Beyond our (kind of) Time

Exploring the Realities of the Eternal Kingdom

Paul Launchbury with Steve Cooper

Beyond Our Kind of Time: Exploring the Realities of Eternal Life,

copyright 2009, Paul Launchbury and Steve Cooper. (Previous edition Beyond Our Kind of Time: Metachronology in the Bible 2007) The right of Paul Launchbury and Steve Cooper to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the authors. The authors do not, however, want to place obstacles in the way of individual Bible students who wish to test our thesis against Scripture. We would allow, without express permission, the copying of texts from this book for the purposes of private study and research, provided that such copies consist of no more than one chapter on any one occasion. May God bless all who read and meditate upon his words!

Versions of the Bible cited in this book

Authorised (King James) Version: (AV) 1611, Oxford University Press, all rights reserved to the British crown New International Version: (NIV) Copyright 1973,1978,1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline Ltd. All rights reserved. NIV is a registered trademark of International Bible society. UK trademark number 1448790 Revised Authorised Version: (RAV) A.K.A. New King James Version of the Bible, copyright 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson Inc., Publishers Revised English Bible: (REB) copyright 1996 Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press Revised Standard Version of the Bible: (RSV) Copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved

The NIV is the standard translation referred to, with others used for their particular emphases. For details of additional, less mainstream, translations referred to in the text, see the Select Bibliography.

Contents
page
5 13 23 34 44 53 69 83 93 99 123 123 191 243 253 267 285 286 299 311 341 343 Prologue 1: Introduction to this field of Biblical studies 2: Visions of the Throne Room Lay-by 1: The Chariot Lay-by 2: Other probable references to Throne Room

experiences
3: Visions

4: Important questions arising from these visions Stepping-stone 1: What does the Bible say happens when you are dead? 5: Metachronology 6: Gods mastery of time 7: The Lord Jesus Stepping-stone 2: Is the Nicaean Creed really the last word on the

Trinity for Christians?

8: The angels

Stepping-stone 3: Where does that leave the devil and his angels? 9: Evil spirits Lay-by 3: What is spirit? Lay-by 4: The medium at Endor Lay-by 5: The sons of God 10: Lets talk about some scriptures that could challenge our view 11: Some concluding thoughts Epilogue: Where do we go from here? Selected Bibliography

Prologue

eyond our (kind of) Time presents a new mode of understanding the Bibles picture of Gods relationship to mankind, time and immortality. After you have read this

book, many passages of Scripture will never look the same again!

The central core of this book developed over a period of some thirty years, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Out of this study and reflection on matters of time, God and mortals, came a picture in which many hitherto difficult-tounderstand Bible texts fell neatly into place. In 1995 I issued an outline thesis, in a very limited print run, on the basic themes developed in more detail in this book. This limited circulation document was distributed through Epsis Theological Monographs, a division of my consultancy, which unfortunately closed in 1997 by reason of ill health. The cover carried the statement: For

evaluation by experienced Bible students. The reactions of

readers of this early treatise, mainly a circle of friends and contacts of friends, or contacts made privately, induced me to consider developing the material into a book for a wider readership. However, Parkinsons disease slowed me too much for me to attempt such a task alone.

It was a great pleasure to me therefore when, some time ago, Steve Cooper and I renewed an acquaintance that had lapsed for a while. It was an even greater pleasure to discover that he had ideas for developing my concepts in much the same way as I had been considering, and was keen to start work! This book is the fruit of our collaboration.
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Now, some eleven years after the original for evaluation outline was circulated, much has happened in this field, in both the scientific and theological areas. The relevance indeed the potential of research into time-related phenomena is illustrated by the status of the current researchers in the field. For example, in 2002 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) held an Advanced Research Workshop in the Slovak Republic, May 21-24, under the overall title of The Nature of Time: Geometry,

Physics and Perception. A quick trawl though the internet will turn
up a great number of workers in this field and the flow of articles on time-related topics in journals, such as New Scientist, has continued at a brisk pace; (To say nothing of science fiction, which has a habit of having prescience in it somewhere!) there is huge interest in this field.

My original studies were, of course, concerned only with those aspects of time which relate to God, Jesus and faithful people who trust in them. This book maintains the same focus on a larger scale.

Incidentally, as a few eyebrows have been raised on seeing the title of our book, it was based on a comment by Professor
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James Barr in his book: Biblical Words for Time; 1962, SCM Press; pg 145, where we read: It would perhaps be possible in theory to maintain that before the creation of the world there was not something other than time, but time of another kind. He also writes (ibid): If, then, there is some reason to suppose that Genesis meant that time began with creation, then there is at least some case for talking about eternity as a reality other than time. (Our emphases in both quotations) Professor Barr held chairs in theology and New (but more frequently Old) Testament studies in several universities in the UK and USA during his career. He is perhaps best known as the author of the outstanding work, The

Semantics of Biblical Language, published in 1961. I just could not

resist picking up that phrase at the end of the first quotation and turning it into: Beyond our (kind of) Time!

For those wishing to know more of current thinking in the God and Time area I would just like to mention, among the many books that have appeared during those 11 years, three as useful background reading:

David Wilkinson: God, Time and Stephen Hawking; an

exploration into origins; Monarch Books, Mill Hill, London &

Grand Rapids, Michigan; 2001. This book is a good one to begin with, very readable.

Hugh Ross; Beyond the Cosmos; what recent discoveries in

astronomy and physics reveal about the nature of God, Navpress

Publishing Group, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80935, 1996. Readable and helpful; good on use of diagrams to link doctrines with e.g. the multidimensional view of God. Craig (below) takes issue with a couple of Rosss points but this just emphasises the

controversial nature of study in this field.

William Lane Craig; Time and Eternity; exploring Gods

relationship to time; Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois; 2001.

Meaty with many points subjected to rigorous logical analysis. Insightful. Well worth the effort of reading it!

There remain one or two items best mentioned at this stage:

Stylistic differences. Readers will notice that two differing styles of writing are detectable in the text of this book. While we have smoothed out discordances, we have deliberately not edited out all traces of our individual modes of expression. After all, it is the work of two people, combining their resources. We would simply assure readers that all our texts are agreed between us and that every section contains work from both of us.

More importantly: Christian doctrinal basics. In this book we are solely intent on outlining our thesis with regard to the relationship of God to time, and all that flows from that. There will, though, be occasions where some of our suggestions may raise questions in the minds of readers with regard to items in their particular Creed or Statement of Faith. In some cases, where this is clearly going to happen, we have given reasons for our particular view in either the main text or, more often, in a Lay-by or Stepping Stone which we describe further in the Introduction, below. For other matters of doctrine, we have adapted as our basic position a version of the Apostles Creed, this being the Creed formulated closest in history to the actual preaching and writing of the New Testament.

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I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, Gods only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, he descended to the dead, on the third day he rose again, he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father and he will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy universal Church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

For the record, we strongly believe exegesis should be derived from fearlessly taking the whole sweep of inspired Biblical evidence into account, without undue deference to the weight of traditions or persons. We trust our readers to do this both with regard to our time-thesis and with reference to any doctrinal questions.

Paul Launchbury, February 2007

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Now unto him who is able to keep you from falling and present you without blemish before the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God, our Saviour through Jesus Christ our lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever, amen. (Jude vv24-25)
To him we dedicate our work in this book.

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Chapter 1 Introduction to this field of Biblical studies

hristians are well known, even notorious, for sharing the Good News, or Gospel: God promises that we can live in glory in his presence for ever! Millions have lived and died

in the confidence of this belief, however simply expressed.

But believers who apply themselves to looking at their Bibles in some depth start noticing some rather puzzling facts.
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They may be struck by what seems to be contradictory teaching about the life after the end of this life, or after the end of this world order; many passages talk about death as a sleep, others talk about future resurrection, but then others seem to talk about being with God at the moment of death; similarly some passages talk about eternal life on earth, while others talk about heaven. Nor is this a lone issue; if we reflect on many teachings about the nature of God and the devil, for example, points emerge that do not obviously add up. Some Christians respond by building their jigsaw from the range of passages that seem to make sense to them while feeling rather embarrassed by all the pieces that are left in the box, while others are discouraged and conclude that we can understand very little about the world to come and spirit existence.

We dont have to settle for either approach. Far from the Spirit being an author of confusion, these seeming problems are

paradoxes, ideas that only seem incompatible to show the

different facets of a greater truth. This book aims to give you a new depth of understanding of our everlasting hope; if you have been frustrated either by some teachers saying that its all very vague, or by others coming out with detailed and dogmatic ideas

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that seem to have limited basis in scripture, then you will find the insights that are shared here both thrilling and encouraging. We will also discover that, far from knowing very little about the angels, we will be amazed to discern a spectacular truth laid out in the scriptures- how Gods ministering spirits came to be, what they do and what they have to do with us! Inevitably we will look at the nature of the powers of evil; if you have been puzzled by admissions in well-regarded books on the devil that we are told very little about the origins of the Enemy, and that the fallen angel story is just the most obvious theory but by no means proven or universally accepted, then you will find a great deal to help you here. No mystical angelology or morbid demonology, we promise- its all relevant and useful, and we hope, honouring to God.

Christians generally recognise that God isnt limited by time in the same way as his creation. We will expand on this idea to explore more precisely how immortals experience time and how, for example, the Son of God could be said to create the worlds and grow in wisdom while in this world aeons after the creation! Many believers either content themselves very simplistic

explanations of the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or assent

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to creeds that they do not necessarily understand. You will find our ideas challenging!

One of the most obvious things that we can say about humanity is that we do things in "chronological order". We cannot return to the past, we live in the moment, and we progress into an unknown future by fractions of a second at a time. As we go on we will discover that there is much of the Bible that makes no sense if we assume that spirit beings are similarly restricted to our present experience of time we are referring to beings such as the angels and those, the righteous, raised to glory in a spiritual body (and even, perhaps in a lower degree, the powers of spiritual evil).

While we will be discussing issues of eternal existence which, of course we will not ever fully understand before we are actually clothed in glory, (and perhaps not all at once then!) readers will be surprised to find that this is not a complicated or heavy book. On the other hand, it does require careful reading; you will need to search the many scriptures that we refer to, and carefully weigh our arguments.

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We all like to be on familiar ground, and yet, as we take you further into the scriptures, we will find that many cherished ideas may hit the dust along the way. We think you will find, however, that your new horizons will be well worth any discomfort in the climb. Be reassured; we are not bringing another gospel, taking our stand on visions or in any way seeking to undermine the great truths of the scriptures. But you will find that the landscape you think you know looks very different from up here!

We read, in the Book of Proverbs (25:2): "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings." (NIV) Kohelet, as the writer of Ecclesiastes is known, encourages us to lift our minds above the humdrum and everyday. He had earlier spoken of how God has prepared mankind to understand his work: "He has also given eternity in the hearts of men, without which man cannot find out the work that God does from beginning to end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Building on this, Kohelet (in a very often horribly mistranslated passage) writes: "Who knows the upwardly ascending spirit of man, and the beast's descending-downwards-to-the-earth spirit?" (Ecclesiastes 3:21), (our translation, in close agreement with that of J.P. Green, The Interlinear Bible, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts, 1985). This is often taken as a reference to the spirit leaving the bodies of man and beast at
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death, but there is no obvious reason for this assumption here. True, the wise man has been comparing man and beast from the point of view of their common experience of death, but then comes a strong point of contrast: Man's mind is made to rise to ever higher things, the beast's is built to be ever downwards in its attention to basic matters of eating, sleeping and reproducing.

So - it is not just a matter of the "honour of kings" (AV). It's much more than that; it's a matter of using what God has given us, in the way our minds have been designed by God, so that we can rise above the mundane and prosaic things of this mortal life and soar in spirit towards the eternal things God has prepared for us. That's what this book is all about!

The Lord has left us a marvellous set of writings, at once clear, simple and all-sufficient to make us "wise to salvation" yet also profound and more than enough to occupy us for a lifetime of study. We should not wonder at this. The Spirit provided the simple basics of salvation for the likes of newlyconverted pagans from the docks of Corinth, and intellectual material more than sufficient to tax someone of the Apostle Paul's formidable calibre. Moreover, it's graded in a kind of
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lifelong correspondence course, so that on each reading something new comes to light; each additional understanding opens the door for yet more discovery. And each generations outlook enables it to find its own new treasures.

Again we say, we should not wonder at this because: "... My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9, NIV). We may often quote these words, but, we suspect, rarely ponder the strangeness, the awesomeness, of immortal being that they imply.

Readers will find the structure of this book somewhat unusual. Weve decided to keep the main argument, about the nature of immortal interaction with time-bound mortals, as a single whole, but many readers will, particularly at certain key points, be asking why we have abandoned some traditional ways of looking at things, and be raising Bible passages to mind that seem to go against our case. We address these issues in three separate sections appendices throughout the book, rather than at the end, if you like. Well call these Stepping-stones. These are distinguished by a border round the text and use of a different
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font. When you come to re-read the book you might feel comfortable skipping these explanatory digressions, or conversely they might be the parts you want to single out to look at again. Either way, we hope you find the layout helpful. There are also Lay-by notes which enlarge on points being made in the main text but which can be skipped by readers who wish to stick to the main flow of narrative. These are identified by a border around the text and yet another font. We have used the 3 fonts that have been found to be the most accessible to readers with any degree of dyslexia. This book presents enough challenge to the reader without the actual reading of the words being more difficult than it need be!

The earlier circulation of these ideas, as they developed over decades, has produced some excellent results; some readers have been encouraged to become believers in Jesus, others have been comforted in the hour of death or other crisis, and it has enhanced the understanding of, and enthusiasm for, the study of scriptures for many others. There were, of course some who for various reasons, were either doubtful, critical (we always welcome

constructive criticism) or just plain dismissive some of these

latter having had an air of Not invented here about them!

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We hope that this full publication will multiply the good work already achieved on a small scale, and that you too will find this clarity of view a great encouragement and defence in these Last Days in which, as Jesus put it (Luke 21:26): Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world. May we all be among those to whom he goes on to say ( v28): When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

As the contents of this book are unlike anything ever published before and as we have seen some readers of earlier notes nearly fall off their chairs at various points: Buckle up were going in!

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Chapter 2 Visions of the Throne Room

he key scriptural passages that, to us, most directly challenge our concept of time are those concerning the heavenly Throne Room. This chapter outlines the main

visions of the Throne Room, and flags up the problems they present to interpretations based on conventional chronology. After outlining what we see in the visions of the Throne Room, we
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will consider the relationship of things "seen in visions" to what we call "reality". We find this a necessary step because, until they have looked at what is meant in scripture by "vision", many people are inclined to think of what is seen as "not really there".

To make it easier to talk about this rather mind-bending idea, allow us to introduce a term- "metachronology". By this we

mean the apparent outworking of the involvement of immortals in the mortal order of things. Immortals are "outside" our
(experience of) time, may fill all time, are able to move freely in time and, to quote the title of this book, are beyond our (kind of) time. Well return to this in more detail later on.

We will then seek to identify the one on the Throne, and those who make up the multitude around it. From there we explore the corresponding nature of spiritual evil, and finally ask a series of important questions leading on from the ideas discussed.

Firstly, then, we will follow the revelations the Lord has given of his Throne Room, and note how the picture of the structure, its occupants and of what goes on there, builds up. We hope you can share with us the thrilling sense of wonder that we
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experience every time we ponder the marvels of this place, as piece by piece we put the picture together. Many of these accounts open with phrases like: I saw heaven opened; the strange thing about this is that whether the prophet lived in c.1500 BC or 90 AD they all saw much the same thing you will see what we mean shortly.

The experience of Moses (c. 1500 BC) The sequence of scripture accounts of the Throne Room begins in Exodus 24 where it is recorded that Moses and Aaron, with Nadab and Abihu and seventy elders of Israel, by the express invitation of God and under strict conditions, climbed Horeb (the Mount of God) and "saw God". Under the feet of the God of Israel was what looked like a pavement of sapphire or lapis lazuli, "clear as the sky itself." There is no mention here of the colour of the throne itself (though Ezekiel tells us that this was also of the same blue material) nor is there any reference to any other beings, such as the seraphs (described by Isaiah and John) or of the multitudes which Isaiah, Daniel and John describe as surrounding the throne. Moses does not record either, anything of the environs of the throne, though he may hint at the throne being in a building, as in v2 he records that God said: "Moses alone is to approach the LORD, the others must not come near". It is
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possible that the others remained, like Isaiah (see the next vision), in the doorway viewing the throne and its occupant from afar while Moses was privileged to enter and "approach the LORD". In addition, we deduce that the throne room contained some furniture which would be familiar to us, at least by name. When Moses was instructed to make the Tabernacle and its furniture he was told (e.g. Exodus 25:40): "See that you make them according to the pattern shown you on the mountain", implying, we suggest, that God said (in effect): "Look around you Moses, and build a tabernacle modelled on this one". While no description of the cherubs or their function appears before Ezekiel, Moses must have seen them to portray them on the veil of the Tabernacle and the cover of the ark. In the light of

Hebrews 9:11, 23-24 we may infer that Moses and the elders were
privileged to see the "true tabernacle" and were instructed to make "a copy of the true" one. Of course, the "model" which Moses was instructed to make for the Israelite Church in the wilderness was a very limited representation of the wondrous place in heaven. Not only did it have to be portable (and therefore dismantleable, and portable by men on foot) and restricted to materials available on earth at that time, but it had to include certain items such as the Table of the Bread of the Presence and the Curtain (veil) of which there is no mention in the visions of the
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interior of the heavenly, true, tabernacle. The altar of sacrifice was probably another addition, made for the needs of the time.

We also read that: "They saw God, and they ate and drank"

(Exodus 24:11). The implication is that they were invited to eat

and drink something offered to them by God on the mountain. The place where they met God seems therefore to be equipped with "food and drink" (whatever these terms mean in relation to the needs of immortals) by means of which a rite of fellowship can be enacted, conveying a sense of approval or, at least, of acceptance, from God to mortal visitors.

Summary of points arising from the experience of Moses 1 Under Gods feet a pavement of blue material (described as sapphire or lapis lazuli - the latter being known to the ancients as "heaven stone" because of its deep blueness, spangled as with stars of "gold" [this is rather unromantic "gold"; it is iron disulphide, FeS !]). It is not clear what is meant by "clear as the
2

sky itself", Moses may be emphasizing that the colour was like the more prized, vivid lapis lazuli, not the inferior kind which is clouded with whitish-grey material; this looks more like an overcast sky.

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2 Some hints that the Throne was in a building: Only Moses was allowed to go near; did the others watch from a doorway (like Isaiah, see below)? Moses was told to make a tabernacle like the one he was shown on the mountain. He was to make a simplified "copy of the true one" (Hebrews 9:23-24). There are facilities for a fellowship meal with mortal visitors.

The experience of Isaiah (c.750 BC) In Isaiah 6 the picture is developed somewhat. The colour of the throne is not described but we are told that it was indeed in a building- "the temple." Furthermore this temple had more than one door as it had "thresholds" which shook at the sound of the seraphs. The temple of Jerusalem was simply not big enough to have been the temple of this vision. Isaiah was evidently standing by or in one of these doorways for he felt them shake.

The Lord is described as being "seated on a throne, high and exalted"... The word translated in the NIV here as "exalted" is translated in earlier versions as "lifted up", an

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expression used in the New Testament to link this vision with both the crucifixion and glory of Jesus (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32-34, 41).

We think it probable that, in addition to the sense of "exalted in glory" the throne which Isaiah saw is "physically" higher than its surroundings in the temple, thus linking the elevation of the cross with the glory of the kingdom. The question of the identity of the one on the throne is dealt with after we have reviewed the visions.

The seraphs are described by Isaiah as flying around the Lord and calling out his holiness and proclaiming that the whole earth is full of Yahweh's glory, while the house fills with smoke. This is at least suggestive of an altar within. As we shall see, John tells us that there was indeed an incense altar before the throne.

There is no specific mention of beings other than the Lord and the seraphs. However, the reference to his "train" has puzzled translators. The words: "of his robe", found in some translations e.g. NIV, are an addition to the text and reflect the translators' interpretation of what Isaiah records; we think that

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the simplest and most likely explanation takes the expression train as it is often used to denote a retinue of followers.

Caroline Maria Noel seems to have understood the word in this sense in her popular hymn At the Name of Jesus in 1870:

Brothers, this Lord Jesus shall return again, With His Fathers glory, with His angel train;

Charles Wesley also wrote in Lo! He comes with clouds descending in 1758: Thousand, thousand saints attending Swell the triumph of his train.

It is interesting that Noel identified the train as being composed of angels, and Wesley as being of saints. We will return to this dichotomy in some depth further on!

Summary of points arising from the experience of Isaiah 1 The throne was in a building, "the temple".
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2 The throne was probably higher than its surroundings. 3 The building has doorways with doorposts. 4 There was probably more than one door to this building (reference to "thresholds"). 5 Seraphs were flying and calling: "Holy, holy, holy..." 6 "His train" is suggestive of a host of followers. 7 The smoke hints at an incense altar in this temple. The experience of Ezekiel (c. 650 BC) Ezekiel greatly expands our picture. In his vision of the throne (Ezekiel 1) he describes first an "immense cloud". This gives us an initial impression of the scale of the heavenly building. What is an "immense cloud"? One of the large clouds we might think of for comparison would be a thundercloud. And how large is a thundercloud? The average would be about five miles high and tens of miles across.

This then has to be the kind of cloud Ezekiel saw, a gigantic cloud concealing within it an enormous structure and, below the structure, giant creatures and wheels. There was fire, lightning and brilliant light in the base of the cloud among the giant cherubs who spread their wings under the heavenly building, and between the huge wheels with their high and awesome rims.
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Over the heads and over the spread wings of the living creatures Ezekiel saw "an expanse, sparkling like ice and awesome". The expanse seems to have been the transparent or translucent floor of an enormous building and Ezekiel looks up from below, through the expanse, and records that in the building above there was a blue throne. It was a blue pavement that Moses recorded, and it would seem from Ezekiel that the throne itself is made of the same material as that pavement. Ezekiel saw the occupant of the blue throne, whom he describes as if full of fire and surrounded by brilliant light. That the place he saw was understood by Ezekiel as a building, a sanctuary, is clear from chapter 3:12 where he exclaims "may the glory of the Lord be praised in his dwelling place!"

For other notes on Ezekiel's experience, especially in connection with the wheels and vehicle-like mobility of the Throne Room control centre, and the notes on David's reference to the "chariot", see under the section on Daniel's experience, which follows.

Summary of points from the experience of Ezekiel, Moses and Isaiah

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1 The throne in heaven is located in a massive building, the temple, which is probably miles across and (in many revelations of it anyway) wreathed in immense clouds. 2 The building has a transparent or translucent floor like ice. 3 The temple has doorways with doorposts. 4 There was more than one door to this building (reference to "thresholds"). 5 On that floor is a blue pavement or dais and on this is the blue throne with its glorious, radiant occupant, elevated above the surroundings. 6 Of the other occupants we have seen brief descriptions of the seraphs. (The cherubs and wheels are below the building, beneath the sparkling ice-like floor) 7 In addition we have noted the suggestion of the shadowy multitude called the Lord's "train". 8 We have also inferred the presence of an altar from the smoke.

The experience of Daniel (c. 550 BC) Daniel will now help us to add to this growing picture. When Daniel was shown the Throne Room, he was allowed to witness the proceedings there as the court was preparing to intervene on
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earth by the return of Messiah to take his kingdom. This seems to be indicated by the words which conclude the revelation to Daniel: Then the sovereignty, power and greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven will be handed over to the saints, the people of the Most High. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will worship and obey him

(Daniel 7:27)
As was the case with the earlier witnesses, Daniel's attention is immediately captured by the one on the throne (whom he calls the Ancient of Days) and, like the others, he notes the fire around his person. It seemed to Daniel that even the throne itself was afire and he describes a river of fire, coming out from before him. We take this to be the moving fires beneath the throne, below the ice-like floor and associated with the cherubs. This view is strengthened by Daniel's reference to the throne's "wheels were all ablaze"; these would be the huge wheels which Ezekiel described which were, like their companion cherubs, below the translucent floor and, therefore, below the throne. If you wish, pull in for a short digression here.

