or as far into the future or to fully develop the dimensionalities required for a life with God in the re-created Heaven-earth.  The unrighteous literally fall short of heaven and end up together in a place much like the ancient understanding of Hades, a holding facility, described in the Scriptures as a “prison” (Psalm 142:7, Isaiah 24:22, Rev. 20:7).  There is no torture or punishment here.  Hades is a place for detention rather like a third world prison where you are brought and left without information, without rights, without comfort. It is the torture of apathy. Hades is a world unto itself, murky and featureless. But it's most important characteristic is that it is a place completely separated from God, his providence, or his mercy.  There is no moral law, only the the law of survival.  There are no more good moral people, because goodness is gone and morality is replaced by a preoccupation of getting the resources necessary for sustenance, protection, and superior place.   Resurrected non-believers build alliances to scheme ways to increase their power.  These gangs are led by exceptionally manipulative leaders.  Whoever were people's Godless heroes in life, run the gangs in Hades.  The rebellion that may have appeared only minor and inconsequential in their life on Earth is now amplified and intensified.  Nice people become boorish and insufferably selfish.   Hatred of God becomes obsessive and all-consuming. God does not use this “hell” to redeem people, but to reveal their true self-idolizing character.  That which made them merely self-righteous unbelievers in life develops to its full extent when all masks of propriety are stripped away.  It is a place of repeated false hope, betrayal, disappointment, revenge, and regret.

                                 

     This cruel and apathetic world goes on and on until one day the gray skies are rolled back and the gloom is overwhelmed with a terrifying light.  The inhabitants of Hades are dumbstruck.  Eyes are not able to adjust to the excruciating brilliance.  People try to shield themselves from the light, but the shining pierces their body and causes them to scream in pain.  Some late arrivals at the periphery try to run away, but a force restrains them and begins to slowly and inexorably draw everyone to a Man who emanates the blinding light.  The horde of people moves like melting silver toward a bunghole.  The drone of agony and despair grows quiet the closer one gets to the Light Being.  They line up single file.  A Voice like a thunderous waterfall speaks to each person.  Like an audience with a King, each one stands transfixed and after a moment bends the knee, moves away, and another takes his place.  This is what the Scriptures refer to as the Great White Throne Judgment (Rev .20:11).

     From Hades each condemned being is taken to a dark, starless place at the center of which is a massive, spinning black hole.  Everything is dragged into this Abyss.  As matter collapses and burns at its edges, it looks like a lake of fire.  But this is the Pit into which the unholy Trinity will be cast and which will consume even time itself.  The destruction of this pit is eternal; that is, there is no coming back from it.  The unrighteous are destroyed forever by the “Second Death” (Rev. 20:14).  All these events occur prior to the revealing of the new heaven-Earth in the Eternal Now of God prepared for his Chosen in Christ.

     The question this side of death is can we know whether we are in Christ or not in Christ?  Does the Church control who enters Heaven or Hades-Gehenna-Tarturus?  Not even the Church knows the people God is preparing for Christ. In the early Church before Constantine, sacraments functioned to confirm the believer in his or her eternal life. Only those who had been rigorously examined by godly men could be baptized and partake of the Lord’s Supper. The rite didn’t save you. You were assured of your salvation hearing the Word of God and surrendering to the life of the Spirit by sincere confession of faith and death to self that baptism pointed to. It wasn't the physical, supernatural properties of the Eucharist that assured you, but self-examination and reconciliation  with God and neighbors. But all that changed under the Emperor Constantine (the spirit of the Beast) when the purpose of the Church changed from making disciples to making converts (the false Prophet).  Faith in God's Word no longer saved, but the rite of baptism.  The Eucharist devolved into magical thinking about bread and wine rather than about the presence of the Holy Spirit in the true body of Christ, the community of believers.  Many baptized but unrepentant people will be in Hades and many who have never heard the name of Jesus will be in Heaven-Earth.  This is not to deny the need for the Church or the Gospel, but rather a recognition of the sovereignty of God to have eternally known, effectually called, and faithfully preserved those who are his as well as to recognize that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” enters into the Kingdom (Mt. 7:21).  The benefit of hearing and believing the Gospel is that we may have the assurance of our salvation as promised by God in his Word, procured by the faithfulness of his Son, and lived out each day of our lives by the sanctifying body-building work of the Holy Spirit. 

