Heaven, Hell, and the Resurrection, What The Bible Says
by tlmadmin on December 31, 2014
Bible teacher, Lex Meyer wrote a great book on the topic of Heaven and Hell. The name of the book is Immortals.
You can check out all of the great teachings by Lex at his site
http://www.unlearnthelies.com/
You can order the book at this site
http://www.immortalthebook.com/
Re Lex Meyer, “Heaven, Hell and the Resurrection, What the Bible says”. The point about ‘the spirit’ of both a human and an animal, being like the power source that gives them life, then what about the Ruach HaKodesh, I don’t understand. If what Lex says, then there doesn’t seem to be a role for the Ruach HaKodesh. Incidently, the Bible doesn’t actually say the “lion and lamb will lay down together”. Isaiah 11:6. Please quote it as it is.
Isaiah 11:6 (CJB)
6 The wolf will live with the lamb;
the leopard lie down with the kid;
calf, young lion and fattened lamb together,
with a little child to lead them.
What happens at death? The Bible is clear, but most people, unfortunately are not. The reason most people do not know the truth is that most believe Satan’s lie from the garden, ” you will not surely die”, even though God had said, “you WILL surely die”. In other words, the world, in general, has embraced the false idea (which is the crux of new age philosophy) that man is inherently immortal, and so can NEVER die.
We know from I Tim 6:15-16 that only One has inherent life and that One is the Most High God, Creator of all things. All other beings, including the angels, do not have inherent externality. We know from Ez 28:19-20 that Satan himself will “never be” again after the judgement. Adam and Eve were never “immortal”. However, had they not sinned, they could have lived perpetually by continuing to eat of the tree of life.
Man, then, is mortal. Gen 2:7 tells us that man became a living soul when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life … the force from God that animates a creature.
So, man does not “have” a soul. Man IS a soul (nephesh).
All living breathing creatures are “souls” and are prone to death and returning to the dust of the ground. Ecc 3:19-20. Th breath of God (life force) returns to God when a creature dies.(Ecc 12:7)
Since animals have no moral responsibility to God, they stay dead. Since mankind DOES have moral responsibility to God, he will be raised to life in the respective resurrections (Rev 20:4-5) by God to give account for himself. II Cor 5:10, Rom 14:10-12
At death, a person ceases to be, for all practical purposes… i.e., would disintegrate and “never be”… were it not for God reanimating him with his breath of life and causing him to live again. Rev 11:11 is one of the most apt descriptions of what happens at the first
resurrection:
“And after three days and a half the breath of life from God entered into them, and they stood on their feet …”
Once a person embraces the lie that we are all naturally immortal, this FORCES ALL other conclusions, no matter what religion, to place a person SOMEWHERE, in total consciousness, after he “dies”.
This is why all of the world religions have had to make up ideas and philosophies to answer this tenet that we are innately immortal, including all facets of mainline Catholicism/Protestatism.
This is where Christians teach that the good people go to “heaven” and the bad people go to “hell”. They are forced to because they, too, have fallen for the new age lie that we are immortal.
The Bible teaches that the dead will be raised to life in the respective resurrections. So all who have died to this very moment are still very dead because the resurrections to life have not yet taken place. David has not ascended to heaven, Acts 2:29;34. Only Jesus Christ has, John 3:13.
No one is floating around with a harp in heaven, and no one is burning in fiery flames. The dead are dead. The Judgment hasn’t even happened yet!
The terminology is simple. “Hell” (Sheol) is simply the shallow grave where the dead are laid to rot. The “Lake of Fire” (which Jesus likened to Gehenna) is where unbelievers will be cast after the Great White Throne Judgement. It is called the “second death”, Rev 20:14-15, because it’s “game over”, no more chances, resurrections … It’s very final, permanent death (the punishment [not ongoing punishING]).
The Bible is clear and simple:
“The wages of sin is DEATH, but the gift of God is ETERNAL LIFE through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Rom 6:23
Notice the options: DEATH or ETERNAL LIFE. (Deut 30:19)
Most of Christendom teaches that the options are eternal life in heaven or eternal life in hell because of their belief that no one can ever die! But the Bible PLAINLY teaches the opposite.
