Undeception

This post is prompted by two recent comments, from two different commenters on two different issues. But their answer, it seems to me, is related.

I was asked, “Why wouldn’t Jesus say that evil would be forever dead instead of having this eternal fire to go to? Even if it was recognized as an exaggeration at the time, is not this caricature of a final death a scare tactic?”

Jesus’ words were not an exaggeration. Eternal fire is an apt metaphor for unquenchable, inexorable judgment. The eternal fire Jesus refers to emphasizes an irreversible judgment, a fire that doesn’t just last long enough to scorch or burn, but remains to consume completely and utterly.

Another important aspect to consider is that the judgment he’s referring to wasn’t to be the end of all things, either. It was tied to a specific event in history, now long past but with ongoing application. Anyone who’s read many of my eschatology posts will know where I’m going here. The Sheep and the Goats judgment was the start of something, not just the end of something. The fires haven’t stopped because there are still those who die at odds with God’s purpose for creation, but there are those who live to accomplish His will on the earth. Jesus was laying out a state of affairs that would begin with that judgment but, along with the world and its inhabitants, would continue for all time.

While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
And cold and heat,
And summer and winter,
And day and night
Shall not cease. (Gen 8.22)

Jesus wasn’t talking about the end of the world: he was talking about the beginning of a world order. The world order we see in Isaiah 2.2-5:

In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!

This where we get to the other commenter’s question. This passage in Isaiah should be familiar to us, but if it were it would certainly have informed us when we read Revelation 21.22-22.7:

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life. Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

And he said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true, for the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.”

“See, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”

This isn’t heaven: it’s heaven on earth. We’re not having to wait until “heaven someday” to be able to behold the face of God without any intermediary; the New Covenant is already established and we may each personally interface with our God and serve Him with love, not fear. We are not blinded by the world and its problems, but have the light of the Kingdom lighting our way, if we would just make sure to keep our eyes on it.

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Mat 5.13-16)

This is not a political system in which each person tries to dominate or force compliance over one another: it’s a personal system of voluntary submission to God and to each other. Living our lives with this example has proved effective for attracting many from outside the city, prompting them to say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” Whenever Christians remember that they are exercising God’s authority in this world as co-regents with Jesus through their humility and imitation of our Lord, they are realizing his promise to inherit the earth and the Kingdom that came.

It is my belief that Revelation’s Lake of Fire/Fiery Sulfur was never intended to be read as an actual geographic location (even in the spiritual realm), but was a colorful apocalyptic image meant to depict and dramatize final termination of various sorts, including punishment. The key indicator of this is that the sulfur imagery and its concomitant punishment is not shown with much internal consistency. We need to look at the three references to this lake.

The first time it’s mentioned in 19.20 it’s only the beast and false prophet who are thrown “alive” into it, in obvious contrast to all the people who were killed by “the sword that came out of the mouth of the rider of the horse” and were devoured as carrion (v. 21). Do note that if too fine a point is put upon it, this contradicts 14.9-11, which calls for those deceived to also receive torment with fire and sulfur, which scholars usually take to be borrowing imagery from Sodom’s destruction in sulfur and fire in Gen 19.24. Note here that if the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra, a definitive punishment thought to be so complete as to have left almost no trace, was indeed being alluded to, then using that imagery to refer to eternally continuing punishment in Revelation would be a somewhat foreign, counterintuitive intrusion.

Then in 20.10, the devil is thrown into the Lake of Fiery Sulfur along with the beast and false prophet, where “They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever,” the only explicit reference to eternal conscious torment in the Bible, used specifically of the unholy trinity. But then again, given Revelation’s over-the-top and sometimes melodramatic imagery and expressions, even this may be a bit of hyperbole. Note that here again, the humans involved receive a different fate: they are devoured by heavenly fire (no sulfur mentioned).

Finally, in 20.14-15, we find our first and only example of the Lake of Fire being used for humanity. Jesus’ statement in Mat 25.41 that those on his left would be sent to “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” corresponds well with this passage, in which those whose names were not found in the Lamb’s book of life would be thrown into the Lake of Fire. But how can this be a reference to eternal conscious torment, when even things that have never been conscious, namely “death and Hades”, are thrown in alongside? Are we to assume that death and Hades (Sheol) suffer for eternity? For that matter, even when personified, what’s Sheol done wrong? It served its purpose, and we’re never given any indication that this purpose is at odds with God’s purposes. So why is it being punished and tormented? I can anticipate the objection, “Well, you can’t be too literal here,” but that’s exactly my point: to be “thrown into the Lake of Fire” is not a literal description of anyone’s fate. It means simply to be consumed and to cease to exist, as happens with anything else that is burned. Now, I grant that the following is highly speculative, but notice that this is the only instance where it is called “the Lake of Fire” instead of “the Lake of Fiery Sulfur”; what if the sulfur aspect was omitted in this instance because, unlike the other two instances, there was no aspect of torture to highlight (the foul, noxious fumes of burning sulfur are legendary)?