     Therefore, if you are able to believe and trust in Christ, run to him every day.  If you are not able to believe and trust in Jesus, be taught.  If you have been taught, and you are still unpersuaded, then eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow you die.

What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 4

      In his novella, Flatlander: A Romance of Many Dimensions, author Edwin Abbott explores the impossibility of someone in a two dimensional world comprehending a three dimensional one. Stick figures would not have the language or the intellectual categories to understand depth, things being in front, or behind. Since Einstein the story has been used to help students of relativity theory understand the challenge of trying to comprehend the fourth dimension of time.

     As Christians caught up in our cultural and religious versions of Aristotle’s three-story universe, it is very difficult for us to understand the Gospel in deeper dimensions outside our own. This is especially true when we ask the question, what happens the moment we die. That word “moment” assumes we know what time it is.

      21^st century believers possess facts about Creation that were unknown to the writers of Scripture. All truth is God's truth.  So, the truth of scientific discovery does not negate the truth of God’s Holy Word, but we may need to update our thinking about what God's Word may mean.  The purpose of Scripture is and always will be to proclaim and instruct God’s plan of amnesty offered in Christ.  The Bible is not a theoretical physics textbook. Say the word "universe" and I’m likely to picture that vast array of stars and swirling nebula called “space, the final frontier” in the introduction to Star Trek.  Admit it, we don’t imagine the universe as a flat platter covered with a sky dome (firmament) and supported on columns or mountains as did Moses and his Bronze Age contemporaries who first penned Holy Writ.  Yet, in spite of its out-dated, culture-bound cosmology, we can still believe the Genesis account of creation, although we’re probably going to have to update our thinking on what the Hebrews meant by “day” and a few other cosmological expressions. The truth that God originated the world in a logically sequential process still shines through the ancient text.

     The problem with most afterlife myths is that they are bound up with notions of time.  God must wait until a certain day known only to him to commence whatever is going to happen.  So, we end up constructing all kinds of theories about what will happen when and where we are in the interim.  But hold on.  God is not limited to time.  God is eternal.  Can you really answer the question, what's the calendar-clock time where God is?  It's ridiculous. The Greek word most often used in the New Testament for talking about this is not kronos (tick tock time),  but kairos, the timing of things, stuff happening at just the right time.

     For the average person, time is the steady progression seconds, minutes, hours, days and years, that make up that "ever-rolling stream" as Isaac Watts paraphrased Psalm 90.  But physicists have known for about a hundred years time is a dimension in space.  Time is a perspective on speed and distance. Everything we are able to perceive in our three dimensional existence is moving through the universe in roughly the same direction and at roughly the same speed we are.  Our galaxy is travelling through space at a dizzying 2.5 million miles per hour.  It’s like riding on a bullet train. You, the other passengers, the seat on which you are sitting, and the cup of coffee in your hand are all moving at the same speed inside the train so we appear to each other stationary. But the world outside is barely discernible; it’s a blur because it is moving about 150 miles per hour slower than we are.  People stopped at the railroad crossing might catch a glimpse of us seated by a window for a split second.  But then we're gone.  Since we can’t see heaven, one option is to assume it doesn't exist; or, it just may be that heaven is travelling at a different speed than we are.  If we argue for a real place named Heaven, and not just a subjective mental experience of peace while the brain runs out of oxygen, we have to account for where Heaven is in time and space.  Heaven is not outside of time, but it may not be in our time. Whatever else we may say about heaven, for the purposes of this paper we can say God is there now and from that vantage point God created and now sustains our cosmos. (if you're a skeptic, play along.)

     It's entirely possible that God could exist in a parallel-type universe. Scientists are telling us almost daily there is a lot more to Creation than we can see.  In fact, some of the things theoretical physicists are now saying make believing in God sound downright simple.  Just this week physicists celebrated the confirmation of a Higgs boson (misnamed the “god particle”). This discovery of something moving so fast that we can only detect it when it's vanished helps explain the nature of matter and could validate the presence of many more dimensions to space than our mere four.  In fact, scientists postulate that there may be as many as eleven dimensions of light and matter.  They talk about the real possibility that there could be alternative universes to our own.  In my opinion we are coming full circle back to the worldview similar to that of the ancient Jews who pictured Heaven not as far, far away, but as overlapping earth, sacred space being the intersection of the eternal and the finite.  For more on this, read N. T. Wright’s, Simply Jesus.

