Bible and Eternal Life (Bible and 21st century)

So, as you continue read and study the written word, keep these 5 principles in mind and try them on from time to time.

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The Cross of Christ is Our Cross 1. We have reverence for the scriptures because they point us to Christ, but we should not become so obsessed with the letter , that we miss out on the Spirit: Consider the following verses in this light: We are called to drink that cup and being baptized with that baptism Mark The Cross of Christ is Our Cross. Email Print Facebook Twitter. Herron decided that what hell needed was a complete brand overhaul.

The new hell would feature no demons or devils, no tridents or lakes of fire. My family belonged to a dwindling Baptist congregation in south-east Michigan, where Sunday mornings involved listening to our pastor preach something akin to the version of hell — a real diabolical place where sinners suffered for all eternity. In the late s, when most kids my age were performing interpretive dances to The Greatest Love of All and receiving enough gold stars to fill a minor galaxy, my peers and I sat in Sunday school each week, memorising scripture such as 1 Peter 5: Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

I was too young and sheltered to recognise this worldview as anachronistic. Our dinner conversations sounded like something out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. According to Christian doctrine, all human beings, believers included, are sinners by nature. This essentially means that no one can get through life without committing at least one moral transgression.

I got saved when I was five years old. I have no memory of my conversion, but apparently my mother led me through the prayer, which involves confessing that you are a sinner and inviting Jesus into your heart. She might have told me about hell that night, or maybe I already knew it existed.

Having a frank family talk about eternity was seen as a responsibility not unlike warning your kids about drugs or unprotected sex. It was uncomfortable, but preferable to the possible consequences of not doing so. The most memorable was Without Reservation, a minute video that I was lucky enough to see at least half a dozen times over the course of my teens.

We soon see four of the kids, Bill, Ken, John and Mary, waking up in the car, which is mysteriously suspended in space. Below them is a line hundreds of people long, leading up to a man with white hair, stationed behind a giant IBM. He then instructs them to step to either the left or the right. The rest of the film consists of a long sequence showing the memorial service for the kids, where a school administrator speaks in secular platitudes about death being a place of peace — a eulogy that is spliced with shots of Ken, John and Mary being led down a red-lit hall and violently pushed into caged lifts.

The last shot of them is in these cells as they descend into darkness.

Lying in bed at night, I replayed the lift scene over and over in my head, torturing myself with the possibility that I might be one of the unconfirmed. The film was not a scare tactic meant to trick teens into becoming Christians; it was clearly designed for the already-saved, a dramatised pep talk urging us to get the word out about hell to our non-Christian friends. Despite this, I never got up the courage to share my faith with them.

Part of it was a lack of personal conviction. Over the course of my teenage years during the s, Christians began to slip into awkward reticence about the doctrine of damnation. Believers still talked about the afterlife, but the language was increasingly euphemistic and vague. Back then, nobody in ministry had the hubris — nor, probably, the sophistication — to rebrand hell as Chris Herron did.

Rather, hell was relegated to the margins of the gospel message, the fine print on the eternal-life warranty. Hell has changed a lot over the years. The Old Testament refers exclusively to sheol, the traditional Hebrew underworld, a place of stillness in which both the righteous and the unrighteous wander in shadows. In the New Testament, several writers refer to this place under its Greek name, hades. Fires burned there constantly, to incinerate the garbage; it was also a place where the bodies of criminals were burned.

The Jewish rabbinical tradition envisioned Gehenna as a purgatorial place of atonement for the ungodly. Another Greek term, tartarus, appears only once, when the author of 1 Peter writes about the angel rebellion that took place before the creation of the world. The most dramatic descriptions of hell come from the strain of apocalyptic literature that runs through the New Testament, as well as the Old Testament prophets.

