This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 563: Kingdom Seminar 2: Defining Heaven by Sean Finnegan

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Transcript

00:00
Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan. And you are listening to Restitutio podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today.

00:12
What is heaven? Although it's not a place where the dead go when they die, it is still a real place, don't you think? Today we'll survey different ways in which the Bible talks about heaven, including the Sky, God's throne, the storehouse and the heaven of heavens. Next we'll consider what other religions.

00:24
Thank.

00:24
You.

00:32
Each about the afterlife, in other words, what are their heavens?

00:36
Finally, we'll conclude by seeing how the biblical authors courageously took a radically unpopular view about life after death.

00:45
Here now is part two of our Kingdom Seminar episode 563 defining heaven.

00:59
Heaven, according to the Bible, what an interesting topic to go over the subject of heaven from a biblical point of view, not from a mythological point of view. Although the myths are interesting, I have to admit I'd like to begin with a little story I heard. I don't know if you heard a story like this.

01:21
There are lots of stories about people who go to the pearly gates and encounter St. Peter. If you heard one of these type of stories.

01:29
There.

01:30
Yeah. So there was, there was a pastor and a taxi driver, and the pastor got in the taxi cab and he was in New York City driving around like a maniac and got into a car wreck. And they both died. And they went to see Peter at the Pearly Gates. The pastor is very confident. He's like, you know, I've trained for this day.

01:52
My whole life, the taxi cab driver is a little sheepish because he's not really lived righteously and Saint Peter holds the pastor and says we.

02:04
Wait.

02:05
Let him come in first, and so the taxi driver is just like thrilled. He comes in, he goes into heaven, whatever happens and and so the pastor says to Saint Pete, he says, why does he get to go in first? I serve God my whole life. And you're you're treating me like a second class citizen. And he said, look, when that guy.

02:25
He drove his taxi. Everybody prayed. But when you preached, all they did was sleep.

02:33
I hope.

02:36
I hope I don't put you to sleep, so my outline for tonight is answering the question. What does the Bible mean when it says heaven and I have four major points? The Sky God's throne, heaven of heavens and afterlife comparison. The first three are looking at what the Bible says and the 4th is just looking at different systems to think about the afterlife.

02:57
When I first started getting feedback on the book Kingdom Journey.

03:02
There are all kinds of different people that read it. I'm part of a sailing club on Saratoga Lake where you have races on on the lake. It's a racing club, so you get race duty twice a year and on the days of race duty you have to operate a motor boat so that if anything happens with the the sailboats racing each other.

03:22
You can rescue them. So I was on rescue boat duty and it was a hot, windless day. And so we're just sitting around waiting for the race to get cold as not happening, which there's all these procedures and you're just, like, sit around for a long time doing nothing. And I was with this, this other gentleman. And he said to me.

03:41
I got your book.

03:43
And I'm like, really, I don't know that this guy's even a Christian, but I had said something on Facebook. He saw it, and he he got it. And his wife read the whole thing and she said she liked it and he was commenting on it, you know, mentioned this, this idea of of inheriting the Earth. And. And he he said to me.

04:01
But what about heaven? Like, do you just not believe in heaven at all?

04:05
And I thought to myself, you know what I never did say anything about that in the book. But I do believe in heaven. I believe heaven is in the Bible and it it it. It's a legitimate place and something to consider. So we're going to look at that. First off, I'd like to have us go to second Samuel, Chapter 18.

04:25
Verse nine and I want to talk about Absalom.

04:28
Absalom had an Afro.

04:31
The scripture says that it weighed 200 shekels, which is I think about 3 lbs. That's quite a pile of cut hair when they when the Barber cuts my hair, it's not so much. But when Absalom had his hair cut, it weighed 3 lbs. And so he had just an immense head of hair. We read about this incident.

04:51
In the thick forest and second Samuel 18, verse nine and it says in and Absalom happened to meet the servants of David. Absalom was riding on his mule and the Mule went under the thick branches of a great oak and his head caught fast in the oak and he was suspended between heaven and earth.

05:09
While the mule that was under him went on.

05:13
This is definitely the funniest thing to ever happen in battle, and it's not clear that it was his hair that got caught or his whole head, or what exactly happened. But here's this guy who's leading a rebellion and.