Lay-by 1 The Chariot

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Daniel has told us of the association of the wheels and the throne as being so close that he identifies the wheels as belonging to the throne - "its wheels were all ablaze". The only other scripture that we know of which concurs with Daniel on this is 1 Chronicles 28:18. In that passage David gave to Solomon detailed plans of the temple, including "for the chariot" which is explained as being "the cherubim of gold that spread their wings and shelter the ark of the covenant of the LORD". David assured Solomon that all the information was direct from God: "All this I have in writing from the hand of the LORD upon me, and he gave me understanding in all the details of the plan." Ezekiel later uses the same expression: "The hand of the LORD was upon me", before each of his visual experiences of the Throne Room and missions out from it (e.g. Ezekiel 1:3; 3:14, 22; 8:1). We think, therefore, that David is here saying that with "the hand of the
LORD upon" him he saw what he then put in writing for Solomon's

instruction, including the throne and its wheels. It would seem that, like Moses, David was told how much of "the pattern" he had to represent in the earthly temple, and how it should be done. This association of throne and wheels to give what seemed to David and Daniel a vehicle which had wheels, to the extent that David calls it a "chariot", is interesting. We do not have enough evidence to be sure, but it does seem as though the wheeled throne may sometimes be separated from the Throne Room and go on missions on its own. Ezekiel, at least, had the impression of the control centre, the glorious throne, being wheeled and mobile. In Ezekiel 8 through to 10, for example, he records the journey from Babylonia to Jerusalem and the movement of the vehicle-like "glory" and its
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"crew" around and within the temple there. We could also note the similarity to the cherubim and a flaming sword described in Genesis 3:24.

Daniel tells us that there was not just one solitary throne; he says: "thrones were set in place" without specifying how many. John, as we shall see, is more specific, and describes in addition the occupants of the other thrones. While up to now we have only inferred the presence of a large number of beings around the throne dais, Daniel is quite definite: "thousands upon thousands attended him; ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him." There is, then, a multitude with the Lord in the Throne Room, and while we doubt whether the Chaldee expressions used by Daniel are sufficiently precise to permit calculations of the numbers (10,000 x 10,000 for example gives 100,000,000!) there is no doubt that the number of those attending the one upon the throne runs into millions.

Here then is the confirmation of the gigantic size of this holy place. Think of the size of a sports stadium that can hold perhaps 100,000 people and imagine the size of building required to hold millions. If the throne is in the middle of such a place,
36

those who (perhaps like Moses' companions, and Isaiah) see the throne only from a doorway would see it from a distance of several miles!

The Presence radiated by the occupant of the throne, to instantly arrest the attention of all who have described this wondrous place, even at a range of several miles, must be overwhelming.

Summary of points arising from the experience of Daniel 1 The main throne was accompanied by an unspecified number of others. 2 The occupant of the main throne is named as the Ancient of Days, and described as having white clothing and white hair. 3 The throne was fiery and its wheels (presumably the cherubic wheels below the throne, seen through the ice-like "expanse" of floor) were also ablaze and accompanied by a river of fire flowing out from before the Ancient of Days. Given the momentous event witnessed by Daniel, i.e. the intervention by the heavenly court in the history of the world by the second coming of the Son of Man, the flowing fire may be evidence of increased activity among the cherubs below the
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floor, and of the fires associated with them, than were seen by the other human visitors to this stupendous place. 4 The one on the throne was accompanied, in addition to the seraphim and occupants of the other thrones, by a multitude which numbered hundreds of millions at least. 5 The ability of this Throne Room to accommodate such vast numbers of beings (and there is evidence that each being in this multitude was of normal human dimensions) indicates that it must be of gigantic size. If the Throne Room be as big as the thunder clouds which seem often to have concealed it then it could be tens of miles across. The central thrones would then be viewed by a human visitor standing at one of the doorways from a distance of at least several miles.

The experience of John (c.90 AD) John, in the Revelation, completes the picture for our purpose at this stage. In chapter 4 he tells us that he (like Isaiah) approached the throne room via an open door. As he was told: "come up here" it is possible that a stairway led up to a terrace or outer threshold of this doorway. Once he had ascended this stairway and could see through the doorway into the Throne
38

Room, John's attention (like that of the others before him) was immediately arrested by the one on the throne. Like Ezekiel and Daniel he records the brightness of his person and the radiance around him.

The imagery conveyed by John brings to mind the picture generated by the Genesis account of Jacob's famous dream at Bethel: "He saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it (NIV footnote, or: "There beside him") stood the LORD..." (Genesis 28:12-17). For a description of such a vast stairway as this must have been one could probably do no better than to read Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama in which he brilliantly conveys the awe experienced by earthlings on being confronted with a stairway 10 km high, that is, just a little more than would take one to the summit of Everest. Something on such a scale seems implied in the Genesis account if taken in the context of those of Ezekiel and Daniel.

Jesus clearly had this stairway in mind when talking for the first time with Nathanael: "You shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending before the Son of Man"
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(John 1:51). We have here accepted the translation as "before"

rather than "on since it is in the accusative; the other possible renderings of this voice would be "for" or "in the presence of", both of which carry the sense of angels carrying out their missions at the Lord's behest. A somewhat similar ambiguity is associated with the Genesis account. The preposition 'alyav can be read as either "above it" or "beside him" (but, please note, never "on him"!).

As both the Genesis and Revelation accounts are very compressed, we suspect that in both cases the reference is to the Lord being on his throne while the angels go out and come in before him, i.e. in his presence, ascending or descending the stairway as they do so.

Whether this stairway is used every time angels come and go from the Throne Room we would doubt; likewise mortals do not always seem to have seen it when taken to this marvellous place.

John adds to Daniel's reference to the other "thrones" by telling us that there were 24 of them, that they surrounded the main throne, and that they were occupied by white-robed
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and gold-crowned elders. These were presumably on the same blue "pavement" or dais as the main throne.

John also notes that before the throne "there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal", and at a later point

(Revelation 15:2) he describes the sea of glass being mingled with

fire.

It seems that this "sea of glass, clear as crystal" must be the "expanse, sparkling like ice and awesome," up through which Ezekiel looked from below (down among the cherubs) to the throne above. The mingling with fire we take, as in the case of Daniel's description, to be the cherub fires moving below this unearthly floor.

When noting Moses' experience we expressed the view that he was being told to look around him and make a Tabernacle which would be a model of the one he was seeing. Sure enough, John records that in the throne room there are seven lamps (4:5) and, as inferred from the smoke which Isaiah describes, there is indeed an altar of incense (8:3; 9:13 etc); there is also an ark

(11:19). As to the occupants of this temple, besides the one on the

main throne and the 24 elders, John (like Isaiah) records the seraphs proclaiming the holiness of the Lord; John goes further
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and tells us that there were four of them.

Again, John like Daniel records a multitude around the throne. Those he calls angels, John says (5:11), numbered thousands upon thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand (as said Daniel 7:10 of those who attended the Ancient of Days) while those who were said to have come out of the great tribulation and to have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb (i.e. the redeemed, the saints) John says were "a great multitude that no-one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb" (7:9).

Leaving aside the question as to whether or not there really were two innumerable multitudes rather than just one in the Throne Room (this will be dealt with later in the book) it is quite obvious that the structure which contained such numbers must be, as previously deduced, enormous.

Summary of points arising from the experience of John

1 The heavenly Throne Room has a door (at least one) and means by which those called to "come up here..." may do just that. A
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stairway, probably of prodigious size, leading up to the doorway seems the logical implication.

2 John's attention, like that of others before him, is immediately arrested by the wonder of the one on the throne, by the brightness of his person and by the radiance around him.

3 The other thrones, mentioned by Daniel, number 24; they surround the main throne and are occupied by elders dressed in white and crowned with gold.

4 Once again the floor of the Throne Room seems to be what is referred to as the "sea of glass", which would correspond with Ezekiel's "expanse" which "sparkled like ice". The fire associated with the sea of glass seems to be connected with the activity of the cherubs below this "icy" floor; the variations in the amount of fire visible through the floor at different times may be related to variations in the activity of the cherubs.

5 The "true tabernacle" contains seven lamps (4:5), an altar of incense (8:3; 9:13, etc) and an ark. (11:19)
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6 The seraphs are four in number.

7 Multitudes of heavenly beings attend the Throne Room: "Angels": thousands upon thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand "Redeemed": A great multitude that no-one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language Whether or not there be really two such multitudes, or just one, the building must be gigantic just to contain such numbers.

Lay-by 2: Other probable references to Throne Room experiences

The following are some of the passages in the psalms which appear to indicate familiarity with the Throne Room, even though they are less explicit than the visions reviewed above. They are not part of our accumulating evidence but are for the interest of readers who like to delve a little deeper. You might want to miss this section on a first reading but it is worth returning to.

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Psalmists

David David, even as a young man, seems to have been remarkably aware of God's "real" dwelling place. In Psalm 18 (also largely reproduced in 2 Samuel 22) he writes: "From his temple he heard my voice... Smoke rose from his nostrils; Consuming fire came from his mouth, Burning coals blazed out of it. He parted the heavens and came down; Dark clouds were under his feet. He mounted the cherubim and flew..." (Psalm 18:6-12, NIV).

He had, in Psalm 11:4, written: "The LORD is in his holy temple; The LORD is on his heavenly throne" - from which he watches, and works with, both the wicked and righteous among men.

In Psalm 20 David seems conscious of a heavenly Throne as well as an earthly one. He writes: "May he send you help from the sanctuary, And grant you support from Zion.... Now I know that the LORD saves his anointed; He answers him from his holy heaven." (Psalm 20:2,6, NIV).

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While acknowledging that God had said that his name would dwell in Zion, he also realistically refers to "his holy heaven" as the real source of God's help.

In Psalm 29:9 David writes: "And in his temple all cry "glory!" - in the context of "The LORD sits enthroned over the flood; the LORD is enthroned as King for ever." While Isaiah and John heard the seraphs cry God's glory, only David and John seem to record all or every creature (Revelation 5:13) singing God's glory.

As to what they actually sang, John gives us a snatch in the verse (Revelation 5:13) just quoted. However, in Psalm 99 there is a remarkable anthem, with a triple "Holy!, all about redemption, which we strongly suspect may have been what David alluded to in Psalm 29 (we make no assumptions about the authorship of Psalm 99). We also think it probable that when, at the birth of Jesus, the angels sang of "Glory to God in the highest..." they were singing the fuller text of the seraph-song (in which they "give glory...to him who sits on the throne" [Revelation 4:9]) of: "holy, holy, holy..." to be found in Psalm 99.

In Psalm 63:2 David writes: "I have seen you in the sanctuary, And beheld your power and your glory".
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There is no way, except as grossly overstated mental imagery, that David could have written this of the Sanctuary that he knew at Nob, for example. As a reference to the glory and awesome power of the Throne Room, though, it would simply be matter of fact. If this be the context, the reference in v7 to "the shadow of your wings" would be an allusion to the cherub wings below the expanse over which the throne is elevated.

A few of the psalms quoted without comment at the end of this section are also marked: "of David".

Asaph(s) Psalm 50 is in many ways parallel to Isaiah 6 in that it opens with a vision of God in glory and goes on to speak of rebuke and condemnation. The references to: "God shines forth", "a fire devours before him", and the gathering of God's consecrated ones (hasidim) strongly awaken echoes of Throne Room visions, though not with absolute certainty. The next Asaph reference, however, seems quite definite:

In Psalm 80:1 Asaph (the son of the earlier one?) appeals to God: "You who sit cherubim-enthroned shine forth". Please note that, contrary to usual translations, there is no "between" in the Hebrew, so that "you who sit enthroned between the cherubim" (NIV), based on an analogy with Exodus 25:22, just will not do, as the
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latter refers only to the arrangements for God to meet with the High Priest in the earthly tent. In Exodus 25:22 the expression is mivei which it is quite reasonable to render: "between", while in Psalm 80:1 the expression is shev ha kruvim which, as the construct, is probably best rendered "cherubim-enthroned". (The same phrase also appears in the Hebrew of Psalm 99:1 where the same translation would also be appropriate).

It seems to us that Asaph was accurately recording the arrangement of the exalted throne above the cherubs and wheels so vividly described by the authors we have already studied.

We readily admit that there are different interpretations, as well as translations, of the opening of Psalm 82. On one level at least, the people addressed in this psalm are humans (Jesus, citing vv6-7, makes this point, at least so far as these two verses are concerned: "I said, "You are gods"; you are all sons of the Most High..."). Yet the opening verses seem to call for rather more than this figure of sonship as applied to humans:

"God presides in the great assembly; He gives judgement among the gods".

Harry Mowvley (The Psalms for Today's Readers; Collins, London, 1989 pp 185-187) writes: "At first it seems as though the people addressed in this psalm are human judges, as in Psalm 58, but then
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vv6-7 make it clear that the psalmist is thinking about the lesser superhuman beings who apparently make up the Lord's court...."

In the terms of our book these "lesser superhuman beings" are the angels (whose origin and identity we will come to later) who encircle the throne and make up the council of God. As we proceed, it will be seen that Jesus' identification of these beings as humans in relationship to God is, in fact, precisely correct. The more we think about this psalm, the more we wonder whether this Asaph had seen the same vision as Daniel (Daniel 7) or at least been privileged to talk to Daniel about it; there is a strong connection of imagery between these two scriptures.

Ethan The references to the heavenly assembly in Psalm 89 are very convincing evidence that Ethan, too, had seen this wondrous place or, at least, had a first-hand account of it from someone else: "The heavens praise your wonders, LORD, Your faithfulness, too, in the assembly of the holy ones (Mowvley: "divine assembly", REB: "angels"). For who in the skies above can compare with the LORD? Who is like the Lord among the heavenly beings (Mowvley: "court of heaven")? In the council of the holy ones (Mowvley: "divine council") God is greatly feared; He is more awesome than all who surround him." (Psalm 89:5-7) Even a summary comparison of the terms used in this extract to describe the setting in God's court, with the elements of the Throne
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Room revelations we have looked at from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and John, indicates a substantial number of common features. Ethan, it seems to us, wrote from experience.

Various psalmists As indicated earlier the opening of Psalm 99 describes God as "cherubim-enthroned" (as in Psalm 80:1).

In this 99th psalm the text is thrice punctuated by references to God's holiness, at the end of vv3, 5 and 9, in strong reminiscence of the triple "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty" of the seraphim (Isaiah 6:3 and Revelation 4:8).

Following Psalm 99, as psalms are now collated in the book, several psalms contain words that seem to indicate familiarity with the Throne Room scene, though we cannot claim that this is certain. Still, for the sake of the inherent interest of these passages we will set some of them out as follows:

Psalm 102: "But you, O LORD, sit enthroned for ever; (v12) The LORD looks down from his sanctuary on high, From heaven he views the earth, (v19) In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, And the heavens were the works of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain;
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They will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing you will change them And they will be discarded. But you remain the same and your years will never end". (vv25-27; said of Jesus in Hebrews 1:10-12, NIV)

Psalm 103 (David): "The LORD has established his throne in heaven, And his kingdom rules over all. Praise the Lord, you his angels, You mighty ones who do his bidding, Who obey his word. Praise the LORD, all his heavenly hosts, You his servants who do his will". (vv19-21, NIV)

Psalm 104: "He makes the clouds his chariot And rides on the wings of the wind. He makes winds his messengers, Flames of fire his servants." (vv3-4,NIV)

Psalm 108 (David): "Save us and help us with your right hand, That those you love may be delivered. God has spoken from his sanctuary: "In triumph I will parcel out Shechem..." (vv6-7,NIV)

Psalm 113:

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"The LORD is exalted over all the nations, Who is like the LORD our God, The One who sits enthroned on high, Who stoops down to look on the heavens and on the earth?" (vv46,NIV)

Although it would be fascinating to look at more of these testimonies, including from the writings of Amos and Zechariah, we think that what has been written above is sufficient for our purpose for now.

We now return to the main text. Before we can answer the questions arising from the Throne Room visions we need to make clear just what we mean by visions and metachronology.

Mowvley, Harry, The Psalms for Today's Readers, 1989 Collins, London

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53

Chapter 3 Visions

In order to prepare to examine the Throne Room visions in some detail we need to be clear as to the answer to a frequently-asked question: "What is a "vision", what

relationship do these experiences have to "reality"?"

eople dont usually think of "visions" granted to mortals by God as representing any kind of reality. Consequently, they think of what is "seen" in a vision as being a condition of
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"seeing something that is not really there." Others have come to think of visions as images projected into the minds of the recipients, as "figurative" elaborations rather than representing a level of reality that is normally unperceived. To us, this seems tantamount to thinking of many of God's revelations as if they were some sort of heavenly slide show, video or virtual reality performance. In saying this, we don't mean to disparage fellow children of God or their understanding of these things; we are just expressing what their ideas conjure up for us. In the last analysis, of course, we shall only be able to be more definite on many of these points when we have visions of this order ourselves or, ultimately, when we are made immortal spirits like Jesus, knowing as we are known.

We may at least clarify some points concerning visions by looking at the way original words in scripture, translated "vision" in our English versions, are used.

Old Testament (Hebrew)

chazon, a revelation, a prophecy, a divine communication, a

vision. This word signifies something specifically communicated from God. Some typical occurrences are:
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1 Samuel 3:1: "In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there
was no open vision" (AV).

Psalm 89:19: "Once you spoke in a vision, to your faithful people

you said; "I have bestowed strength on a warrior...I have found David my servant..."

Isaiah 1:1 "The vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem..." (What follows is all words! This "vision is spoken!)

Jeremiah 23:16: "Do not listen to what the false prophets are
prophesying to you...They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord".

In fact, all the occurrences of chazon seem to be connected with speaking, not primarily with visual images (as in the case of the revelations of the Throne Room), though the oral revelation was often given in circumstances in which the prophet was seeing things he would not normally be able to see. Note the

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last example above; the true vision or revelation, as presented by this Hebrew word, is from the mouth of the Lord.

In any case, none of the visions of the Throne Room are recorded in terms using chazon to describe the experience of the prophet. The same comment can be made of the cognate Hebrew words chazot/chazut, chizayon and machazeh.

By contrast most of the "visions" - sightings - of the Throne Room have involved the verb lir'ot, which simply means "to see" - the sort of seeing we do every day with our eyes. The two words derived from this infinitive (or, more accurately, from the same root as the infinitive) are:

1) mar'ah, a seeing, a sighting, a vision.

The sense conveyed by this word is exemplified by:

Genesis 46:2: "And God spoke to Israel in a vision mar'ah at night

and said, "Jacob! Jacob!" The old man had had doubts about whether his son Joseph really could be still alive in Egypt so God

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reassures him to enable him to "see" that it really was best for him to make this journey.

Exodus 38:8: "They made the bronze basin and its bronze stand
from the mirrors mar'ot of the women who served at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting". Here the bronze "lookingglasses" (AV) are described by this word - the "seeing bronzes" or "face-view" or "face-vision" mirrors.

Ezekiel 1:1: "I saw visions of God". Here both the words translated
"saw" and "visions" are of the same root "to see". "I was seeing sightings (or sights) of God", seems to be the literal translation.

Both Ezekiel (1:1; 8:3; 40:2; 43:3) and Daniel (10:7; 10:8;

10:10) use mar'ah several times to convey what they saw.

2). mareh, a sight, the sight of (the eyes), appearance, sightly (i.e. opposite of unsightly), vision,

Genesis 3:6: "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was
good for food and pleasing to the eye (sightly)..."
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Genesis 24:16: "The girl was very beautiful" (mareh, eye-worthy,

fair to look at, sightly)... (A similar use of mareh is made in

Genesis 39:6 about Joseph's attractiveness, while in Genesis 41:23 it is used of both the sightly and unsightly cows that Pharaoh
saw in his dream).

Exodus 3:3 "I will go over and see this strange sight - why the
bush does not burn up"; Moses in Horeb, encountering the burning bush. The simple NIV rendering is quite correct. Here both the words translated "see" (er'eh) and "sight" (mareh) are of the same root "to see".

Exodus 24:17: "To the Israelites the glory of the Lord looked like
(mareh) a consuming fire on top of the mountain". Clearly, the supernatural glory, seen with unaided human eyes, looked different from what Moses was enabled to see. Yet the same word applies to both cases; they "saw sights/appearances."

Leviticus 13:3: "(if) the sore appears (mareh) to be more than skin
deep..." (AV: "the plague in sight be deeper than..."). This form of expression occurs 11 times in Leviticus 13 and 14 and refers to normal visual appearance.
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Numbers 8:4: "The lamp stand was made exactly like the pattern
(the appearance, mareh) the Lord had shown Moses". A visual original, to be copied in making the lamp stand for the earthly tent, is clearly indicated here.

Numbers 9:13: "...the cloud above the tabernacle looked like (AV,
"had as it were the appearance of") fire".

Judges 13:6: "A man of God came to me. He looked like mareh an
angel of God, very awesome."

1 Samuel 16:7: "But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not consider his
appearance (mar'eyhu i.e. appearance [mareh] of him) or his height...The LORD does not look at the things man looks at... the
LORD looks at the heart".

Isaiah 52:14: "His appearance (mareh, AV "visage") was so

disfigured..."

Isaiah 53:2: "He had no beauty (mareh, sightliness) or majesty to

attract us to him..."
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All

the foregoing are clearly references to visual

appearance, sightly or otherwise, as seen by human eyes. Why, then, should anyone assert that the same word changes its meaning to refer to something that's "not really there" when it is used in the following contexts (the word mareh is indicated by the italics):

Ezekiel 1:5: "In appearance their form was that of a man..."

Ezekiel 1:13-14: "The appearance of the living creatures was like

burning coals of fire...like (AV, as the appearance of) flashes of lightning".

Ezekiel 1:16: "This was the appearance and structure of the

wheels..."

Ezekiel 1:26a: "Above the expanse over their heads what looked like a throne of sapphire..."

Ezekiel 1:26b: "and high above on the throne was a figure like that
of a man..."
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Ezekiel 1:27-28: "I saw that from what appeared to be his waist
up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and from there (i.e. what appeared to be his waist) down he looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance round him". This passage in Ezekiel 1 is the only occasion, that we can find, that a word translated "vision" under certain circumstances is used of one of the Throne Room theophanies or appearances of God. Clearly, in all the above usages from Ezekiel 1 the meaning is simply that what the prophet saw could best be described by him as having the "appearance of" or as "looking like" something he and his readers could identify and recognise.

All the rest of the descriptions of the Throne Room are simply encompassed by the verb "to see". Just as we see what is before us, with our eyes, so (it seems from this study) did the prophets see the Throne in Heaven. If what we see with our eyes be accepted as being "really there" then so must be the Throne in Heaven; the fact that most of the time it is invisible to us is due to God's concealing it from us, not because it isn't really there.

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New Testament (Greek)

horama: vision, sight.

This is the word used of what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration: "Tell the vision to no man ..." (AV) "Don't tell anyone what you have seen..." (NIV) (Matthew 17:9). The NIV conveys something much more commonplace ("what you have seen") than does the AV ("the vision"). We would not be having as many problems now, in trying to understand what is meant by a "vision", if all translators had simply used the word "seen" right from the beginning!

Another, instructive, use of horama concerns Peter. In

Acts 10:9-17 Peter is reported to have had a "classic" vision - he

fell into a trance and was shown the sheet full of all kinds of creatures. In Acts 12:1-10 we read of Peter's release from prison by an angel and during the proceedings Peter could not tell whether what he was seeing was really happening - "he thought he was seeing a vision" (v9). If Peter could not tell the difference between what he saw by the normal process of using his eyes and what God revealed to him in a "vision" this does suggest that there is no great difference between to two. Peter, at least, might have been expected to be able to differentiate between God-given vision and eye-generated vision - provided, of course,
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there are any perceivable differences between the two processes upon which to base a differentiation. So far, there do not seem to be any such differences.

Another occurrence of horama has a curious and perhaps very natural context, though it is concealed by current translations. In Acts 16:9 we read: "During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us"." It is rather interesting that up to this point we are reading of "Paul and his companions" whereas in v10, immediately after this "vision", we read: "immediately we sought to go into Macedonia" indicating that during the night of the "vision" Luke had joined Paul's group. Could it be that on this occasion the Spirit of Jesus (v7) had arranged for Luke, a "man of Macedonia", to make his arrival in order to appear and plead in person on his Lord's behalf for the Gospel to be taken over to his people? If that were the case, the passage might better be translated: "During the night Paul saw a man of Macedonia appear, standing and begging him.... and having seen this sight,

immediately... "

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In fact, horama is translated "sight" - and clearly means precisely and only that - in Acts 7:31 where Stephen tells how Moses experienced the revelation of the angel in the flames of a burning bush. "When he saw this, he was amazed at the sight (horama)".

horasis, act of seeing, sight, vision.

This word is used in Acts 2:17 in the famous quotation from Joel: "Your young men will see visions..." and would thus seem to denote the "classical" visionary experience of some kind of supernatural perception.

However, the word is also used in Revelation 4:3: "And the one who sat there had the appearance (horasis) of jasper..." which again sounds very much like ordinary sight, as though there really is nothing to distinguish between what we normally see with our eyes and what God enables people to see which, apart from his help, they would not be able to see.

Since the Old Testament scriptures seem to describe a Throne Room which can be seen like any other "real" object (i.e. with our eyes, or at least, our brains occipital cortices) and the New Testament uses words which indicate that God-facilitated
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visions could not be distinguished from "real" happenings even by experienced apostles, we maintain that there are no grounds on which it can be claimed that things seen in "visions" are "not really there".

On the basis of all the foregoing we believe that "in vision" the Lord permits mortals to see what is "there" but not perceptible by means of our physical sense organs; mortals are, "in vision" or "in the Spirit", permitted to glimpse what the immortals (the Father, the Saviour and the angels) see as a matter of course.

