HELL
The Argument of Permanence
“Sin” can be defined in a number of ways. One definition is that it is disregard for God’s commands. Sin is either doing what God has said not to do or not doing what God has said to do.
Jesus explained sin in another way when he stated that all of God’s commands are summed up in this way: “love the Lord your God” and “love your neighbor as yourself”. This is clarification that the spirit of God’s law is the most critical part of obedience. By saying this Jesus exposed how it is possible to follow the letter of the law while being at odds with its deeper intent. This was Jesus’ fundamental problem with the Pharisees. The law had become for them a source of pride and security but they had no passion for its essence, its meaning, or its Giver. It’s possible to follow the letter of the law and still sin.
Another way to look at sin is to consider its correlation with permanence. When God created, there was no death. When sin was committed, the consequence was conflict, struggle, and death to the human race. Did the plants die before the Fall? The issue is not addressed in the Bible, though geology is clear that death, decay and regeneration have been part of our world for millions of years. Interestingly, Adam and Eve were not authorized to eat animals in the Garden. It was after they sinned that God made coverings of skin for them, in order to address their worries about nakedness. This suggests that the absence of death prior to the Fall also applied to Adam and Eve’s relationship with the animals. There may not have been peace in the animal kingdom but there seems to have been peace between humans and the animals.
Sin ended the peaceful relationship between Adam and Eve, as is evidenced particularly in Adam as he blamed Eve for his disobedience. Cain’s murder of Abel illustrated the extent of the damage caused by sin: one brother murdered the other for a minor offense. The offense was not even intentional, nor was it a true offense. It was Cain who took offense.
The point, though, is that God told Adam and Eve, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2.17). Most Christians believe Adam and Eve will be in heaven, saved by the work of Jesus Christ. But the Bible doesn’t make this clear. What it does make clear is that their sin introduced death into our world. Adam and Eve had been created but their sin undid their creation, not immediately, but after a time both died. Their progeny was to live on but each human was to discover that he or she, too, were under the sentence of death. Our young learn early that they live under the cloud of death. The only question about death is when it will arrive.
Permanence in the Law
The association between permanence and good is woven within the Ten Commandments. God demands that we seek the positives of permanence through his various commands.
God’s first three commandments have to do with himself. He requires worship to be directed only toward himself. This is primarily because he is true and deserving, whereas all the other so-called gods are less than worthless. Notice that God is an everlasting God. He referred to himself as “I Am”, both when he introduced himself to Moses, and when Jesus identified himself using the same phrase. The permanence of God is one of his crucial qualities. God intended permanence for Adam, Eve and their progeny. This is one aspect of what it means to be made in God’s image. One of the tragedies of the Fall was the loss of permanence. But God would not have life so easily destroyed. He also provided a remedy, the remedy we call the plan of redemption. Jesus destroyed the power of the curse, that is, death, enabling all who would trust in him to return to their intended places as glorified, permanent human beings, even sons and daughters of the Creator of the universe.
The remembrance of the Sabbath day is a perpetual celebration of God’s creativity. It is a time of rest and rejuvenation. It is a time of worship and reflection. While God’s creative activity, as far as our universe is concerned, took place over six days (best understood as 6 ages), the celebration of his creative activity goes on forever. We celebrate his creativity and also see it as a guide for what it means to be human. We are to be like him through creative acts forever.
There is another important idea that comes through the Sabbath. Even God rested. He did not create us to be his army of slaves. He created us for abundant life, which includes times of rest. He doesn’t want us to be weary of life; rather, he desires for us to fully enjoy it. God cares for us. He tells us that, while he wants us to be living abundant lives, he assures us that he will always provide for our needs. As creatures we don’t have the power to control our circumstances, as much as we strategize to minimize risk in our lives. But we cannot control the weather. We cannot control the earth that sometimes shakes and breaks open. We cannot keep it from erupting in volcanoes, or from washing away our coastal towns. We cannot control the great conflicts that erupt between nations or religions or ideologies. We cannot control the great sicknesses that can come out of nowhere, such as we recently experienced with covid. We cannot control the sicknesses and the harms that come to us through the aging process. In the end, we must face the reality of human mortality. In the end we must acknowledge our helplessness and that our only hope is in God’s good will. The Sabbath is God’s reminder to us of that good will. Its permanence reminds us that God’s good will towards us is permanent.
God says to “honor your father and mother so that you may live long”. Who are our fathers and mothers? They are the ones who, through their love, have imaged God by creating our lives. God says to honor these re-creators, these nurturers, these lovers of the little ones. When God tells us to honor, he is telling us to respect, and he is telling us to provide care when care is needed. Our good health, our enduring health is promoted by our care of these relationships.
We are not permitted to murder. Murder ends a life. The command to not murder implies that human life is to be respected, maybe even revered. Central to the human task and to human identify is the work of improving and preserving all human life.
Adultery is not permitted because it is an act of unfaithfulness. It produces children who may not know their fathers; it breaks up existing marriages. It is counterfeit, uncommitted love. Rather than contribute to permanence, it contributes to the dissolution of relationships. Adultery has historically been very hard on women. It has always damaged men. Most of all it has always harmed children. This harm ranges from the disruption of basic care to long-term psychological damage. Cavalier attitudes towards family permanence have a way of being passed down from generation to generation. Faithlessness in marital relations brings harm to people who have yet to be born. In contrast, faithfulness in relationships brings strength and joy.