05:27
He gets trapped in a tree. He was riding, his head, got stuck in a tree and his animal kept going. The mule kept.

05:35
Doing.

05:36
And so he's just hanging out there.

05:38
We're not really going to look much at Absalom other than to just notice that it says at the end of the verse he was suspended between heaven and Earth.

05:50
And when it comes to the subject of heaven, one of the definitions for the word heaven is just simply the sky. He was suspended between the sky and the land. He was somewhere in between.

06:03
So that's just our first definition. We can look at more of this in Genesis chapter one.

06:08
Verse 14.

06:10
And I have that up on the slide too. And God said let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.

06:20
And let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so.

06:30
And God made the two great lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars.

06:37
And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that.

06:47
It was good.

06:48
And there was evening and there was morning, the 4th day and God said let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. So I I don't want to get too technical here, but I find it incredibly interesting that the same.

07:08
Realm where it talks about.

07:12
Lights in the expanse like verse 15.

07:15
Talking about like the the sun and the moon is the same realm where the birds fly. They're both cold. The expanse of the heavens when you are looking from the ground looking up, you see birds. You see other things clouds and the birds and you know, we know that certain things are farther away than other things.

07:37
But at the same time, our visual experience is to say that this is in the heavens or in the sky. The Hebrew word for sky is shamayim, and it's plural and is always plural.

07:50
A lot of times it just gets translated. It's heaven or sky, but it's it's a plural word in the the Hebrew.

07:56
In Matthew 626, Jesus says look at the birds of the air. They neither sow, nor reap nor gather into barns. And yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? This word heir is the Greek word for heaven. What anos.

08:16
You understand that word uranos? It sounds like a planet.

08:23
You ever heard of that planet?

08:26
Uranus.

08:28
Right Oranos, it's it's literally the same word that gets identified as that planet, which is totally off topic. We're not going into that, but this word is the standard Greek word for sky and for heaven and for that particular planet. So that's pretty interesting. So Jesus says the birds.

08:48
Of oranos of the heaven or heavens, they neither so nor reap. So heavens for the birds, heaven is a place where we we basically just call Sky heaven is what we call sky.

09:01
Let's look at definition #2. Here, heaven as God's throne, and for that we're going to look at Isaiah 66, which says.

09:11
Thus says the Lord, Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. What is the House that you would build for me? And what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made. So all these things came to be declares the Lord. But this is the one to whom I will look. He who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles.

09:31
That my word God says heaven is my throne you can imagine.

09:37
A chair, right. A throne is like a chair. It's a very fancy, elaborate chair, but basically a chair where God is sitting and he's got his feet kicked up on the earth. And so heaven is a a place from which God rules. And it's his throne. And I love this verse because when it's talking about the temple.

09:57
It says in verse one. What is the House that you would build for me?

10:01
Right. It's talking about the temple. The the temple that they built for God was just magnificent building. It was just stupendous like everyone would look at it.

10:09
And say wow.

10:11
What God is this temple for?

10:15
You would just be so amazed by it really in any period, but especially the temple that Solomon built, maybe maybe a little less so after the exile, because I think it was a bit.

10:24
Though because the old people were crying saying this is not so great. But then Herod renovated the temple and it became magnificent again and people would come from far away. And they would say, wow, look at this temple and God is looking at the temple and he's like.

10:43
You know, I've made all this with my hands. What is not that? He's like saying it's it's stupid or doesn't want it. But like it's just not that significant compared to the immensity of God whose thrown is heaven and whose footstool is the earth.

11:02
There's a way of thinking about this, that Old Testament scholars have where they talk about heaven or God's throne as the command center or the control room from which God operates, which I think could be helpful. Another way of thinking about it, and Jesus talks about this in the sermon on the Mount is that heaven is the storehouse. It's where.

11:22
Things are stored up with God and protected. So you remember the part where Jesus and the Sermon on the.

11:30
Said don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal, but instead store for yourselves treasures in heaven, where none of that stuff happens because God's protecting it. Peter also says in first Peter 1/4 that we have an inheritance imperishable kept.