Visions are not just pictorial representations, like a heavenly slide-show, video or virtual reality simulation of what is "not really there". Visions "in spirit" are glimpses of reality. "For what is (normally) seen is temporary, but what is (normally) unseen is eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Before we pass on to consider metachronology and then the important questions which arise from the experiences of prophets and apostles of the Throne Room, we ought to try to address just one more aspect of "visions" which troubles some and
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makes it difficult for them to accept that "visions" show us a normally-hidden "reality":

Visions: If they represent "reality" why are they often so strange, even weird?

Firstly, it is important to remember that, as we have seen, the original Hebrew and Greek words translated "vision" cover the whole spectrum of divine revelation from the directly spoken word and apparently "physical" appearance of angels, right through to the often (to us) weird visions of the apocalyptic type. If certain visions, such as those of the Throne Room (or of any other subject), be claimed to be "figurative" non-literal revelations, at what point in the "vision continuum" does one draw the line separating "reality" from "figure"?

The visions of the Lord in glory are revelations of things which are eternal; eternal things must be more "real" than those which are temporal!

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Some visions incorporate (to us) very strange elements. We suggest that this is because:

1 Seeing as immortals do seems to involve seeing time as a component of what is seen; four-dimensional vision, at least, it should be if this thesis on the mastery of time by immortals has any validity!

2 The LORD, as we have seen above, looks "on the heart", not just on outward appearances to which we are limited by the laws of physics. It seems that to immortals, for example, aggressive empires look like rampaging beasts, the turbulent wickedness of men looks like a rough and dangerous sea, and power centres are seen as the sky and associated heavenly bodies. The newlyresurrected Saviour, in spirit sight, appeared as a freshly-slain lamb, while in glory on the throne of his Father as lord of all he is an awesome figure resplendent with fire.

3 The "living beings", the cherubim and the seraphim, do all seem very strange companions to the recognisably human-like occupant of the throne and the clearly human-like redeemed who throng the Throne Room. We can only suggest that heavenly, spirit,
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bodies, freed from the constraints of the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, can assume, at the Creator's will, forms which would be impossible for mortal bodies to assume. We suspect that we will, when we (in God's mercy and love) come into these wondrous heavenly places, see many more wonders than these.

We hope these thoughts will help as we go on to think about metachronology and the Throne Room experiences and look to answer some of the questions that arise.

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Chapter 4 Important visions:

70

questions

arising from these

Who is the One on the Throne? Who make up the multitude around it? What and where is the building? aving already glimpsed the structures associated with the Throne Room and having briefly noted its occupants we now need to identify the one upon the throne and

the multitude around it. Lets take the elements of the scene as they unfold:

You will have noticed that the descriptions that those privileged to see the Throne Room, from Moses to John, gradually become more and more detailed. This shouldnt surprise us as many themes in the Bible develop in much the same way. To take the supreme example, that of God as Redeemer of all mankind who will turn to him, a theme we shall refer to in more detail later; in the Law and Prophets the references to such a hope are thin on detail; Isaiah, for instance, used Redeemer as part of Gods title when he wrote: This is what the LORD says your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel... (Isaiah 43:14). Or again, Job, in his desperate plight, could still affirm that: I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth... (Job 19:25). But it is not until we get to Jesus and his saving ministry that we perceive something of the enormity of his
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mission and what it cost him and his Father. True, the Psalmist (one of the sons of Korah) gave a hint of what might be involved when he wrote: (Psalm 49:7-9): No man can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for him - the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough, that he should live on forever and not see decay.

In spite of this assertion, however, he confidently continues (v15): But God will redeem my life from the grave; he will surely take me to himself. (NIV) Even though the cost is admitted to be unpayable by us, this gives little hint of what, for example, John records of the price Jesus paid throughout his life.

So it is with the detail of the Throne Room. Isaiah tells us more than Moses, Ezekiel more than Isaiah while Daniel prepares us for Johns detail by including mentions of items which John then fills in with his descriptive reporting.

So far as the one on the throne goes, although the passage in Isaiah refers to the seraph singing the praises of the Lord God
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of Hosts (or the Lord God of heavenly armies) we shall see that the Lord on the throne was none other than Jesus Himself.

There seems to be something of a consensus among scholars that Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1, Daniel 7 and Revelation 4-5 are all visions of Jesus on the throne of his glory in the Millennium. Actually, this does not take much working out as the Spirit through John (John 12:41) tells us that in the vision of his sixth chapter "Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him". Since Bible students from many

backgrounds generally agree that the reports from Exodus,

Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation are connected revelations of

much the same heavenly scene, Johns comment can be applied to them all. A few examples of this identification:

First, in connection with Isaiah 6 to which John refers, Rabbi David Stern, of the Messianic Jewish Community, has no hesitation in identifying the throne with Jesus in glory. He comments on the John 12:41 reference above:

John apparently means that in this heavenly vision Isaiah had a glimpse of Jesus future manifest glory; and since Jesus is to be included in the concept of Adonai (Lord), there is no a priori
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reason to suppose that Isaiahs vision was of God the Father. (pg 194, Jewish New Testament Commentary, 1992, Jewish New Testament Publications; italics as per Stern, we have altered Hebrew name forms to their more familiar Anglicised versions.)

So, back to Revelation 4-5:

The Speakers Commentary was so called because the

proposal to undertake such a large and detailed study of scripture came from the then Speaker in Parliament; it took Anglican theologians eighteen years to complete its thirteen hefty volumes in 1881! Regretfully, it is seldom encountered now. Its

bibliographic reference is a bit prolix: The Holy Bible according to

the Authorised Version of 1611, with an explanatory and critical Commentary and a Revision of the Translation, by Bishops and other Clergy of the Anglican Church; editor F.C. Cook, Canon of
Exeter; We are considering New Testament, Vol. IV, 'Hebrews to

the Revelation of St John; John Murray, London, 1881.

The Commentary identifies the scene in Revelation 4 and 5 as revealing God, as the God of the Redeemed, the Father upon

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the throne with, in the midst of the throne, the Lamb still bearing the tokens of the cross. (pp 551-570).

Admitting that it is difficult for mortals to visualise how a second being can be seated in the midst of an already occupied throne; one exegete, quoted by Speakers, suggests that the throne was semi-circular.... The four and twenty Elders are said to represent the Churches of the Old and the New Covenants.

The Commentary links the scene and proceedings with those in

Ezekiel 1-10, Isaiah 6 and Daniel 7 just as we have done though

without, of course, recognizing the metachronological aspects that we have picked up. Summing up, perhaps the interpretation of Speakers would be that this scene represents the Redeemed Creation standing before the throne of God. And that, in our submission and in terms of our kind of time, will follow the return of Jesus to judge both living and dead.

Stern has no hesitation in asserting the basic unity of the visions of Exodus 24, Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 7, Daniel 7 and Revelation

4-7. Of Revelation 4-7 he writes:

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"Johns vision closely resembles several found in the

Tanakh. (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament). Exodus 24:9-11 says that

Moses, two sons of Aaron and seventy two elders "saw the God of Israel" on "a paved work of sapphire stone as clear as heaven", very much like the sea of glass, clear as crystal of Revelation 4:6a (also see 15:2). The k'ruvim (Cherubs) Ezekiel saw closely resemble the living beings of vv 6b-8a (Ezekiel 1:5-11; 10:12; 1415); he also saw a man on a throne with surroundings very similar to those John describes in vv 2-6a (Ezekiel 1:22, 26-28; 10:1). The prophet Micaiah said, "I saw the LORD sitting on his throne and all the army of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left" (1 Kings 22:19, 2 Chronicles 18:18). Isaiah wrote, "I saw the
LORD sitting on a throne, high and lifted up" (Isaiah 6:1). He too

saw winged beings (s'rafim, seraphs) who worshipped God in language like that of Revelation 4:8b, crying to each other, "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of heaven's armies" (the LORD of Hosts) (Isaiah 6:2-3)...." (italics and bold type are as per Stern, we have altered Hebrew names to their more familiar Anglicised forms; ibid, pp 804-805)

Likewise, in our view, the presence of the redeemed from every nation before the throne implies a time after the

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resurrection of the saints to immortal life, an event to take place at the Second Coming of Christ.

So, the throne room "in heaven" is, in fact, the Lord's sanctuary of the temple in Jerusalem during the Millennium still, as yet, in our future.

We use the term "Millennium" because it is widely accepted as referring to the time of the rule of the returned Jesus over his kingdom on earth some time in the future (as we now reckon time, anyway) from now. It could be that it will be of 1000 years' duration (i.e. one thousand earth years as we know them) or some other long period of earth time. The duration of 1000 years is mentioned only in the Apocalypse (Revelation 20:4) and in that book just about every other time period is taken to be figurative or symbolic of something else, at least by our standards of time. In any case, it looks as if it will last for some

(substantial) duration of time. The precise duration of the process of putting down all authority and power (1 Corinthians 15), and of finally destroying death itself, does not seem too important for our purpose.

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Likewise, we make no assumptions as to what other structure(s) there may or may not be at the centre of world government in the kingdom of Christ on earth. We are concerned only with what has been seen, namely the divine sanctuary which we call the Throne Room where the Lord meets with his people in the eternal fellowship of the Israel of God, (Galatians 6:16) and from which go out all the decisions and decision-enforcing agencies necessary for the control of the history of the world.

So we find, bizarrely, that the Belinda Carlisle lyric heaven

is a place on earth was theologically spot on! This is very

remarkable, because many of us are used to thinking of heaven as another realm altogether, in another dimension.

Well, we never promised you an easy ride, did we?

The points arising from these visions and the common question which arises from all of them may be stated as follows:

Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and John (among others) were shown the glorified Jesus upon his throne. Yet, in the time of the Old Testament prophets, Jesus had not yet been born;
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the nativity of the Son of God was still hundreds of years in the future. His Kingdom was millennia away. Nonetheless Isaiah talked with him, in a physical, human form and so did Ezekiel; both were given commissions by Jesus which changed the course of Israel's history.

HOW COULD THIS BE?

The prophets, in addition to seeing Jesus, also saw the redeemed, the saints of the Most High, called out of every nation, tribe, people and language, before Jesus' throne in their myriads. Yet the saints are, even "now" (in our experience of time), still in their graves awaiting their resurrection and transformation to immortality. The writer to the Hebrews explicitly says: All these [men of old] though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. (Hebrews 11:39-40, NIV)

Nonetheless Isaiah, Daniel and John, for example, saw the redeemed saints in enormous numbers, heard them in song and saw their movements.

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Most readers will have a lot of awkward questions at this point. More on this in our first stepping-stone digression, at the end of this section.

What are we to make of that multitude of the redeemed around the throne? What were they doing millennia in the

past?

HOW COULD THIS BE?

It was in an attempt to answer this recurring question that, gradually over many years, the ideas we are sharing here took shape. There seemed to be something about the facility with which the glorified Jesus of the Millennium involved himself in Old Testament history which demanded a reconsideration of what time is - at least as far as the immortals are concerned.

Besides (and we have not raised this in our brief sketch of the throne room) the identification of the one on the throne with the glorified Jesus raises questions about, for example, the "one like a son of man" (Daniel 7:13) or the "Lamb, looking as if it had been slain" (Revelation 5:6) which come before the one on
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the throne. Both are clearly Jesus at different stages of his work fulfilling his Father's purpose, but it does seem odd, to say the least, that Jesus should interact thus with himself, being seated on his throne and receiving himself into his presence. Again, the recurring question:

HOW COULD THIS BE?

Whenever "heaven was opened" or the "throne in heaven" was revealed, what was seen was the sanctuary of the temple in Jerusalem in the time of the Kingdom following the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus. We suspect that access to this sanctuary will be limited to the immortals, with (perhaps) special exception being made for favoured faithful mortals as was done in the past for apostles and prophets. Indeed, it is quite likely that the Throne Room will be, to the eyes of the mortal population, shrouded in the immense clouds which Old Testament writers record.

Yet, from the viewpoint of the early 21 st century, the Throne Room is not yet the centre of an earthly kingdom of God. The occupants, or at least, the multitudes of redeemed faithful, are still awaiting the call to the resurrection of life. Some have
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probably not yet been born, depending on how long we have left before the Last Day. They do not yet, to our way of thinking at least, exist!

All these appearances of a future government of a future kingdom are therefore metachronological.

HOW COULD THIS BE?

It would seem, from what has been set before us in the visions we have looked at, as though there is something very special about the immortal state which allows immortals to have access to the "past" as well as "present" and "future", something which enables them to make metachronological

appearances to selected people millennia before (in "earth time", anyway) they received their immortality. Immortality would seem to be much more than just living on and on into the future with time proceeding just as it does now.

The ideas that follow are our attempt to pull these and many other scriptures together so as to draw closer to eternity and to glimpse what immortality may be like and what it may be
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about. It seems to us that this is what God wants us to try to do. After speaking of this time-bound life ("There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven", and ""He has made everything beautiful in its time") Kohelet says also of God: "He has also set eternity in the hearts of men..." (Ecclesiastes 3:1-11a)

Let us, in what follows, try to draw close to eternity, to immortality. We think that many of you will find that it's already in your heart, even if you don't as yet know it, as the place "where your treasure is".

Bibliography for this section Nowells, Rick and Shipley, Elaine, Heaven is a Place on Earth 1987, Heaven on Earth album, Belinda Carlisle, Virgin Records

Stern, D.H. Jewish New Testament Commentary 1992, Jewish New Testament Publications

Cook, F.C. (editor, Canon of Exeter) The Holy Bible according to

the Authorised Version of 1611, with an explanatory and critical

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Commentary and a Revision of the Translation, by Bishops and other Clergy of the Anglican Church; New Testament, Vol. IV, 'Hebrews to the Revelation of St John; John Murray, London,
1881

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Stepping-stone 1: Afterlife: What does the Bible say happens when youre dead?

What do we know about any Afterlife? After what? After death of course! This is a question that has troubled human-kind for as far back as we have any records, thousands of years so how can we expect to answer it more fully in a book such as this? Well, when you have read this book, and seen how one can, by looking at the Bible with twenty-first century eyes, make a lot more progress towards knowing what happens to us when we die than was possible for earlier writers. Even the word immortality gains new meaning.

In 1 Timothy 6:15 Paul refers to God who alone is immortal. So clearly only the Creator has an inherent capacity to avoid end of days, regardless of how many others he may bestow eternal life upon. However, many churches have embraced the concept of people having an inherent immortal soul that inevitably persists after the death of the body, in either a happy or unhappy state, but no matter how elaborately or dogmatically churches may choose to promote the idea, (Roman Catholics, for example, are required to accept the concept) the Bible simply never uses such the term immortal soul anywhere at all! Nor, indeed, do we find narratives where the conventional terminology employed by many Christians- so and so died and went to heaven (or indeed hell) occurs.

As the popular theologian and current Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, puts 85

it: Jesus and the writers of the New Testament have very little to say about going to heaven when you die. When I point this out to my students, as I do from time to time, they look shocked. Why? Very often, people have come to the New Testament with the presumption that going to heaven when you die is the implicit point of it all, of Christianity, and indeed of all religion. They acquire that viewpoint from somewhere, but not from the New Testament (pg 6, N.T. Wright, New Heavens, New Earth: A Biblical Picture of the

Christian Hope , 1999 Grove Books Ltd, Cambridge, UK)

God will know his own? So how does the Bible talk about the death state? As we hinted in the introduction, different passages throughout the Bible teach seem to teach different ideas that are not obviously easy to reconcile- so lets explore some of them before suggesting how these problems can be resolved.

First of all, check out 1 Kings 22:50, where the death of Jehoshaphat, a really Godly man, is described:

Then Jehoshaphat rested with his fathers and was buried with them in the city of David his father Now contrast 2 Kings 16:20, where that of the deeply wicked Ahaz is described:

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And Ahaz rested with his fathers and was buried with them in the city of David.

Note that in each case both men had a mix of righteous and wicked ancestors. Is there really so little distinction between the righteous and the wicked? These two verses are typical of how the Old Testament writes up the end of numerous characters lives.

Grim and Grimmer? In Psalm 6:5 David writes: Noone remembers you when he is dead. Who praises you from his grave?

In Psalm 30:8-9 he writes: Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness?

Heman in Psalm 88 writes:

(v5) I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom
you remember no more, who are cut off from your care (vv10-12) Do you show your wonders to the dead? Do those who are dead rise up and praise you? Is your love declared in the grave, your faithfulness in Destruction? [Abaddon] Are your wonders known in the place of darkness, or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?

The righteous Hezekiah expresses similar views in Isaiah 38:18: For the grave cannot praise you, death cannot sing your praise; those who go down to the pit cannot hope for your faithfulness. 87

Ecclesiastes 3: 18-21:
I also thought, As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Mans fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: as one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and all to dust return.

Ecclesiastes 6:6
Do not all go to the same place?

Ecclesiastes 9:5-6
For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun.

Clearly these writers express no awareness of immortality of the soul although it was a popular concept among the surrounding nations of their day. The Egyptians, for example, the Israelites immediate neighbours, are famous for their elaborate concept of the afterlife.

But of course we cant take these passages entirely at face value in the light of other scriptures.

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Awake, O sleeper, and rise from death One of the sons of Korah writes more optimistically in Psalm 49:15. In spite of using language very similar to that of Ecclesiastes, he draws a distinction between the fate of the righteous and wicked: God will redeem my life from the grave; he will surely take me to himself.

In Daniel 12:2,13 an immortal being, possibly Gabriel or even Jesus himself, tells the prophet: As for you, go your way until the end. You will rest, and then at the end of days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.

But this is about the only explicit teaching of the resurrection in the Old Testament! By the time of Jesus, the Sadducee movement, who emphasized the 5 books of the Torah over any of the later scriptures, saw no reason to believe in a resurrection or afterlife. (Acts 23:8) In Mark 12:24-27 they bait Jesus with a good old chestnut about the woman with 7 husbands at the resurrection. He retorts: Are you not in error because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God? When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. Now about the dead rising- have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!

And now for something completely different Yet in Acts 7:59-60 when we read of the death of Stephen, we have the odd combination of these statements: 89

While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Then he fell on his knees and cried out, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. When he had said this, he fell asleep.

By now you may well be feeling that if any more light is shed on the subject, we will soon know nothing about it all, but persevere a while longer!

In John 11: 23-26 the picture gets even more complex:

Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise again. Martha answered I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?

The grief-stricken and bemused Martha, doubtless in no state of mind to unpick this teaching, can only express her faith in the divine man before her.

And then it gets even more confusing. (We apologise if this is beginning to feel as if youre being mentally tangoed!)

In 2 Timothy 4:18 Paul writes The Lordwill bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. Then in Philippians 1:20-24 he states: I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is 90

better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.

But now, and lastly, lets look at his statements in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, and this passage particularly merits careful reading: Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men who have no hope. We believe Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lords own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left to the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who are fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

Then Hebrews 11:39-40, which we considered in the last chapter, reiterates the point made in 1 Thessalonians, from a different angle: These [faithful dead] were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Putting it all together So; lets make some obvious points:

Many passages describe death as an unconscious sleep. Many passages teach a raising of the dead in the future at Jesus 91

coming. Death is also sometimes described as if one goes instantly to God. Those dead and those living at Christs coming are raised to glory

together.
If we think metachronologically, the problem resolves. The dead person experiences no lapse of time, even of thousands of years, from their last breath to the resurrection. They simply do not effectively exist, personally, in the gap, however much they may seem dead to us or lie as cold clay. God too perceives no gap between the mortal that dies and the immortal that rises; they are already experiencing the intermittent (from our point of view) nature of their Personal Event Sequence. (see below!)

As Tom Wright observes: When Paul also uses the language of sleep, as he does in 1 Corinthians 15.51 and 1 Thessalonians 4.13-15, this is a metaphor, but not a misleading metaphor. When one sleeps, one is still alive, albeit, as we sometimes say, dead to the world (Pg 20, Wright, N. T. New Heavens, New Earth) The language of immortality itself, then, has to be held within the whole sweep of thought from creation to new creation. Some churches, I have noticed, have stopped saying merely of the departed may they rest in peace, and have added and rise in glory. That, it seems to me, is a thoroughly proper thing to say of those who have gone on ahead of us. (Pg 23, Wright, N. T. New Heavens, New Earth)

And again: Far too often today Christians slide back into thinking of the immortality of the soul, of mere survival in some shadowy existence, or of a disembodied 92

heaven, as the ultimate destination of Gods people Heaven, or as some Jews called it, paradise, is a temporary resting-place, in between bodily death and bodily resurrection Gods future for his people is a newly embodied life on a renewed earth, married to a renewed heaven. This is the hope that followers of Jesus must keep before their eyes. (pg84, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship, 1994, SPCK)

Brian D. McLaren is of the same mind: But for Jesus and for most of his contemporaries, the ultimate hope beyond death was not to live forever in a timeless disembodied state away from the earth. Instead, they anticipated resurrection, an embodied state within the creation in a new era or age when present wrongs would be made right. (pg 184, The Secret Message of Jesus, 2006, W Publishing)

But what about? Many readers will be curious about the Rich Man and Lazarus parable in

Luke 16:19-31. Jesus is doing a number of things with his telling of this
story, none of which involve teaching about the nature of the afterlife. He takes a well-worn moral fable popular with some Jews of his day, who rationalised the problem of their belief in the immortal soul with a day of future resurrection and judgment, by imagining the wicked and righteous dead already being divided for bliss and torment in the underworld, Sheol, (NB: neither heaven nor the conventional hell!) while waiting for bodily resurrection. The conventional tale (actually derived from a pagan Egyptian fable!) makes a great deal of how sinful the rich man and how righteous the poor man were, but this element was so familiar to his audience that Jesus didnt bother to spell it out. He takes his own friend Lazarus, whose rising 93

from the dead would only provoke the Sanhedrin to try and kill both Jesus and Lazarus, (John 12:10) and contrasts him with Caiaphas and his five brothers-in-law, the sons of the High Priest Annas, (Cf. Josephus Antiquities

of the Jews, Book 20, chapter 9, section 1) to provide the punch-line they
will not believe even if one should rise from the dead. Note, incidentally, that no-where in Moses and the prophets are people warned of fiery torments after death, although Deuteronomy 28 certainly describes hell on earth. This consideration of passages is not exhaustive, but it does address the range of teaching to be considered. Some issues relating to the state of the dead, and particularly the wicked dead, will be addressed in a later steppingstone on the devil. (All scripture quotes above are from the NIV.) Further Reading for Stepping Stone 1: Josephus, Flavius

Antiquities

of

the

Jews,

94,

available

on

earlyjewishwritings.com & also gutenberg.org McLaren, Brian D. The Secret Message of Jesus, 2006, W Publishing, Nashville Wright, N. T.

New Heavens, New Earth: A Biblical Picture of the Christian Hope, 1999 Grove Books Ltd, Cambridge, UK

Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship, 1994 SPCK

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Chapter 5 Metachronology

irstly, we will set out our reasons for choosing the prefix

meta. Among the many dictionary usages of meta- as a

prefix are the following:

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"In succession to; after": We use it to mean "in succession to conventional chronology", or. "that which comes after

conventional chronology in the sense that a higher follows a lower form of something (Einstein's cosmology came after Newton's, for example). So relating to the Afterlife, or the next world, as the expressions are.

"Situated behind": we consider metachronology to be the underlying reality "behind" conventional chronology.

"Beyond;

transcending; of a higher type": So the

metachronology of immortals is "beyond" our time-bound state, "transcending" it, just as God's ways and thoughts transcend those of mortals (Isaiah as having

55:8-9).
a

We

use

the

term to

"metachronology"

similar

relationship

"chronology" as does "metaphysics" to "physics". Metaphysics is the study of "the things after those relating to external nature" and "treats of the relations obtaining between the underlying reality and its manifestations".

Please note that very rarely one comes across the word "metachronism" in literature. In this context the word is used to
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mean the same thing as the much more common "anachronism", i.e. something out of date, anachronistic. We are not using the term "metachronology" in anything like this sense and feel that the very rarity, perhaps even obsolescence, of the word "metachronism" makes it reasonable to ignore it.
Metachronology, then, as we use the word, is the relationship of beings not bound by time to the chronology of beings who are so bound.

Metachronology also describes the way in which, if we understand the visions and statements of the Bible correctly, the things immortals do are related to each other, so that events we would think of as coming "before" other events (as we understand time) may in fact come "after" them or in parallel with them. We hope the concept will develop naturally as we proceed. We have called this aspect the Personal Event Sequence (PES).

Maybe it would be useful to define the idea of the Personal Event Sequence at this point. It seems to us, although we have no personal experience of immortal living, that even "beyond our (kind of) time" there will be a clear sequence of events so far as an individual's personal involvement in them is concerned.

