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Heaven & Hell

Heaven & Hell. Mullen (1980). Preconception Snowballs. The Jews of the OT. To begin with, the Jews didn’t attach much significance to what happens after death. The believed in a misty underworld, known as SHEOL or HADES.

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Heaven & Hell

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  1. Heaven & Hell Mullen (1980)

  2. Preconception Snowballs

  3. The Jews of the OT • To begin with, the Jews didn’t attach much significance to what happens after death. • The believed in a misty underworld, known as SHEOL or HADES. • The spirits of the departed lived a shadowy existence until they eventually faded away altogether.

  4. But then they began to think about it… • “1 Enoch [a book dating from 1BCE] develops the ideas of heavenly abodes for the righteous after death and of places where the wicked are held until the judgement and their punishment in Gehenna [hell].” • “The abode of the righteous is known as Paradise, a Persian word for a park of garden.” • “The opposite of Paradise is Gehenna, originally the vale of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem; at one time a place for burning the city’s rubbish…but now a symbol of horror and torture for the wicked.”BLACK

  5. Heaven & Hell in the NT • Mt 5:13 • Mt 5:11-12 • Mt 13:40-43 • Mt 25:46 • Mk 13:27 • Lk 16:23 • Rom 6:23 • 1Thes 4:16-17 • Rev 20:14-15 • Rev 21:1-4

  6. A General Picture • Over time, a general picture starts to emerge: • Those who do what is right (accept Jesus Christ as saviour) will, after death, share eternal bliss with God in heaven; • Those who have done wrong (rejected Jesus as saviour) will go to hell / ‘outer darkness’ • Hell certainly appears to be a place of torment, out of God’s presence and beyond his love and care.

  7. An appetite for heaven • Human beings have appetites (e.g. hunger & thirst.) The means for the satisfaction of these appetites certainly exists in the objects of food & drink. • Since we desire eternal life in the same way as we desire food, then eternal life must exist as the object by which that desire (or appetite) is actually satisfied. • If there was no such thing as life after death, then we wouldn’t have an appetite for it.

  8. 3 Objections! • It is based on a false premise; that all men desire eternal life, as they do food & drink. They don’t! • Eternal life does not belong to our world of daily experience and so we can’t compare it to things that do. • The fact that we wish/hope/desire anything does not mean that it exists.

  9. The Evidence of Grief • MacKinnon argues that the experience of grief when a loved one dies is such a deep and disturbing experience that it convinces us that human beings count for something. • But others argue that it is just powerful in its ability to generate emotion.

  10. Pascal’s Wager • “I will stake everything on the belief that there is a life after death.If I’m right, then that’s all to the good because I shall have lived my life conscious of it’s reference to eternity and I shall awake after death to enjoy eternal bliss.If I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter, because I am not to live on after death, then I’ll never know I was wrong.”

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