11:50
In heaven. So this is another important understanding of the idea of heaven is that yes, it's God's throne. But it's also where God is is keeping track of things. You can store things up with God in heaven, and that is also where our citizenship is. According to Philippians 320, that our citizenship is in heaven.

12:10
Now, because of these facts that we soar up treasures in heaven and our citizenship is in heaven, and we have an inheritance and perishable in heaven, many of us might think many Christians might think.

12:24
Well, you have to obviously go to heaven to get these things, but I love this NT right quote because he dispels this myth in a in a very humorous way, he says. What then do the New Testament writers mean when they speak of an inheritance waiting for us in heaven?

12:40
This has been much misunderstood.

12:43
The point of such passages as in first Peter 14, Second Corinthians 51, Philippians through 20, and so forth is not that one must go to heaven, as in much popular imagination, you can almost hear as like sneering British accent, right there is much popular imagination in order to enjoy the inheritance there it is rather that heaven.

13:03
Is the place where God stores up his plans and purposes for the.

13:08
If I tell a friend that there is beer in the fridge, sorry, this is a northern quote, so you have to just translate that to sweet tea. Now that we're in the South here, OK, if I tell a friend that there is beer in the fridge, that doesn't mean he has to go into the fridge in order to enjoy the beer. What a weirdo, right? Nobody would do that.

13:29
When the early Christians, he goes on to, say, speak of a new body in heaven or an inheritance in heaven. They mean the new identity, which at present is kept safe in heaven, will be brought from heaven to earth at the great moment of renewal. Isn't that just brilliant?

13:45
I love that. So heaven is the storehouse is God's thrown. It's the place where everything is kept track of and recorded that then we will be able to enjoy on Earth. The Bible does not have a collection of precise words to distinguish between air.

14:05
Like what do we have? What do we call these layers?

14:10
Like I know each layer has a name. There's like the stratosphere and the all these other. Those are just layers of the atom. Preston, what are they called? Is there like, a term? You fly a plane in these layers, right?

14:23
Atmospheric layers. Alright. Alright. So yeah, like so we have terms for everything. We have terms for the air. That's kind of low than the higher levels of the atmosphere. And then we have another term for once you get outside of all of that and you're served like in the space beyond. We call it a real technical term.

14:42
Outer space.

14:44
We think we're so smart with our terms, right. We literally just call it the outer space. And the ancients didn't have any of that. They didn't they they just looked up and they saw the world as their eyes perceived it. Everything was in, you know, they they just had a word for everything. And it was just simple. That doesn't make it wrong.

15:04
It doesn't make it wrong at all. It just means that they weren't modern scientists, and if the Bible communicated using the language of modern scientists, which, you know probably didn't have Hebrew equivalents in the time anyhow.

15:19
Nobody would understand it. So God's communicating with people in a language that they understand, and we we usually just call that phenomenological language just the language of phenomena that you you perceive. So for example, in the morning, the sun rises.

15:34
And in the evening, the sun sets, of course.

15:36
We know that's.

15:37
Not true, but it's what it looks like. So we don't correct it on The Weather Channel to say Earth rotation.

15:46
You know what? I don't know what you would call it, but like Earth rotation.

15:50
Level 1 and then you know, like we don't have, we just say we call it sunrise and sunset. The sun's not rising and the sun's not setting. But it looks like it. So we understand that it's OK to use that.

16:00
Kind of language.

16:02
The ancients didn't have her cosmology.

16:05
Our cosmology is our cosmic geography. You know what geography is? It's just sort of like the lay of the land. You have mountains and you have valleys and you have oceans, right? That's geography. Cosmic geography is just sort of like describing the way the universe is. They didn't have our view of that. And if we're really honest, we're not really so smart.

16:25
Either you know we have words for things which.

16:28
You know, we can fool ourselves into thinking we're smart because we have words for.

16:32
Things like the word gravity.

16:35
What causes gravity?

16:37
To pull and to to attract objects. Probably say mass right. So if an object has great mass then it has great gravity. Well that's that's describing the the equation. I guess a little bit. You know the the the principle.

16:51
But like what?

16:52
Causes what in the mass causes the gravity to to occur? Do we really know how that works?

16:58
Right.