     Here’s a thought experiment proposed by some theoretical physicists.  Imagine yourself standing in your backyard on a clear night watching stars twinkle. (By the way, the ancient Israelis thought the stars were angelic beings, Yahweh’s star army called "the heavenly host," hovering high in the firmament, or "sky dome."  We don’t try to fit that ancient cosmology into our scientific world view. We accept that’s how the ancients understood their universe, but for us who have seen men walk on the moon, it’s more like historical poetry, or even a myth.  We don’t insist that it’s a description of verifiable astrological fact. )  We know the light you are seeing from those far, far away suns has travelled millions of light years across mostly empty space to reach your eye.  The star you are seeing in your backyard may have exploded to cinders eons ago, but it takes time for the light from that event to reach us out here on the edge of the Milky Way.  So, looking at the night sky is looking backward into time. Now imagine yourself instantly a hundred million miles closer to that star and in the instant you arrive at your new vantage point, you see the star explode.  You will see it go super-nova about ten minutes before the same person back on earth will see it.  From an earth-bound perspective, you are in the future.  Now imagine we place cameras every 100 million miles along the trajectory our star’s light has travelled from the point where it blows up out past the earth to where the light from the star's birth is just reaching.  If we could snap a picture from each camera simultaneously, we could see time unfold  like a series of frames on a movie reel as we panned from right to left. This exercise helps us understand more clearly what time actually is: it is merely a perspective on distance and speed.  From the perspective of heaven (where God is), any point in time is accessible.  That's what we mean we say God is omnipresent.  All time is in God’s now. Imagining such weird stuff is one thing, but what about how this might look in the real world.

     The only evidence we have for a heaven-human interface is the resurrection body of Jesus.  Because the Scriptures say that we will become what he is in his resurrection existence (I Cor. 15:49), we may find some important clues for understanding life as God intended it.  One obvious conclusion is that Heaven does not take place outside of all time.  Eternity does not mean timelessness. That would be a realm totally out of sync with the life God originally intended.  In his resurrected body Jesus can move at our speed.  For 40 days, Jesus interacted with hundreds of mortal people in this three dimensional existence.  But eyewitnesses say he was not subject to the limitations of space-time as we are. He could be here and then not here but somewhere else in an instant. Jesus could enter locked rooms.  His body was tangible, not ghost-like or ethereal. He ate fish on a beach with his friends. His body was real.  In the same way, our resurrected body will be a tangible body, a body that has both continuity and discontinuity with our current nephesh-psuche.  The wounds of Jesus’ torture on the cross were still evident.  Mary recognized his voice.  I find it fascinating that Mary was warned not to touch him, but Thomas could.  Does this mean that his resurrection body was still forming for a time or was it something more to do with Mary’s motives?   It may take more than a moment for those In-Christ to acclimate to traveling on God’s wavelength, and getting up to God’s speed.

     The Apostles who had walked with Jesus those forty days struggled with describing what happened to God’s In-Christ people when they died.  They had seen Jesus as a different kind of human, not a ghost or an apparition. They described his ascension as going up into clouds, but that’s poetic language, too.  Jesus’ ascension is not about him helicoptering off the planet to far away heaven.  Ascension is King-speak. He ascended to his throne.  He takes his rightful place. And Jesus told them why he had to disappear: so that the Holy Spirit could be given to guide each believer in the way of truth (John 14).  The spirit of Jesus becomes omnipresent in the world.  The resurrection body is not bound by the same time and space limitations, but can conform to them.  My opinion is that the resurrection body moves in all 11 dimensions.  What the disciples could only perceive in their worldview as lifting into the clouds may have been Jesus separating himself to a safe distance from the onlookers and becoming a fully energized multi-dimensional human, accessible everywhere and in every time.

