Questions and Answers, Part 11

Transcript

GRM 1207
Questions and Answers, Part 11
11/25/2018
Selected Verses
Gil Rugh

All right, well you’re here tonight so maybe I’ll give you a chance. If you came and you have something you’d like to talk about, maybe things you’d like to bring up, have addressed. Let’s open that up before I talk and take the whole evening. Anybody come with anything or something you’d like to say? Don’t be afraid, if it’s a dumb question, I’ll give you a dumb answer and we’ll both be gracious to each other. Everybody good.

“Good evening, Gil: I’ve often wondered when you make statements from the pulpit, and you have comments that you make considering other people’s theologies or thoughts on different subjects that you obviously disagree with. I was just wondering, do you ever make contact with these people or have interaction with them over what they may have written or stated?”

Okay, that’s a good question. Do I ever talk to these people that I have disagreements with? Let me think. Usually comments I make regarding positions are positions that people have taken in what I’d call the public forum. For example, when I preach something and take a position, I don’t think that the Bible requires people to come and talk to me personally. You know, sometimes you say if you see your brother overtaken in a fault you go and talk to them. There it becomes a personal matter. But when I, using myself, take a position and preach it in the pulpit, that’s a public forum. I think it’s perfectly legitimate if someone in another church, another place, disagrees with the position, does that publically. But I think that’s been pretty much the practice in the church down through the years. I wouldn’t be opposed to talking to a person. There have been occasions where I’ve done that, occasions where I’ve personally talked to people or they have even written. Sometimes you get a response, sometimes you don’t, but usually the positions I’m addressing are positions that are out in what I’d call the public forum so it’s not a personal thing. If there were something that was personal information, or I’d think that we personally disagree on, but a doctrinal issue is out in the public. So, for example, someone on covenant theology.

I’ve sometimes been asked, because there have been times when I’ve been criticized in other pulpits, well did they talk to you? I said no, I don’t think they need to because my position was made public in a public forum and they presented their position in their critique of mine, so it’s the same when somebody writes a book. Someone else might write a critique of that book, but they don’t need to go and address the author. So as a general pattern I’d say no, because people, number 1, generally, like a covenant theologian, they probably wouldn’t be that interested in engaging. They’ve put their position out there, they’ve interacted. I’m responding, but probably dozens of dispensationalists have responded to that as well, so I make a distinction between what’s out in the public forum and what might be a personal thing. If you and I had a personal disagreement I’d think we’d have an obligation to talk personally, but if you wrote a book, and you weren’t part of the congregation that I disagreed with, I’d say it’s in the public forum. So I feel that way about my sermons and what’s out on the internet. I’d say, well it’s out there for people to critique and criticize. Yeah, that’s a little bit of the distinction I’d make.

I’m saying I don’t think you need to worry about me writing a book! So there are disagreements but they’re not personal, except theology is personal to me and I think it’s personal to these people. I have some men who have come through the church here who have moved on to be pastors of reformed churches. I received a very nice letter from one of those a few years back and he’s just telling me how much he appreciated his time at Indian Hills and the emphasis on the word. He was just sharing on the reformed covenantal position, but, “I just want to thank you for the time I had in the Word at Indian Hills.” Not personal. We disagree, and I sharply disagree with him, and he would with me.

“Gil, thank you so much again for such a tremendous message this morning. We were home but it was very clear on our computer and I told Sue Ann as far as zeroing in every minute we could really concentrate. We won’t miss church again because that’s not better, we like the fellowship, but I just wanted to say that I grew up in a church where the Bible was taught but I don’t remember ever going through Revelation. Then in Bible school, I don’t remember that we studied that book as well, so we appreciated the other times you went through Revelation and now it was even more clear to me about the nations. I never really thought about that before you taught it, even the first time. I caught on that you’re talking about the nations, and this morning you said when you think of the new heaven, we as believers that will be raptured, the church, and then of course the Old Testament saints too as they’re raptured after the Tribulation period. We’ll enjoy that new heaven, but then you came real close to saying that they’ll be two places. You did say that the people that will be the nations and those that have literally walked from the Tribulation through the Millennium into eternity, they’ll be outside of the new heaven. Can we call that the new earth, so it’d be two places, one for the glorified bodies, one for the earthlings, the earth people?”

Yeah, thank you, I think that’s the distinction that’s being made. The nations and the people outside the city bring their glory, their offerings, their worship to God in the new Jerusalem. This is a little bit like we have now, we have two separate places where believers are. We’re present on this earth but angels dwell in heaven, and believer’s spirits are in heaven even though they’re not in physical bodies there, their spirit is there. There we’ll bring it down, but there still is a distinction between those in physical bodies and those in glorified bodies. Non-physical in the sense of non-glorified, angels and the people we saw in Hebrews 12, so it’s an interesting distinction. But it seems to me, some say the nations are just blended. That would include Israel, but it seems to me Israel is kept distinct through eternity. One question back, why does it matter? Will it matter in eternity the distinction between Israel and the church? I think it does.

