![]() ![]() Once they are shocked and filled with regret – but too late - they will permanently be wiped out of existence. ![]() The multitude who had been opposed to God will also be raised, but for a different reason: to see the errors of their ways and be judged. And God will bring all the dead back to life, not just the righteous. Indeed, God will breathe life back into the dead, restoring them to an earthly existence. Most important, this new earthly kingdom will come not only to those alive at the time, but also to those who have died. God is soon to intervene in earthly affairs to destroy everything and everyone that opposes him and to bring in a new realm for his true followers, a Kingdom of God, a paradise on earth. But the forces of evil have little time left. Even though God is the ultimate ruler over all, he has temporarily relinquished control of this world for some mysterious reason. This new idea maintained that there are evil forces in the world aligned against God and determined to afflict his people. Some thinkers came up with a solution that explained how God would bring about justice, but again one that didn’t involve perpetual bliss in a heaven above or perpetual torment in a hell below. If God loves his people and is sovereign over all the world why do his people experience so much tragedy? ![]() But the problems with that thinking were palpable: God’s own people Israel continually, painfully, and frustratingly suffered, from natural disaster, political crises, and, most notably, military defeat. Jews had long believed that God was lord of the entire world and all people, both the living and the dead. About two hundred years before Jesus, Jewish thinkers began to believe that there had to be something beyond death-a kind of justice to come. The most one could hope for was a good and particularly long life here and now.īut Jews began to change their view over time, although it too never involved imagining a heaven or hell. God would forget the person and the person could not even worship. That is what made death so mournful: nothing could make an afterlife existence sweet, since there was no life at all, and thus no family, friends, conversations, food, drink – no communion even with God. But in most instances Sheol is simply a synonym for “tomb” or “grave.” It’s not a place where someone actually goes.Īnd so, traditional Israelites did not believe in life after death, only death after death. It is true that some poetic authors, for example in the Psalms, use the mysterious term “Sheol” to describe a person’s new location. The Hebrew Bible itself assumes that the dead are simply dead-that their body lies in the grave, and there is no consciousness, ever again. So too the “soul” doesn’t continue on outside the body, subject to postmortem pleasure or pain. When we stop breathing, our breath doesn’t go anywhere. Then it was dust to dust, ashes to ashes.Īncient Jews thought that was true of us all. Adam remained alive until he stopped breathing. On the contrary, for them, the soul was more like the “breath.” The first human God created, Adam, began as a lump of clay then God “breathed” life into him (Genesis 2: 7). Unlike most Greeks, ancient Jews traditionally did not believe the soul could exist at all apart from the body. ![]()
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