      Paul didn’t really think the saints died at all.  In light of what Jesus had become and taught him in person in the Arabian wilderness for three years after his Damascus Road experience, Paul describes the metamorphosis with different word pictures: as being “swallowed up in victory,” “clothed with an imperishable existence”, harvested (1 Cor. 15), caught up in the air (1 Thess. 4:17).  Paul was much more likely to write that the a dead body was asleep because he didn’t want to acknowledge that believers die. Why? Because Jesus said believers had already died, our eternal life had already begun the moment God graced us with the faith to believe the Gospel.  In the same way God’s gift of faith renewed the nephesh-psuche invisibly, so the final stage of amnesty was an invisible transformation, a metamorphosis out of sight of the wailers around the corpse.

     Our psuche body cannot survive in God's recreated heaven and Earth, merged as one.  One of the worst and most confusing Pythagorean translations of Scripture is 1 Corinthians 15:44 where Paul is made to say, “We are planted a natural body and raised a spiritual body.”  Isn’t that what a Pythagorean wants and expects to hear?  But that is not what the text says and certainly not what Paul meant.  What he actually wrote is: sown a psyuche-body, raised a pneumaticka-body. We start existence as a psuche body, perfectly adapted to living in three or four dimensions travelling at the same speed with lots of other psuches.  But when we are resurrected we are energized by a different force, by God’s Spirit. Time and distance collapse in new dimensions of glory. Scientifically speaking, I think this means our corporate existence becomes compatible with the world as God intended.

    I might liken the experience as like coming out of surgery, opening our eyes to find ourselves in a different place and with a different set of abilities. Unlike surgery, we will not awaken to pain, but to something unfamiliar. The air will smell different; light will reflect differently. We will touch our face to see if we are alive and find a different kind of skin, a different sensation of touch that can penetrate the surface of things. We will be more solid than we remember; more agile, less frail.  We may recognize our surroundings; we may not.  But I think those In-Christ will know that we have been rescued and transformed into something built for a completely different kind of world.  I think it likely that Jesus himself greets each one of his elect children upon their arrival, puts us completely at ease, and gives some initial instructions on how to habituate to the new surroundings.  He tells us where to find our loved ones.   There is no judgment.  People ask,” What age will we be in heaven?”  That’s like asking a flatlander to describe the depth of something. Remember, it’s not time that makes us old and wears us out.  That’s the entropy of the current rebel planet. Time is only a perspective on distance and speed and does not have to result in entropy. In God’s renewed Heaven-Earth, time passes to allow things to become newer, fresher, stronger and more excellent.  There is no longer death because the “law of sin and entropy” has been revoked or overcome in new dimensions of glory. Time doesn’t stand still. We will have work to do as we continue to grow in Chris and discover his sufficiency and His excellence in new ways forever.

    I am trying to answer the question, what happens the moment we die.  My answer to that depends entirely on the perspective from which you view the event. From the perspective of the dead believer, death doesn’t touch me. One moment I am one thing and instantly I am changed into something else and discover myself in a world similar to what I had known, but newer, lighter, and completely under the sovereign control of a very real God and his human viceroy, Jesus.  From the perspective of those gathered at my death bed, I stop breathing and in their timeline they grieve and go on with making plans for my funeral. They are still trapped in nephesh-psuche time. They cannot see the atomic structure of my body completely transform as "I" and not some other begin a new existence in a parallel universe, right on top of the old one, but travelling at a much faster speed.  From their perspective I have ridden a bullet train to the future.  My soul didn’t sleep or wait around for the end of time.  I’m at the end of time.  That is why prophets could foretell the future, why the New Testament teaches we are foreknown and predestined. Because in nepesh-psuche life we are playing out the great story of redemption that has already been accomplished.  On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus let Peter, James, and John glimpse the future as Moses and Elisha appeared with Jesus who became Wholly Other for a brief time. From the perspective of God’s eternal now, the moment I die is the moment I am free from the constraints of time, religion, sin, and weakness to follow my Savior as he marches on, conquering worlds for the Father, praising in song the Lamb that was Slain among the whole company of the redeemed.

     There is still one part of the story that remains to be told. What happens the moment those not In-Christ die. Is there a hell? What will it be like? And who will be there?

(To be continued)

What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 3

     Before we can fully comprehend what happens the moment we die, we must understand what death is and what it is not.  Why do we die?  Those who reject or ignore the Bible contend that death is a natural part of life (as irrational as that may sound).  They consider death OK for old people, but tragic and unfair for the young. The book of Genesis reveals that life as God intended (nephesh, psuche) did not include death. The Biblical revelation is that death is not a natural part of life, but the result of a treasonous crime against a rightful Sovereign.  None of us knows where or when we will die, and that is certainly a great mercy. But God has revealed in his Word why we will die.