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Clearly, for all the immortals except the Father himself, the PES begins with our first consciousness of growing up as an infant. Then we experience childhood, adulthood and finally death. The PES then continues with the resurrection and elevation to immortality. Then what? We think that there must be a coherent sequence even to immortal activity. Regardless of what the sequence and timing may appear to be from the mortal point of view, we feel pretty certain that for the individual involved a clear sequence is maintained. The following example may help.

Event order in the Personal Event Sequence of the immortal, with the historical location of the activity:

1 Go to Hezekiah in Jerusalem c.700 BC 2 Go to Moses at Sinai c.1400 BC 3 Go to Paul in the ship near Malta in the Mediterranean c.60 AD 4 Go to East Germany 1989 AD 5 Go to Hagar fleeing from Sarai in South Canaan c.1900 BC

In this hypothetical PES the second event is clearly after the first in the metachronological experience of the immortal
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whose PES it is. From a mortal human (chronological) viewpoint, however, event number two seems to be before (about 700 years before) the first.

Likewise, event three seems, and is, after event two. It is after in the sense that it is next in the PES and after in the sense that it is carried out later (about 1460 years) later than event two.

The same reasoning can be applied to event four, but then event five, while last in this short PES extract, is carried out some 4000 years before number four in historical terms. Event five was after event four in metachronology, but long before it if viewed in conventional chronology.

We hope this helps your metachronological thinking as you continue to work through this study!

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Chapter 6 God's mastery of time

Some scriptures relating to divine freedom from time constraints

The Potentate of Time

ince God is the name we give to the first and greatest of immortals (however we picture him and whatever our concept of his powers/involvement in our current times)
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he is the one we should look to for our first sample of data on immortals and the immortal state. It is evident from the well known words of Peter (2 Peter

3:8) that time does not proceed at a steady rate for the
Creator: "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years" (time is dilatable) "and a thousand years are like a day" (time is compressible). To this we could add the words of Moses (Psalm

90:4): "For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has
just gone by, or like a watch in the night."

If we are to try to understand God's view of things we will have to take a very different, metachronological, view of time from the one we are accustomed to.

We will never, this side of the Kingdom, get to full understanding, but in this work we try to take a few tentative steps in this direction. The results will not, as already indicated, be comfortable to all, while they may prove thrilling to some; they do, however, (again as we have already noted), lead us to consider some scriptures Christians generally do not do well at interpreting and which therefore tend to pass over quickly and uncomfortably.

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We have noted that Scripture suggests that time does not always proceed at a steady rate so far as the Creator is concerned. Does it always go in the same direction? Apart from the fact that we have seen that the Redeemer and his saints appeared, metachronologically, in millennial glory to the prophets and apostles, several other lines of reasoning suggest that it does not, and that it is just as easy and normal for God to move backwards in time (as we see it anyway) as forwards:

One or two examples of what we mean might help here:

1 In scripture forthcoming events are often foretold in what is known to theologians as the prophetic perfect. In short, the Lord describes the future in language usually reserved for past, completed actions. One example will suffice: God said to Abram: "I have made you" (not, "I will make you") "a father of many nations." (Genesis 17:5)

This use of past for future is usually taken as indicating the certainty of fulfilment of such pronouncements by a God who plans, knows and controls what is to come.

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But may we not take it more literally? May we not visualise the Lord talking to Abraham from the viewpoint of, say, our present day? He would see the teeming multitudes of Semitic peoples he has made from Abraham and say, quite simply and factually: "I have made you a father of many nations".

We might remember also the import of Romans 4:17: "...and calls things that are not as if they were" or, more literally, "as being". Things which to us are non-existent are actually present as far as God is concerned. Such would only require the Lord to be able to travel forward and backwards in time (as men dream about in their science fiction) or, more likely, to be beyond time but able to interact with his time-bound creation.

And can we not see the same one saying to Abraham: "I have just pulled your descendants out of Egypt" (to paraphrase) "but that will be in 400 years as you understand time"? At any rate, the use of the prophetic perfect is consistent with a God who moves backwards in time as well as forwards, from the fulfilment to the prophecy, with a God who can with equal facility (and at the same "time") converse with the glorified resurrected

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Abraham in the Kingdom and the mortal pilgrim in Canaan nearly 4000 years ago.

2 The Law through Moses, we are told, was but a shadow, of which the reality is Christ (see for example Colossians 2:17). Have you noticed how odd this is? In our experience the object comes first, then its shadow; we cannot throw a shadow without an object! Yet we are told that the Law was the shadow cast by something which came into existence 1400 years later!

We suggest that in God's metachronological experience of time Christ did come first and threw his shadow into Old Testament times; we suggest therefore that it is as natural for God to reverse the flow of time and to be present in and interact with the past as it is for us to think of time moving past us (or however we personally visualise it) in one direction only. We hope to build on this thought, and make it more explicit, in our next chapter, The Lord Jesus.

3 N.T. Wright picks up on this time-telescoping of reality in his consideration of John 11:23-26: Jesus reply to [Martha] and the conversation they then have, show the back to the future idea isnt entirely a movie-makers
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fantasy. Instead of looking at the past, and dreaming what might have been, (but now cant be), he invites her to look to the future. Then, having looked to the future, he asks her to imagine that the future is suddenly brought forwards into the present. This, in fact, is central to all early Christian beliefs about Jesus she isnt prepared for Jesus response. The future has burst into the present. Jesus has not just come, as we sometimes say or sing, from heaven to earth; it is equally true that he has come from Gods future into the present, into the mess and muddle of the world we know (pg 6-7, John for Everyone part 2 Chapters 11-21, 1992 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, London)

4 One further pointer to time's not being the unvarying irresistible thing we commonly suppose it to be comes from the language of the Old Testament. For example, George Stosch (The

Origin of Genesis, Elliot Stock, London, 1897) wrote (pg 36):

"Would it be too bold to assert that in its extraordinary simplicity of tenses, (Biblical) Hebrew reflects that time when eternity was still as time, and time as eternity?"
Stosch adds, in a footnote:
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"Imperfect and perfect, the only tenses, are, in fact, not tenses

at all, but represent the relation of incomplete and complete action."

Some have asked: Is subjection to time to be added to the list of things that changed with the Fall? Was that the occasion when mankind was made subject to time as we know it? (In passing we note that there is no mention of the time spent in Eden or of the age of Adam at his expulsion.) We honestly do not have a firm view on this. We have, though, up till now, assumed that the subjection to time began when the Creator brought the cosmos into being.

We cannot, on the other hand, exclude the possibility that Eden was a special case. If we believe that the Throne Room will be the focal point of Christs kingdom on earth, might it not be possible that it was on earth once before - long ago - before the fall of humankind led to separation from God and expulsion from Eden? We remember that the apostle Paul was caught up to Paradise (2 Corinthians 12:1-6; see under chapter 8, The Angels, below) which, by his reference to the third heaven implies involvement of the Throne Room; (cf. the 3 heavens and earths referred to in 2 Peter 3) we think it quite possible that the
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heavenly environs of the Throne Room sanctuary are, in fact, what in Genesis was called the Garden of Eden. If this were to be the case Eden and the whole of the Paradise landscape (garden and Throne Room together), at the time of Adam and Eves occupation of it, might have been running on heavenly not earth - time, beyond our kind of time. If this were to have been the case, the answer to the question as to whether earth time was imposed on man at the time of the Fall would be affirmative.

Stosch writes much more about Adam's contribution to the

Genesis record as, moved by the spirit of his Creator, Adam sets
down the history of the beginnings of all things. Just one example (pg 57):

"It will be evident from this passage ("In the day you eat ...") that 'ba yom' (in the day) without a doubt originally was not temporal, but relative in its meaning. The nature and value of a day reaches further than the day itself; that is the unconscious opinion of the first created, who stood nearer to eternity than to time, and thus could not misunderstand the expression "in the day"."

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5 We have already quoted in the Prologue Professor James Barr; he also argues: It would perhaps be possible in theory to maintain that before the creation of the world there was not something other than

time, but time of another kind; and: If, then, there is some
reason to suppose that Genesis meant that time began with creation, then there is at least some case for talking about eternity as a reality other than time. (pg 145, Biblical Words for

Time; 1962, SCM Press),

Barr further writes (ibid pp 146-147): ...there are passages mentioning God himself, the glory due to him, the unseen world, the everlasting fire, and so on, where it is extremely likely, if not certain, that the realities mentioned are taken by the writers to have been existent as such throughout the totality of time. Now while perhaps (or certainly) the writers would understand these realities not to be in a static condition throughout the totality of time, but to be living and active, it remains true that continuance in the same status, of being God or of being fire or whatever it is, throughout the totality of time, is rather different from the condition of beings which are ephemeral. In other words, when the writers say that God is eternal, they may well be saying rather more, or meaning rather
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more, than that his existence is conterminous with the totality of time. We may therefore consider it meaningful to speak of eternity as a useful designation for the kind of existence involved in these cases

In this book, we explore a number of these issues. Metachronology and the Book of Life We might pull these thoughts together, as we draw this introduction towards a close, with a glimpse of the Lord's omniscience from Psalm 139. We are here presented with a Lord to whom not only is the future known, but for whom it has a solid and real existence. The future is actually recorded (as a kind of personal prophecy) as it will unfold for each one of us before we are even born: "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be" (v16). Or, again: "Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD " (v4).

In his book: "Psalm 139, A study in the Omniscience of

God", (Banner of Truth Trust, London, 1965, pp80-81), Edward

Young, Professor of Old Testament, Westminster Theological

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Seminary, Philadelphia, PA, USA, writes (and we think this is worth extended quotation):

"God has a book, and in this book he writes the names of his people. In the New Testament this book is referred to as the Lamb's Book of Life, and only those will enter the heavenly city whose names are written therein. In the Psalm, however, the conception or at least the emphasis is a bit different. The thought here is that the entirety of the Psalmist's being, even including the days of his life, are inscribed in the book that belongs to God.

"By the days of his life the Psalmist has in mind all the vicissitudes that he must experience. All his life, each individual day with all that that day will bring, is written down by God in His own book.

"Furthermore, it is stated that these days of the Psalmist's life have been formed before there were any of them. If we translate the Hebrew literally, we may notice what an expressive thought is here given. "Days were formed, and there (was) not one among them."

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"Expressive as is this thought, it is nevertheless difficult and requires careful consideration. What actually is the Psalmist saying? If we understand his language aright, he is saying that the days of his life were actually formed before even one of them had come into existence. All his life, the details of each day,

had been written down in the book of God, before any of these days actually occurred." (Our italics)

No wonder the psalmist is permitted to exclaim: "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain"!

(v6)

Many baulk at the apparent implication of this passage from Psalm 139, i.e. that all is foreordained by God, that it is by our predestination that God is able to write our lives in his book before they happen, that we have, therefore, no freewill. Nothing of the sort is required by this passage. The Bible does teach that we have enough freewill to make eternal choices, and that God cannot save us if we exercise that freewill against his offer of life. It is God's foreknowledge that enables him to know in advance how, in the exercise of our freewill, we will choose. And, knowing how we will choose, he then predestines, calls,
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justifies and glorifies us. Some words from the Apocalypse may help us to visualise how this may be.

In the Book of Revelation there are two references to those "whose names have not been written from the creation of

the world in the Book of Life belonging to the Lamb that was
slain," (13:8) and "whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world." (17:8) Have you noticed, when reading this previously, how odd this is? That the Book of Life is, apparently, fully entered up from before Eden? That those "whose names are written in heaven" (Hebrews 12:23) do not have their names entered in that record as their lives develop and as they make their godly choices (as we might expect), but rather that the record bore their names from the creation of the world?

Hopefully this will help you to accept that the Lord does indeed live in the future (as well as the past) even though it is beyond us in our time-bound mortality; and, living in the future as well as our present and past, he knows us all, and watches us in all our days, "before one of them came to be." And it is of this knowledge, this foreknowledge, obtained by observing how we choose to use our freewill, that it is written: "For those God
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foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son" (Romans 8:29-30).

God does not limit his foreknowledge in order to grant us freewill, as some aver, (see below) he does not need to; rather his knowledge of how we shall choose enables him to write our names in the Book of Life, to "predestine" us, before we are born, before - even - the creation of the world.

Does the Omniscient God ever limit his foreknowledge of the future and thereby jeopardise his title, Omniscient?

We offer some further comment regarding the view held by some, referred to above, who find knowledge of the future too big an attribute for even the Omniscient God to possess. Professor William Lane Craig writes: The suggestion that the God described in the biblical tradition is ignorant of future contingents is, on the face of it, an extraordinary claim. For not only are the scriptures replete with examples of precisely that knowledge on Gods part, but they explicitly teach that God has foreknowledge of future events, even employing a specialist vocabulary to denominate such
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knowledge. The New Testament introduces a whole family of words associated with Gods foreknowledge of the future, such as foreknow (proginosko), foreknowledge (prognosis), foresee (proorao), foreordain (prooritzo) and foretell (promarturomai,

prokatangello). Thus, the claim that the biblical concept of

omniscience does not comprise knowledge of the future seems frivolous. (pg 244, Time and Eternity; exploring Gods relationship to time; 2001, Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois)

To those that argue that Gods omniscience cannot extend to future events, on the basis that the future doesnt exist yet, Craig has (inter alia) this to say: For the people in 2005 the events of that year are just as real as the events of our present are for us [in 2001], and for those people, it is we who have passed away and are unreal. On such a view God transcends the four-dimensional space-time continuum, and thus all events are eternally present to him. It is easy on such a view to understand how God could therefore know events which are to us future.

Craig then lists many passages in which God uses his knowledge of the future as a basis on which to challenge the idols
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of the nations and their adherents, including, sadly, many of Israel and Judah. For example, Craig suggests that Isaiah flings this challenge in the teeth of all pretenders to deity:

Isaiah 41:21-24
"Present your case," says the LORD. "Set forth your arguments," says Jacob's King. "Bring in [your idols] to tell us what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare to us the things to come, tell us what the future holds, so we may know that you are gods. Do something, whether good or bad, so that we will be dismayed and filled with fear. But you are less than nothing and your works are utterly worthless; he who chooses you is detestable. (NIV)

The utter silence from the pagan gods calls leads to the majestic declaration from the God of Israel:

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Isaiah 46:9-10
Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please. (NIV)

We simply cannot understand how, in the face of scriptures such as these, anyone can seriously doubt that to God the future is as open as the present or past.

At this point, we cant resist calling attention to a curious little passage in the Book of Job:

Job 3:1-11
After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. He said: "May the day of my birth perish, and the night it was said, A boy is born!' That day - may it turn to darkness; may God above not care about it;

may no light shine upon it.

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May darkness and deep shadow claim it once more; may a cloud settle over it; may blackness overwhelm its light. That night-may thick darkness seize it; may it not be included among the days of the year nor be entered in any of the months. May that night be barren; may no shout of joy be heard in it. May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan.

May its morning stars become dark;

may it wait for daylight in vain and not see the first rays of dawn, for it did not shut the doors of the womb on me to hide trouble from my eyes. (NIV) (Italics ours)

How can a long-past day perish? Only, we suggest, if before perishing it still had existence. And its not just a matter of tearing it out of the records or removing it from calendars for how could it in response to Jobs curse - be darkened if it were not there in light, if it did not exist? How could a cloud settle over a non-existent day, or how could it be deprived of shouts of joy unless it were there in happiness? And how could it have the
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morning stars darkened and be deprived of dawn if it were not in the habit of experiencing day and night despite the fact that it must have been at least 40-50 years since Job passed through it as a new-born infant. Even allowing for the powerful imagery used in this debate and the poetic nature of this book, there is still something natural, almost commonplace, in Jobs rhetoric against that day, as though its existence and vulnerability to cursing could be assumed. A glimpse, we suggest (we put it no more strongly than that) of days in our time as viewed from the eternal perspective of the sons of God, of which body Job was an elder. (see, e.g. Job 1)

To God, and those with whom he shares his nature, all days exist and can be visited in one way or another.

To those who really do find this difficult we would suggest that they think of God, somewhere in the future, seeing our life's record when it is complete, making his entry in his Book on the strength of that record and then, by his mastery of time, taking the fully entered-up Book of Life back with him to the creation of the world.

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To close this introductory section, we suggest that the evidence which will be presented in this work points to God's being beyond time as we reckon it, perhaps filling all time, yet able to interact with it so that he can see all time periods simultaneously and involve himself with any of them whenever he wishes.

C.S. Lewis famously discussed this concept in an entire chapter of Mere Christianity, entitled Time and Beyond Time: If you picture time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C before we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all. (Pg 168, 1942, HarperCollins) For reasons which will become apparent later, we visualise time as curving around the presence of the Creator so that, as in the analogy above, he can observe and interact with all our journeyings through time. The concept may be represented diagrammatically as in this Figure 1 (overleaf) in which we have tried to illustrate how we visualise God as being at the "centre" or focus of a time
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curve; time as we know it functions around the curve ("earth time"), within the curve (and "beyond our [kind of] time") God is free to interact with any time period as he wishes.

Earth (cosmos) time

David Exile

Noah

EDEN

GOD

Birth, ministry & death of Jesus

The three grey arrows represent Divine access to any period of time as we know it (earth and rest of universe time)

There is obviously much more to this than can be expressed in a diagram, as will be evident shortly. Suffice it at this stage to say that the ability to travel in time, to interact with "past" as well as "present" and "future", calls for the exercise of intellect and, above all, responsibility, far beyond man's capability because it involves the fundamentals of causality itself. Although men dream of time travel we believe this will always be denied them during our mortality because man simply cannot handle the awesome responsibility. We think, nonetheless, that time travel,
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or the ability to be present in all time does exist but that it is reserved for immortals. And the first was the Creator himself. Bibliography for this section Barr, James Biblical Words for Time; 1962, SCM Press Craig, William Lane

Time and Eternity; exploring Gods

relationship to time; 2001, Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity, 1942 HarperCollins Stosch, George, The Origin of Genesis, 1897 Elliot Stock, London Wright, N.T. John for Everyone, part 2, Chapters 11-21, 1992 Young, Edward, Psalm 139, A study in the Omniscience of God, 1965 Banner of Truth Trust, London, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, PA, USA

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Chapter 7 The Lord Jesus

His birth, death and resurrection

esus was born about 2000 years ago of Mary by the Holy Spirit. Before that time he had no more, (nor, indeed, less) personal, conscious existence than the rest of us.

That last assertion will be disturbing to most Christian readers. If this is indeed ringing alarm bells for you, then take
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some time to read through our next Stepping-stone before continuing on the main text.

Stepping-stone 2: Is the Nicaean Creed really the last word on the Trinity for Christians?

The Nicaean What? In his 2002 booklet, Is the Trinity Unbiblical, Unbelievable, & Irrelevant? Nicky Gumbel seeks to justify and explain the doctrine that, he says, Christianity rests on. (Pg 7) The booklet (extracted from his 1994 Alpha Course text-book Searching Issues) makes fascinating reading, because it unwittingly exposes an astonishing lack of reflection. Please understand that what follows is not Gumbel-bashing on our part. Lets establish a few points; Nicky Gumbel is a brilliant and visionary apologist. His promotion of the popular ALPHA course movement has been responsible for a massive advance of the kingdom of God. He is a highly intelligent and educated man - a trained barrister and ordained at one of the most thriving churches in the country. It is precisely because of these achievements and qualities that the howlers in his widely distributed booklet are so interesting.

On pg 7 he points out that the biblical basis of the Trinity is questioned particularly by members of cults. Why do mainstream Christians define such groups as cults? Because they question the doctrine of the Trinity! Later, on pg 13, speaking of the creed decided at the Church Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, he says This view of the Trinity has been held by every orthodox church

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since that time. How do we know they are orthodox? Because they accept
the Nicaean Creed- thats why their teaching is classed as straight (Orthodox = straight teaching) and they are not classed as cults! These quotes are truisms- they sound profound but in reality they say nothing at all! As a barrister Nicky Gumbel was trained in the use of exquisitely careful and precise argument. If someone of his calibre can have such a blind-spot, it will not be surprising if we find other Christians are equally unclear about what they are assenting to.

As a Christian reader, check which category you come under:

1) Ive heard of the Creed but I dont really know it. 2) Im familiar with the Creed, but Ive never studied its origins and Im not sure what all the details mean. 3) Ive studied the Creed in some depth and know about its origins and meaning.

We suspect most readers wont place themselves in the third category So join us for a whistle-stop tour!

So whats it all about? The Apostles and Evangelists never mentioned the term Trinity in the New Testament. In fact any numerical mention of three in relation to God as such is never flagged up at all. Both the Testaments only emphasize the

unity of God. (E.g. Exodus 34:6, James 2:19)

However, Jesus and the Apostles and the Apostolic Fathers (i.e. early second

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century writers who had known the Apostles or people who had known them) talk about Father, Son and Holy Spirit although interestingly in the New Testament the formula is often replaced by God, Son, Spirit. (1

Corinthians 12:4-6, 2 Corinthians 13:14, Ephesians 4:4-6, 5:18-20, 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17) This can be referred to as the Triadic Formula.

Lets note that carefully - the modern tribal mark of the mainstream Christian is not defined in the very early church - the Apostolic era. Do you find that odd? In the New Testament the Father, Son and Spirit are described as sharing the divine Name (Matthew 28:19), and from numerous other passages in Old and New Testaments it is clear that they are all divine in some sense. The next few centuries would be spent arguing that exact sense!

Theophilus, a Bishop of Antioch set the ball rolling in 180 AD by innocuously using the word Trias- Threeness to describe God- not as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but as God, Word and Wisdom! (The last 2 concepts were of great weight in philosophical terms at the time- more on that later.) Between this point and the Nicaean Creed of 325 AD there follows a very confusing period where everyone uses the term Trinitas or Trinity to mean a mass of completely contradictory or partially overlapping definitions. The worst of these models made valid points, and the best theories had flaws. Most of these third century writers have not been labelled heretics for their unorthodox views- on the contrary they are often revered as Church Fathers.

In spite of these contradictory definitions, the Church rubbed along pretty well, for a very simple reason- they were an underground movement. For 126

centuries Christians were at best beyond the pale and at worst violently persecuted. There simply wasnt motive or opportunity to have a mass religious argument. Most Christians just got on with things and viewed these intellectual theses with suspicion.

Those who love sausages should never watch them being made Once Constantine took the astonishing step of legalising and promoting Christianity, the agenda changed under the pressure of politics. When the arch-heretic Arius came on the scene, promoting views on the Godhead that provoked dissension in the church, the unprecedented Church Council held at Nicaea took place in 325 AD to impose unity - by force. This premier doctrine is reactionary - it wasnt written because all or even a majority of Christians had decided that it was self-evidently fundamental, but because an unacceptable extreme viewpoint provoked an aggressive response. But the issue ground on contentiously for decades:

For 34 years after Nicaea, division reigned in the Church because believers in different regions of the Roman Empire were using different dialects, and because they understood key words in the debate in different senses they misunderstood what the others were actually teaching! (This is the origin of our saying, not an iota of difference.) Much of the dissension was due to an unbelievably pathetic lack of communication.

After the Council began (!) its session by tearing up Arius writings, it was 34 years before the orthodox even attempted to prove their own ideas in a reasoned way!

It was 37 years on before the Church added the Holy Spirit to the equation - very much as an afterthought! Both sides used threat and force at different times to coerce the 127

other into assenting to their definitions - always understanding, but being indifferent to, the fact the others hadnt really changed their beliefs. Major parts of the Creeds terminology depend on concepts of classical philosophy that were of great weight and pressing concern at that time, but which are virtually meaningless now. The Creeds definitions depend on a view of time and eternity that is rooted in the Classical Worlds knowledge of time. More on that below Roman Catholics are required to accept the Nicaean Creed. But the Bishop of Rome had no special role in drawing it up and indeed a subsequent bishop of Rome was pressurised into denying it! The special role the Popes gave themselves was only invented much later in history.

It can be daunting to try and evaluate such ancient and portentous events in Church history. Try to imagine these events and arguments scaled down to a dispute in your church or to friction among local Churches Together in your town; if your leaders behaved like this would you respect or tolerate it? Yet many Christians ignorantly revere the process! This orthodoxy on the Trinity was not drafted because there was a self evident need for it, based on truth and spirituality, but because of misunderstandings, internal politics and vested interests, infatuation with Greek philosophy and pressure from the majority pagans. The bulk of the vehemence with which the Church promoted the Athanasian and Nicaean Creeds was not to do with their inherent truth or worth, but with the pressures and stresses of group psychology and identity. Rather than being a wonderful story of how the Church attained to truth, its actually frightful!

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And the point is..? Lets summarise the key points of the Nicaean Creed, and the later fifth Century Athanasian Creed that we need to reconsider, metachronologically:

The Church in the Nicaean Creed eternally condemns anyone who claims that the Son did not have eternal existence (There was once when he was not), or that he was created.

The Athanasian Creed claims that Father Son and Holy Spirit are three separate persons, co-equal and co-eternal- and that if you want to be saved, then you must accept this.

Clearly this is an eternally weighty issue? Can believers dare to question or even reject the authority of these Creeds?