16:59
So I think what I'm really just trying to warn you about is chronological snobbery. And if don't, don't be a chronological snob who says, because I live in the 21st century, I'm better than people that lived in the 15th century or in the 1st century or the 21st century before Christ, when great, great buildings were built.

17:19
Even back then, buildings that you could not build on your own without modern technology, it would be very, very difficult. So we don't want to be chronological snobs, we are not smarter than ancient people. As a people, we're not smarter or Dumber, like they had smart people. They had dumb people just like we do.

17:38
Probably 100 years from now, your great grandchildren.

17:42
We'll look back and think you were just really hopelessly primitive and off on a lot of things, just the way you look at people from the 1800s today. So anyhow.

17:55
Here's my point. I've got another slide here, my 13 year old who knows about the planet Neptune is not smarter than Galileo, whose telescope couldn't see Neptune.

18:04
He just happens to have received inherited that knowledge in the classroom. I assume that you do know about Neptune W OK, just wanted to confirm that. Yeah, that's a good time to do that. We'll science in the church.

18:18
OK, so on to my Third Point.

18:21
Heaven of heavens.

18:23
Heaven of heavens, we do get some hints that they recognize God's heaven is actually beyond the sky. Let's take a look at Deuteronomy 10/14. Behold to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens the earth with all that is in it.

18:39
This.

18:40
So this is this is an ancient person saying, yeah, but it's like more than just the sky, but not having other language to describe it. Right. So you have the sky shamayim. And then the shamayim of the Shamayim is talking about this other realm, even before or beyond it says.

19:00
To God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, or another verse on this is first Kings 8/27, that says. But will God indeed dwell on the earth?

19:09
Behold heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built.

19:17
So.

19:19
The Bible doesn't have a great deal of specificity about what heaven is. It talks about heaven as the sky. It talks about heaven as the zone or domain, where things are stored with God, and it kind of hints at like heaven is like just little transcendence beyond what we really can get at.

19:39
With our certainly with our naked eye.

19:41
There are lots of theories on like what exactly heaven is, and honestly, they're all just speculation, so I don't think I really want to get into it very much with you because we can speak with great boldness when the Bible speaks and when it doesn't. We can speculate and theorize, but it doesn't really hold any authority, does it? One theory.

20:01
Might be sounding really good, and many Christians might believe in that theory.

20:05
And then 100 years passes and then people are like that theory was totally dumb. Look at this evidence that disproves it. Right. So I I would say probably the most mainstream theory of the idea of heaven is that it's just another dimension of space-time that God is able to have access to. And angels are able to have access to and that we as humans are not.

20:26
But who knows? So let's move on. Let's summarize. So heaven is the sky. Heaven is God's throne, and God is beyond heaven, and the heaven of heavens. And we can now move on to consider some afterlife comparison. So I mentioned this morning.

20:43
About different ancient cultures and religious systems and I want to read to you. These are just like short little paragraphs from Wikipedia. Don't ever quote Wikipedia in your college papers. This is not a college paper. So giving myself a pass, but I think it's a helpful, helpful little perspective.

21:03
Let's look at what ancient people thought about the afterlife. And.

21:09
This is usually what they think of when they say the word heaven today.

21:14
So the question is where? Where do people go? Where did? Where did ancient people think they went? So the first one I want to to mention to you is the Egyptian afterlife, which is described by these words at death. The soul goes to the Kingdom of the dead, where it must recite secret formulae from the book of the Dead.

21:33
That's kind of like a.

21:36
Like a final exam at the end of your life, right? Like you should like studying this book of the the dead. You finally get, like, the the secret codes, the cheat codes, and you're you're confronted with that information. Judgment involves the demon Amet, devouring an unworthy soul, whereas the good will live on in the fields of Yalu and accompany the son.

21:57
On its daily ride. That sounds nice.

22:00
Only those who could secure embalming and a sarcophagus had a way into the afterlife. So if you're in Egypt.

22:06
Then.

22:07
Basically, the whole afterlife idea is limited to those with specialized knowledge and money, and if you had those two things, you had a good shot. But like, who knows, your soul might get devoured by Emmet. Alright, let's look at the Greek idea.

22:24
The Greek afterlife is that on death, Hermes takes the dead soul to the shores of the river Styx in the realm of the God Hades.