“The nephesh that sins shall die.” (Ezekiel 18:20)

In our Western mythology of afterlife, we tend to interpret “sin” in terms of Pythagorean ethics (see Part 2 of this series). Sin is moral or ethical failure. Sin is inversely correlated with heaven; more bad deeds than good deeds earns for us hell; more good deeds than bad means we can be rewarded with heaven. This reward and punishment way of thinking about afterlife has made atheists of many parents crushed by the cold hand of death upon an infant who never got the chance to make a moral or immoral decision. Death hardly ever seems a natural part of life when the corpse is a child or a young adult struck down in the prime of life with a ravaging, painful disease.  Inevitably everybody is confronted with the question of why bad things, especially death, happen to good people.  What about those hundreds of thousands of people killed by the tsunami in Myanmar?  What about 13 million Russians slaughtered by Stalin?  If there is a God, why does he allow such atrocities to occur?  Either God is not good, or he is not all-powerful.  The logical mind insists God can’t be both. If God is good, he must not be all-powerful else he would have prevented such massive cruelty.  If God is all powerful, he must not be good because he could have stopped it and didn’t.

     Jesus’ disciples raised this very question one day (see Luke 13:1ff).  Apparently Pilate had ordered his troops to kill some Jews while offering their sacrifices in the Temple. By implication, the sacrifice had expiated their sin. So, Jews were outraged and confused about how God could allow such a thing.  Jesus’ answer is chilling.

Do you think those people were any worse than the 18 people crushed to death when the Siloam Tower collapsed? Here’s the truth of the matter: unless you deal with your sin problem, you will all perish like them. (Luke 13:2-4)

Jesus isn’t confused about God’s goodness or power.  It is precisely because God is good and all-powerful that God is completely justified in taking life. Just because we don’t take sin all that seriously doesn’t mean that God will easily dismiss it.  All death is God’s judgment against sin.  Jesus isn’t embarrassed by God’s ways. He doesn’t make excuses.  Jesus doesn’t question the Creator-King’s right to do with his creation what he will.  Jesus says, the irrationality of death is your problem, too, if you have rebelled against God.

     It seems to me that when the cynic raises his fist at God and demands, “How could a good and all-powerful God allow bad things to happen to innocent people,” the unbeliever is acting out of an unspoken assumption that things shouldn’t be this way. What way should they be? When is death ever timely?  In Romans 1, Paul writes under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that God has implanted in every soul the inherent knowledge that there is an all-powerful God.  The irrational expectation that the cosmos should be fair I think is evidence of this primeval awareness of a higher dominion and accountability, something the Bible calls the “image of God.”  Don’t think of mirrors.  Think of an engraved image on a coin.   In the same way a coin bears the image of the authority who made it and to whom the coin belongs, people were created to bear the stamp of their Creator. But a massive rebellion has gripped the world God made.  People (me included, me especially) ignore and contradict the Creator’s will, wishing to live as if we belonged to no one but ourselves, hoping that the world should operate according to our whims.  The Bible view of reality is very different.  All have rebelled and squandered the life God intended (Romans 3:23).  It’s a fatal flaw in our existence, to be fickle and faithless and forever preoccupied with ourselves.

     Religion is the invention of flawed humans to create myths and systems that attempt to undo the damage of our self-centered propensity, make God less angry with us, and thereby earn our heavenly reward.  Every civilization in history was grounded in religious myths of expiation.  Even the descendants of Abraham to whom God revealed the one and only way to end individual rebellion, ignored the way God had saved Abraham. The Jews asked God to give them a group plan by which they could do something.  God gave Moses the step-by-step dos and don’ts of attaining the life God intended, hoping they would see the utter impossibility of the task. Moses hadn’t even brought the tablets down from the mountain before Israel was dancing around a golden calf, breaking rule #1 of the law covenant.  But that didn’t stop the priests from working out a religion based on Pythagorean salvation. They took elements of God’s holy demands and from them concocted a system that re-defined everything.  Judaism was about keeping the moral and ethical Law.  It didn't matter that you couldn't obey the Law.  You could offset your wrong choices and impure thoughts by doing religious things, adding to the positive side of the moral ledger and proving your good intent to whomever you meet at heaven’s gate.  Jump ahead a millennium or two.  When the medieval Roman Church read the Old Testament through Aristotelian spectacles, they concluded this merit-based morality was the path to God.  Of course in such a religion there can never be any assurance that you will get to heaven the moment you die because you may have sinned and not even known it.  You hope and pray that when you are about to die, or if you have just died and your soul may still be floating around nearby, the priest has time to give you Holy Unction (last rites), the one last religious good you do to prove yourself deserving of heaven.