This also perpetuates that gnostic / docetic idea that a person is dual in nature … that only his body dies, but a separate ethereal invisible aspect of the person flies off somewhere to live on. The Bible teaches the opposite. When a person dies, that person (all of him, the whole) is dead, period. (Ps 146:4, Ecc 3:19-20, 9:4, 12:7, 8:8, 9:10, Is 38:18)
It is VITAL to understand what it means to be mortal flesh and blood in order to understand what John is teaching about the doctrine of Christ in John 4:15, II
John 7-9.
Jesus Christ came in the flesh (mortal flesh and blood like we are). When he died, all of him died, not just his body, as the Gnostics are FORCED to say. He was really dead for three days and three nights. He was raised to life by command of the Father at the end of the third day, just as the Bible says he was. This is the doctrine of Christ.
The mantra “God in the flesh” is antichrist and a complete oxy moron to the truth of the Bible.
It is for lack of knowledge that the people perish. Satan has deceived the whole world in general, Rev 12:9. One false doctrine leads to a web of entangled other false doctrines, as we can see from the false “doctrine of immortality”.
Lex Meyer seems to basically be on the right track with this particular teaching.
insightful teach will read his book.
I believe Herbert W Armstrong also wrote about this same understanding of scripture. I have come to believe the same myself.
Especially since many years back I once witnessed a real-life Lazarus resurrection of a relative of mine from dead. She was dead for a full 35-45 minutes before God answered mine and her mothers’ prayer and brought her back to life. I later asked her what she saw when she was clinically dead and she said to me she was simply asleep.
Is it possible that the near-death experiences some people have had of life after death and hell is what scripture refers to in
2 Thessalonians 2:11, ‘And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie’
2 Timothy 4:4 ‘And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables’.
Incidentally the word for fables can also be interpreted Myths. Does the idea of the Plato influence ring any alarm bells? The Greeks were famed for their myths
A God who would allow torment of a person day and night for all eternity does not fit in my mind with the same God who says in Mark12:31 ‘love thy neighbor as thy self’
Also in Matthew 5:39 ‘If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also’.
Also it says in Ecclesiastes 9:5 ‘For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten’.
Surely if a person was in hell being tormented day and night they would know what was happening to them there, if nothing else?
Another important point not mentioned in this video that people often cite as proof of an instant heaven or hell after death is the thief on the cross. However how could that be if the Lord was three days being resurrected? Could that sentence in Luke 23:43 be misinterpreted? I don’t believe commas were used back then as in writing today. I believe it was the case that in Hebrew scripture at least that gaps were used where we now use full stops and that was the extent of any sense of punctuation.
Luke 23:43 could be read completely differently with one move of a comma, for example and if there is no comma in the original scripture at all then we can deduce that this has been open to interpretation.
For example –
Luke 23:43 Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise
Or could it have been?
Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise. The moving of the comma completely changes the meaning. The latter I would take to mean “I will tell you now, you will be with me in paradise. A strong statement with no precise timing on when. I believe the Hebrew word for paradise can also be garden.
What about, Matthew 5:5 ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’.
Adam and Eve were on earth after all, not in heaven which proves that is what God intended for us. He intended to commune with us here on earth as it was previously before sin came in as suggested in the video. What would be the point of a new earth otherwise if we were all destined to go to either heaven or hell by that stage.
See Isaiah 65:17 below
“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. That could also indicate we will not remember things from this current earth, possibly.
If we really look at the Bible without preconceived ideas or the ideas that the regular church have taken as truth for centuries, we may rethink what it all actually means.
Look at the described attire and paraphernalia of the beast in Revelation 17 of the Bible and think whom or what could that be? I think I have an idea. Virgins are used to describe Gods children and too the mother of Christ. What could the whore be and whose mother? Not the mother of the true Christ? A counterfeit maybe?
The God of the Bible is a loving God who wants a large family of humans around him and his son. If I am wrong then God forgive me but, the above is what I have come to believe.