I think that’s why you have the gates with the name of each of the tribes of Israel. You have the foundation with each of the names of the twelve apostles, then you have the nations, and that’s always a contrast with the nation. You don’t blend Israel and the nations generally but they are a nation, they are unique among all the nations as the pupil of God’s eye, the only nation He chose, so you know the similarities with what we can identify with in present life and then the magnitude of change. You know you go through it, certain things impress you and the idea that what God had done with the tabernacle and later the Solomonic, Solomon’s temple and so on. The culmination there, they’re just miniature models of the pattern taken from heaven, and what God has prepared for us so we can connect, but the magnitude and the glory of what God has prepared for us, we just get a glimpse. You know it’s like a little peephole almost because I say, how do I contain this and that doesn’t bother me? I read some of those who don’t believe in a literal interpretation, like I said. You couldn’t have a 15 hundred mile cube, and they’ve got their reason why that wouldn’t, but it’s not a problem for God, though it makes you more anxious. I can’t wait to see it, I can’t wait to live there. And to think we’ll rule and reign over the whole earth, which was God’s intention when He created man, to rule and reign.

How that could go on for a 100 billion endless years and not run out? I think of it a little bit, the modern technology. We were talking in my first hour class, watching someone on TV talking about, you know, you have on your phone more computing power than they used to have on mainframe computers. That was his statement. And I say, how could they imagine in that day? I still have my first bag phone because I was really upscale. It weighs about five pounds, and you carried it around everywhere, but you could talk on the phone. I put it in my car and I could get a call. I say, man this is amazing. Anybody think that’s amazing? It sits in the garage now as a relic. You know, hard to conceive back then. Could you talk about travel today and people grasp it? People going to the moon, and you get on an airplane and you fly all the way across the country, when it was a major trip to go from the little towns to Nebraska, traveling distance. God is telling us a little bit, He keeps allowing us. It’s the delight of man to discover things, it’s the delight of God to conceal them. And then He lets man, in His plan, discover more of what He’s done.

It reminds me, some of you may have seen the news article this week, I should have downloaded it to read to you, but the scientists have said they’ve come up in their computer discoveries with a shocking revelation, that all present human beings can be traced back to just two individuals. A man and a woman and their DNA. They’ve done this with your DNA and all of that, and there’s not room for development from separate DNA, we’ve all come from the same. They said that’s true with the species of animals, this pattern. I’m not scientific but reading it, it appeared on a couple of the news sites on the internet. I know you really never know everything on the internet is true, sometimes it’s not, but these scientists and the universities they represent—now they haven’t become biblical believers. They say the explanation of this is that something happened about a hundred thousand years ago, which they said is just a pin prick in the evolutionary scale, that evidently destroyed all but a man and a woman, and one pair of representatives of each of these species, and everything’s descended along those lines. I’ll be interested to see what appears in the news and how that develops.

We say well, we could answer that, the flood of Noah, and there was just Noah and his wife, and everybody descended from them. And he took two of every kind on the ark, so all the kinds have developed from those. And what you’ve discovered is what the bible said happened. They’ve narrowed it down to a hundred thousand years. Keep going, you’ll get down to where you’re right, but man keeps thinking he’s discovering something. So I look at it, the future, and God’s promised His glory. How could I talk about the glory of heaven? Like I said, with myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands of angels, and all the spirits of God’s people that have gone to glory dwelling in His presence in heaven. And then He’s going to come down to earth, and we’re going to dwell there, but that’s not all there is. There’s the new earth upon which the new Jerusalem resides, and there will be people, and we’ll be back to God’s original plan and creation for Adam and Eve. The devil couldn’t short-circuit that. God’s plan is amazing! We will not grasp it until we’re there.

“Gil, somewhat related to the other question. I wonder if you could comment on 1 Corinthians 15:50 where Paul says, “This I say brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” Kind of related to that, I assume your view of physical beings in the eternal state is somewhat of a minority view. Are there others that hold that view?”

Yes, I think a number of dispensationalists, those who take the literal interpretation. Not every one of them would, but I think within that realm it’s not an uncommon view. I haven’t counted it up, but just in a few of the commentaries, I think maybe J. A. Seiss for an older commentator, the old Lutheran commentator, but don’t quote me on that because sometimes I get them mixed. I believe Robert Thomas holds that in his two-volume commentary more recently, and some others, so it wouldn’t be uncommon because it’s a natural way to take the nations, they have kings. So usually those who have a distinction between Israel and the church, and so on, but there are dispensationalists who don’t hold that same distinction.