Theft, lying and covetousness are all similar. They are forbidden because they are examples of faithless behavior towards our neighbors. Such faithlessness leads to distrust, which leads to weakening of relationships. Instead of friends and neighbors being sources of support, they become reasons to be afraid, leading to relational isolation. Isolation is not spiritually healthy and, in practical terms, it leaves people without help when life’s difficulties require help. Society is a blessing when people are mutually supportive. These supports give us strength and joy, enabling us to endure hardships and celebrate life’s good times.
To steal from one’s neighbor is faithlessness toward God, as well. It reveals a belief that God is not good enough, not powerful enough, and that he doesn’t care enough to provide for our needs, or that we know what we need better than he does. It is an act proclaiming self-determination and self-sufficiency. Of course, none of us can care for ourselves indefinitely. Ultimately our bodies fail and we die. Typically our bodies diminish significantly before this happens and it becomes abundantly evident that we are not self-sufficient. In any case, commitment to self-sufficiency is a certain death plan. If we are to live, it is only God who can carry us across the great chasm from this world of sin and death into the new heaven and new earth he has prepared for us. Trusting God is our best hope for the present, and our only hope for permanence.
Covenants
Biblical history is presented as a series of covenants initiated by God.A covenant is a contract; it is an agreement; it is a promise. We ought to pause a moment to think about the oddity of this idea that permeates Judaism and Christianity. Why would a God who created the universe feel inclined to covenant with beings he created? The clear message is that God looks on us with profound kindness.
Few people give much thought to covenants anymore, unless they have to do with property rights. A bank covenants with a homebuyer by providing the needed money to buy. In return, the homebuyer promises to pay the bank back, with interest. The bank receives payments and keeps an honest accounting of them. Once the house is fully paid for, the bank provides the buyer with a satisfaction document, making the buyer the legal owner of the house. If the buyer defaults on the loan, the bank will come knocking. There will be penalties to the buyer. Perhaps the covenant will be re-established with revised terms. Perhaps the bank will take possession of the house, requiring the buyer to vacate. The point is that the covenant is an agreement that both parties have entered into freely on the assumption that both parties will gain some benefit.
Another common covenant is marriage. Marriage covenants used to be between a man and a woman. They used to assume that children would be a welcome consequence of the relationship. They used to assume a commitment until “death do us part”. Marriage is still this for many people, but easy divorce and the strange governmentally mandated redefinition of marriage to include same sex partnerships have severely degraded the meaning of the marriage covenant. Today we say, “Agreements are made to be broken.” In the past, agreements were made to be kept. A man of true integrity can say, “My word is my bond.” Those who know him know that what he says is true. He will follow through on his obligations even if he must hand them down to a trustee in the case of his death.
God’s covenants are of this serious, unbreakable sort. He had no need to enter into the agreements in the first place. God made humans and he made all of creation. These were already his possessions. He had full rights and authority over them. He could make them do whatever he wanted them to do. Instead, he effectively limits himself for the benefit of humanity. God does, in some of the covenants, express expectations, but in all of them he promises good things he will do, and he promises bad things he will not do.
This approach was foreign to other religions. Other religions had gods but they didn’t make promises. These gods were like humans but with superpowers. Gods needed to be flattered and sacrificed to, in hopes that they would provide goods and services to those who flattered and sacrificed. These gods were typically capricious. Humans would often hope their gods would not notice them.
This is the covenant between God and Noah: And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”(Genesis 9.12-16). Note that this covenant put no responsibility on Noah but that the covenant is everlasting. It was a great blessing that God delivered Noah and his family through the great flood. He could have died, just as everyone else did, but he was delivered. The covenant proclaimed an everlasting deliverance. This is a clear emphasis of the importance of permanence.
The very idea of covenants between God and man imply that God values permanence. There are a number of covenants in biblical history, all of which bear resemblances to the others, and all of which build on the earlier covenants. God’s final covenant came through Jesus, who spoke of it as he instituted Communion with his disciples. “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” (Luke 22.20). This covenant is spoken of again in the book of Hebrews. In it we see that the new covenant includes perfected spirits and everlasting life for those who are included. This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds. We are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls. (Hebrews 10.16, 39).
Permanence and the Good
There is a pattern in the Bible that connects permanence to the faithful, while the lives of the wicked are limited. Consider the following: For the Lord loves justice, and does not forsake His saints; they are preserved forever, but the descendants of the wicked shall be cut off. (Psalm 37.28). The wicked are overthrown and are no more, but the house of the righteous will stand. (Proverbs 12:7). The Lord preserves all who love Him, but all the wicked He will destroy. (Psalm 145:20). Don’t be misled—you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant. Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit. (Galatians 6.7,8).
Then we see, too, that living forever is a sign of God’s blessing. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:17). Surely your goodness and love will follow meall the days of my life,and I will dwell in the house of the Lordforever. (Psalm 23:6). I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. (John 6:51).
There is a clear relationship in God’s Word between permanence and blessing. Likewise, there is a clear relationship between evil and impermanence. It is good to keep this theme in mind as we consider how God will address the wicked. Will he torment them forever? The theme of permanence suggests otherwise. If God deals with the faithless in his final judgment in the same way he deals with the faithless on the earth, we can expect the result will be that his punishment will be the removal of life support.
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