22:34
Charan the ferryman, brings the deceased across the river. Based on how someone lived, he or she would go to Elysium. Paradise for the good and heroic. The asphodel fields for people who did as much bad as good. The punishing fields for the mediocre bad, or Tartarus, a place of torment.

22:54
By hot lava on the rack.

22:57
So yeah, that's the Greek sense. And you know the Greeks, this is their folk religion. Like philosophers wouldn't believe any of this. But like that that your average person would talk about Hades as this realm and trying to get over the river sticks. And you know, you really had to have enough money to pay the ferryman to do that. So again, there was there was a financial aspect.

23:17
And sometimes they would put coins on dead people's eyes. Did you know that when they just.

23:23
But.

23:24
You got to pay your toll. You know when you go across the river. Alright then. We had the Norse afterlife. Some of you might be familiar with this from the Thor movies. The soul stays in the body until released through decay or cremation.

23:38
It goes to one of the four places, Valhalla, where warriors who die in battle join Odin and Asgard.

23:45
Folk fonger a great Meadow where Freya Reigns. Hell, you heard of that? A place where those who are neither good nor bad go to reunite with loved ones. That doesn't sound so bad. Right? And then NIF hell.

23:59
Punishment for those who break oaths or commit wickedness.

24:04
So are you seeing does any of this strike you as a little bit familiar to like modern Christian?

24:10
And especially like the Catholic system, where you have heaven, purgatory and hell right? This is starting to seem a little familiar. Alright then we have the Zoroastrian.

24:21
They are duelists who believe that matter itself is a corruption at death, a human, the evil God enters the body and contaminates it, whereas the immaterial spirit escapes to remain in the vicinity for three days and nights, and suffers anxiety from the recent separation. The angels.

24:40
Vohuman and Mithra prepare an account of good and evil. The person committed once Deena leads the soul into the spiritual world and must cross a bridge of judgment. Good souls into a paradise, evil ones, a realm of punishment. These are the the afterlife myths of the great religions of the ancient world.

25:01
At least in more of the western side, on the eastern side, we have the Buddhists, the Hindu, and the Taoists. So I want to show you those as.

25:07
Well.

25:08
The Buddhist afterlife says that death the person reincarnates based on the qualities of that one's actions, karma to higher or lower forms of life.

25:20
For Buddhists, the soul is not eternal, and believing so is the prime consequence of ignorance. When one succeeds in eliminating desire, delusion and ignorance, he or she can escape the cycle and cease existence. So the Buddhist is a little different in that the ultimate goal, I guess I got to.

25:37
Put that back around this way.

25:39
The ultimate goal for the Buddhist is to cease existence. Like if if you, if you finally have enough life cycles in a row enough times that you're reincarnated, eventually you'll cease to exist and that's good on Buddhism.

25:55
Hinduism is a little bit different. Hinduism says that after death an immortal soul reincarnates based on one's deeds. That's typical. Eventually one can escape the cycle by improving his or her karma over many lifetimes and Interstate of perpetual disembodied bliss.

26:12
Sounds like the traditional idea of heaven to me. And then last of all, we have the Taoist a goal, for the Taoists to achieve immortality through breathing techniques, meditation, sexual practice is I know what you're thinking. You're like, why didn't I sign up for that religion? Sorry, sexual practices, physical exercises.

26:31
Thank you for laughing. Andy's purified metals ingestion and moral living with the goal of eliminating impurities and demons from their bodies to increase their souls energy.

26:43
So I've just read to you short descriptions of the Egyptian, the Greek, the North, the Zoroastrian, the Buddhists, the Hindu and the Taoist beliefs of the afterlife. What do they all have in common? They all have in common that they locate the arena of final redemption off world.

27:04
None of them see our world, our planet, the land earth as the fitting location for final reward and redemption and eternal life.

27:17
They're all saying you've got to go somewhere else. You have to go to Asgard or you have to go to some Nirvana or you have to cease to exist or you have to go to the Kingdom of the dead and join the sun on its ride across the sky. Right, nobody's saying.

27:36
The world will be restored.

27:39
Nobody, do you think? Doesn't doesn't that blow your mind?