The passage in 1 Corinthians 15, I’m glad you brought that up because it is something that should be clarified. You’ll note when he says in 1 Corinthians 15:50, “Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep.” I think what he’s saying there has to be taken in the context, he’s addressing the church, the church at Corinth, and it’s true anybody in the church in this dispensation, from Acts chapter 2 down to the Rapture, cannot go into the kingdom in a physical body, so I think it would be in that context. That’s why he tells them why they won’t, because we’ll all be changed, but that’s a passage pertaining to the church. “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” so I think that would be--otherwise you wouldn’t have anybody who could go in even to the first phase of the kingdom, the Millennium, in a physical body because you can’t inherit the kingdom. I think he’s talking here about believers and, in particular, he’s talking about the church that we couldn’t go into it in physical bodies, but I think there will be people who go into it because that was God’s original intention, so I would limit that to the context, he’s writing to the church at Corinth. He immediately goes on to explain to them how the church will be removed, so it’s not possible for us to go into the kingdom in physical bodies. In fact, as we’ve shown, at the Rapture every believer will be removed from the earth, so really nobody up until that point will be going into the kingdom in a physical body. But you know, at the Rapture it’s only people saved after the Rapture that will have that, so that’s how I would take that passage in it’s context there.

Okay back here. “A question for you related to this morning’s sermon. Will there be weddings, marriage on the new earth between those in physical bodies, weddings or marriage?”

Yeah, you know I want to distinguish between what I would see as an implication. My understanding is there would be, because if there’s going to be children, God’s intention from the beginning was marriage, He made man as male and female. Then He brought them together, that’s why leave your father and mother, and cleave to your wife in chapter 2. That’s all before sin occurs, so really you know, at least I would hold and I think other dispensationalists, the kingdom will finally bring about the realization of what God intended when He created Adam and Eve. Can I say it this way; we have undone the problem of sin with the redemptive work of Christ so the whole creation groans together in anticipation of the finality and the realization. I would take it, with the nations and kings that these would be people marrying, giving in marriage, having children, in the pattern that Adam and Eve would have set, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. Well, God’s intention in the beginning, He created them male and female, Jesus said, so marriage would be the intention. So I think we’ll see that perfectly realized in the new earth, with those who went in in physical bodies.

Otherwise we’d say Satan so disrupted that original plan of God that we can never have what God originally intended. So I would say, yes, that since there are people going in in physical bodies and there are nations that have to develop that there would be no reason. Like I said, if we’re back, what would have happened if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned? What we’re saying is, we’re back to the original purpose of God in Genesis 1 and 2 and now we’ve dealt with sin. God’s plan included that, but originally He created them to obey Him, to honor Him, to live forever, so think about it. If Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of life before they sinned, they would have lived forever. That’s why they had to be excluded from the Garden of Eden, remember after they sinned, because if they’d have eaten of the tree of life they would have been forever confirmed in their lost condition. So they had to be excluded, and the angel that guarded the garden, you can’t come back. You can’t, but when we get to the kingdom and we’ll get to this when we move into chapter 22 next time, the tree of life is there. The peoples, the nations come in, they come in to the new Jerusalem and partake of the fruit of the tree of life and the water of life that flows from the throne of God. The very thing that God provided for them in the garden, but were excluded from because of their sin, is now freely there for them to enjoy. So I think it indicates again God’s original purpose being realized, so I would assume there’d be children born.

They’re born without a sin nature because the sin nature will be eradicated as we go into eternity. That’s why they’ll be no sin, none of those things. No evil people because the sin nature came in
in chapter 3 of Genesis, it’s not there in chapters 1 and 2. He didn’t create Adam with a sin nature. He didn’t create Eve with a sin nature, even though she was created out of Adam, because there was no sin in them. So sin has to be removed or Satan has succeeded in corrupting God’s creation to such an extent that even the redemptive work of Christ can’t bring it back to where it was. You see that connection is crucial for us to see God’s original purpose. How beautiful it would have been if there had never been. And what did Adam and Eve do? They walked with God in the garden, had free fellowship with Him. After the fall they’re hiding from God. Now we’re back to where everybody can come up into the presence of God, enjoy fellowship with Him. No barriers, there’s a city with gates but the gates never close. Day and night, we say, but there is no night. You can come into that city and fellowship with God, into His very presence. So that’s a long answer to a short question.

Yeah, I think there’ll be marriage, children. They’re being fruitful, multiplying, filling the earth, ruling over creation. And our role will be to rule with Christ over the people out there, but there will be kings and subject authority all the way down, and there’s a mixture. We see glorified people, unglorified people. But like I said, there’s angels now, spirit beings could be present here. God chooses to keep them hidden from our sight, but on occasion we find in the bible, when He wants them to be manifest, they’re seen. So I take it that we’ll go on in eternity, but there’s a lot, you know, we can’t put together. Will we ever run out of room if people keep having babies and no pain? Well what about, okay a 100 billion years, 200 billion years? What would have happened if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned, could they have been fruitful multiplied and filled the earth? What happened when they filled the earth? God would have been stuck, so thankfully Satan intervened and caused sin. Death came in so God didn’t have a problem He couldn’t resolve. Some things I have to leave with God, how’s He’s going to do it, what He’ll do. Look at the vastness of the universes. I mean it seems that it’s, you know, the more we can discover, the more it is so, and He knows it all, calls every one of them by name. We’re small beings, but we belong to Him.