Begotten or created? None of us have experienced being fully God and fully Man. Jesus could have attempted to define that experience- he didnt. Jesus did not speak about definitions; he spoke about relationships and trust. This is crucial. The nearest thing to a creed on the New Testament on this subject is 1 Timothy

3:16 that teaches that God was revealed to us in a human body.

C.S. Lewis has a lucid take on this: What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind (Pg 157, Mere Christianity 1942 HarperCollins)

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The Bible never states that there are three Persons in the Godhead.

Matthew 1:20 and Luke 1:35 explicitly state that Jesus was conceived by the
Holy Spirit. If there is a Person called God the Holy Spirit who is distinct from God the Father, then it is unclear how God the Father was Jesus father - no one can be conceived by more than one person! We have heard Christian arguments that try to get round this, but they seem to add up to in effect the Spirit doing the equivalent of bringing a pipette full of sperm, and this does not really make much sense. However much it upsets the neat symmetries of the Athanasian Creed, we have to consider the possibility that the Spirit, while intensely personal, is not a distinct Person. Jesus said that

God is spirit (John 4:24) not that one Person of God is the Spirit.

The scriptures simply make no claim that the Son was co-equal with the Father. While John 5:18 says Jesus made himself equal with God, he clarified: I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. (John 5:19) And further: For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself (John 5:26) And again: For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it (John 12:49) And: The Father is greater than I (John 14:28) (NIV)

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These are only a selection of passages. We doubt that anyone reading them can have said to themselves, The evident teaching here is that the Father and Son are co-equal.

So why the dogmatic assertions of the Creeds? The reasoning seems to have been that if the Son was God, and God is eternal, then the Son must have been eternally God. The Son was the radiance of the Fathers glory (Hebrews

1:3) but in fact, by the above reasoning, eternally the Son and eternally
radiating. The later thoughts on the Holy Spirit similarly took the view that if God was infinite, then one person of the Godhead could not be less than another- how do you make a fraction of infinity?

The Living God? This consideration sounds compelling on paper, but unfortunately it reflects a view of God more akin to the theoretical deity of the Greek philosophers or the Brahman of Advaitin (i.e. monistic) Hinduism than the way the Bible defines Yahweh. The philosophers god was a being so transcendent that he wasnt personal in any meaningful way that we could experience. Brahmans infinity means he is supposed to comprise all opposites: good and evil, truth and falsehood etc. By contrast Yahweh says in Exodus 3:14 I will be that I will be which implies that he elects not to be certain other things. In fact the Bible spells this out by stating in many passages that he doesnt lie, doesnt break promises, and is never unjust, for example. (We will return to this point in the later stepping-stone on the devil.) This is a huge idea, which few Christians seem to have spotted the full implications of. God wills to limit his existence in this way in order to be truly personal, and truly holy. If this suggestion makes you uncomfortable, does not his greatest triumph through experiencing death in apparent weakness through the Son on the cross teach the same truth? 131

The implications of spacetime The other belief of the ancients that seems to have compounded the problem is that they did not understand Einsteins amazing insight that space and time themselves had a beginning - were created - just like the material universe. They understood that God was not impaired by time like the creation, but simply imagined that he had always existed in time and would always exist in time, and that therefore Father, Son and Spirit must reflect his absolute and eternal nature. We now have the advantage - and the insight shows us a God even greater and more wonderful than mankind could previously grasp - of realising that God has existence beyond the boundaries of spacetime, albeit in terms that we cannot possibly begin to conceive. And the Father, Son and Spirit reflect how the Deity manifests within his created limitations and boundaries of spacetime. A Son being as eternal as his Father and eternally radiating his glory, are in reality concepts that make no sense outside of spacetime. The very idea of radiation depends on the radiance starting at its source, and travelling from it, and the idea of a Father and Son depends on a different point of origin of the Son to be meaningful. These ideas may shock, but do we detract from the greatness of the Godhead? Not at all - but we can only speak of what is revealed.

We suggest the Father is the closest to the philosophers concept of the transcendent deity. This is God beyond spacetime, who we can only begin to understand through his creation. (Romans 1:20) The philosophers taught that the Supreme God interfaced with creation via his Logos or Word, and unsurprisingly the New Testament and the Gospel of John in particular support and use this concept. Without the creation the Logos has no role or function! The Bible says that the Spirit sustains creation, indeed in Acts

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17:28 Paul quotes a pagan poet to say In him we live and move and have
our being. (see also Job 34:14-15) but we can draw a distinction between the divine Spirit that makes the grass grow and our hearts beat, and the Holy Spirit, which works out Gods special purpose to redeem the cosmos. The Spirit (Genesis 6:3) consigns sinners to mortality because God will not tolerate anything of his divine nature being associated with evil for ever. It is unsurprising to find the Holy Spirit even less patient to prolong its dwelling in rebels. (1 Samuel 16:14, Acts 5:3) But the Bible promotes a new dimension to the role of the Logos that was outrageous in the Roman world: (John

1:14) - God with us. We will concentrate more on this wonderful reality in
the main text of this book.

But What About..?

Philippians 2:6-7?
Who, being in very nature [or: in the form of] God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature [or: the form of] a servant, being made in human likeness Is this teaching that a pre-existent Son emptied himself to be born as a mortal, and to therefore be able to grow in wisdom, a concept that makes no sense for God (Luke 2:52) and to be subject to tiredness, limitation, temptation and death? Lets give some examples of the problem:

God cannot be tempted: James 1:13, Habakkuk 1:13; however Jesus was tempted: Hebrews 1:18, 4:15, Matthew 4:1 This was possible because Jesus had a separate will to his Father:

John 6:38, Mark 14:36

God does not become tired, or sleep: Psalm 121:4, Isaiah 40:28; however Jesus became tired, and slept: Mark 4:38, 133

The Son had limits on his eternal knowledge: Mark 13:32 As we have discussed, God is immortal: 1 Timothy 6:15; Jesus by contrast, died: Hebrews 2:9

We must ask - if a being divests itself of memory, powers, knowledge and character to become another being, what real continuity is there between the one and the other? What remains of the pre-existent divine person thus emptied in the mortal baby of Bethlehem?

And a fairly obvious question may occur to readers, was Jesus only subject like this in his days of mortality? Are not things different with the glorified Son in heaven? Surprisingly, not at all. Consider the explicit teaching of 1

Corinthians 15:20-28:

Then the end will come, when [Jesus] hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. For [God] has put everything under [the Son of Mans] feet. Now when it says that everything has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who has put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all and in all.

Readers may be interested to compare the context of Psalm 8, which Paul is quoting here. Again, we would not read Paul and conclude that the Father and Son were co-equal.

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For the time being, bear in mind the apparent non-sense of the expression pre-existence; could thinking about the issue metachronologically make it more meaningful? We will explore the implications of this further on in the main text.

Further Reading for Stepping Stone 2: Chadwick, Henry, Pelican History of the Church 1: The Early Church, 1967 Penguin Books, London Gumbel, Nicky Is the Trinity Unbiblical, Unbelievable, & Irrelevant? 2002 (Also in Searching Issues, 1994) Kingsway Kelly, J.N.D. Early Christian Doctrines, 1958 A&C Black, London Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity, 1942 HarperCollins Wand, J.W.C. A History of the Early Church, 1937 Methuen & Co Ltd, London

God the Son How come, in view of the facts in Stepping Stone 2? The idea is often put forward that Jesus was fully God and fully man `- the miracle of the Incarnation was to perfectly combine these two natures in one being without diminishing or compromising either. This sounds fine if we say it quickly, but the implications merit deeper examination. We do not want to use a model where Jesus death, or indeed any aspect of his life,
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involves God just pretending, or going through the motions, of being human - (known in theological terminology as docetism, i.e.

seeming.) The Gnostics taught - for example as expressed in the

second century text The Gospel of Basilides - that Jesus physical body was only an illusion, and the divine spirit was unscathed by the suffering of its shell on the cross. The Apostles denounced this heresy in the most vehement terms (1 John 4:2-3) so clearly the real nature of Jesus death must be starkly different.

So we need to explore, in positive terms, how Jesus is indeed God. We will do this by following through different strands of scripture teaching on the theme, which we will then attempt, within the constraints of our limited mortal faculties, to then consider all the strands together as a whole- so dont be alarmed if, as we develop each of these individual strands, we seem to be not to be expressing the full glory of the divine Sonship- things will ultimately tie up, at least within the limits of our flawed capabilities!

We suggest that Jesus was established to be the Son of God by virtue of these experiences (in the following natural order): Conception
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Unction (Anointing) Perfection Resurrection Ascension

However, we shall consider the last concept first, as it is the ascension of Jesus that has the most profound metachronological implications. Though exploring some of these other definitions may hold some startling surprises!

The Ascension of Jesus Jesus of Nazareth was born, lived into his later thirties and was killed. He rose to a new life, and then to his Father's right hand.

Now, if we credit the Creator with mastery of time, the ability to fill all time or to travel at will through time, what do we think of Jesus once he was immortalised, raised to his Father's nature? Must we not credit the resurrected glorified Jesus with the same "timelessness", the same mastery of time, the same ability to make metachronological appearances to men, the same being beyond our (kind of) time as his Father?

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If we do, we are immediately required to conceive of Jesus as not only living for ever, into the future as we call it, but also living into the past, before he was born of Mary. We must recognise Jesus' taking his place at the Father's side throughout time, from the creation of the worlds to the Exodus and so on through the times of the prophets.

In other words, the scriptures normally read as evidence for conventional ideas about the pre-existence of Christ, may be taken by us, metachronologically, as evidence of the participation in Old Testament times of the risen, glorified Jesus, potentate of time as much as his Father "before" him.

Spirit body... heaven...time... It is written in Ephesians 4:10 that: "He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe (AV: all things)". We do not believe that heaven is "up" literally, given that after his resurrection Jesus stepped out of heaven into the upper room, and when he had convinced his disciples that he was thoroughly material, of flesh and bones, he stepped back into heaven and disappeared from mortal sight. We shall allude again to the "parallel universe" kind
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of

relationship

between

the

material

and

spirit

worlds,

between earth and heaven, but for the time being would suggest that when Jesus "ascended higher than all the heaven to fill the whole universe" he did so in the sense of rising to life on a higher plane. When he had filled all things, the whole universe, he filled the whole time-space continuum which we know of, but barely comprehend, and the whole universe of the Spirit we call the heavenly places. In other words, he filled all "time" as well as space. As we understand it, this placed him beyond our (kind of) time though able to interact with it.

The concept of heaven as all around us, interlacing with our world, so to speak, rather than being far away "up there" actually makes us think of Jesus as "physically" very close to us as well as being with us by the Spirit. This fits beautifully with the assertion through Paul: "the Lord is at hand" (Philippians 4:5) which literally means close beside, rather than soon to come. This filling of all things, especially those who are his, is alluded to earlier in Ephesians 1:23: "God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way." (NIV)

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It may help us at this point, since we are to consider the participation of Jesus in events millennia before he had any existence, to go back to Fig.1 and remind ourselves how the metachronology of immortality places God in touch with events in all time periods. Now that we have considered Jesus' resurrection to Divine nature we can redraw that Figure, as Figure 2, and add the name "Jesus" to the centre of the time arc, next to "God":

Earth (cosmos) time

David Exile

Noah

EDEN

GOD Jesus

Ascen sio

Resurrection of Jesus
n of Je sus

The three grey arrows represent Divine access to any period of time as we know it (earth and rest of universe time)

This might help us to visualise how elevation to immortality would enable Jesus, like his Father, from then on, to converse (for example) with mortal Abraham about the destruction of Sodom and commune, perhaps even at the same "time", with the
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immortalised Abraham in the Kingdom. It will help us, too, to conceptualise how Jesus appeared to Isaiah and gave him the commission that was to lead to Israel's exile - as we shall see later in this chapter under the heading: The one upon the throne. Figure 2 reflects the situation after the Lord's resurrection to eternal life and glory.

"Today I have become your Father" It is noticeable that in the declarations of God, before the death of Jesus, that his Son was pleasing to him, God never used the momentous words of Psalm 2: "Today I have become your Father" preferring instead to say words along the lines of "You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22). Once the battle with sin, and therefore mortality, was over and won, however, we find the Creator welcoming the

resurrected immortalised Jesus with the words: "Today, I have become your Father!" This seems to be the sequence of events as indicated by words in Acts, Hebrews and Romans, which we will now look at.

In Acts 13:33 we read: "...by raising up (i.e. resurrecting) Jesus. As it is written in the second Psalm: 'You are my Son; today I have become your Father.'"
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In Romans 1:4: "Who through the Spirit was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead..." In Hebrews 1:3-5: "...he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs. For to which angel did God ever say, 'You are my Son; today I have become your Father'?" (NIV) (We shall write more about the inherited name, and the relationship of Jesus to angels, in due course).

In being welcomed into the immortal state, proclaimed to be thereby the Son of God, Jesus had bestowed on him the names and titles of his Father. We think that it is important to understand this to absorb fully the momentous implications for Jesus' work from then on. We often quote Jesus' words, before he ascended to his Father: "All authority in heaven and on earth is given to me" (Matthew 28:18); perhaps, in what follows, we may just get a glimpse of how awesome that really was.

His Father's Name The only one who can take a father's name is his son: this is true in human affairs because it was first true in the Divine family: "For this reason I kneel before the Father, from
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whom the whole family (from whom all fatherhood) in heaven and on earth derives its name" (Ephesians 3:14-15). Hence, we suggest, Jesus inherited his Father's names and titles, including

Yahweh, the LORD. We now suggest that probably all the other instances in the Old Testament where the LORD is manifested to men were actually works of the resurrected Jesus and not just angelic manifestations as we commonly interpret them to be.

After all, although some scriptures do refer to an angel as mediator, for example, of the giving of the Law at Sinai (e.g.

Galatians 3:19; Hebrews 2:2) or as being in the pillar of cloud and

fire (Exodus 23:20-21), we have to remember that Jesus is the

pre-eminent angel. He is called "the angel of the Covenant" in Malachi 3:1; the fact that the Hebrew word malakh is usually, in
this verse, translated messenger" is of no relevance here; the word can be interchangeably translated as "angel" or "messenger" depending on the translator's judgement.

The Son takes his Father's Name(s) Let us look first at some of the scriptures where one or more of the Heavenly Father's names passes to the Son:

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Isaiah 9:6: "And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." Jesus has indeed
inherited some portentous titles!

Before we go any further, to avoid misunderstanding, we would like to state how we understand the reference to the title Father as one of the titles Jesus bears. The term father is used in ways other than for a progenitor.

For example, Joseph, comforting the brothers who had sold him into slavery, said: "So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt. (Genesis 45:8).

Naaman, the commander of the army of Syria in the days of the prophet Elisha, had been told that the prophet could heal him of leprosy (then a more general term for unsightly skin disease). Arriving at the prophets house he was, he thought, treated in an offhand way and went off in a rage. Naaman's servants went to him and said, "My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How

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much more, then, when he tells you, `Wash and be cleansed'!" (2

Kings 5:13).

These two examples indicate that lordship or captaincy was recognised by a paternal reference on the part of subordinates. This is still the case. Infantry is still a word for soldiery, though were so accustomed to it we dont usually think about the origins of the appellation. We understand that in the French armed forces an officer will still address his men as mes enfants. This is also illustrated in 2 Chronicles 29:11 where Hezekiah at the grand old age of 25 addresses the assembled tribe of Levi as my sons!

There is more, but we think these examples should establish that it is reasonable to take the reference to Everlasting Father as applied to Jesus reflects his role as our Lord, Captain of our salvation and Supreme Commander of the armies of heaven; such a title well befits him on whom his Father has conferred the title: The LORD of Hosts.

Hebrews 1:8: "But about the Son he says" (from Psalm 45) "Your
throne O God, will last for ever and ever." There is no doubt here as to who is being addressed nor about the relationship between this "God" and his "God", for the Spirit continues: "therefore
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God, your God has set you above your companions." It is plain that God (the Son) is within the power of God (the Father) who can set him at his pleasure above his companions. But the Son bears his Father's title (God) nonetheless.

Hebrews 1:10: continues the story by developing words from Psalm 102:24-27. In the Psalm the words are clearly addressed
to God: "Do not take me away, O my God.... In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth..." while to the Christians to whom the Letter to the Hebrews is addressed, (in this section "about the Son", v8) the writer puts it: "In the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundation of the earth...."

Another pair of passages transferring what was said of God in the Old Testament to Jesus in the New is to be found in

Isaiah and 1 Peter. In Isaiah 8:13-14 we read of "the LORD

Almighty.... he will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that causes them to fall", while in 1 Peter 2:4-8 we read of the stone, chosen by God, but rejected of the builders: "a stone that causes men to stumble", words applied by Jesus to himself during his ministry.

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Perhaps just two other passages should be noted: "...the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ..." (Titus 2:13); and, "the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ..." (2 Peter 1:1). Further passages will come to mind; suffice it for the moment to recall that when Thomas, confronted by the risen Lord (John 20:28), exclaimed: "My Lord and my God!", Jesus did not correct him and tell him that he had got it all wrong, he simply accepted that his doubting disciple had now seen and believed.

"No-one has seen God..." Before turning to the Old Testament to look at some of the works of the resurrected, glorified, metachronological Lord Jesus, we would just like to draw attention to a saying through John. In John 1:18 we read: "No-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known" (We are aware of the textual arguments about this verse but they do not affect our case and we are therefore ignoring them). We note, in passing, that here again the Lord Jesus bears his Father's title, 'God', and yet is clearly distinguished from him and, being at his Father's side, is manifestly subject to him.

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However, the point we want to make is this: We are clearly told that, "no-one has ever seen God." Yet we all know that Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, plus the elders of Israel, "saw the God of Israel.... they saw God, and they ate and drank," (Exodus

24:10); again, a little later (Exodus 33:11) we read that: "the LORD
would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend." If now we remember the second part of what the Lord said through John: "God the only Son (or, God the One and Only),

who is at the Father's side, has made him known", all should fall
into place - but for many the conclusion will come as a shock.

Who then did they see? The conclusion must be that in all the places in all the scripture (because "no-one has ever seen God"), in Old as well as New Testament times, whenever a revelation of God, of

Yahweh, occurred, it was in fact a revelation of the risen, glorified Jesus, "making known" his Father. We are asserting, as
a proposition to be evaluated by other Bible students, that on his ascension to his Father's nature Jesus attained to that mastery of time hitherto the prerogative of his Father alone and that by virtue of that nature, that power, he moved beyond our time, moved freely in time, and carried out his Father's will in times before his birth as well as after it. This involved his making
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many metachronological appearances before the epoch of his birth. This will doubtless be so startling to some as to need a demonstration:

The one upon the throne As we have briefly noted in the introductory chapter on the visions of the Throne Room, an experience which is repeatedly recorded by prophets and apostles, from the book of Exodus through to the Revelation, is a vision of one who sits upon a blue throne set on a dais of lapis-lazuli with a sea of glass, an expanse awesome and sparkling like ice, beneath it. As we have earlier noted, at different times different prophets were shown different levels and parts of this wonderful structure. Again this seems to show that "heaven" and "earth" are two interlacing states. Moses and his colleagues, for example, were brought before the structure at the level of the blue pavement (Exodus

24), while Ezekiel was down among the wheels and cherubim and
saw the glassy or icy expanse and the blue throne towering above him. (Ezekiel 1).

We will now take up some of the questions which arise from these visions, so far as Jesus is concerned.

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In Isaiah 6 a vision is recorded which seems clearly to manifest the Creator, the Father: "I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted...." The seraphs sang: "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty...." On the face of it, clear identification. But in whom was the Father being manifested in this vision? We are told explicitly in John 12:41: "Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him".

We will accept that the one who appeared to Isaiah et al. was indeed Jesus in glory. Here then, is our demonstration that the risen Jesus was freed, like his Father, from the constraints of time. It was Jesus on that throne, Jesus in glory, which must be after his resurrection - indeed, after his second coming. The Lord of Time, the resurrected Jesus, was really there before Isaiah - Jesus making a metachronological appearance in the pages of Old Testament history.

That this was not "just" a "vision of the future" seems to us to be obvious from the conversation between Jesus and Isaiah. The two actually talked to each other, with questions and answers, and one of the attendant seraphs actually came and touched the prophet's lips with a coal from the altar. This was no mental
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imagery or remote audio-visual link! In the course of this conversation the one whom John tells us was Jesus in his glory actually gave Isaiah the commission that was to shape Israel's history, "Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant...."

Having attained to immortality and taken his place at the centre of the Throne Room, Jesus was able to access any time period in history to interact with it. He thus appeared to Isaiah about 700 years before the Christian Era and gave his commission to the prophet. Naturally, there were seen with him the seraphs and the saints of his train as well as the temple that enclosed them. And the words he gave Isaiah are repeatedly used in the New Testament as a witness against Israel as, indeed, they are in

John 12 from which we have already quoted.

When these words given to Isaiah ("he has blinded their eyes..." etc.) were used by Jesus during his ministry he had not yet, in his personal experience, seen Isaiah. Nor would he until after his resurrection. The meeting with Isaiah and the commission to him were still future to Jesus, in his personal experience, though actually in the past, from his mortal point of view. In Jesus' own Personal Event Sequence his birth was followed by his youth, his ministry, his death and resurrection, his
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ascension to his Father's side and assumption of his Father's names and titles and then...who knows what commissions his Father gave him and in what Event Sequence?

John was, like Moses, Isaiah and Daniel, shown a higher level of this heavenly structure than was Ezekiel when he saw before him "a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it"

(Revelation 4). While it is not recorded whether Moses and his

fellow elders saw the seraphs, Isaiah and John clearly did and both heard them praise God in similar words. Ezekiel, as we have said, was shown the cherubs and wheels far below the level of the throne and seraphs, with the awesome expanse sparkling like ice (which we take to be the sea of glass in Revelation 4) between him and the throne level.

The similarities between this vision and the one in Isaiah 6 are so marked as to indicate that the same setting was before the prophet and apostle. Now comes a startling development.

Remember that in John 12 we read that the vision in Isaiah 6 was of Jesus in his glory; in Revelation 4, then, since the scene is the same, the one on the throne is Jesus. What then are we to make

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of what follows, as we read on through the developing account into

Revelation 5?

Meeting one's self As thoughts of Divine freedom to travel in time were developing we initially wondered if some kind of exclusion principle- such as is often discussed by physicists of our era theorising about time travel- would prevent one's interacting with one's self in a different time period. The vision in Revelation 4-5 supplies the answer: it is perfectly possible to interact with one's own self in the Divine mastery of time. Jesus is the one on the throne in Revelation 4, and before him is brought one described as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David, a Lamb looking as if it had been slain. This must also be Jesus, but at a very different phase of his work from that of his occupancy of the throne bearing the name of Yahweh. This vision was one of the first in scripture to bring home to us the timelessness, or metachronicity, which is implicit in Divine things, for in this vision we see Jesus, in the state of being freshly resurrected and newly having prevailed over sin and death, taking the scroll from the hand of Jesus, enthroned on the seat of all power as the LORD of all.

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A very similar occurrence is found in Daniel 7. There the Ancient of Days is seated; that this too is the resurrected, glorified Jesus seems evident from vv 21-22: "this horn was waging war against the saints and defeating them, until the Ancient of Days came and pronounced judgement in favour of the saints of the Most High..."

On the right hand of the invisible God? If then, the visions of God on his throne were actually visions of him manifested in the Son who bore his name, the Father being to mortals, "the King, eternal, immortal, invisible ..." (1 Timothy 1:17), if indeed Christ is, "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation" ( Colossians 1:15), being the revelation to man of his Father, "whom no-one has seen or can

see", (1 Timothy 6:15-16) (noting in passing, by comparison with Revelation 19:16, that King of kings and Lord of lords is another
title which passes from Father to Son), what then are we to make of the vision to Stephen (Acts 7:55-56)?

"But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. 'Look', he said, 'I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at
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the right hand of God.'" We note, again in passing, that Jesus, "after he had provided purification for sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven" (Hebrews 1:3). But, to strengthen and support his disciple in his hour of need, Jesus showed himself standing with him. A lovely touch. But to come back to our point - who was the "Majesty on high" on whose right hand the resurrected Jesus took his seat? If we are correct it was Jesus, showing in his glorified state, with all the titles of deity, the invisible Father revealed to men. So here again we have, in the metachronicity of immortality, Jesus in his own presence.

Maybe some of our readers need a little more explanation as to how this can come about. It is very simple really, though for us, as mortals, impossible. Here is one example of how it works. Imagine that you had the power of time travel, or the technology to be mobile in time. Imagine that on week one you were working in a particular office. During week two you could be elsewhere in the normal course of time but in the course of that second week you decide to go back in time (say for a day) to week one; you arrive in the office to see yourself working there - there are now two of you, both unquestionably yourself - present in the room. You may decide, during week three to return again to week one at the same hour ("earth time") as the visit from week two, and to
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the same office, so that there would be three of you - all unquestionably yourself - in the same room.