27:44
You know, like here are these people, like, grasping at different ideas and philosophies and and religious ideas and and they're trying to figure it out and they're just all getting it wrong. And yet what does the Bible say?

27:59
In Genesis 319, we read from the Bible by the sweat of your face. You shall eat bread. Boy, you really lived that out here in the South. What was it like 95° today?

28:11
By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for you are dust and to dust you shall return.

28:20
The biblical afterlife is so simple it's so obvious and even scientific. If we can use that word. Dead people just go on the ground.

28:30
We'll look at Ecclesiastes 910 verse. Many of you are familiar with. I think whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might.

28:39
For there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom and shield to which you are going. Shield is just a word that refers to the realm of the dead. It's it's a it's a funny word. I always get suspicious when the translator is use a non-english word in their English translation. Does that does that get your attention to like say LA in the Psalms you're like.

28:59
We we're going along so well in the English language. What happened here? You know? Because like last time I checked, SHIELD was not like something you used in polite conversation with your friend. You know, it's just it's not an English word. And I guess, like, the the the translators say.

29:15
Well, we don't want to like pick a side on the debate on what the afterlife is or the intermediate state is. So we're just going to leave it as a as as a untranslated word or maybe they have other reasons, but it's it's really just referring to the realm of the Dead, Psalm 146, verse three says.

29:35
Put not your trust in Princess in a son of man in whom there is no salvation when his breath departs, he returns to the earth on that very day, his plans perish.

29:46
So once again, the Bible is just so weird.

29:50
I mean, I've shown you all these other religious ideas from around the time of the Bible, before the time of the Bible, after the time of the Bible. They all say something different and the Bible saying no like this is it like you gotta live now. You gotta work now. You gotta love. Now you gotta do life now because then you're dead.

30:09
And here it says his breath departs. He returns to the Earth. It does not say he his body returns to the Earth. Do you notice that it does not say your body returns says he returns to the Earth. Incredible.

30:22
And then we have, of course, Jesus, I quoted this this morning, John 528, do not Marvel at this for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out. Those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. So where are the dead? According to Jesus the dead are in their graves, they're in their tombs.

30:43
That people don't go anywhere. They're in their tombs. They are asleep until Christ comes to wake them.

30:49
In between death and resurrection on the last day, the dead are unconscious. They are inactive. There's no thought or planning or wisdom.

31:00
In the grave in SHIELD.

31:03
This is where they also have this epitaph. Rip rest in peace. This is where that comes from, too, probably.

31:15
Where did this have an idea come from? It came from extra biblical sources.

31:20
The Bibles vision is clear. It's simple. Dead people are in their graves until the time of resurrection, at which point, if judged righteously, they are to enter the Kingdom of God the age to come when God makes everything wrong with the world. Right when he restores our world, talk more about restoration.

31:41
Tomorrow and this beautiful vision that not just the Old Testament but also the New Testament has for the WO.

31:49
World so this have an idea really comes from these other these other sources and I want to share with you a quotation from Justin Martyr.

32:00
He's a Christian who lived about a century after Christ and he was in a dialogue with a Jewish person, and he was telling this Jewish person is like, you know, if you hear of some Christians that believe in heaven, this is what I want you to think about them.

32:13
And I think this is really fascinating and this is what Justin says, for I chose to follow, not men or men's doctrine. So Justin is a Christian. He's having a conversation with a Jew for I choose not to follow men nor men's doctrines, but God and the doctrines by him. For if you have fallen in with some who are called Christians but who do not admit this and venture to blasphemy.

32:35
God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, who say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die are taken to heaven. Do not imagine that they are Christians.

32:48
This is an incredible early witness to a strong stance and we know that Justin believed in a Kingdom age. He believed in a restored Jerusalem. Specifically trifle asked him about this in his in this book dialogue with TIFO, and we know that his successor, a man named erroneous also.

33:08
Believed in the coming Kingdom of God wrote 5 chapters about it in his book against Heresies. So heaven is a biblical idea. There's nothing to be afraid of about the concept of heaven.

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But it's not a sophisticated idea. It's a very simple idea. It's just anything that's above the ground, which would include the sky all the way to outer space, and God's thrown, if that's another dimension, or if it's some other way of talking about space and time and whatever it is, that's all included.