“Hello Gil. In the high school group we’re talking about Jesus on the cross, about how long and where all the beatings, stuff that Jesus went through on the cross. How long was Jesus on the cross, and how many beatings did He endure?”

Off the top of my head, somebody help me out here, there were three hours of darkness, six hours, three before that and three hours of darkness and then—okay, how many beatings did He endure? I don’t know that I can tell you off hand. Anybody been in that section of the gospels recent enough, if you have, where beatings occurred? The original one with the Romans. The second question is a little harder to answer because it becomes difficult there. He was beaten. It was customary, you know, you beat them when they’re preparing you for the cross because that added to their suffering to lacerate their back. You know, contrary to our day, the Romans with crucifixion, it was to be an agonizing death.

You think about it, being nailed to a cross. They laid the cross down then they nailed you to it, and usually through the feet or ankles, and then maybe the wrists or hands, but then they raised the cross up and you hang there, and the way you continue to live is periodically you know as you hang, pretty soon you can’t breathe. All your weight is down so you have to push yourself up with your feet to take a breath. Pretty soon you just aren’t able to do that, so the point was to make it a lingering death, and you did it in a public forum so that you were making a statement. This will be you if you get out of line, in one way or the other! So you think of six hours of that and they hasten the death by breaking the legs, because when you broke the legs you no longer had the ability to push yourself up and take a breath. In effect, you suffocate because you can’t get any breath. So you had to push yourself up so breaking the legs hastened the death because you’re just going to hang there, gasping for air. You no longer can use your legs to give yourself a push up to take another breath, and the beatings added to that, so a terrible death, but let me just say that a different kind of death for the Jews—stoning was the normal way.

That was not a very pleasant death either. I mean it wasn’t geared to be pleasant. Think about the instructions. I happened to be reading the Book of Leviticus this past week, and I was reading the instructions on stoning, and stop and think about it—you take them out, you stone them. What does that mean? Well the people here gather, everybody brings their stones, and you just keep throwing stones at the person until you kill them. You get hit with a stone here and hit with a stone here and hit with a stone in the head and it’s not quick. God could have said stab them in the heart, slit their throat, like you do the animal, whatever. Even in Israel that’s different from the Roman, but our days of how we view capital punishment. Even in Old Testament for Israel, we want to be careful because we say the Romans were so inhumane, but some people view that—that’s why they have a problem with the God of the Old Testament, He seems to be a vindictive God. And would we want to kill people that way, just picking up stones and throwing at them? I mean, well we say, well they didn’t have other ways. They did, you know, they had knives, they had spears. They could have done a quicker death but God ordained stoning, and that involved also sometimes the people of Israel in it. So but all that, back to the question, the crucifixion.

Six hours on the cross. Three hours were darkness as He’s bearing our sin, and beaten at least once, and what else went on because they would punch Him, remember, and then say, “well if you’re the Christ, say who punched you.” The crown of thorns, everything to make it as unpleasant, carrying the cross to the place of crucifixion, which Christ was unable to do probably because of the things He had suffered in connection leading up to His crucifixion, but carrying the cross. It’s the analogy, “take up your cross and follow Me.” We don’t want to think God called us to an easy life, an easy road. You have to be willing to take up your cross. Well what does that mean? All the suffering, all the rejection, all the humiliation that went with that, they understood well that picture, “take up your cross and follow Me.” Like those going to be crucified carried their cross to the place of crucifixion. Okay, yeah. Thank you.

“All right Gil, back here by the cameras again. A question about Genesis 5:29, the genealogy of Noah. No doubt, you have that memorized! Verse 29 is, ‘now he called his name Noah, saying, this one will give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the LORD has cursed.’ Is that a prophetic look forward to Jesus or just about Noah?”

A good question. It would seem to me he’s talking about Noah because that’s where we’re going, so I would see that as primarily a focus probably on Noah, but I’d have to look at that again, if there is a prophetic reference. I haven’t thought of that in particular in that kind of picture. He’s going to bring, you know, you come to Lamech who lived for so long and then you pick up Noah verse 32, five hundred years. Noah was five hundred years old, and Noah became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, so I take it that it’s anticipating the end of all things for humanity, except the family of Noah. That would be my initial response. Some of you may have been in this more recently in Genesis, you have any other—go ahead.