If instead of just weeks of time travel you travelled years, and by moving both forward and backward in time, you could encounter yourself as a young person or as an elder; you might well not recognise yourself under such circumstances! While we cannot undertake even such simple time manoeuvres we believe that immortals can and do and that the appearance of the newlyrisen Christ in the presence of his glorified self was brought about in such simple fashion. We shall meet another example of someone interacting with his glorified self in the chapter devoted to angels.

The Exodus: "That Rock was Christ". The events of Israel's release from slavery in Egypt were brought about by one who announced himself as, "the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob", "the LORD", (Exodus 3:6-7); the same one hovered over their hovels (if marked out by the blood of the lamb) to prevent the destroyer from entering (Exodus 12:13, 22-25). In the march out of Egypt through the sea and into the wilderness of Sinai the
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people were led by the pillar of cloud and fire which concealed the one of whom the LORD said, "my Name is in him" (Exodus 23:20-

21) and when they finally crossed the Jordan there he was again,
"as commander of the army of the LORD ", standing on holy ground

(Joshua 5:13-15).

Since this was presumably also the one to whom we have already referred as having been seen by the elders of Israel

(Exodus 24) we have presumptive evidence that the exodus was

the work of the resurrected, glorified, Christ or, at least, that he was the one whose form appeared, in whom the Father manifested himself when the Creator's saving work was being carried out.

This conclusion is strengthened by the statement of the Lord through Paul concerning the rock from which they drank, representing in figure the one who went with them - whom we have already tentatively identified - "and that rock was Christ",

(1 Corinthians 10:1-4). Note that the figure of their Rock is here

applied to Christ, "the spiritual rock who accompanied them" (1

Corinthians 10:4). Note again that the reference is by no means

solely to the rock that gushed water at Rephidim (Exodus 17:1-7) or that at Kadesh (Numbers 20:1-13); the language quite
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specifically refers to the one who "accompanied them". The Rock who accompanied them is also the "Rock, his (Israel's) Saviour" and "The Rock who fathered you (Israel)..."

(Deuteronomy 32:15, 18). All the works of the generation of the

people of Israel and of the Exodus deliverance were the works of the same one Rock.

Nonetheless, that one did indeed also specifically identify himself with the rock at Rephidim (Exodus 17:6) so that in smiting the rock face Moses, in effect, struck the one who was identified with the rock. We think that the whole episode was an enacted prophecy, a type, of the one who would later be smitten by Moses' people so that the water of life might be made available. But, granted that thereby the smitten rock represented Christ, the question still remains: "Who was it who identified himself with the rock and gave Moses instructions to strike it?"

Appeal is often made, in interpreting the words of 1

Corinthians 10:4, "that rock was Christ", to the frequent use of

figurative language in such contexts. For example, Jesus said, "this cup is my blood", when, firstly, it was the wine, not the cup, strictly speaking, that was being referred to and, secondly, the
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cup did not contain blood, but wine. "This wine represents my blood" would be the literal expression. While there is force in this argument as regards "that rock was Christ", so far as the literal rocks of Rephidim and Kadesh are concerned, we have also to consider the one who was also called "the Rock" who

"accompanied" them (as discussed above). If indeed he was also the one on the Throne then, quite literally, that Rock was Christ, "the only Son who is at the Father's side", who "made him known". If indeed the glorified Son of God, bearing his Father's names and titles, was the one who led Israel from Egypt, baptised them "into Moses in the cloud and in the sea" and then, after forty years of suffering with them, led them into the promised land - what does this do by way of enhancement of the types the enacted prophecies - involved ?!

Take, for example, the blood of the lamb. They were to take the lamb and kill it, probably at the entrance to their homes. They were to take the blood and with hyssop strike it onto the doorposts and lintel of their doorways. But there was more. Although most translations refer to the "blood in the basin"

(Exodus 12:22) the word translated "basin" or "vessel", saph, is

much more frequently translated "threshold" or "doorway"; it is
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connected with the word khaph, a cupped hand, and relates to something hollowed out. While the application to a basin is obvious, it also refers to the depression worn at the threshold by the continual passage of feet. The word saph is, in fact, translated "threshold" or "doorway" twenty five times and "vessel" or "basin" only five times. It is therefore, on balance of probability, likely that "threshold" is the appropriate translation here. The killing of the lamb at the door would result in the filling of the hollow at the threshold with its blood. When blood was then applied to the doorposts and lintel anyone going out to commence a journey to the Promised Land would do so through the

blood of the lamb, it being above them, below them and on either
side. And this is just what we do when we are baptised as adult believers into Jesus. We start out on the wilderness journey to the Kingdom "through the blood of the lamb."

How much more vivid does this become if the one who, because of the faith shown by the occupants of the house in the blood which foreshadowed the blood of the Lamb of God, gave them protection by hovering over them (note: not "passing" over!) was himself the Lamb whose already accomplished sacrifice in the far future was thereby represented!

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"Before Abraham was born, I am!" (John 8:58) When Jesus said this he had not yet seen Abraham. Yet we think Jesus knew that after his death and resurrection he would be Lord of all, including time, and that he would shortly be making the personal acquaintance of Abraham close on two millennia in "the past". Yet since that encounter was in "the past", though "future" to his personal experience (he had not yet encountered it in his own Personal Event Sequence), he used an expression he had previously used of his future glorified state. In John 7:33-34 Jesus used the expression "I am" for his future state: " I go to the one who sent me. You will look for me but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come". Jesus here quite clearly uses the phrase "I am" for his immortal glory beyond the grave - so why not in the slightly later, equally enigmatic saying? One could, we suppose, rephrase Jesus' words as: "before Abraham was born, I will be!" We can find no textual justification (or any other rationalisation) for the sometimes-suggested rendering "I am he".

In agreement with this Jesus uses the expression "I am" to refer to his future glorified, post-resurrection, state, in his famous prayer (John 17): "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory
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you have given me, because you loved me before the creation of the world" (v24). It is quite plain that Jesus could not have been referring to his then present state, awaiting betrayal and death; the context demands that "I am" in this passage has the meaning "I will be".

We might note in passing the reference to Jesus having been loved by his Father "before the creation of the world". In our conventional, time-bound, interpretations we have to say that really all this means is that the Father loved what he saw of Jesus in his mind's eye, in the far future - that he had loved the thought of the one he had purposed to bring into existence ages hence. How much more natural are Jesus' words if they are metachronological, if they refer to his future glorified self who "had" been loved by the Father through all time. This was yet, it must be said again, still future to Jesus' personal experience. As in the case of seeing Abraham and being "before" him, Jesus looked forward to being loved by his Father before the creation of the world as a future experience, yet in the past. Likewise the "glory I had with you before the world began" (John 17:5) was something for Jesus to look forward to, from the standpoint of the days of his mortality.

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Messianic prophecies; "The spirit of Christ in them..." ( 1

Peter 1:11)
We tend to read these words of the spirit through Peter as meaning "the spirit that spoke about Christ", but once more we have to ask whether we need thus impose on the text? The glorified Christ rose to spirit life, was freed from the constraints of time and was therefore as able to reveal things concerning himself to David and Isaiah in Old Testament times, in

metachronological appearances, as he was able to instruct Paul in the first century. The one who moved the prophets in Old Testament times was, we suggest, the same as the one that, under the title, "the spirit of Jesus", forbade the disciples of the New Testament to enter Bithynia (Acts 16:7). While it is easy to accept that the New Testament phrases refer to the risen glorified Jesus, we suggest that we should make the effort to see him also, and metachronologically, at work in the prophets of the Old Testament, "after" his resurrection - the "spirit of Christ" directing the prophets as well as the apostles. To quote a scripture we shall come back to in the chapter on angels, "For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy" (Revelation 19:10).

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This process enables us to visualise a "mechanism" for the prophecies concerning, for example, the piercing of Jesus' hands and feet, the actions of the Roman soldiers in gambling for his clothing, and of the offering to Jesus of gall and vinegar. Every messianic prophecy can be seen as the work of the risen glorified Christ giving a metachronological account to the prophets of what "had" happened to him in the far future from their point of view.

We have come back to the idea mentioned very briefly earlier, under the heading of God's Mastery of Time. We there suggested that the use of the prophetic perfect is consistent with a God who can move in time, from the fulfilment "back" to the prophecy saying, in effect: "I have done so and so, and now I will show you what it will be". A metachronological God who fills all time, or moves freely in time, or is beyond our (kind of) time would find this natural, and so would the Redeemer on attaining the immortal state.

Prophecy in general May we not extend this concept to apply to all prophecy?

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After all, the Lord through Peter gives us a pretty pointed statement concerning who it was who "strove" with the antediluvians and told Noah to be a preacher to the souls in bondage to sin for one hundred and twenty years ( 1 Peter 3:18-

20): "For Christ died for sins once and for all, the righteous for
the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through which also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah when the ark was being built".

Note again that Jesus was doing God's work - the Son is always shown doing the Father's will - only, again, it was metachronological activity, "before" his birth, long, long before, but "after" his resurrection, this being stated explicitly through Peter: "put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through which he went..." (NIV)

This, incidentally, is one of those passages that we tend to skip over rather uncomfortably, because we are not quite sure what to make of it, in our use of succeeding verses in connection with the subject of the meaning of baptism. If, however, the passage is understood in the context of the mastery of time by
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immortals

it

becomes

immediately

and

straightforwardly

comprehensible.

So we would apply this principle to all prophecy and suggest that God, either directly or through his Son (or through the angels, about whom more in the next chapter) carries out a deed at a certain point in human history and then goes back in time to give a prophet details of what has been done. In a funny sort of way we are taking the point of the so-called Higher Critics who always claimed that prophecies were written after the event. So they were, but not in the fashion they meant! They never conceived of "after" the event being "before" it in time (as we see it), but we think this is in fact the reality of the matter.

The one who came from heaven....where he was before. A series of passages in John's gospel bear on this theme:

"No-one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came down from heaven - the Son of Man" (John 3:13).

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"The one who comes from above is above all; ... the one who comes from heaven is above all" (3:31).

"The bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world" (6:33).

"For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me" (6:38).

"No-one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father..." (6:46)

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven" (6:51).

"What if you were to see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!" (6:62).

"I am telling you what I have seen in my Father's presence..."

(8:38) (NIV)

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In interpreting Jesus' statements as to the origin of his mission we could draw a parallel with the case of John the Baptist: "There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John"

(John 1:6). This is perfectly valid in relation to his being "sent" to

the lost sheep of Israel, and in the context of his fulfilling the type of the life-giving waters of Siloam whose name means "sent"

(Isaiah 8, John 9). It should not be pressed too far, though, as

John was never said to have come down from heaven, or to be going back where he was before.

Again, it is perfectly correct to note the theme of ascent and descent for redemption and salvation which runs through the scriptures, beginning perhaps with Exodus 3:8: "I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians", and involving such famous passages as Psalm 68:18 and Ephesians 4:7-10. This theme does indeed relate to the salvation from bondage of sin wrought by God through Jesus. Yet, again, though, this line of exposition also does not take us quite far enough in the face of such passages as those set out above from John 3 and 6.

What then are we to make of this clear sequence of statements to the effect that Jesus came down from heaven?
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The people who heard him rightly judged that he was claiming more than that his mission, like John's, was from God for they discussed what they thought they knew of his parentage (John

6:41-2) which they contrasted with what they took to be his claim
to heavenly origin. And again, they were right in that Jesus did claim to be the Son of God; the claim that God was his Father led the Jews to seek his death on more than one occasion (e.g. John

5:18, 8:59). Yet Jesus went on to claim more than this. He

claimed to have come "down" from heaven "where he was

before".

How do we put these words of the Lord into an overall picture? We think that, in terms of this thesis, we can understand these sayings of Jesus on two levels:

1. His upbringing and preparation for his ministry. We have outlined earlier the experiences of the prophets of Old Testament times in the heavenly Throne Room (though we have only mentioned a few who had this experience). They were taken there, we judge, to prepare them for their difficult missions, to give them confidence in the overwhelming might and glory of the one who had sent them, and to give them insight into their message.
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Take as an example one whom we have mentioned already. Ezekiel, for example, in that series of contacts with immortal beings spanning chapters 1-10, was not only prepared by detailed instructions as to what he should do and say, he was given insight into what was going on in the "enemy" camp, too. In chapter 8 he was, from the Throne Room, taken to see what the elders of Israel were doing in secret in the depths of the temple. From the way he records it, it seems as though Ezekiel was enabled to enter among the worshippers of the idols and other detestable things, see who was doing what, and still not be perceived by those he was watching. This greatly assisted him in the preparation for his ministry against them. We could follow this through for other prophets, too.

Now, if God did this to prepare and assist his prophets in Old Testament times, how much more would the Son of God be welcomed into this place to prepare him for what would be, for anyone else, "mission impossible"? Jesus was being prepared for a task which no-one in human history had been able to accomplish. Would not his Father therefore give him every possible resource to assist him? We visualise the Son of God being taken frequently to this wondrous place, from early childhood, so that his Father could give him hitherto unparalleled insight into
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his Father's Word- probably much more than humans who were not also Son of God could cope with?

We also think that, just as God gave Ezekiel the ability to go out from the Throne Room to watch and listen to his opponents while remaining unseen himself, so he would ensure that his Son had this facility as much as he needed. We suspect that this may, in part at least, account for Jesus' apparently detailed knowledge of what his opponents were saying and doing behind his back.

If we are right about this, and it does seem very likely to us, then it would be natural for him to think of this marvellous place as "home", and as "my Father's house", and to speak of his having come from there and to be going back there. He would naturally talk of what he had seen in "my Father's presence" and of the bidding he had been given by God when he was started on this momentous mission for him.

On this level, therefore, we think we may comfortably understand the references we are considering. There is, however, another level to which we can take this understanding:

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2. His understanding of his future If we try to listen to Jesus, thinking of him as one who was to be freed from the constraints of time following his resurrection from among the dead, his words drop into place.

Jesus would know of what lay before him; what awesome power, what inconceivable knowledge would accompany attainment of immortality and with it mastery of time. He would know that although he had not yet had that experience - it was still future to him in his mortality - he would shortly assume that role with his Father which would take him not only forward into the future but also backwards in time to work as the Creator in all his purpose from the creation of the world.

Although all this was future to him he would know that, as men (and he too, at that stage) counted time, it was in the past. He would know, if we are right about the instruction he received from his Father, that the manifestations of God in the Old Testament were actually he, Jesus, himself, "making known" the invisible God. He may very well have already met his future, glorified self bearing all the titles and glory of his Father and been given to understand that mastery of time meant that from
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his resurrection he would be in heaven and that since much of his work would be metachronological, involving the "past", he would, on his resurrection to the glory of his Father, be "back where he was before".

In the Beginning was the Word To these thoughts we might add a few words on the justly famous opening of John's gospel record: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning" (1:1-2)

We are sure that there is more to these words than just that the

Logos (Word) was God's firm purpose to generate a Son in the far
future from the creation of the world and that all that was done was carried out with that purpose in mind. The Word did indeed become flesh (1:14) and showed the Father's glory, his grace and truth, to men. Yet this does not in any way argue against our theme. God did indeed have a purpose.

That purpose did take fleshly form in Jesus. He died and the Word became a corpse. When he rose to eternal life the

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Word became a life-giving spirit, no longer flesh, his tangible form, visible wounds and ability to enjoy food notwithstanding.

That Spirit Word filled all time and was with the Father in the beginning and in the unity of the spirit he and his Father are one; the Word is God. Not only so, but as we have seen, on attainment of immortality Jesus inherited all the names and titles of deity, including "God"; the Word was, is and will be,

God, the Word being God.

ONE Redeemer What we have seen so far may help another feature of the saving of mankind from sin to drop into place. In the Old Testament the God of Israel is frequently spoken of as the redeemer of his people, while in the New the title is used of Jesus. It almost looks, even making allowance for the fact that Jesus' work was not his own, as if there were two Redeemers, the Father under the Old Covenant, the Son under the New. For example, the word that came through Isaiah, "This is what the LORD says - your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel..." (43:14) could be set against the writing through Paul, " Christ has

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redeemed us from the curse..." (Galatians 3:13) to give us this impression.

How straightforward it becomes if all references to the Redeemer, in Old and New Testaments, are references to the risen Christ! Such must surely be the case, we would think all would agree, with one of the most famous Old Testament references to the Redeemer, that of Job in his extremity, bursting with the confidence that, whatever might befall him in this life, "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth..." (Job 19:25). This assertion links readily with another plain statement, to the effect that Yahweh's feet will stand upon the mount of Olives (Zechariah 14:3-4) which many recognise as clearly parallel to the famous promise of the return of Jesus in Acts 1:11. So again, we have the linkage of the name of Yahweh with Jesus, and with him as Redeemer.

This may help in the understanding of how the sacrifice of Jesus was retrospective in its effect. It had to be, for there is only one name, that of Jesus, by which we may be saved, and the faithful of former times, under the Old Covenant, had known him only as promise, before his saving blood was shed, hadn't they? Besides, don't we have a pretty explicit statement in the Letter
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to the Hebrews? "Christ is the mediator of a new covenant,

that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance - now he has died as a ransom to set them free

from the sins committed under the first covenant" (Hebrews 9:15).

How much easier this retrospective ransoming becomes (for us, being time-bound) to understand if the Redeemer who died in c.AD 33 was also the one who, subsequent to his resurrection, and bearing all the names and titles of his Father, including Yahweh, spoke to and worked with the people of Old Testament times metachronologically. He was their Redeemer because he had already, in the far future as they saw it, died for them and bought them with the price of his own blood.

The angel of the covenant Given the close association between redemption and covenant, it is perhaps appropriate here to ponder a little further on the title, already noted under the heading "His Father's name", of "angel of the covenant" as applied to Jesus in Malachi 3:1. We noted there that Jesus is the pre-eminent angel, that he is called

"the angel of the Covenant", and that the Hebrew word malakh is
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usually, in this verse, translated "messenger" though this is of no relevance; since the word can be interchangeably translated as "angel" or "messenger" depending on the translator's judgement.

Angel of which covenant? Does this mission as angel refer only to the one in his own blood, or is he the mediator of other covenants also? The covenant of Noah? The covenant of Abraham? The one sealed at Sinai? All Divine covenants? Given what we have seen of the Lord's activities in Old Testament times and his redemptive work in all ages, can we not propose that all Divine covenants are mediated through him? May we not think of the work of entering into saving covenants as something worthy of a title in itself: "the angel of the covenant"?

Who is Michael? Most think of Michael in terms of the prophecy in Daniel

12, where he appears bearing the name "Who like God" at the time
of the end, standing for the deliverance of God's people. Many would see this as one of Christ's titles, as in Daniel 12 the work of Michael is concerned with resurrection and judgement. In

Daniel 10:13-21 he is working with Gabriel among the power

centres of the world; Jesus must have been at work in Persia in Daniel's time.
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We believe that Jesus, the Lord of Time, will yet prove to be the one who has metachronologically, "since" his resurrection, been at work among the nations from Eden to the Kingdom, sharing with his Father the work of generation of the sons of God. As it is written (Colossians 1): "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all were created by him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things are held together."

It is strange, is it not, that we can sometimes miss the obvious? We see Jesus working among the seats of empires in Old Testament times, setting up or throwing down "thrones or powers or rulers or authorities."

Some with whom we have discussed this point have said that they cannot see Jesus as just " one of the chief princes"

(Daniel 10:13); is he not far and away the chief prince? We can
understand this point yet cannot get away from the fact that Isaiah (53:12) writes of the triumph of the Suffering Servant resulting in: "I will therefore give him a portion among the great,
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and he will divide the spoils with the strong." Jesus, even in his great glory, is still a part, a precious and triumphant part yet still a part, of a great communion of spirit children of God who will share fellowship in eternity. We therefore can indeed interpret this passage to describe him as one of the chief princes, without any violence to his divine pre-eminence.

The identification of Jesus with Michael is further strengthened when we consider the war in heaven, in which Michael and his angels break the power of sin, as the supreme act of the "man child", through whose victory came "salvation, and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ" (Revelation 12:7-10 - more on this later!) In fact Spurgeon wrote: he is the true Michael whose foot is upon the dragon. All hail, Jesus! thou Angel of Jehovahs presence

(Morning & Evening: Daily Readings, Morning October 3rd)

Michael the Archangel

1 Thessalonians 4:16 is another passage that reads very

oddly if we apply conventional assumptions:

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For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. (NIV)

Note that Paul emphasises that it is Jesus himself who will come down from heaven, yet if the archangel is a third party then the Lord goes on to issue the call to resurrection by proxy. We suspect readers will agree that this does seem incongruous. John

5:25 confirms that it is indeed the voice of the 'Son of God' that
raises the dead.

Lets look at the translation of this passage by a few different translators; as might be expected, Youngs Literal

Translation follows the Greek fairly closely:

Because the Lord himself, in a shout, in the voice of a chiefmessenger and in the trump of God, shall come down from heaven.

The Interlinear (Hebrew, Greek and English) Bible, edited

by J.P. Green, which uses his Literal Translation of the Bible, gives us: Because the Lord himself shall come down from heaven with a commanding shout of an archangels voice and with Gods trumpet.
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Weymouth is interesting: For the Lord Himself will come down from heaven with a loud summons, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God.

Peterson, in his The Message translation, clearly but cleverly sidesteps the two possibilities here: The Master himself will give the command. Archangel thunder! Gods trumpet blast! Hell come down from heaven

Readers will probably agree that the text can be taken to imply that Paul is talking about Jesus having an archangel voice, whatever that means. Its not obvious why the NIV puts 'voice of the Archangel' there is no definite article in the text- unless there was a bias on the part of the translators towards equating Jesus and Michael, so its possibly backhandedly implying our viewpoint on Michael!

What is an archangel anyway? Given the conspicuous place afforded to archangels in the monotheistic traditions its quite surprising to find the word only
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occurs twice in the Bible, the other being Jude vs 9 , where Michael is indeed this time the archangel . All the differing notions of archangelic hierarchies are the products of extrabiblical material. There is more to be said on the Lords role as the Archangel, but to avoid running ahead of our argument well revisit it in the chapter The Angels.

For now we can conclude that metachronology is very much involved in many important accounts of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, however Jesus ascension brings out just one aspect of his divine status. Let us return to our list of aspects of Jesus Divine Sonship, but this time returning to its natural order.

The Conception of Jesus This is the hardest aspect of Jesus nature to fathom, and, in addition to the following, we will return to this theme later, when we consider the nature of humanity in general.

What happened at Jesus conception? On a physical level (so far as we can understand it, and treading softly and reverently on such holy ground), in the absence of a human father, the Holy Spirit must have acted upon an ovum of Marys, providing a Y182

chromosome and every other genetic influence that would normally be provided by a sperm cell. This in itself is not controversial, even Muslims believe that Jesus had no human father, but deny that this makes him the Son of God. So in addition to the creation of a human body, there was also a divine component to the virginally-conceived zygote, or fertilised egg.

In Luke 1:35 Gabriel explains that the influence of the Holy Spirit will mean it would be therefore holy the Son of God. Not merely fathered by God but already, somehow, in some sense, holy. Let us consider the related passage in Matthew 1:22: All this took place that is, the conception and birth of Jesus to entitle him to be described as Immanuel - God with us. So God was with us in Jesus from conception, before the little baby had spoken one word from his Father, or done any of his work!

In Luke 1:44 Elizabeth says of the unborn John the Baptist: The babe in my womb leaped for joy on the arrival of the mother-to-be of his relative, Jesus. We are told that John was filled with the Holy Spirit from the womb, (Luke 1:15) and it was by the Spirit that this theoretically unconscious foetus could respond to the imminent conception of the Christ-foetus.

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The Unction of Jesus Perhaps unsurprisingly in the light of the Divine

confirmation of Gods pleasure in the development of his son (Matthew 3:16-17), John the Baptist recognised Jesus as awesomely holy, even though up to that point he had led a very ordinary life, and so far as we know done nothing much to excite spiritual expectations since his precocity caused a stir in the Temple when he was twelve years old. (Luke 2:47, Luke 4:22)

The title Christ or Messiah means Anointed One. This prompts the obvious question, When was Jesus anointed, and with what? prompting the answer, At his baptism, with the Holy Spirit. In Acts 10:38 we note that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit, an innocent statement that wreaks havoc with the neat symmetries of creeds involving co-equal Persons! Indeed in John 3:34 we note that the Spirit was given without limit.

So, then, did he become the Messiah at his Baptism, when he was anointed with the Spirit without limit? No, because in

Luke 2:12 the angels announced at Jesus birth He is Messiah the

Lord. However, it was at his baptism that Jesus was first
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entrusted with the power of heaven, and temptation to misuse it immediately followed. (Luke 4:1-2) His full work in confronting the works of Satan had begun.

The Perfection of Jesus In Luke 2:52 we read: And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men. It is uncontroversial that the Son of God got taller after he was 12 years old, and that his standing with other people grew, but for the Divine Son to grow in wisdom, and in favour with God? That is something astonishing. Somehow, he knew more of God, and pleased God more, as he progressed through life, up to the point where at his baptism the Father calls him my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. (Matthew 3:17) Nor did this process stop there; in

Hebrews 2:10 we read:

In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.

