(Sorry about all of the links to follow; I just like to list references, and I'm a BibleHub addict.)
King_Erlian wrote:I'm convinced that the whole point of the establishment of a New Heaven and a New Earth is that all of creation will be reconciled to God and there won't be anywhere in the universe - in the multiverse, even - where God is absent. So where, physically, could all these lost souls exist? To me, the only logical answer is that they won't - if they don't accept God, they'll be destroyed. That's what I believe the Bible teaches. I think the "Hell as everlasting torture" thing is a misinterpretation of Scripture.
There are definitely verses that indicate that God will indeed be "all in all"—
Romans 11:36,
1 Corinthians 15:28, and
Romans 14:11, for instance.
It's possible I'm missing some instances, but
by my count, there are about seven verses that use the word "eternal"—
and I'm assuming that it's the correct translation, rather than age-long—in connection with fire and punishment in the New Testament. Three of those relate to the eternal fire, which rather makes sense to me, since
God is described as a consuming fire and He is, of course, Eternal. One of them mentions
eternal judgment, and one of them speaks of the
eternal sin of those who look on the miracles of the Holy Spirit and blaspheme them of being from a power of evil. And then there's one that speaks of
eternal destruction, which I often see proponents of annihilationism cite.
The verse that I've been getting really hung up on lately, though, is
Matthew 25:46. In just about every translation,
kolasin is merely rendered as "punishment," but when I look at the
concordance, I find words like "chastisement" and "correction"—which is odd to me, because frequently hell is represented as a place where there is punishment merely for punishment's sake; it is not a tool for teaching desired behavior and there is no ultimate purpose for it.
Yet if I'm to believe that the dictionary definitions apply, a word like correction seems to imply the opposite. It indicates discipline and training with a purpose of rehabilitation and reform. But what is the point of rehabilitative punishment if the sinner cannot be saved at this point? Or is it only eternal punishment until the sinner no longer needs to be punished because they have at last learned the lesson; that the conditions that sent them to hell in the first place no longer exist?
I'm pretty mystified, to say the least, and it's something I'd like to spend a lot more time researching, especially since the word
kolasin only appears twice in the Bible and the word it originates from only appears twice as well—not exactly a lot to go on when trying to form an understanding of what it means. The Greek Lexicon section on the concordance page lists Aristotle as having defined
kolasis as disciplinary, differentiated from a word like
timória which indicates punishment for the sake of vengeance. Plato, too, if I'm reading it right. It also says that there are other usages that don't always recognize such a distinction, though. Oh well, it's a place to start.
Anyway, I've struggled a lot with making sense of eternal punishment as well, and it's obviously something I continue to study. Something that's also worth studying is
universal reconciliation, which is an interesting approach to reconciling verses that say God will be all in all with verses that clearly state that some people will go to hell.
This is an article that lays out a general case for it, though I have issues with a couple of the arguments listed there. Whether or not it is a scripturally-sound doctrine is something that I continue to examine.
MinotaurforAslan wrote:I don't see how Jesus could possibly have free will. For Jesus to sin would be a violation of his very nature. It would be akin to God creating a rock so big he can't lift it (an omnipotence problem that Christian apologetics solve by asserting that God can only do logically possible things).
What do you make of his prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane, in
Matthew 26:36-46 and
Luke 22:39-46? Jesus is in anguish. He does not want to go through with the crucifixion. He is beseeching the Father to take this cup away from him. But in the end, he does not ever waver from his devotion to the will of the Father.
Not my will, but yours be done. That clearly indicates that Jesus had an individual will. But if sinning would have been a violation of Jesus's very nature, wouldn't the temptation to violate the will of God be the same? After all, there was nothing inherently wrong with eating a piece of fruit in Eden. It was wrong because it was rebellion; it was not the will of God. For Jesus to submit to his own will instead of the will of the Father would have been to rebel—and thus to sin, if rebelling against the will of God is the basic definition of sin. At least, that's my understanding of it.
MinotaurforAslan wrote:Once upon a time, three researchers sat a walahooga in front of the plate of beans and a plate of carrots 1 billon times and asked it to choose a plate to eat, and every time it chose the plate of beans. One researcher said it would be logical to assume now that walahoogas will always choose beans. A second researcher said, "But we haven't tried the experiment an infinite amount of times! There might be an infinitesmial chance that the walahooga would choose the carrots!" But then after the third researcher discovered that the very definition of walahooga is "one that will never choose carrots" they realized it would be pointless to keep trying. They concluded that the walahooga didn't have any real choice in the matter to eat beans or carrots. If it did, then it simply wouldn't be a walahooga anymore.
*Full disclosure, I made this story up.
If a possible outcome of a situation will literally never happen, then it's not really a possible outcome.
Well, I think that would only be correct if our behavior was completely random, but every day we make choices based on our unique perspectives and needs and desires. For instance, you're not likely to walk out in front of heavy traffic if you're in your right mind, but no one disputes that it is
possible.
(And technically, since God is infinite, He
can try the experiment an infinite amount of times. But maybe I'm not completely understanding your point.)
Perhaps a better way to look at it is that the Walahooga sometimes
wanted to eat the carrots under certain circumstances, but there was always another force at play. Perhaps the Supreme Walahooga didn't want the Walahooga to eat carrots because beans were much better for him. Because the Walahooga cared more about the opinion and desire of the Supreme Walahooga than he did his own, he always chose the beans. And that never changed, unto infinity, because the Walahooga's relationship with the Supreme Walahooga was always going to be more important than eating some carrots.
*Full disclosure: I totally imagined the Walahooga as looking like the hillbilly character from AMinotaursJourney.
MinotaurforAslan wrote:If we ever did sin, we wouldn't be in heaven anymore, because heaven would no longer be an perfect place.
Or maybe we wouldn't be in heaven anymore because we'd left. It was possible for the angels to fall; I don't know enough to say it's impossible for humans. I know that
no one can snatch them out of the Father's hand and
God will never drive away those who come to him, but we all know that many Christians go through periods of rebellion throughout their lives. That doesn't mean they've been snatched out of God's hand or that God is driving them away; they're just rebelling. Would the
ability to make these choices change upon entering heaven? It's something I'm still researching.
Even if it were possible for the saved to fall, though, I think it would be much less likely for people to rebel in heaven because the air is clear, so to speak, and it is much easier to see reality for what it actually is. It won't be nearly as easy to fool ourselves and talk ourselves out of obedience as it is on earth. In general, it would be a lot like Jill's experience talking to Aslan at the beginning of
The Silver Chair.
EDIT: Forgot something else I wanted to comment on... because this post wasn't long enough already, right?
MinotaurforAslan wrote:Thirdly, if God is infinitely good, then being with him would be inifinitely more fulfilling than being with anyone else. What more would we have a need to recognize or distinguish each other? Any interaction we could possibly make with each other would pale in comparison to interaction with God.
That makes it sound like if you're choosing to love or spend time with anyone else, then therefore you are not fully choosing or loving God. I don't think that's the case. We're all part of Him; we're basically His family.
What we do for each other out of love and obedience to His will, we do for God. Maybe some people would say this is a stretch, but it seems to me that loving someone is also loving God, and spending time with someone while living in loving obedience to God is essentially spending time with God.