“In my lesson today, I got an idea this came out of—somebody had heard me say this. Well, what’s interesting about that verse is that Lamech says that Noah will deliver them from the curse, which is strange. Maybe Lamech said things beyond his understanding, which is what you almost have to do. You know, he said this about Noah thinking that he would, because he was aware the ark was being built. In fact, he lived within five years of the flood so he would know what Noah was doing, that he was getting ready for some big event, with the ark. But this of course was said when he was born 595 years before. It’s just interesting that he would say that, that Noah means rest, that with Noah the world would rest from the curse, which took a while longer for that to happen. So was Lamech just saying that thinking wrong? We don’t want to say that you can do that, everything in the bible that it says doesn’t mean it’s true the way it’s understood by the prophet, the fuller understanding could have come later, which I think is the answer.”

It could come later. He also, in light of chapter 6 with the corruption of the world, will bring rest by the destruction of all the wicked and, so to speak, we start over.

“Yeah, that was the other way to go. You almost have to make the world before the flood worse than the world after the flood and that’s kind of hard to do, but that’s an option.”

Yeah, that’d be the two options. The wickedness of the world had gotten to the point God said He would destroy it, but obviously the wickedness continued to build after Noah came on because Noah brought the sin nature with him, and the ultimate rest and deliverance will come later. I don’t know that any New Testament book as you’ve talked about, that makes that connection with this as a prophecy except we know the ultimate deliverance comes through Christ, and there is the connection like in Peter of the flood, the destruction of the wicked, and Christ coming, the destruction of the world by fire.

“Another question that came in. If the new Jerusalem is fifteen hundred cubic miles is there any insight to what is above ground level? Are there layers?”

Evidently, it is a residence. Angels will dwell in there. You know when you go to Jerusalem you have the Jewish quarter. Well, maybe we’ll have the church quarter, and we’ll have resurrected Israel’s section. It seems that God’s plan for His creation is order. Like I mentioned, we start out in Genesis, He creates male and female and the Scripture later makes clear that’s the intended order. That there was a leader in that twosome, and Eve was made for the man. We put negative connotations on that, but it wasn’t negative. So I would take it in heaven there is order, and I don’t think you’d have angels just milling around, there is seemingly a hierarchy of structure. So now you’re going to put others in heaven. I mean where do we go? When we die and our spirit leaves the body and goes to heaven, I don’t think we just mill around. There probably is order there, so I would think there would be dwellings in there. Jesus had to go to prepare a place for you and I, I take it, for ultimately the church. That place will be in the new Jerusalem, a place that will keep them.

It seems that in eternity this distinction is kept between the church and Israel and, of course, between humans and angels who are spirit beings. Angels can have—they have substance. They’re created beings, but they’re spirits. They don’t have flesh and bone like we do, but they have the ability to manifest their presence, and with a substance. I want to call it a substance because they’re not flesh and bone. Jesus said, “a spirit does not have flesh and bone as I have,” but angels are spirit and Jacob wrestled with the angel of the LORD. It would have been a spirit, so that’s why I say they could have substance, but its spirit substance, whatever that means. They’re not just like puffs of smoke floating around, you know, they have defined characteristics. We see the angels like we saw in the Book of Revelation described. If an angel manifested itself, all the times that angels are manifest, they relate to having a form somewhat like we can identify with, but they’re not human. They don’t have flesh and bone.

Jesus said in His resurrected physical body, a spirit does not have flesh and bone as I have, so I’m not just a spirit. I am a resurrected human, as well as God, who is spirit. So some of those things; we’re just starting our learning. We’ve got all eternity to grow because we will never know everything, because only God is infinite, and that’s something I cannot grasp. You mean to tell me in a billion years I won’t have learned everything about God there is to know? I’ve read theologies, you know, I think I’ll get it down, but I’ll never exhaust the knowledge of God. It’ll just keep growing and growing and growing. I said to someone this morning after my first hour class, and saying all the questions this raises when we get into this. I said, sometimes you feel like you’re growing in ignorance because the more you study the Word the more you realize, you don’t know. In one sense I’m growing in knowledge and the grace and knowledge of our Lord, and in another sense I sometimes feel like I know less than I did when I started, because I realize there’s so much more to know about Him and that’s a little bit of what I see going on here.

“Another question that’s come in. I heard someone say that Song of Solomon is a love letter written from Christ to His bride the church; also, that Proverbs 31 is describing how Christ sees His bride. What are your thoughts?”

Okay, that view of the book of Song of Solomon is common among those who don’t take prophecy literally. It would be common among old writers like the Puritans, and so on, that it’s a spiritual analogy being developed. You know, sometimes our songs, His Banner over Me Is Love, and sometimes that’s taken, you know, we reinterpret some of the song, so I think that’s not uncommon. The problem is some people had a problem with taking it literally, that it’s just marital love. It seems that, you know, this is Christ’s love for His church, and so you make that all an allegory. But I think the simplest understanding of it is, it is a picture of true genuine love. The way marital love ought to be, the way Solomon’s love with his wife was and should be. Some things we don’t have answers for, Solomon had a lot of wives, and a lot of concubines, and the Lord uses him to write about the beauty of marital love, but I take it that’s what he’s writing about here.

