Production Note: Continuing On

Photo by Onomatomedia

So, as I told my Facebook page members last week (which you can 'Like' and 'Follow' by clicking here if you have the notion, although I think you may need to join Facebook first. But who hasn't joined Facebook, right?) I am going to finish up the three series I have running on this page. That would be Life After Death, The Great Announcement (about what the Gospel really is), and the Trinity. And partly due to the death of my father last year, contemplating which is part of the reason I haven't posted since January (well, that and probate), I plan first to dive back into the subject of Life After Death.

If you'd like to catch up with that series you can  Part 1, Part 1.5 (aka A Revelation About Revelation), and Part 2.

Part 3 is still "in progress" and won't appear right away so until it does (which won't be long) I will be sure to post other interesting things. For instance, tomorrow I'll answer a question someone asked me just the other day: What was in the Dead Sea Scrolls besides Old Testament books...?

Life After Death, Part 2

The gateway to Sheol

(The first two sections of this series are Life After Death, Part 1 and A Revelation About Revelation. In Life After Death, Part 2 I want to briefly cover what the God of Israel revealed about death before Jesus came.)

In the Garden of Eden God reveals the icy fact that doing wrong leads to death. The revelation that there is something after death is made only a few chapters farther into the story of mankind. Interestingly, this piece of information is spoken of (by the ancient patriarch Jacob) as though it is common knowledge, something that's been known for a while.

You may remember the story: Jacob's children were jealous of his favorite son Joseph, so they sold him to slave traders and ripped up Joseph's famous "coat of many colors," soaking it in goat blood. Jacob was given that as evidence that "a wild animal has devoured him! Joseph is surely torn to pieces!"

That is the situation when Jacob says this, for the first time in the Bible, about a place called Sheol:

He refused to be consoled. And he said, “No, I shall go down to my son to Sheol, mourning.” And his father wept for him.

(Book of Genesis 37.35 New Revised Standard Version)

For the Hebrews, Sheol was the place you go when you die. As they interacted with their God over the years, they gradually learned some details about this place, although giving a grand tour of Sheol never seemed to be high on God's to-do list.

What Sheol is not

It's important to know that there are two ways that Sheol is mistranslated in some Bibles. One is to render it as "hell." The old King James Version tells us for instance that the guests of Folly, "knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell," (Book of Proverbs 9.18 KJV). But Sheol, as we'll see, was nothing like the dreadful fiery place that "hell" conjures up in our minds today.

Another incorrect translation of Sheol is "the grave." This one is understandable because sometimes the Scriptures will say something like, "Your pride is brought down to Sheol, and the sound of your harps; maggots are your bed beneath you, and worms are your covering," (Book of Isaiah 14.11). But even in the first place it's mentioned, Sheol can't mean just a grave. At this point in the story, Jacob believes his beloved son Joseph is torn to shreds in the wilderness, unburied and his bones scattered. Yet he is sure, despite this, that Joseph is in Sheol, where Jacob will eventually join him: "I shall go down to my son, to Sheol."

A grave is to Sheol what the front door is to a house. Graves are "the gates of Sheol," which you can be "summoned to go through," (Isaiah 38.10, LEB).

Dark, dusty, silent

Photo by Kecko

What it was like

Sheol was conceived of as being underground (Book of Amos 9.2, Book of Ezekiel 31.16) or under the sea, as deep as you could possibly go (Book of Deuteronomy 32.22, Book of Jonah 2.2, 6). This was because Sheol was as far as you could be from Heaven, where God is (Book of Job 11.8, Book of Psalms 139.8).

You existed in Sheol as a repha, which was very similar to what we would call a "ghost" -- a disembodied spirit (Job 26.5, Psalms 88.10, Isaiah 14.9, etc.). Modern Bibles translate this word as "shades" or "phantoms." On at least one occasion a necromancer was apparently able to bring Samuel the Prophet's repha up from Sheol at the request of the Israelite King Saul, (1st Book of Samuel 28.8-19).

At first people thought of Sheol as dark (Job 17.13), dusty (Job 17.16), a quiet place (Psalms 115.17 and 31.17) where not a lot happens (Book of Ecclesiastes 9.10), and you were pretty much cut off from God (Psalms 6.5, Isaiah 38.18). But they realized fairly soon that nobody is ever cut off from God: "Sheol and Destruction are open to the LORD, how much more the hearts of the children of men!" (Book of Proverbs 15.11).

As time went on the later prophets revealed that Sheol wasn't quite the quiet, do-nothing place the Israelites had assumed. Both Isaiah (Isaiah 14.3 - 20) and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 32.21 - 32) describe a louder and more active Sheol, with Kings welcoming other Kings to the underworld and whatnot.

Years ago some scholars would brush all this off as just "poetic descriptions of the grave," and even now the occasional preacher will claim that that's all Sheol is. But honestly, there are 65 mentions of Sheol in the scriptures, and many more passages using synonyms. Taken together, there is no way it can just refer to the local cemetery. As John Cooper says in his book Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, a standard work on the scriptural view of the afterlife:

In fact, there is virtual consensus that the Israelites did believe in some sort of ethereal existence after death in a place called Sheol... As far as I know, the general description is undisputed among Old Testament scholars.

(Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Duelism - Monism Debate, pp. 52 - 53)

One for all?

The interesting thing is that in the Old Testament everybody goes to the same place. Job actually rhapsodizes about it. Nowhere does the Old Testament mention different destinations for the good and the bad. We are told that Sheol has "chambers" (Proverbs 7.27) but no clue what they're for. But as we get down to the Book of Daniel, and the subject of resurrection comes to the fore, we do get a hint that the life you lived matters in the afterlife:

At that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever, 

(Daniel 12.2 - 3).