Apocalypticism was a worldview that arose during the 6th century BC, when Israel was under Syrian domination. It involved the belief that the present era, which was ruled by evil, would soon give way to a new age here on Earth in which God would restore justice and all evil-doers would be punished. The authors of Daniel and Ezekiel were apocalyptists — so was John of Patmos, the author of Revelation. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. As a kid, it never occurred to me that Solomon and Daniel had drastically different views about the afterlife.

Christian theology, as it has developed over the centuries, has functioned like a narrative gloss, smoothing the irregular collection of biblical literature into a cohesive story written by a single, divine author. As time went on, Satan, Lucifer and Beelzebub were consolidated into a single entity, the personification of all evil. Likewise sheol, Gehenna, hades and tartarus came to be understood as physical representations of the darkest place in the universe.

The various depictions of hell over the centuries tend to mirror the earthly landscape of their age. Torture entered the conception of hell in the second century, when Christians were subjected to sadistic public spectacles. Roman interrogation methods included red-hot metal rods, whips and the rack.

Lower hell is depicted as a walled city with towers, ramparts, bridges and moats; fallen angels guard the citadel like knights. Today, biblical literalists believe hell exists outside of time and space, in some kind of spiritual fifth dimension. The buildings were connected by subterranean tunnels, so it was possible to spend months, particularly in the winter, going from class to the dining hall to the dorms, without ever stepping outside. According to the Scriptures, only man received life in this way from God.

Because of this man is the only living creature to have a soul. Of the many references to soul and spirit in the Bible, never once is either the soul or the spirit declared to be immortal, imperishable or eternal. Indeed, only God has immortality 1 Timothy 1: Adventists teach that the resurrection of the righteous will take place at the second coming of Jesus, at which time they will be restored to life and taken to reside in Heaven. Jehovah's Witnesses believe the word soul nephesh or psykhe as used in the Bible is a person, an animal, or the life a person or animal enjoys.

Hence, the soul is not part of man, but is the whole man—man as a living being. Hence, when a person or animal dies, the soul dies, and death is a state of non-existence, based on Psalms One group, referenced as "the little flock" of , people, will receive immortality and go to heaven to rule as Kings and Priests with Christ during the thousand years. As for the rest of humankind, after the final judgment , it is expected that the righteous will receive eternal life and live forever on an Earth turned into a paradise. Those granted immortality in heaven are absolutely immortal and cannot die by any cause.

They make a distinction between immortality and eternal life in that humans who have passed the final judgement and were rewarded "eternal life" can still technically lose that life and die if they were ever hypothetically sin at some future point in time, though they do not succumb to disease or old age, due to their living forever still being subject to obedience. In Latter-day Saint Mormonism theology, the spirit and the body constitute the human soul.

Whereas the human body is subject to death on earth, they believe that the spirit never ceases to exist and that one day the spirits and bodies of all mankind will be reunited again. This doctrine stems from their belief that the resurrection of Jesus Christ grants the universal gift of immortality to every human being. Other Biblical scriptures speak of varying degrees of glory, such as 1 Corinthians There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: The few who do not inherit any degree of glory though they are resurrected reside in a state called outer darkness , which, though not a degree of glory, is often discussed in this context.

Only those known as the " Sons of Perdition " are condemned to this state. The doctrine of conditional immortality states the human soul is naturally mortal, and that immortality is granted by God as a gift. The doctrine is a "significant minority evangelical view" that has "grown within evangelicalism in recent years". Some sects who hold to the doctrine of baptismal regeneration also believe in a third realm called Limbo , which is the final destination of souls who have not been baptised , but who have been innocent of mortal sin.

Souls in Limbo include unbaptised infants and those who lived virtuously but were never exposed to Christianity in their lifetimes. Christian Scientists believe that sin brought death, and that death will be overcome with the overcoming of sin. Eternal Life is Now!

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. E-J by Geoffrey W. A Commentary by Arland J. Different authors provide slightly different counts for the use of the term life in John, e. The Triumph of Christ by John R. The Watchtower , April 15, , p.