That’s sort of like the Book of Ecclesiastes, which I’ve been doing some work in here. I think it’s, you know, sometimes say, well that’s Solomon writing of, you know, his frustration with a wasted life. I think its Solomon being used of the Lord to write about the reality of life for a godly person, and it puts life in perspective and the reality of it. So some of these things, I think we take it that God wrote it there. I don’t think God’s just using Solomon as a frustrated old man to write about how he wasted life and opportunities and, so I think, in the Song of Solomon, but that’s a common view that they don’t take that literally. Maybe because of it’s, if you’re taking it literally it’s writing in detail and there is something beautiful in the physical love between a man and a woman. That’s the way God intended it, and the expression of that love, and the carrying out of it. The problem is not they’re enjoying it so much and enjoying each other so much, its sin has corrupted that, and you know sometimes in marriage we have a hard time because people think there’s just something tainted about sex.

It’s beautiful in marriage, that’s what God intended. You know He intended Adam and Eve, if I can put it this way, to have sex together. How else were they going to be fruitful? And I take it before sin entered in, sex would have been more beautiful, more fulfilling, more satisfying than it is today. Now some of you are sitting there thinking, boy, I’d rather be in on that side than the glorified side, and that’s because we can relate to these things, but it is to be pleasurable and enjoyable, and as Song of Solomon talks about, they enjoy one another. They long for one another. They express their love physically to one another, but that’s not an uncommon view, and that’s common down to today with those who don’t take much of the Old Testament literally. But if you read old writers and some of the Puritans and that, that will be the way that they would take it.

This is expressive, in an allegory kind of setting, of Christ’s love for His church, and we are called the bride of Christ, but I don’t think that’s the point. And those people usually have a spiritual view of the church and Israel, and so on as well, and tie all of that together. I believe it became true of the Jews, that they did not read Song of Solomon in their public readings because they thought it was a little graphic for that kind of setting, but you know it would be. There’d be challenges on maybe doing a study of Song of Solomon on Sunday morning with all ages. Younger people, and unmarried, and some of those things, but the answer is not to make it an allegory. I think it’s expressing true marital love, but not an uncommon view.

What was the second part of that question? Proverbs 31, the same kind of thing. Some take the wisdom of Proverbs and say, that is a picture of Christ. He’s the incarnation of wisdom and so there is a reading of Christ into that. That’s a little different from the perfect wife and the situation there at the end, and so I take that as just a literal interpretation. It’s part of what happens when you start just taking parts of the bible literally and other parts not literally. Now sometimes obviously there are figures of speech of a variety of kinds in the bible, particularly in the Old Testament, but we take them when they’re clearly that. We want to be careful about changing. There’s no reason to make Proverbs 31 and the situation there anything other than a picture of a godly wife. That’s what it’s portraying. I think the wisdom in the first part of Proverbs, where wisdom is personified often, it is talking about the wisdom. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the LORD, and then the description of how we function out of that. Once you start not interpreting parts of the bible literally, you end up in putting more and more into that bundle of non-literal. Now you want to be careful, just like our figure of speech. You know we use analogies of figures of speech all the time. They liven up our speech, but it’s usually pretty clear unless somebody’s putting them close, and you’ll say now I can’t tell whether you’re joking with me—there are those times, but usually it’s clear. Got another one.

“Does the specific fulfillment of the land promised to Israel take place during the millennial period of the kingdom?”

I think that’s a fulfillment, I don’t think it’s the final fulfillment, and that’s where we realize there’s certain things like the Millennial temple. That’s not the final temple because that’s laid out and will be constructed during the first thousand years, and there’s similarities. But just like the tabernacle and Solomon’s temple, they all have similarities because they’re made of the copy in heaven, but the reality is, heaven come down. I think Israel will have its land on the new earth but, obviously, it’s like Jerusalem that’s promised as the capital of God’s world. But boy, when we get to see the new Jerusalem coming down this goes beyond the old Jerusalem, so I think there’s allowance. God will fulfill it because they’re promised that land forever and Israel will be Israel forever, so I think the promise is given, but I don’t know that the new earth is just limited to this, size wise. It may be greatly expanded, it could be the same. I don’t know. It could be like a balloon, you know you blow it up so far and it’s this big, but you blow it up and it can get a lot larger, but it’s the same balloon. I mean, if the new Jerusalem is going to be fifteen hundred miles by fifteen hundred miles, come down on the new earth, maybe Israel’s land is proportionally expanded.

