When I’m not thinking about how God’s words in the Bible make so much sense if you truly explore them, I’m often thinking about how to bring God’s love and justice into our very broken world. Every day, a ridiculously tragic number of young children die from a lack of clean water, mosquito bites, parasites in food, and diseases you’ve never had to worry about any kid in your life ever getting.
These are often children – and parents – who have never heard the Gospel, don’t know anything about Jesus, and couldn’t possibly make an informed decision about the Christian afterlife. God tells us that he’s just, that he wants everyone to choose his plan of salvation, and that it’s not his will that anyone should be lost. So how does he get a fair and through explanation of his salvation plan to these folks?
That’s what our next discussion is all about! We finally finish our exploration of how God’s biblical afterlife is really set up, and it’s so rational and refreshing! It allows for every single human situation to be justly accounted for, from death in the womb to death without ever hearing the word “Jesus”. It allows God to apply the same fair and sensible standard to everyone, while allowing us to choose for ourselves.
God’s afterlife works so well, and it’s truly fun to piece it together. After all, making sense of God’s biblical hereafter is what my free Healing Hereafter book series is all about! But don’t worry about going too deep; I’m giving you the lite version! Below is the Quick Read summary of the closing chapters of Booklet 3, exploring what happens to the multitude of people who could not – and cannot – access or understand God’s message of salvation during their lives here on earth.
Keep in mind that these “Quick Reads” aren’t meant to extensively prove anything, just intrigue more interest concerning nearly all the questions and conclusions found in the last two chapters of Booklet 3. Please explore the Full Version of this booklet (free and two clicks away!) for a more thorough discussion and extensive biblical and scholarly evidence supporting what’s below.
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Booklet 3: The Ultimate Publicity Stunt
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Chapter 9
With an intermediate existence for all humans between death and judgment firmly established, we set off to discover where this occurs and what it’s like. We discover the Bible’s diffuse descriptions of Sheol (Hebrew)/Hades (Greek), confirming that it is everyone’s first stop in the afterlife. Upon reviewing the parallels between the Jews’ and Greek’s understanding of Hades, we learn of its three very different but necessary regions, all with biblical correlates.
The first is called Tartarus in the Bible, and it is described as essentially a pre-Hell—a place of agony, although it is not completely devoid of God and his ideals. The Bible is clear that everyone in Tartarus will go to Hell/Gehenna.
The second is called Paradise in the Bible, and it appears to be described as essentially a pre-Heaven—a place of peace, rest, and comfort that is not yet completely devoid of the experience or memory of evil. Only the righteous fit for Heaven/the New Earth are given as examples of humans in Paradise.
Because these locales are unfamiliar to many, we affirm their biblical reality and necessity. Then we merge what the Bible directly reveals about them with its pervasive acknowledgement of a postmortem existence other than Hell and Heaven to demonstrate how well these locations explain otherwise confounding passages and answer otherwise impossible questions.
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Chapter 10
The third region of Sheol/Hades is directly referred to at least twice and indirectly implied several times in the Bible. We validate this in each passage, and by placing them in the context of the biblical hereafter as a whole, we learn that this would be the spiritually neutral place that serves as a transient limbo only for those who had no meaningful access to Jesus’ message during physical life.
As soon as a person has received a fair chance to demonstrate faith and be taught the gospel by Jesus, their response would land them in either Tartarus or Paradise with everyone else. We explain why people there won’t be more likely—and may even be less likely—to accept God’s solution of Jesus, and we answer objections some have to a place like this. It is also differentiated from similar ways people account for the unreached that are either biblically inconsistent or dismiss any need for Jesus.
We then consider the three regions of Sheol/Hades together and offer two crucial reasons why the Bible spends the bulk of its words on Hell and Heaven and less on its other postmortem locales. We close our discussion about how God desires to, can, and will give everyone a just opportunity to exercise faith and know the gospel by emphasizing how biblically real, distinct, and necessary the regions of Sheol/Hades are and by summarizing how rationally and simply they can answer so many disturbing questions that a hereafter comprising only Hell and Heaven cannot.
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So although it is more complicated than the over-simplified and over-problematic afterlife we’re typically taught, God’s biblical afterlife actually makes sense! It allows him to maintain his great mercy, just wrath, and meticulous fairness, all while letting us each chose our eternal fate. But wait! If we choose, then how does that work with God’s plans, predictions, and maybe even predestination of our choices? Well, now that we’re done with Booklet 3, that’s what Booklet 4 is all about…
