Developing a Biblical Worldview – Part Five: after death

This morning we continue our series on Developing a Biblical Worldview by examining what happens to a person after death.

TRADITIONAL VIEW

Now before we jump right in, I want to share with you the traditional view.  In short, man is immortal and his eternal destiny will be determined by whether he believes in Jesus or not.  Believers will enjoy eternity in heaven while non believers will go to a fiery place called hell.

According to Wayne Grudem in Bible Doctrine Essential Teachings of the Christian Faith, on p 459 “We may define hell as follows: Hell is a place of eternal conscious punishment for the wicked.”

This is a pretty good representation of what most Christians believe.

In an online article by Jack Wellman on August 27, 2013, entitled Top 10 C.S. Lewis Quotes with Commentary, he writes:

“Whether we realize it or not, we are all going to live forever.  The moment we were born was the time that we would never cease to exist.  Everyone born and alive today has an eternal soul.  The soul is going to live forever.  There are only two places that your soul can go…heaven or hell.  There are only saints and “ain’ts” and there is no sitting on the fence.  If you’re on the fence, your destiny is hell for there is no neutral ground in the Kingdom.  Jesus said you are either for Me or against Me (Matt 12:30 ).  My plea to you is to jump off the fence and believe today, while it is still called today (2 Cor 6:2).”

As we saw last week, this idea that man is immortal or has an eternal soul by nature is not a Biblical idea, so you can see the problem with this view right off the bat.

TRADITIONAL VIEW MUST BE INFERRED

Now, the Bible doesn’t teach this doctrine explicitly.  It is a doctrine that has to be inferred by taking several different verses and putting them all together.  But rarely does the Bible just come right out and teach a doctrine explicitly, so there is no reason to reject this traditional understanding for that reason.  We must systematize our theology with most doctrines, as you saw with the doctrine of the end.

SOME ISSUES I HAD WITH THE TRADITIONAL VIEW

Nonetheless, there was always something a little off about this view for me.  It was never, how could a loving God send people to a fiery place of eternal conscious torment just for not believing in Jesus? OR My view on justice is different from God’s (lifetime of sins = eternity in hell???)  I reasoned through that very quickly that God’s ways are above our ways and his thoughts are above ours, he is God and has the prerogative to do as he pleases.  That may sound cold or harsh, but I think it’s reasonable to say that if that’s how God wants to handle things he can; he has every right.

Rather, my issue with this paradigm had more to do with questions like these:

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  If this is the case, why did God never mention to Adam and Eve that the result of their eating the fruit that they would burn in hell forever? (just death – exile)

  
  


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  Why did God flood the earth of Noah’s day in which the wicked perished with no apparent warning that their afterlife would be spent in hell?

  
  


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  Why did God never mention in the LOM that the result for disobedience would be an afterlife in hell? (just curses including exile)

  
  


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  What happens to babies that die?

  
  


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  What happens to people who live on an island where they never heard the gospel?

  
  


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  Finally, as we saw last week, man is NOT immortal; man is mortal and immortality comes only through Christ for eternal life is the gift of God

  
  

HOW HERMENEUTICS CHANGED MY VIEW

Even though I had all of these questions I still held to the traditional view because that’s what Christians believe and after all, it says right here “Essential Teachings of the Christian Faith.”

Besides, no one had presented a better alternative view.  However, about 7 or 8 years ago I embarked on an intensive study of hermeneutics and learned a series of principles of interpretation, which rocked my worldview and caused me to re-examine several doctrines in light of proper principles of interpretation.  I began to unravel some of these puzzling teachings that weren’t cohesive, coherent or consistent.  One of those was the end times, which we looked at a few weeks ago.  Another is the afterlife.

One thing that really hit me about six or seven years ago is that I had been failing to consider and interpret the gospel narratives and teachings of Jesus in light of the fact that Jesus’ contemporary audience was the nation of Israel who had been living under the LOM for the past 1500 years.

So whatever Jesus said he was saying to them and was to be understood in light of

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  their law

  
  


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  their history

  
  


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  their social structure

  
  


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  their culture

  
  

Not mine.  And nowhere in the entire Old Testament is it taught that the righteous will go to heaven when they die but the wicked will go to a fiery place called hell where they will suffer eternal conscious torment.

So that needs to be considered whenever we read whatever Jesus may have said to his audience about hell.

It also follows that the better one knows the OT, the better he will understand the teachings of the NT.

I also realized the importance of word studies.  I realized the significance of the fact that the Bible was not originally written in Elizibethan English, but the OT in Hebrew and the NT in Greek.  And while I am thankful for our English translations, it is almost impossible to translate in a completely objective way without letting one’s doctrinal biases dictate how certain texts are translated.  Although, if such an unbiased translation exists it would be the YLT by Robert Young.

SPEAKING OF TRANSLATION BIAS

Consider the following:

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  KJV uses the word hell 54 times

  
  


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  NIV uses the word hell 14 times

  
  


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  YLT uses the word hell ZERO times

  
  

I wonder why the Youngs Literal Translation never uses the word hell.  Because it is literally never there.

So…where did it come from?

FOUR ORIGINAL WORDS TRANSLATED AS HELL

It is not as if there was a teaching of a fiery place of eternal conscious torment that had a proper name and the name when translated to English is “hell.”  Rather, in most translations when the word hell is used, it is used in the place of four different words:

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  Sheol

  
  


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  Hades

  
  


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  Gehenna

  
  


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  Tartarus

  
  

I’d like to spend some time looking at each of these.

SHEOL

The first word is Sheol.  The word sheol literally means “unseen.”  The word Sheol is used about 65 times in the OT original Hebrew.  KJV translates Sheol as

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  hell 31 times

  
  


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  the grave 31 times

  
  


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  the pit 3 times

  
  

My 2002 NIV never once translated Sheol as Hell.  NO HELL IN OT!

(although the translators reconvened about four years ago and if you search the NIV on Bible gateway you will find it there now one time in Psalm 139:8.  Every other time, it is translated as the grave, the realm of death, death, and the depths.  (Great comparison chart at http://www.bibletopics.com/biblestudy/149.htm)

According to Strong’s Concordance, Sheol is the underworld, the place to which people descend at death.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, It connotes the place where those that had died were believed to be congregated. Sheol is underneath the earth and it marks the point at the greatest possible distance from heaven.  Here the dead meet without distinction of rank or condition—the rich and the poor, the pious and the wicked, the old and the young, the master and the slave

Now, if Sheol is simply the place of the dead, the grave, a place without moral distinction, a place where both the righteous and the wicked would reside, why in the world would King Jimmy translate Sheol as hell?

HADES

The next word that has been translated as hell is the Greek word Hades.  I’ll keep this short and sweet.  Perhaps this is an oversimplification,