I don’t know how God is going to work that out. Obviously, it’d be a difficulty to put that new Jerusalem on the new earth if the new earth is just like us. Like I said, somebody said if we put it in the United States it would go from Colorado to the east coast, from Canada down to our south border. I mean, it’s a huge facility and so I think the land belongs to Israel. Evidently the new earth still has its national divisions because the nations of the earth come up with their kings. Well then, there has to be divisions on the earth, I mean we have all this going now. If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a kingdom. If all the nations are just one people all mixed in together, how do you have the distinctions? I think that’s why we have this laid out. Israel will be Israel in eternity, the church will be the church. The nations, they’ll be national identities. Now some nations have come and gone, we can’t find the Hittites, we find remnants of them finally. The Old Testament identified them before we could identify them in archeological findings, but it seems to me those divisions will be there. So the new earth is related whether it’s renovated or it’s a totally new earth to us.

Does it have to be the same? Well, the new Jerusalem will not be the same. The new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven. Now the present Jerusalem in that sense is just a preliminary copy, like the temple, the tabernacle, all of that. It’s modeled after the tabernacle in heaven. The reality replaces, however you want to identify that replacement, it does replace it. This is the new Jerusalem and the whole city is the temple. There’s not a temple in the new Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem is the temple because the glory of God fills it. That’s different from the old Jerusalem, like Solomon built. He built a temple in Jerusalem. That temple was modeled after the tabernacle in heaven. Now that comes down and encompasses it, Jerusalem will be the capital of the world.

The new Jerusalem on the new earth. You can’t have another Jerusalem, this is the holy city. The old Jerusalem was called the holy city, but that was just a copy, so to speak. Although it didn’t have the model, but there would be a Jerusalem on the earth. And so I take it that was the land, and so on, as God originally intended it to be divided. We still have the twelve tribes identified, and the twelve gates, so I take it those twelve tribes will exist. God has given promises to them permanently so this part of the discussions we try to fill in. This is going to be true. It seemed to me the new earth will be quite a bit bigger, but it’s connected to this earth. What’s the proof of that? Well, the new Jerusalem is quite a bit bigger than the old Jerusalem. And it’s the new Jerusalem, the holy city, but it’s connected, so I take it. I look at it that it may be like that balloon that has been blown up, but you still have the identities, but there’s no sea on it. That’s why He had to tell us that there is some kind of connection. Keep going you’re on a roll.

“Yeah, that’s right. Can you explain the differences between Hades and hell? If people are placed in Hades as, a temporary holding place, is anyone in hell right now?”

Okay, a good question. As far as we’re told in Scripture, I don’t believe there’s anyone in hell right now. Satan won’t be sentenced to hell, cast into hell, until after the thousand years. Remember, in Revelation chapter 20, he’s confined in the abyss, which evidently is specifically the holding place for angels for their final judgment, or until God intends to set them loose for a purpose, like Satan specifically. So as far as we know, there’s no one in hell at this point. The beast and the false prophet are cast into hell at the beginning of the Millennium, in Revelation chapter 19. Chapter 20 tells us they are there when Satan is cast there, so as far as I know, hell is the place where they will be finally sentenced. And I assume when, and I assume because some of this we can only go on what it says and expect the other. Satan’s final judgment and sentencing to hell is not until the end of the Millennium, so normally I would think that would be when the demons are finally sentenced, and so on, but the final sentencing of humans is at the great white throne.

The Antichrist and the false prophet have been sentenced to hell a thousand years before the great white throne, so there is an exception, but we try to fill in. If that’s where Satan is cast finally into hell, and hell was made for the devil and his angels--now it’s also true God could have put some of the fallen angels into hell because He never intended to allow them freedom--but I don’t know why, since Satan led the rebellion. You know, it becomes a matter of trying logically to think it out. Why would any of those be considered worse and cast into hell before he is? So simply, as far as I can tell from Scripture, hell is not yet populated. It will be when the Antichrist and the beast are cast in at the beginning of the Millennium, and then Lucifer, Satan, and the fallen angels at the end of the Millennium, because he will need his fallen angels, I take it, to help assemble the unbelievers of the world in rebellion.

Hades is the holding place of the lost until their final sentencing at the great white throne. I take it that’s why Revelation 20 says “Hades gave up the dead, which were in it,” that’s where they have been waiting. The difference in light of Luke 16 where the rich man in Hades is tormented in the flame is a matter of permanence. If I can use the analogy, it’s like being in jail awaiting your sentencing to prison. What’s the difference? You’re in a bare, perhaps a similar size cell, a similar kind of confinement and the difference is maybe duration. You’re going to prison for life. You’re in jail waiting that final sentencing kind of thing. I see Hades as a place of torment for the unbeliever awaiting final sentencing to hell. That seems to me to be, because the great white throne, you have all the unbelieving dead and those who were in Hades reunited with their bodies, so when God created man in His image he is an eternal being.
That’s why it was so important that Adam not eat of the tree of life in his fallen condition. God created him to be eternal, so the unbeliever is also eternal, and we don’t call him having eternal life because life as we have is connected to our relationship with God in its full extent, but they have eternal existence.
Once you come into life, you will never end, so no one who has ever lived will ever cease to live. It’s just a matter of where, heaven or hell, so Hades is the place to hold the spirits. They will be reunited with their bodies to come before the great white throne. God intends our physical bodies to have that duration. He didn’t create Adam and Eve to die, He created them to live. Sin came in, in the plan of God, but for the unbeliever that’s what? Again, the importance. Why did God have to exclude Adam and Eve from the garden? Well, so they wouldn’t meet with God. Well, God could have just not come down to meet with them in the garden. What does the bible say? “Lest they eat of the tree of life and live forever.” Well they’re going to live forever, aren’t they? Yes, but they would have lived forever in their fallen condition. Now we have a problem, they’re confirmed in that condition. So I think Hades is the place where unbelievers go.