So there was much more to Jesus perfection than simply avoiding imperfection by not sinning. Sin does not just mean doing forbidden things, or omitting to do good things. The word means
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to fall short of Gods standard, and throughout Jesus mortal life, the divine bar was being constantly raised, culminating with his drinking of his cup of suffering (Matthew 26:42) on the cross.

In Hebrews 5:7-8 there even more challenging words in this vein: During the days of Jesus life on earth, he offered up loud prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and once made perfect, he became the source of salvation for all who obey him (NIV)

It was the man breathing his last on Golgotha who was in that instant the perfected image of Gods holiness. From then on he could only be enhanced in power and glory, not in righteousness. In this sense he was more divine at his death than he had been at his birth.

Tom Wright advocates an approach focussed on the reality of Jesus revealing the Father:

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My proposal is not that we know what the word god means, and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross- and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word god to be re-centred around that point. (pg 92, The Challenge of Jesus, 2000 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London)

Christians often say that Jesus did not have to die on the cross; he could have freely returned to heaven and left us all to it. This is scripturally indefensible. The truth expressed in James

4:17 was as binding on the mortal Jesus as on anyone else:

Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins. We suggest the redemption of mankind represents the ultimate good.

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The Resurrection of Jesus: The Glory It is no surprising leap to read the implications of the Resurrection of Jesus. In Romans 1:4 we read: through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God, by his resurrection from the dead

So finally we read (Colossians 2:9) For in Christ all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form The Carpenter from Nazareth is God. Yahweh bears the wounds of nails and spear.

So we can think of Jesus as the Son through his Conception: already holy, already Divine in a unique way. Unction: even more in Gods favour, and entrusted with all power. Perfection: attaining to unsurpassed holiness, in spite of mortal nature. Resurrection: freed from mortality and temptation. Ascension: to the - at present invisible heaven around us, beyond any constraint of time and flesh, wielding all authority in heaven and on earth.

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We now turn to consider the implications of this thesis for the Lord's redeemed, the saints. The reason for the title of this next chapter will shortly become obvious.

Bibliography for this section Basilides, Gospel of Basilides, c.120-140 AD A lost Gnostic book,

discussion of its fragments at earlychristianwritings.com

Wright, N.T. The Challenge of Jesus, 2000 SPCK

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190

Chapter 8 The angels

The concept

f, on his resurrection and elevation to Divine nature, Jesus moved beyond our kind of time to become like his Father, and could work metachronologically with him in Old

Testament times, what are we to say about his people, those who are accepted at the resurrection and the judgement? For "we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2) We have made a case for the
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metachronicity of immortality, that immortality is not just "living on and on into the future with time carrying us at the same rate and in the same direction as now. So, when the saints also put on immortality, they too will be freed from the constraints of time, and be able to interact with (earth time) past as well as present and future.

In this book we use the word saint in the Biblical sense, as referring to those who are called by God and come to him in faith, thus setting themselves apart from the world. Thus, all the redeemed of God, the faithful of all ages, races and countries, are called saints and a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. (Exodus 19:6; 1 Peter 2:9) Indeed, both under the Old Covenant and the New each individual is expected to try to live up to this high standard.

So, one might expect that, just as the glorified Jesus was active in Old Testament times, so the glorified saints of the future kingdom should be active in our days as well as back in scriptural times. Are they?

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Suddenly it dawns as these ideas fall into place: the saints

of the Kingdom and the angels of heaven are one and the same! The angels come out of time from the Kingdom of the
future to work among us for the glory of God and the saving of yet more in Christ.

The angels are us!

This hypothesis resolves a problem that presents if we follow the orthodox assumption that angels are a completely different order of beings to humanity. Thomas Aquinas in his

Summa Theologica, 1:50-64 argued that angels were bodiless

spirits of pure will, who on beholding God on their creation made an irrevocably profound decision (as befits their presumed nature) to follow God or the devil. (In spite of its latter C13th composition, Protestants seem to have made little advance on Aquinas reasoning, and his ideas still seem to be reflected in their modern teachings on the devil and demons.) However, this

proposed origin of a happy race of beings dwelling with God by exercise of freewill calls into question the advantage or even the need for a separate race of corporeal beings in the image of God humanity. (We will consider the devil and his angels and the

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issues arising around the nature of humanity in more depth in due course in the chapter Evil spirits.)

A problem also confronts those sectarians who have speculated that the angels might be from, say, a pre-Adamic race or from a people elsewhere in the universe: scripture always speaks of Jesus as the one and only Son and one and only Redeemer. So who redeemed this hypothetical race?

Both these problems disappear if it be accepted that the angels are the redeemed of "our" creation (from Adam to the Kingdom) since

1 The Redeemer is Jesus, and 2 The angels have already exercised their choice, they have volunteered; they are a select population (see also below under the heading The elect angels).

Going back to our diagrammatic representation of the way immortals are in contact with all time periods from the moment of attaining to that state, the situation immediately sequential to
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the resurrection and granting of eternal life to the saints at the second coming of Jesus may be represented as in Figure 3:
The three grey arrows represent Divine access to any period of time as we know it (earth and rest of universe time)

Earth (cosmos) time

David Noah Exile

EDEN

GOD Jesus Saints

Resurrection of Jesus

Jesus return. Resurrection. The saints made like him

Psychological difficulties Before examining the scriptures which bear on this aspect of our subject we should mention that some have had considerable difficulty with this particular part of the thesis. Some quite experienced Bible students, some very open minds who have found no problem over the work of Jesus in the Old Testament, for example, have encountered major psychological problems over the identification of the angels with the saints.
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The problem seems to boil down to this: we (or at least, many of us) have been brought up to think of angels as Godcreated spirits, servants of his, outside us and above us, who care for us, camp around us and work with us for our salvation. In our minds, angels are superior creatures without our weaknesses, to whom, as God's agents, we can entrust ourselves. We need to think of them as "not of us", above us yet involved with us. Yet all

this is still true! The only point at issue is the origin of the
angels, not their nature, not their powers, not their authority, not their work.

And to those who feel an exceptional difficulty in accepting, even in the face of the scriptures we shall, God willing, be looking at shortly, the identity of the angels with the saints, we would simply say: "Just try to open your mind to the scriptures, let go of all the images and conceptions you have built up, perhaps from childhood, and see what comes as the case unfolds."

Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, familiar with their concept of the benign attentions of departed saints, by
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their definition of the term, may find this proposal easier to accept, although, of course, we challenge the dogmas of those churches on several levels with what we are proposing here.

The other objection that is likely to be raised to this proposal is that many Christians believe the devil and his demons were once angels of heaven. This we address in our Steppingstone 3, below.

Again, to all of you, but especially to those who have difficulty with the concept, we would ask: "Don't you remember that the elohim, the angels, have experienced evil as well as good? "The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:22) must mean that those who laboured with the LORD God in the creation of the world have already experienced temptation and sin, as well as goodness and redemption. The

elohim only recognised mankind as having become like them in

knowledge of good and evil when Adam and Eve had experienced the doing of wrong, and had come to their "knowledge" of evil by that experience. This must mean that the elohim had, at some stage, been through that same experience.

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So, perhaps, the problem is in our perceptions, our preconceptions, about angels and their nature, rather than in the scriptural presentation of them. Besides, the elevation of the redeemed to angelhood confers on them all the powers, perceptions, understanding and attitudes that go with omniscient immortality. "We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is"

(1 John 3:2) is a very high station to contemplate, as is

elevation to the Divine nature. (2 Peter 1:4)

So just because the angels are us, elevated to spirit life, it does not follow that they are just human, frail, prejudiced, subject to all the imperfections of judgement that characterise us in our mortality - far from it! Being like Jesus the angels have the breadth of view, the perspective, the wisdom, the love and sympathy, the firmness and balance that go with Divine nature and with mastery of time.

We now propose to examine a number of scriptures in the light of this concept. In pursuing this matter through the scriptures it is worth saying again that the reader should be awake to the fact that the translators have a choice in rendering the Hebrew or Greek original words as either "angel" or
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"messenger". The former implies that the translator interpreted the passage as referring to the spirit beings and the latter as mortals. The translators are almost certainly in error in this from time to time and the reader should make a careful assessment as to whether heavenly or earthly messengers are referred to in any particular passage.

Revelation

7:9-11:

"A

great

multitude...from

every

nation...before the throne...all the angels were standing around the throne..."

One multitude or two? People naturally read this passage with the assumption there were two distinct multitudes around the throne in the Throne Room, a multitude of redeemed and a multitude of angels. However, the record does not say this. This is not the place to deal with matters relating to the Throne Room in detail, and preliminary comments have already been made in the chapters on the visions of the heavenly Throne Room and the questions arising, and in the chapter on Jesus, so we will at this point just draw attention to the main points as they emerge from the early chapters of the Apocalypse.

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In Revelation 7:9 we read: "After this I looked and before me was a great multitude that no-one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb." This is clearly the multitude of the redeemed, the saints, as is explained to John by one of the elders (perhaps even his own glorified self?) in vv14-17. And where were they? The word translated both as "before" and "in front of" in the NIV and "before" in most other versions means literally no more than "in the presence of".

For a human audience with an earthly monarch this would involve, of course, being directly in front of the throne, facing the sovereign. In the case of a divine audience, we suspect that orientation is not particularly important, and in any case, it is difficult to imagine that every individual in a multitude no-one could count could actually be "in front" of the one on the throne. We suggest that "in the presence of" means "in the same room as" in this case.

In Revelation 7:11 (the same chapter, just two verses later) we read: "All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures". This is
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amplified by going back to chapter 5:11 "Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders."

The first point to notice is that we have here, apparently, another enormous, countless multitude in the same throne room as the innumerable multitude of the redeemed. Could it be, therefore, that the two multitudes are one and the same?

Secondly, the angels are said to be "around" or "encircling" the throne. This, while it need not mean precisely the same as "in the presence of" can mean that, and in this case we suggest that it does.

A third point is the song sung by the angels (5:12): "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!" Would it not seem more appropriate for the redeemed to sing the praises of their Redeemer? But if the angels are the redeemed, that is precisely the situation.

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The combined weight of these three points is to our mind overwhelming, identifying the multitude of the redeemed and angels as one and the same. We suggest that there was one multitude, not two, near the throne. The multitude was of angels from every race and nation, the angelic redeemed.

There is, however an additional possibility:

All angels are redeemed, but are all the redeemed angels? It is possible that the term "angels" refers to only a

proportion of the multitude. This would not only be consistent

with our thesis, it would in fact strengthen it. The pattern was set in Israel under the Old Covenant. In the words we have already referred to (in passing) in Psalm 68, as expanded and elaborated in Ephesians 4, God divided up the work of running the nation with particular reference to the spiritual responsibilities. In the theocracy of the wilderness the Levites camped around the Lord's Tent of Meeting, and they and the priests taken from among them, were the Lord's intermediaries between himself and his people. They were joined as required by the prophets sent specifically for particular missions.

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In addition, of course, there were the elders, the judges, priests, prophets and so on. As the Lord makes plain in Ephesians

4 the counterpart of this organisation was the separation within

the Christian church of people to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers.

These servants of God who (should have) led the people aright were Gods gift to men. (Ephesians 4) At the same time, the labours of those who served well were the gifts that God received from them. (Psalm 68)

Now, would it be surprising if the same situation pertained among the immortal redeemed, given that the pattern in the heavens determined the provision on earth? Is it therefore not only possible but perhaps even probable that from among the multitude of the redeemed some have been set aside as "messengers", God's agents for his work among men? And on the basis of his arrangement of the Levite tents around his own tent of meeting, where his cherubim-ark formed the meeting place with his high priest, might we not rather expect such angelic ministers to be arranged around the throne, next to him? If this were to be so the angels would quite clearly be of the redeemed, though not all the redeemed would be angels.
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At present we do not know of any evidence that enables us to decide between the two options i.e. whether the angels are the redeemed as a whole, or a group set aside from among them.

Revelation 19:10; 22:9: "I am your fellow-servant and of your

brothers who have the testimony of Jesus"

This is a curious and instructive saying on the part of the angel. John was so overcome with the wonder of everything before him that he felt impelled to worship the wonderful creature who was explaining it all to him. The angel restrained him with the words given above.

The word here rendered "fellow-servant" occurs only ten times in scripture. Of these, in five it refers to literal servants in some of Jesus' parables (all in Matthew's record as set out below), twice it is the term used by the angel to John, and the remaining three times it quite simply refers to disciples of Jesus

(Colossians 1:7; 4:7; Revelation 6:11). Paul's use of it in his letters

to refer to those who laboured with him in the testimony of Jesus is most eloquent for the identification of those designated "fellow-servants" as "disciples of Jesus." Indeed the use of the
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term in the parables of Matthew's gospel record is also helpful in this respect for, again, all the parables involved concern the

church Jesus would leave behind, again identifying the "fellowservants" as his disciples (Matthew 18:28,29,31,33; 24:49).

The

redeemed

in

their

myriads

appeared,

metachronologically, before the likes of Daniel and John; they were the redeemed from this world, this creation, saved by our Redeemer. This should have taught us that time, as we know it, means nothing to the Creator or to the Redeemer, and should have enabled us, long ago, to see that angels and redeemed are one and the same. They are not "yet" raised, yet were seen long ago.

In restraining John's inclination to worship him the angel simply said, as we understand it: "I am one of you!" It seems to us that on these two occasions a glorified saint (or was it two different saints, given that perhaps John would not make the same mistake twice with the same one - presumably angels have recognisably different features, one from the other, just as we have now?) reminded John, or sought to get him to accept what perhaps he already knew but was having difficulty in

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understanding, that an angel is but one of the brothers (the term includes sisters) who have the testimony of Jesus, raised to glory.

Hebrews 12: The cloud of witnesses, the angels, the church

of the firstborns, the spirits of just men.

Through the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the

Hebrews there is a long list of those who died in faith without

receiving what was promised. The exposition continues into the twelfth chapter with: "since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses....let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us." We all agree that the figure is one of a crowd in the amphitheatre watching a race, but then we stop and say: "but they are not really watching, they're all dead and unconscious." It really does spoil the figure when we thus pull back from accepting the simple force of the words of scripture. Can't we accept that we are being watched over as we run the race, watched over by the citizens of the "future" Kingdom, by the angels, by all those faithful witnesses listed in chapter 11, by an innumerable multitude of the redeemed - our glorified future selves among them if indeed we are the Lord's?

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As we read on in Hebrews 12 we come to a remarkable passage beginning at verse 22. "You have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousand of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."

We propose that in this statement we are given a triple parallel as follows (following the Diaglott): 1. The final unity of Gods family in Jesus The new Jerusalem A full, or festal, assembly God, Elohim who judges 2. The constituent parts taken from among men Thousands of angels Church of the firstborns The spirits of the righteous

3. By means of: Jesus The sprinkled blood

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Column one offers three ways of describing the final unity when God is all in all; Column two, we suggest, presents three ways of describing the formerly mortal constituent parts of that final unity in which the words, "angels", "church of the firstborns" and "spirits of the righteous" are equivalent.

Below both columns of the parallel listing the allusion to Jesus and sprinkled blood emphasises the role of Jesus and his sacrifice in the founding of this wondrous eternal fellowship, this Divine family, the originating of which was the motive for the

Genesis creation and all that followed. It is to this assembly that

we are called and even now those of us who will attain unto life are metachronologically represented in that great congregation by our glorified, resurrected "future" selves, our angels.

We have seen this full assembly, the myriads of angels, this church of righteous firstborns made perfect, in the visions of the Throne Room.

2 Corinthians 12:1-5: "Caught up to the third heaven"

"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven.
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This passage about Paul's "visions and revelations from the Lord" is another that we do not commonly do well at interpreting. Some things are, however, clear. We know from 2 Peter 3, for example, that there were or are three heavens and earths.

Firstly, there was the heaven and earth that by the word of God was destroyed by water in the time of Noah;

The second heaven and earth is the present order kept in store by the same word against judgement by fire; after that judgement, the third heaven and earth of the Kingdom will be revealed.

So the third heaven of which Paul speaks must be the ruling hierarchy, the seat of power, of the Kingdom of God.

But Paul's language is very curious. He had met someone who was, or had been, in the Kingdom, in Paradise, but who was not permitted to tell of that state. Strangely too, Paul was eager (in contrast to his usual reticence) to boast of such a one. Why should he boast of someone else? It was evidently not the Lord he met because it was the Lord who had arranged the encounter: "I
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will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord". We think the evidence points to Paul's having being permitted to meet his future, glorified, angelic self so that from that time onwards he would know that his place in the Kingdom was established. We might envisage Paul being shown, as were Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel (to name but some), the Throne Room of the Lord's glory from whence the angelic redeemed go out to govern the kingdom and control the history of the world.

Maybe Paul, like Isaiah, came to one of the doorways and looked in, and maybe the one who came to help him understand identified himself not just as "your fellow-servant" but as his own glorified future self. No wonder, if that were the case, that Paul was moved to say: "I will boast about a man like that!" How necessary then: "To keep me from being conceited because of these surpassing great revelations, there was given to me a thorn...." We are sure that it was this encounter that made Paul so certain, when he wrote his last Letter to Timothy, that the Lord would give him the crown of righteousness.

As to the "in the body or apart from the body I do not know", we suspect that Paul, confronted with his angelic self had
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the same problem as the disciples did when handling the risen Lord: they found him to be "in the body", only to have him vanish from their sight. Spirit bodies are beyond our present ken.

Other interactions with glorified selves? Whilst thinking of meeting or seeing one's self in glory, we have already looked at the situation with regard to the risen glorified Jesus. We might also think of John, receiving the

Revelation while in Patmos. If indeed the twenty four elders

include the twelve apostles then he also would have seen his future glorified self though he may well not have recognised the fact. It is also possible that an angel may have so identified himself.

It

almost

looks

as

though

John's

capacity

for

comprehension was just about exhausted, saturated, by the overwhelming abundance of heavenly things (witness his attempts to worship as discussed above under "I am your fellow-servant"). The identification of one of the participants in the proceedings in the Throne Room as himself might have been just one thing too many to take in.

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We may also wonder about the identity of the one who wrestled with Jacob (Genesis 32). Angels rarely give their names, and this one did not, possibly to conceal the identities of those who will inherit the Kingdom. But would it not be appropriate if the one who wrestled with Jacob were to be his future, glorified, angelic self?! We often, when right and wrong are before us, talk about wrestling with our conscience; how true this would be if weak, erring, mortal Jacob wrestled with his strong, good, immortal self! Another little pointer suggesting that this might have been so is the parallel in the sequelae: Just as Paul was given an affliction after his encounter with his angelic self, Jacob from that point onwards was afflicted with a limp.

The transfiguration: Moses and Elijah In common with many we had long thought of the transfiguration as being an occasion when the disciples were transported forward in time to see the glories of the coming Kingdom, for had not Jesus given a strong hint of that six days before? We now think that the Lord did not work that way (though that feat in itself would have argued for our case that the Lord has mastery of time). Instead, we think, the glorified

angelic Moses and Elijah made a metachronological appearance

before the disciples. There was no need for these prophets to be
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temporarily resurrected or for the disciples to be transported forward in time to the Kingdom to see them. True, in our concept of time Moses and Elijah were (and still are) in their graves, unconscious. This is why we call their appearance

"metachronological" because, as we reckon time, they visited Jesus and his disciples at least nineteen hundred years before they "should have done" i.e. at least 2000 years before their resurrection.

But in due course, as we reckon time now, they will be called out of their graves to immortality. The Kingdom is "already" there - in the future, alive and well and functioning, just over the time horizon from us, and Moses and Elijah are honoured citizens. And, being immortals, angels, they travel in time as well as space to any or all ages as part of their work. They are, therefore, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, alive in all ages of history including "now" and, if God wills, can make themselves visible to men. They did so at the transfiguration.

Deuteronomy 32:43: "Rejoice, O nations, with his people",

"and let all the angels of God worship him." (LXX).

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These words at the close of the Song of Witness with which Moses left his people reminded them of the intention of the Lord, from the beginning, to call to himself any who would respond, from "the nations" as well as from the descendants of Israel. In the final analysis the "children" with whom God will spend eternity will be from all nations on earth - including many who were Jews.

The Massoretic text on which our English versions of

Deuteronomy are based seems to have suffered a mishap in this

v43 in that the words, "and let all the angels of God worship him" seem to have disappeared. They are present, though, in the Septuagint (LXX) and Dead Sea scrolls manuscripts and, much more importantly, are quoted as the words of God himself in

Hebrews 1:6, speaking of his Son. It may be accepted then that

the Song of Witness closes with two parallel lines:

"Rejoice, O nations, with his people", "Let all the angels of God worship him".

This strongly suggests, at the very least, that the word "angels" is equivalent to "nations with his people"; this is precisely
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the picture we gained from Revelation where the "angels" appeared to be identical with "those redeemed out of every nation".

Romans 8:19: "The creation waits....for the sons of God to be

revealed"

Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy"

We have chosen these two passages simply as examples of texts where the term "sons of God" seems to be used, in the one case of the redeemed and in the other of the angels. In the

Letter to the Romans the identity of the sons of God is quite

clear: "We wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies" (v23) while in Job it as explicitly refers to the angels, participating in and rejoicing over, the creation: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?" (v4). In fact some versions (including the NIV) simply translate "sons of God" as "angels" giving "sons of God" as a footnote.

At the very least there seems to be a strong case for saying that the same "sons" are referred to in all such passages,

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especially as the book of Job opens with an account of meetings of "the sons of God" in their mortality.

The use of a term such as "sons of God" for both mortals and immortals, fits into a wider pattern:

The word "elohim", for example, is used both of mortal beings ("I said, you are 'gods' ( elohim), you are all sons of the Most High" Psalm 82:6) and of immortal. ("Then God (elohim) said, Let us make man in our image...")

A similar case is that of the word "angelos", translated "angel" or "messenger". It is used of messengers who are clearly immortal (angels) as in: "God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth..." (Luke

1:26) and of messengers who are just as clearly

mortal: "Was not Rahab the prostitute considered righteous ... she gave lodging to the spies (AV "messengers") and sent them off..." (James 2:25).

This, to us, strongly suggests continuity between the mortal and immortal; it indicates that there are:
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mortal sons who will become immortal sons mortal elohim who will become immortal elohim mortal angels who will become immortal angels

Of course, it would not be expected that the translators would think of a possible identity between the "sons of God" of

Job 38 and the "sons of God" of Romans 8, as we think that this

may be the first time this has been proposed.

We will discuss the term sons of God further in Lay-by 5 in chapter 9.

It has been suggested in earlier discussions of this thesis that we may only be adding to the existing number of angels and when we attain immortality, that there may "already" be other angels, "pre-existing" angels. We cannot of course exclude this possibility but at the same time we cannot see any evidence for it nor see any necessity to postulate such "other" angels, except perhaps for one scripture, mentioned in considering a later passage.

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1 Timothy 5:21: "I charge you, in the sight of God and Christ
Jesus and the elect angels...." Oddly, we rarely seem to notice the strangeness of the expression: "the elect angels". "Chosen angels" sounds distinctly odd, and it makes us wonder about the whys and wherefores of their choosing, yet it is a good translation. So what does it mean?

Paul, as the mouthpiece of Jesus, is charging Timothy to keep his instructions, and to emphasise the solemnity of the charge makes it before God, Jesus Christ and the elect angels. Unquestionably God and Jesus are heavenly so presumably the angels are the heavenly ones too and not earthly ones, i.e. mortal messengers. How come then their description as "elect"? The problem disappears once we understand that angels are the elect, the chosen of God, in glory, and the Lord's expression through Paul then sounds simply natural.

Matthew 18:10-11: "...these little ones. For I tell you that

their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven."

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We suggest that we should take it as read! Each disciple ("little one") who attains unto the resurrection of the just will be made immortal like his or her Lord, and with him will be freed from all the constraints of time. In short, each of God's children who will attain the Kingdom is already (metachronologically speaking) represented by his or her future glorified self among the ranks of the angels.

Although their elevation to this high state is yet future to us, the metachronicity, the "timelessness" of immortality means that the citizens of the Kingdom are now before the Father and are being sent on missions among men. Thus the angels who "will be" the glorified form of every child of God are "always" beholding the face of the Father. We have seen them thus beholding him, at least him as manifested by the glorified Son, in the visions of the Throne Room. Nor are they simply "beholding", gazing at, the one on the throne; they are working with him for the saving of the children of men.

Many Christians have long, rightly, believed that the resurrected, glorified, immortal saints will be kings and priests working with their Saviour in the Millennium. We are now proposing that to that, perfectly correct, picture we should add
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that of the saints working with their Saviour throughout time, from Eden onwards, for the generation of the sons of God. After all, if he laboured with his Father in the millennia before his resurrection to immortality why should it seem strange that his saints should labour with him in the millennia before their resurrection?