     Jesus taught nothing like this because he rejected the Jewish religious idea of sin as ritualistic or moral.  He intentionally flaunted the ceremonial and moral code of his Jewish contemporaries. He intentionally violated the two most sacred taboos of his culture, saying his body was the true Temple (John 2:13-21) and the Sabbath was his in which to work (Matthew 12:8).  Jesus forced religious people to deal with the fact that God is not made in their image and is no respecter of their religious traditions. Sin is not merely what we do or fail to do.  Sin is existential; it’s something we are that overflows into our daily behavior. Jesus’ mission was not to make morally bad people good enough to go to heaven when they die. Jesus came to provide amnesty for rebels according to the plan God had revealed to Abraham enabling them to live the life God originally intended.

     Religious people use the word salvation to talk about God’s amnesty plan.  Jesus knew that he was Israel’s Messiah, the promised deliverer foretold by the prophets.  He appears to have been the first rabbi to understand that the Suffering Servant of Isaiah was Messiah.  He would be Lamb of God sacrificed for sin. He would stand in for a group of people and take upon his own body the wrath of God and the punishment for their rebellion. This group was made up of Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and freemen.   Jesus read the Old Testament very differently than the way it was being prostituted by the priests of his day.  Jesus trusted the promises of God that his body would not see decay (Psalm 2), but that God would vindicate him as God’s Anointed Savior by raising him from the dead, thereby fulfilling God’s unbreakable contracts with Abraham and David. These people for whom Jesus died, who are they? What did they do to deserve such special treatment? Who are these the New Testament says are “in Christ,” no longer condemned, no longer hell-bound, no longer God’s enemies, in spite of the fact that they continue to lapse back into their rebel ways?

                The Bible says these folks were chosen by God before the creation (John 17:24, Ephesians 1:4). The amnesty plan would not immune them from rebellion all at once, but would be completed in a series of stages.  The first stage is regeneration through the Word of God; they hear the Gospel and faith is created as a gift of God.  From God’s perspective, they suffer death to self and receive the Spirit of the resurrected Christ. Their old nephesh-psuche is regenerated and their eternal life begins, this gift of faith delivering them from God’s judgment and from his ultimate death penalty (John 5:24). Their destiny is assured. Nothing can undo God’s purpose for them (John 10:28-29).  Because they are in Christ, when God looks on them, he does not see their rebellion, but only the merits of Jesus.  The second stage is the work of the Holy Spirit to deliver them from rebel habits of thinking and acting individually and to re-orient their social and political life to gathering with others who are in Christ and learning about the Law God is writing on their hearts. Their eternal life has already started,  Born again of the Spirit, they cannot be unborn. The final stage of amnesty begins the moment we die. At stage one we were saved from the penalty of sin; at stage two, the power of sin; at stage three, the presence of sin.

                Now this is all just too bizarre for those who are not in Christ. That is the primary way they know if they are included in this rag-tag bunch of people for whom Jesus died, was raised, and now intercedes. Paul says that instead of being covered in Christ's spirit, they are covered only "in flesh."  The amnesty plan means nothing to them. They are not interested in it at all (1 Cor. 1:18-25). But those God foreknew and chose 5 billion + years ago (many of whom do not even know it) find themselves drawn to Christ, have a life history that is such that upon hearing God’s amnesty proclaimed from the Scriptures, something deep within them changes and life becomes totally new (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). But how do we know this isn’t all just one more mythology told by Reformers of the Pythagorean Church? How does all this work in real space and time and not just in the pages of some holy book or in the mind of a clever theologian.  How does it get applied?  If we are going to answer the question, “What happens the moment we die?” we need to examine our assumptions about time and space.  And that’s where we turn next.

(To be continued)