The body without the spirit is dead, James 2:26 says, so we don’t cease to exist at death, this body ceases to function. That’s what the Scripture calls sleep for the Christian’s body, he’s just not using it and when the Christian’s body is resurrected his spirit moves back into it. For the unbeliever at the great white throne there will be a resurrection. There’s a resurrection of life, there’s a resurrection of judgment. Remember we looked at John chapter 5. So the unbeliever gets a resurrected body too, and so in that resurrected body indwelt by his spirit he will suffer forever. The rich man in Hades can suffer in his spirit but it’s God’s intention humans have a body evidently raised endurable, if I can put it that way, but spirit beings can suffer. The rich man is disembodied in Luke 16 but he’s suffering. The angels of heaven are spirits and the angels that fell from heaven, fallen angels are spirits, but they will suffer in hell because hell was made for the devil and his angels and they are all spirits. But God’s human beings they have their own identity, they don’t become angels. Sometimes you read in the papers so and so died and now they are angels, you know. No they’re not. Angels were created as angels so there will always be that distinction through eternity.

“So, just a follow-up on that question, Gil. So, my understanding of Scripture is that hell will have different degrees of punishment, depending upon what you’ve been given. Do you believe that those different degrees of punishment will also be present in Hades, or is that only in the lake of fire when that distinction would be made?”

It would seem that final distinction is made because they’re not judged out of the book of their works until Revelation 20, and that would determine their degree. So how it differs, everybody going to hell is going to suffer, you know, terribly. In that sense, they can be placed there. And again, if I can use the analogy of being put in jail. Now there might be worse prisons to go to, or something like that, but that’s not settled until final sentencing is given. So I would say they’re in Hades suffering like the rich man. Probably, maybe, there is a levelness there and a final sentencing will increase the degree, it would seem, at the great white throne. If they’re already in Hades suffering at various levels it would be hard to understand why the judgment of their works comes later, so that I sort of back up and say it seems Hades is the place where they’re confined in suffering. But the final sentencing, what will the penalty be?

Perhaps we see it more in old days where there were various penalties, like under the Mosaic Law. You know, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth kind of thing, hand for hand. There, while awaiting the final sentencing for the judgment, you could be held, something like that. But I think the final division won’t take place until hell because of the books of their works at the great white throne. But nothing is said specifically about Hades. I think that’s why at the resurrection of the church we stand before the Bema Seat there, following the rapture of the church. Because by the time we get to the return of Christ, seven years later, to the earth the church is clothed in white garments which are the righteousnesses of the saints, which indicates we have been judged and awarded and rewarded and now we’ll come to carry out our ministry. We’re not judged regarding our eternal destiny, but as 1 Corinthians 3 makes clear in some detail, we will be judged according to our faithfulness and we will lose rewards for not being as faithful.

Well good, appreciate the questions. All right, maybe this is a good break. I think we’ve answered them but we’re just about at the end of the time. Appreciate you being out on a cold night. Be careful on the ice going home, it is slick but we’re happy. One thing, I can’t help but think on these days. I pastored in Palestine, Indiana, so at seminary I was known as the bishop of Palestine as some of you know. But we had a little white church, celebrated their hundredth anniversary while I was there. It had the graveyard, and in between the church and the graveyard were two little structures. They were the outhouses, one for the men one for the women. Indiana has cold weather like this. I think the graveyard was for the people who made a bad choice! But I appreciate the nice warm place, all of the facilities. We’re blessed, so let’s pray together.
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Thank you Lord for Your blessings. We’re reminded of the riches and depths of Your word. Lord, how awesome it is that you have revealed yourself, You have spoken. You have created us so that we could communicate, we could be communicated to, and You have stooped to communicate with us and record that so that we might study it, given us Your Spirit. Lord, You’ve communicated so that we would know but, Lord, we study Your word. We study and You know there’s more to know, there’s more to grow. Thank You for the privilege of growing together as a church family, for all the gifts You have brought together in our church family so that the ministry of Your word can be facilitated and implemented in our life as we exercise our gifts, and so all together we grow together as a body. Now use this as we scatter to different places, use our testimony in the week before us as we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.