*          *          *

In the next installment of this series we'll get into what Jesus himself taught about life after death and before resurrection, and how it all ties together with what we talked about today.

A Revelation About Revelation

Read more in Part 2a>>

(The first part of this series is Life After Death, Part 1. Think of this article as an interlude in the discussion where we bring up a different but closely related subject.)

Revelation is progressive

Before starting Part 2 of our Life After Death series, there is one small thing I'd like to point out first. It's a simple point and will be blatantly obvious once I type it, but you'd be surprised how many people down through the ages have gotten tripped up by it. So many bad Bible interpretations and misunderstandings have stemmed from not getting this that it's really rather embarrassing.

The Big Reveal

Ready? Here it is: Revelation is progressive.

This has nothing to do, incidentally, with whether your theological views are "progressive" (i.e., liberal) or "traditionalist" (conservative). Instead it just means that Adam didn't understand as much of God's program for humanity as Noah did, Abraham didn't know as much as Moses, Isaiah could grasp more than Moses, and Jesus of Nazareth, well... he himself was the final, complete, and sufficient revealing of that program.

"Spoken through his Son"

So God did not reveal all the truth he had to reveal at the beginning in a blinding flash of light. He revealed it by dribs and drabs within the stream of history as it flowed along. "In the past God spoke to our people through the prophets. He spoke to them many times and in many different ways. And now in these last days, God has spoken to us again through his Son," (Letter to the Hebrews 1.1-2, ERV ). Previously obscure or unknowable, God has made his truth known in events of finite history (Letters to the Colossians 1.26-27 and the Ephesians 3.3-6).

Why bring this up now? Because what God reveals about death and what comes after was revealed gradually over time. You can see it grow as we trace it throughout the Bible until in the New Testament Jesus gives it definitive form.

Two Difficuties

But there are two things that happen with alarming frequency with the subject of life after death (and many other subjects for that matter):

1.)  Sometimes people will reach right into the middle of the process of God revealing this teaching and cherry-pick a bit that they like. A variation of this is, in effect, ranking the earlier bits over the later, more complete bits of God's revelation.

So someone who, for instance, believes the dead are all unconscious until the resurrection (sometimes called "soul sleeping") will support that by quoting Book of Ecclesiastes 9.5 - "the dead don’t know anything." But when "the Teacher" wrote that, God wasn't done revealing things yet; that whole process was still going on. In fact, it still had a long way to go.

With anything we try to understand from God's revelation, like the afterlife, it is crucial that we take everything he has taught, as a whole, leaving nothing out. We need to try and hold the entire revelation God gave on that topic in our minds at once, and grasp the "story flow," not just cherry-pick our favorite proof-texts. And it is equally crucial that we look back at the whole long flow of what God revealed through the lens of the supreme revelation of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

2.) The other thing that happens with alarming frequency is that people chuck the revelation on any particular subject and substitute some other idea instead -- often because they weren't even aware that their substitute isn't what Jesus and his Apostles taught.

Greek philosophers

Photo by Matt Neale

With the afterlife for example many people believe that when you die, if you've lived a virtuous life, you shuffle off your old body and live forever as an immortal disembodied soul in Heaven. And this despite the fact that the Christian Movement has recited innumerable times over the centuries, "I believe in... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting."

That first belief is actually a hodge-podge of old Greek ideas (like this one as an example), not at all what Jesus or his Movement or the Hebrew scriptures teach.

Forward

So, forewarned of these two muddy ditches on either side of our path, let's begin tracing out the trail of what God reveals about life after death.

Read more in Part 2a>>

Life After Death, Part 1

Read more in Part 1a>>

What happens to us when we die? Do we lie there moldering in our graves? Do we head off to Heaven to live a disembodied eternity with God? Are we conscious or do we "soul sleep" until the resurrection?

As the Apostle Paul said in the scripture I posted Sunday (1st Letter to the Corinthians chapter 15 verses 22 - 24), whatever it is that happens to us, it will be the same thing that happened to Jesus when he died. Followers of Jesus live "in Christ," bonded together with him. Like him we will die and be resurrected; only the timing is different. As the Messiah, he went first, and we will all follow him by being bodily resurrected when it's our turn -- "when Christ comes again."

Jesus' younger brother once wrote, "A person’s body that does not have a spirit is dead." Christ's body, we know, died and was buried in a tomb for 3 days, but what about his spirit? Where was the spirit of the Son of God during what the Christian Movement has long called "Holy Saturday" -- the time between his burial and resurrection?

Wherever it was, or whatever condition Jesus' spirit existed in, our spirits will experience the same thing between our deaths and resurrections -- with one important caveat: the universe was altered on a cosmic scale with the death and resurrection of the Messiah. That was sort of the point, after all: "The Son of God came for this: to destroy the devil’s work," (1st Letter of John chapter 3 verse 8, ERV). So conditions may have changed even in the world of the dead since those epic 3 days, but the overall situation of those who will be resurrected remains.

 It's never been our main topic of conversation (that, of course, would be the announcement of the arrival of the Lord Messiah and his Kingdom) and we never fleshed it out as much as you and I might like, but the early Christian Movement was aware of where Jesus was, and where we go, between death and resurrection.

So this will begin a series of posts on the after life. The scholar N.T. Wright famously calls being resurrected "life after life after death," something Jesus and his Apostles were much more interested in. But we won't go quite that far for now. We'll be looking at what they taught about what comes before that: "Life After Death."

Read more in Part 1a>>