So a brief recap: the devil, beast, and false prophet are the only ones said to be tormented day and night for ever and ever, and this is just as likely to be hyperbolic as the other imagery of Revelation. The “Lake of Fire/Fiery Sulfur” was a multipurpose apocalyptic picture of termination that, considering the various types of things being thrown into it, was given more than one meaning within the three passages in which it is mentioned. Revelation can be used to defend eternal conscious torment only when literalized in a way most expositors find uncomfortable elsewhere in the book, and even then it requires a leap of logic from the unholy trinity receiving it to all the ungodly receiving it.

I was recently asked to contribute to a podcast for Love for All Ministries, a group of young Christians dedicated to honest, intellectual dialogue with non-believers of all walks and creeds. The topic for the discussion when I was on was “Hell”. I haven’t talked much about hell on this blog so far, so I thought I’d point to this podcast.*  I didn’t want to bring in too many of my own unique and esoteric beliefs on the topic – although I would have brought in more if I had had time – but I was primarily interested in problematizing the typical fundamentalist/evangelical view of hell.

My primary goal in discussing this topic was to emphasize something that Travis, the show’s main host, brought up on his own: the majority understanding of hell is not easily demonstrated in Scripture. The main biblical sources that fanned the flame (so to speak) of the medieval imagination on the topic of hell are all highly figurative (more on this in another post, perhaps). But even the word “hell” is nowhere near as clear-cut as modern Christians think it is: for one thing, there is no single word for “hell” in the Bible. We have the obscure and poorly understood sheol in the Old Testament, translated as Hades in the New Testament, which in the OT was the place both the righteous and unrighteous slept after death; we have Peter using (of angels) a verb that means “imprison in Tartarus”, another word originally tied to Greek mythology; one more word that has played into the current understanding of hell is the NT word Gehenna.

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Following the lead among my local blogger friends Saige, Heather, and Josh, all of whose blogs have around 200 posts, I decided to reckon my own post count.

Now, mind, I started blogging on a blog called Don’t Dream It’s Over in March 2006. Note for anyone clicking on those links: it’s a part of the blog system for a site called Planet Preterist, where my user name has always been “Ransom” (I am still proud of the blog’s tagline: “Where Ransom goes to rant some”). Also, a visitor to that site and this one would notice some quite similar blog posts, due in part to the fact that I imported a number of DDIO posts to Undeception (originally hosted at wordpress.com) when I started the latter, and in part to the fact that since starting Undeception I have cross-posted a couple newer posts for the attention of those at Planet Preterist.

Anyway, I realized today that I started Undeception in September a year ago, so I missed my 1 year anniversary last month. Because there has been continuity between DDIO, the wordpress.com version of Undeception, and the current Undeception, I have been blogging for two and a half years. This means that apart from Kev (with probably about 3,000 posts by now) I am the first blogger in our local group of blogging friends. So why, including this post, do I only have 140 posts? What da heck?

I have recently been dialoguing with a new full preterist friend, Patrick Stone, about the timing of the millennium. Early on in the conversation, the possibility was raised that the First Resurrection of Rev 20.4-6 occurred at the beginning of the Roman-Jewish war and corresponds to the resurrection of the martyrs at the time the fifth seal is broken (Rev 6.9-11). Patrick has been exploring the viability of this interpretation, and has come out in the affirmative with this extensive article. As a bonus, his interpretation makes some very interesting suggestions about the nature of the Resurrection.

In this article, Patrick utilizes a hermeneutic for reading the recurring symbology of Revelation that I find to be quite plausible for a conscious first-century author: it has the virtues of not viewing Revelation as either a reckless jumble of imagery or a composition of wholly ecstatic origin, decipherable only with an esoteric “key” (usually some ad hoc rubric favorable only to a predetermined interpretation). Of course, one of the biggest problems with interpreting Revelation is its undeniably cryptic usage of numbers, which for futurists has strangely not called into question the idea that the “millennium” must require a time period that at least resembles 1,000 years. Patrick gives a novel but quite simple numerical interpretation that makes some sense of the millennium in relation to other time periods mentioned in Revelation.

This is a large article, and I haven’t read it all the way through yet. Check it out, and let me know what you think!

I’m embroiled once again in a major challenge in my personal life that, aside from some interesting interaction in the comments, has kept me from posting here over the last couple weeks (it’s the same issue that occasioned my “Radio Silence” post). I am confident I will have all this behind me in just a couple weeks’ time.

Just thought I’d let you know…

Steve

P.S. Once again I solicit your prayers for my satisfactory performance.