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In the word heaven, it's not specific between those different things, and although all the different, I want to say all but the ones that I've looked into of the different religions of the world, they all see death as pretty.

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Much a doorway.

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OK.

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Into another form of life, the Bible courageously and radically teaches the idea that the dead are asleep in their graves until the final day when Jesus returns. So next time we'll cruise through the Bible and see what it says about the Kingdom of God, and then we'll talk about Kingdom allegiance.

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In Kingdom ambassadors on Tuesday and Wednesday.

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Well, that brings this message to a close. What did you think? Come on over to restitutio.org and find episode 563 defining heaven and leave your thoughts and feedback there.

34:42
Well, we got a new review.

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Thanks so much to John Doe Smith Zero, who titled his review on Apple Podcast, delivers greater knowledge of biblical genres and theological matters, and he wrote.

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This podcast read the Bible for yourself series is for anyone who wants a greater knowledge of the different genres of biblical literature, law, psalms, prophecy, proverbs, usually within only an hour's length. By doing this, a dedicated person is equipped to read a thousands of years old.

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Look without misinterpreting it. Said person will gain the building blocks to learn how to apply biblical texts to their own life. Highly recommend.

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Well, thanks so much John for writing in and leaving that very friendly and encouraging review of the podcast, this class that he's referring to is an 18 part class that I started this past January and it starts on episode 531. So if you're subscribed.

35:52
And you're listening to this in your podcast app, you should be able to Scroll down to episode 531 for the first part of this class. Now, if you would prefer, this class is also available on YouTube with a full video and slides and so forth. And that is going to be findable on.

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LHIM living Hope International Ministries YouTube channel, since they're the ones that recorded the class, they have it on their YouTube.

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Channel I also have those embedded on the restitutio website restitutio.org. There's a tab on that site that has classes and you can be able to find it that way. And last of all, I actually have a podcast just for classes, so if you are just interested in finding out all the classes that rest studio has ever done including.

36:39
I mean, but also by others. Then you can get those on the rest of studio classes podcasts. You just search in your podcast app, whatever you happen to use and you'll be able to find those and then listen to the classes uninterrupted by interviews or sermons or other kinds of podcast content that I put.

36:56
On another note, I did want to mention that the New Zealand UCLA Conference in November is filling up. I think there's only space for about 100 people at the venue and the number of folks registered is already approaching 80 or right about at 80. So if you are planning on coming, whether you live.

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In New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, wherever you live, Fiji, Hawaii, West Coast, United States, or if you're one of the folks from Europe, that just is always wanted to go down under and explore New Zealand.

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This is your chance to sign up before space runs out. This is the first historic inaugural UCLA conference in New Zealand. I'm telling you, if you can get there, you want to do this and it's going to be a great time, I'm going. I know will Barlow's going, Dale Tuggy, Mark Cain, Zach and Kayla.

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Mayo are the organizers for the event, and I know that Greg Dibble is coming. Jeff dibble.

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Many of you know Greg from his famous book, which is called they never told me this in church published back in. Well, I think the 2nd edition came out in 2010. So it came out even before that really excellent book that covers a whole range of doctrines written by a previous Church of Christ, Pastor Greg Dibble.

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And then now also his brother Jeff, Devil's book Christ before creeds, which is available in English and Spanish and and hopefully in the next months and year.

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Other languages as well as people request to have that book in their language as well. So if you want to meet these folks, come on over to New Zealand, to the Cambridge area, Cambridge, Hamilton area. And let's hang out for a weekend would be great.

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That would be great, but if you are planning to come, you should definitely sign up now or very soon on our last episode 562, which is why should you care about the Kingdom of God? I told the story of about the cuckoo bird and I I honestly don't remember.

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Where I first came across this if it was a movie, if it was just somebody mentioning it in a sermon or something, but somehow or other I came across this rude parasitism.

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It really shook me and I was like, man, this is just crazy. So Candace wrote in and offered some helpful information. If you want to combat brood parasitism in America, she writes, the American cowbird also practices nest parasitism much closer to home.

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These are the black birds with brown heads, males with a pretty whistle like song. They will come to feeders that contain Millet.

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Feeders using specific seeds without millets will select for other local seed eaters and help to keep the cowbirds out of your area and thus protect the nests of smaller birds like the blue birds.

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And she continues. Thanks for your consistent preaching. Always look forward to the podcasts. Well, thank you, Candace, for writing in those of you who are bird watchers and are into bird feeders that this, this is some helpful, helpful information. Basically the way I use the bird illustration was to.

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To talk about how Plato has laid an egg in the nest.

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Of biblical Christianity. If you missed it, that's what I was talking about, Mark writes in saying my Oh my, you know how to tell a good parable, Sean.

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Not sure if you came up with that whole bird analogy, but it was great. Can easily be used to apply it to other innovations as well.

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Well, I will definitely be buying the book when there's a hard cover option available. Well, Mark, good news. There is a hardcover option available. It's already out. You can get it on Amazon, on your, whatever country you live in. Hopefully there's an Amazon store. You can get it in. If not, there's Walmart, Barnes and Noble and so forth.

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Whatever the big book sellers are, they will have Kingdom journey. If you want to get the book, you can order it that way.

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As for the mark continues. As for the survey and actual beliefs of people, I think we can be a bit more generous. Belief in the afterlife, heaven and hell are not all incompatible with belief in the ultimate Kingdom of God, and it's probably what I would have answered myself if I had to fill out the survey.

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In my personal life too, I have often experienced that a definition of terms may be helpful. I find that many people simply consider the term heaven to be referring to the ultimate Kingdom. Similarly with beliefs in Judaism, which you refer to, I will just be using the term Olam habah world to come.

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And this is the normative belief in orthodoxy, and people will understand what you're talking about just fine.

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Of course, there's also the intermediate state of refinement of however you view it, but certainly this is not considered the ultimate destination. I often speak of the Kingdom, and though people may have various ideas or uncertainties about how exactly the afterlife should be understood, I do find that many people who would merely profess that you go to heaven.

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After you die, do actually believe in an ultimate new heaven and earth to come in the end, if one should ask them to elaborate.

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Further also, this May of course be very different where you live and for the people that you interact with, but this has been my experience that perhaps this serves as a hopeful message. All the best mark. Well, thanks so much, Mark. I'm not sure really which mark this is or where you live, but I will say this that in my experience, which is obviously limited.

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People do not talk about what happens however many thousand years after they die, and they do not care. And I know that it's become popular because of the work of NT right and others to say that, well, what really matters is the Kingdom. What really matters is life.

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After life off to death as he says it. But let's be honest.

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That's only the theologians that talk that way. The regular people are just going to heaven or they're just going to hell. At least that's in their heads.

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And there is no discussion of the Kingdom of God. But I think you're probably right that if we really did have better survey options out there, we would pick up a lot more people that do believe, at least in a hybrid view, where they go up to heaven for a while maybe.

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Thousands of years and then they come back and live on the Earth forever more after.

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To that, but I think if you then ask them which is more important, they would all say that going to heaven when you die is more important because that guarantees that you're going to be in the good place forever on Earth or not. They don't really care. And I and and I and I see this a lot with that phrase, new heavens and new Earth. That phrase drives me nuts.

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I'll be honest and I may comment on this further, but it's just not a helpful way of thinking because.

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It doesn't specify where you're living. Are you living in the sky or on the land? Because those are two very different things. So. So those are some concerns that I have. I think you're right, Mark. Probably there are more than just 1% in America today that believe in an ultimate Kingdom on Earth.

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But hey, I'm not really sure if somebody can point me to a survey that asks better questions and can give better answers. I'm all ears. Would love to hear more about this. Thanks so much for writing in Candace and Mark on the rest of studio website. If you would like to write in on that episode from last week or from this episode from this week.

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You can do that at restitutio.org. Just find the episode and leave a comment on the bottom of the page. Well, that's going to be it for today. Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you next week where we'll talk about the Kingdom defined and work through what the Bible says about the Kingdom of God in a brief session.

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This is something that could be done over hours and hours and hours and I'm trying to condense things, which is probably why I'm talking too fast in in these presentations, but I am trying to condense things down so that it is easier to digest and then also share with others.

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So tune in for that next week.

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If you like to support us, you can do that at Restitutio org. And remember the truth has nothing to fear.