And as we have noted in the penultimate paragraph, the saints were there in the past, visible to the likes of Isaiah, Daniel and John. It seems as though Jesus were saying, "At whatever point in the history of the world and of God's dealings with his children you look, "their" angels will be there, "always" before my Father in heaven." They were, indeed, not just passively beholding the occupant of the Throne, but working for him, in all ages.

Luke 20:35-36;(see also Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25) "In the

resurrection from the dead...they can no longer die; for they are like the angels;" The original Greek prefix here translated in various versions as "like" or "as" can have several related meanings: (i) "like", (ii) the same as, (iii) equal. The most familiar, perhaps, of
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the uses of this prefix iso is in words like "isosceles", the triangle with equal, identical, sides, or "isotope" an atomic variant occupying the "same place" in the Periodic Table as the atom to which it is related.

In the above passage translators have all plumped for the first option and rendered the passage as if a comparison was intended by the Lord: "and they will be similar to the angels." Indeed, some of our critics try to take translations such as "like unto" as a basis for claims that "if the saints are only LIKE UNTO (critics usually put these words in capitals) angels, they can't be the same as angels". There is good ground for believing that the translations are incorrect here. Accepting the fact that

presumably the translators never dreamed even of the possibility that resurrected saints and angels could be one and the same, and therefore would not think of rendering the passage in this sense, the text does in fact allow us to render it in the sense of "the same as" or "identical with".

Liddell and Scott in their 1983 reprint of the 1940 new edition of their Greek-English Lexicon, pg 836, refer to Luke

20:36 and give "like an angel" but later in the same paragraph they
give the prefix the force of "equal to" (the immortals). On pg 839
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the prefix is given the force of "equal in size, strength, or number or appearance" etc... This sense of iso, "as", "equal to", opens the possibility of rendering the passage, paraphrasing for clarity, as follows:

"Now they live as mortals, in the resurrection they will live as angels", or "Now they are mortals, in the resurrection they will be angels."

After all, we use "as" in the same idiom in other contexts without misunderstanding. We speak, rightly, of:

Jesus having come as a man, and that he will return as a lifegiving spirit not that he was like a man or like a spirit, he was man and is spirit. Likewise, he was the Lamb of God (he came as the Lamb) and will return as the Lion of Judah (he will be the Lion).

So it is with us. In this life we live as mortals, in the Kingdom we will be the angels. This interpretation is greatly strengthened by continuing another couple of verses in Luke's record:
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Luke 20:38: "Concerning the resurrection....God is not a God

of the dead, but of the living....For to him all are alive"

If the concept we are proposing is valid the above words mean that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will be resurrected to life in the future to us, but, once glorified, will have the mastery of time like their Lord and with him pass beyond our (kind of) time. The glorified patriarchs are therefore

now

(again,

metachronologically speaking), standing before the God they trusted, as angelic inhabitants of the future, and, we suspect, are currently working among men. God is the God of the living, says the scripture, and further, that in the state of Divine spirit life the faithful are alive now . Like all saints the patriarchs will have experienced the long unconscious sleep of death before their awakening sometime in the future as we reckon time, but once they awake to eternal life they will find past, present and future are alike to them.

Matthew 25:31-46: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory,

and all the angels with him ... these brothers of mine"

This interesting passage was drawn to the attention of Paul Launchbury many years ago by Margery McGregor, an elder and
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fellow Bible student and Greek scholar with whom he has discussed this thesis (inter alia) on many occasions.

Jesus says that he will return, and that when he does he will be accompanied by "all the angels". He will then judge "all the nations". When accepting the righteous he will say: "Whatever you did for one of these brothers (the term includes sisters) of mine, you did for me", and similarly when rejecting the wicked.

Who were those "brothers of mine"?

The only ones

present with Jesus, to whom he could point, were the angels. Jesus calls his angels "brothers of mine". This sounds very odd if applied to any of all the conventional and/or current beliefs about the specially-created "ministering spirits", but seems so obviously right when his angelic companions are understood to be those he redeemed, that he might be "the firstborn among many brothers" (Romans 8:29).

Acts 12:5: "It must be his angel"

Peter, released from prison by an angel, was knocking on the door and calling to be let in. As Rhoda kept insisting to the unbelieving elders that it was Peter, the assembled worthies
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explained the phenomenon in the words quoted above. We might wonder at first if they simply meant: "It is his messenger", meaning someone sent from prison with word of him; but we dismiss this explanation immediately because it was recognisably Peter to those who knew him well.

Could it be that the early church knew that each of the saints would be an angel in the Kingdom (in view of Jesus' words considered earlier, for example) and that as angels they are now beholding the Father's face? "Peter's angel" on this

understanding would have been a reference to the immortalised, angelic, Peter who in spite of being made spirit and freed from all constraints of time was still clearly and recognisably Peter. To the church of the first century, as to us, that transformation is still future, but those who attain that age come out of the future, through time, to work with us.

We will now consider this transformation to angelhood:

The Return of Jesus: Resurrection and transformation to angelhood It is admitted that this sequence of events, the "changeover", as it were, from our epoch of time limitation to the
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metachronology of immortality, is one of the most difficult of all to visualise. To add to our difficulty there is no single view as to how exactly the scriptural teaching of resurrection and

judgement to come will work out in practice. It would be out of place for this work to attempt a study of the Judgement, both of the world in general and of the responsible including the saints in particular, so we will confine our treatment of the topic to the minimum comment necessary to develop the thesis given that this "changeover" constitutes an obvious conceptual difficulty that must be faced.

Given the difficulty of visualising this phase (which applies also, of course, to the resurrection of Jesus, though for simplicity we omitted to mention it when considering the Redeemer). We will try to break it down into sections and stages, not necessarily "chronological" of course.

Myriads of holy ones Many passages speak of the coming of the Lord in the company of large numbers of holy ones or angels:

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"The Lord came from Sinai and dawned over them from Seir; he shone forth from Mount Paran. He came with myriads of holy ones..." (Deuteronomy 33:2). While the NIV and RSV are strictly in accordance with the Hebrew in translating the description of the Lord's retinue as "holy ones", the AV and RAV make a very reasonable

interpretative translation as "saints". If we are correct in this thesis, this rendering of the word for the Lord's companions, when he descends from heaven, as "saints" will prove to have been made with more insight (albeit unconscious) than anyone yet suspects!

"Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men: 'See the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone....'" (Jude 14-15). Again, the AV and RAV translate the original (Greek this time of course) as "saints" while the RSV renders it "holy myriads"; in this case the NIV and RSV are strictly literal and accurate in their translation while the AV and RAV are interpretative, though very reasonably so. It is worth noting, in passing, that Moses wrote of Yahweh's coming while Jude pretty obviously had the Lord Jesus in mind; this coupling of identities or titles is another reminder of the way Jesus inherited all his
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Father's names and titles and will fulfil all the prophecies concerning him.

Again, the fact that the original Hebrew and Greek can be rendered in ways permitting identification with angels or saints with equal justification does at the very least suggest that there may be a continuity between the two. It may also be a strong hint that "holy ones", "angels", and "saints", are synonyms for the same beings. It seemed to us singularly appropriate that when the glorious Son moves to establish his Father's will on earth, the citizens of his Father's Kingdom should be with him in carrying through the great event which will terminate mortal man's rule on earth.

Zechariah 14:5 also refers to this coming of the Lord and

his holy companions: "Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him";

While David (Psalm 68:17-18) heightens the consistency of the picture with words which are specifically applied to Jesus and his church by the Lord through Paul in Ephesians 4:8-13. David wrote: "The chariots (Weiser: "chariotry", an expression which, perhaps,
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relates to those who ride the craft above the cherub "wheels") of God are tens of thousands and thousands of thousands: the Lord has come from Sinai into his sanctuary. When you ascended on high, you led captives in your train; you received gifts from men... (Ephesians: gave gifts to men; LXX: received gifts for man)"

The picture is consistent, is it not? Consistently one of a Lord who descends and ascends accompanied always by "holy ones."

On the basis of Ephesians 4:8-13 (based on a quotation and development of Psalm 68) these "holy ones" are those from whose

number he "gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some

to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." This maturity, this knowledge (experiencing) of the Son of God, will of course only be attained fully when we become like him in immortality, seeing him as he is, though we can make significant,

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though halting and limited, progress in that direction even now, with God's help through the Holy Spirit.

To return, though, to the coming of the Lord with his saints, the picture we have so far built up is also evoked by the well-known words of the Spirit through Paul:

"We believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him" (Thessalonians 4:14). This is certainly curious language, suggesting that when the Lord descends from heaven those who accompany him in his descent will be those who have fallen asleep in him, dead saints in other words. But are they not dead and unconscious until he descends to bring about their resurrection?

Is there not a hint of the popular doctrine of heaven-going at death in these words, with the idea that the souls of the dead saints being with their Lord while their bodies await resurrection from the ground? We think not.

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Firstly, we need to take into account the reversed priority of Hebrews 11:39-40 as we discussed in Stepping stone 1. On the contrary, these words through Paul fit very consistently into our thesis and are in perfect harmony with the prophecies through Moses and Enoch (the latter via Jude), David and Zechariah, about the Lord coming with myriads of angel-saints.

Perhaps we can best set the scene for a closer look at the events of Jesus' return, and the resurrection, in a series of statements based on the thesis as it has developed so far:

The "changeover" sequence (a) We know that the saints now sleep in death. (b) When Jesus comes they will be resurrected. (c) On their acceptance by him they will be immortalised. (d) On being immortalised, they will be like him, for they will see him as he is, and participate with him in the divine nature. (e) Being like Jesus they will have mastery of time, with him and his Father, filling or moving in all time, right back to the creation of the worlds, when together they sing as sons of God rejoicing at creation.
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(f) Being thus elevated to spirit nature they move in time before their resurrection as well as after (in mortal conception of time, that is). (g) Being their Lord's constant companions they move with him wherever he goes, or on whatever mission he sends them. (h) When he moves to end man's rule on earth and to raise his elect from death, they accompany him. (i) The difficulty lies, for our limited comprehension, in the concept of one's glorified angelic self calling one from the grave.

Let us therefore look a little more closely at the concept of resurrection, acknowledging that we shall never really understand it all fully this side of immortality and that however hard we try and whatever progress we make in understanding we shall still be very surprised by it all when it happens!

Resurrection: Re-creation? We think we all sometimes tend to visualise this wonderful process a little simplistically. Do we often have in our mind's eye a picture of a body sleeping motionless and unconscious until stirred
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into new life at the resurrection? Certainly there was something of that in our Lord's case though the wonder of the awakening and the transformation of his flesh to immortal spirit substance is sometimes not given the notice it should have.

In the case of recently buried saints for whom the sojourn in the grave is of only a few years or at most a few generations so that the localisation of the remains is still fairly well defined we may again think perhaps of an opening grave and an emerging saint, though this still ignores the problem of the chemical (and therefore structural) dissolution that occurs in death.

But what of those faithful ones burnt to ashes, their substance wafted to the winds in smoke? Or those eaten by lions, or lost at sea and consumed by aquatic creatures? Or those so long dead that no trace remains of their substance or even of their burial site? Yet they remain secure in the Lord's care and will stand in their lot at the end of days. Does this not suggest that resurrection is really re-creation?

We are sure that very many will be in complete agreement with this, so let's now think through some of the implications.

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The record of us Given this need for re-creation it follows that the Lord has a complete record of all who have died, their physical and mental attributes, in such a form that they can be remade at his will. This record, presumably, will include all our imperfections, our tendency to evil as well as good, so that when we are first remade at resurrection we will be just as we are in this life; only on transformation to immortality will the frailties, the evils, of mortality be lost, "swallowed up by life".

We wonder whether, when the life-force which makes the difference between a living soul and a dead soul leaves us, an integral part of it is the imprint, the specification, of our whole being sufficient to re-create us at the last day? Is this specification of each living creature spoken of by the Teacher in those famous words about the end of our mortal life: "the dust returns from the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it" (Ecclesiastes 12:7)? Does the life-force given to each living creature from conception "pick up" the stamp of individuality during the life of the creature and become an indelible record or specification of that living being? We might hypothesize that it does. It does not follow, of course, that the Lord will activate all such records and resurrect every life form
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that has ever lived, though plainly, he could if he wished. (We will return to this idea of spirit shortly, when we consider the problem of supernatural evil.)

We might, in this generation living at the beginning of the twenty-first century, be better placed than those of earlier times to understand (however dimly) how this might be. We can store enormous amounts of information in computers. We can store in electronic memory a complete specification of a product and, by means of machinery linked to and instructed by the computer, we can produce that product either singly or in multiples. The computer memory is translated into a three-dimensional product. The simplest example is probably the word processor (on which this book was composed). The "text" in the machine consists of tiny clouds of electric charge in the computer memory, which are juggled around as the editing proceeds until the text is deemed satisfactory. The electronic memory is then translated into a magnetic memory on a disc (or similar device) for safe long-term storage.

At any time this memory (of either type) can be translated into pages of print, recognisably a text - a product which can be handled - by means of a printer linked to the computer. Our own
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brains, converting concepts and memories into text or objects by means of our hands operate in a similar way.

So may not the Creator operate in an analogous, though far more wonderful, way? The following extract from a science fiction work may give some help in visualising how resurrection may be brought about:

"Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in another station and the materialiser had built up a pattern of it - not only of its body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life. Then the impulse pattern had moved across the gulfs of space almost instantaneously to the receiver at the station, where the pattern had been used to duplicate the body and mind and memory and the life of that creature now lying dead many light-years distant. And in the tank the new body and the mind and memory and life had taken almost instant form - an entirely new being, but exactly like the old one, so that the identity continued and the consciousness (the very thought no more than momentarily interrupted) so that to all intents and purposes the being was the same" (Simak, C., Way Station, Gollancz S.F., Methuen, London, 1984 (paperback), pg59).
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It does not follow, of course, that the re-creation of the resurrected ones is exactly on the spot of their death and burial. Again, this is obvious once it is stated, but we suspect that many of us do have a mental image of the resurrected ones coming up out of the ground, and in a location at least approximate to their "last resting place". This is not necessary and in most cases would be improbable.

Having now thought a little about the process of resurrection perhaps we should now turn to think about how the day of resurrection would appear to the individuals involved.

Resurrection to angelhood At the end of our present age the Lord will come accompanied by myriads of angel-saints. Those who are the Lord's righteous, and who sleep in death, will stand up, recreated, somewhere on the surface of the earth, probably at ground level. As they regain consciousness each of them will see an angel before him or her, sent to gather the Lord's elect from the four corners of the earth. They will probably not know it but, we suspect, each saint will be raised, re-created from the

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heavenly records, by his or her own future glorified angelic self who will be seen standing before the awakened one.

Those who are also the Lord's righteous but are still alive at the coming of the Lord will be met by an angel, again of that number sent to gather his elect together. Again, that angel will be the future glorified self of the individual living saint though, once again, it is unlikely that recognition will come to most of the mortal ones thus confronted.

What happens next? We have before us living and resurrected saints each in the company of his or her angel; how are the two "selves" to be united? How is mortality to be swallowed up by life, and the perishable to clothe itself with the imperishable? It could be that the angel moves closer and closer to the resurrected, still mortal, saint until the two are superimposed, fused into one. To us it looks as if this were what the Lord was conveying when he moved Paul to write:

"Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our
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heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life." (2 Corinthians 5:1-4)

This language is very vivid and suggests something like a swallowing up by, a fusing with, a covering over by the angel to end mortality and to destroy the weakness and evil of fleshly life. This conferring of immortality would be followed (probably) by the meeting with the Lord in the air.

Recall our comments in the last chapter on Jesus as the ruling angel and his trumpet call, and consider the description in

Numbers 10:7 of the trumpet being used to cause Israel to

assemble; Paul's apparently incongruous choice of wording in 1

Thessalonians now makes perfect sense- the 'ruling angel' will use
the trumpet call to summon his army of angels to assemble.

All this leads us to another useful point. The Gnostic heresy, which John calls the spirit of Anti-Christ in 1 John 4:3, depended on the belief that bodily existence was something that
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the divine human spirit was duped into accepting by the lying creator, who wasnt God at all but a deceiver. By contrast, we have seen that God views bodily existence as very good, both for mortals and immortals. Bishop Tom Wright again: The present life of the church, in other words, is not about soulmaking, the attempt to produce or train disembodied beings for a future disembodied life. It is about working with fully human beings who will be re-embodied at the last, after the model of the Messiah. (Pg 108, The Challenge of Jesus). We will enlarge our field to consider also the resurrection to judgement of condemnation of the wicked in the next chapter.

Caution... In all these considerations, whether we are considering Jesus or his redeemed, we can get quite the wrong impression unless the whole process is viewed from the perspective of individual experience, what we call the Personal Event Sequence (PES).

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All that we have written so far has been from the perspective of we mortals, considering the coming of the Lord with his angels, and from that perspective it does look as if the angels were glorified "before" us. If, instead, we look at it from the point of view of the individual angel and follow through his or her Personal Event Sequence (PES), the picture is quite different.

Since each angel is a glorified saint the first conscious moments experienced and remembered by the angel in his/her PES would be those of infancy as he or she grew up as a baby. Then would come childhood, adolescence and adulthood, with (for those in the Christian era) baptism into Christ. At some point, for most, death came but the sleep of death passed like an instant, however long it was, for it was a totally unconscious time. Immediately, therefore, it seems to the saint, after falling asleep in death he or she is awake again and clothed with immortality.

Only then does mastery of time come and the angel-saints find themselves like their Lord, free from the constraints of time, beyond time as we know it. In this state they may well see the events of their own mortal life (perhaps rather as we can recapture the past on film or video tape, only in this case it is
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real) and may even be required to play a part in shaping their own development. They, because of the metachronicity of immortality, exist "before" and "after" their own resurrection and become involved in it.

To quote Bishop Tom again: We speak of people being shadows of their former selves; if 2 Corinthians 5.1-10 is correct, we should think of ourselves as being shadows of our future selves in Gods purpose. (N.T. Wright, New Heavens, New Earth, pg 12) Cast your mind back to our comments on the Law being a shadow of Christ in chapter 6.

Exactly the same sequence of thought applies to Jesus. Although he became involved in the creation of the world and the events of the Old Testament, this was outside his personal experience, his PES, until after his resurrection. For him, like us, the first conscious moments were in infancy, to be followed by his growth as a youth which in turn led to his ministry and death. While, as we have already written, he may well have understood during his mortality the part he was to play in "the past" after his
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resurrection he would not actually carry out this work until he attained his Father's nature on rising from the dead. It is not therefore correct to think of a pre-existing divine Son who came down in human form and nature to give himself for us. The situation is the reverse of pre-existence - a human Son died and rose to immortality, only then becoming a master of time as well as space and joining his Father in eternity. Such is the process of the generation of the children of God.

References for this section Aquinas, Thomas Summa Theologica , 1274 , available on line e.g. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1.htm Liddell, H.G. and R Scott, R. Greek-English Lexicon 1940, latest edition 1996 Clarendon Press, Oxford Simak, C., Way Station, 1984 Gollancz S.F., Methuen, London Wright, N.T.

New Heavens, New Earth: A Biblical Picture of the Christian Hope 1999 Grove Books Ltd, Cambridge, UK

The Challenge of Jesus, 2000 SPCK

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At this point many Christians will be saying All well and good, but so take some time out for our 3rd Stepping-stone...

Stepping-stone 3: Where does that leave the devil and his angels?

Was not that Lucifer an angel once? Most Christian readers will be objecting that the devil and demons are generally supposed to be fallen angels. Obviously it would be preposterous to imagine redeemed saints turning on their redeemer, so if it could be shown that the fallen angel concept was indeed scriptural, it would create some problems for our ideas, unless we fell back on the remote possibility, as we discussed before, of the redeemed only adding to a population of angels. However, we feel this is not necessary.

Lets remind ourselves of the conventional story, as it has been told by millions of Christians worldwide for centuries. In some primordial, celestial time Lucifer was one of the chief archangels- perhaps even first among them. Unrivalled in power and beauty, he became vain and conceited, and finally could not tolerate the authority of his creator over him. A multitude of the heavenly host was seduced into his rebellion, and the whole band was cast from heaven, becoming Satan, the Devil and his demons. Filled with malice and spite against God, they tempted Adam into sin and then persisted in ruining his creation.

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Its a famous tale, long and widely accepted, but is it Biblical? Is it true?

If it isnt, then who is Satan, and what are demons and the powers of spiritual evil generally? How do they fit in metachronologically? And what about hell and the war in heaven? We will discuss this in the next chapter below. In this Stepping-stone we will confine ourselves to explaining why we feel readers should confidently reject the Lucifer story.

And dont come back! First, lets apply a cold flannel to the story as it is often told or imagined. Do we really believe that Heaven is like some huge Byzantine palace, where an arch-angel could pull some unsuspecting angels into a store cupboard and whisper Pssst! How about you help me rise up to replace God? This flags up an important problem; what sort of entities would choose to plot against an all-knowing God, or rise up against an all-powerful one? Surely a superintelligent angel, who knows better than anyone the powers of the Almighty, would not think it a terribly cunning plan to oppose God? As Miltons Beelzebub describes God to Lucifer, after they are ejected from heaven: our Conqueror (whom I now/ Of force believe almighty) [I:43-44]

And later he says of the army of rebel angels:

Which but the Omnipotent none could have foiled! [I:273] (John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1665)

To which we can only say: Er- which bit of Omnipotent didnt you get?

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We suspect readers will concede that it cant have been quite like that.

Back to the Bible So what Biblical evidence is put forward for the fallen angel hypothesis? Some readers may be surprised to learn that the name Lucifer that gets used with such glib confidence in the conventional telling of Satans backstory is not found in modern translations of the Bible at all; you will only find it in Isaiah 14:12, in the AV:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!

Other translations render this bright morning star, day star, son of the dawn etc. and do not mention the name Lucifer at all; it is not in the Hebrew text. (In fact, it was first inserted as a proper name by Jerome in his Latin Vulgate in the fifth century AD!) Please read this verse in the context of the whole passage in Isaiah 14; we note the following points:

Lucifer is identified in v4; the passage is about The King of Babylon He was oppressing Israel, and other nations, in the prophets day

(v3)
He has a body of flesh (v11) and is covered in other dead bodies

(v19)
He is a man (v16) He had a grave that he should have been buried in (vv19,20)

In v13, he simply plans in his heart to ascend to heaven; this is very 246

different from talking about an angel, already up there, who gets thrown out! It is only this reference to his megalomaniac fantasy of ruling in heaven, together with the pre-conceived ideas conjured up by the name Lucifer, that has resulted over the centuries in this passage being applied to the Devil. We suggest the interpretation is very forced indeed!

We believe Lucifer can be readily identified. Without boring the reader with a history lesson, everything in this passage applies to the Assyrian emperor Sargon, who presided over the deportation of Israel from their land, but who was later slaughtered with his army and was eaten by carrion-feeders rather than receiving a decent burial, and denounced by his son who succeeded him. Isaiah was prophesying against a contemporary menace to Israel and Judah.

Why the Morning-Star imagery? The pentagram, or five-pointed star which describes the motions of the planet Venus was the symbol of the Assyrian kings as the servants of Inanna/Ishtar, the Babylonian Venus and Goddess of War. Readers will be aware that this is still a military symbol; both Russia and America still use it on their military vehicles!

We submit that there seems little reason to associate this passage with the origins of the devil.

Ezekiel 28 is actually very similar. Again, it is explicitly talking about a human

ruler, but using apparently divine imagery. This may be to do with Tyres involvement with the building of Solomons temple, and with the religion of the Tyrians themselves. Deriving teaching from this passage on the devil is as incongruous, and poorly-substantiated as relying on Isaiah 14. 247

Jewish Beliefs in Jesus Day What then of Matthew 25:41: Then [Jesus] will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. (NIV)

Some Christians have drawn the lesson from this that hell-fire was not originally designed for humanity, but for the rebel angels! We feel that this may be missing the point. As we have noted elsewhere, the word angel is simply the word messenger in both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New, and it is simply the translators assumptions which dictate which is used in a given passage. Would rendering this as the devil and his messengers be appropriate, or meaningful?

In the second century BC apocryphal book 1 Enoch 54:1-6 the expression messengers of Satan is used to refer to kings and potentates who are thrown into the furnace of fire on the great day of judgment. In 1 Enoch

64:12 it refers to governors, kings, high officials and landlords as the

oppressors of the poor who come under judgment.

Jesus was not necessarily alluding directly to any of the Enoch texts that we have now- which are only those which have happened to survive, and only a fraction of the mass of this odd literature that was put out in the centuries before and around Jesus time. They simply reflect the religious language that was used in common parlance by the mass of the people, who were strongly influenced by the Pharisees and Essenes. (A comparison could be made with all the Christians who refer to the expression the Rapture without necessarily having read the nineteenth century books that 248

introduced the term, or agreeing with all the theology of their authors.) Jesus, in order to communicate effectively with his audience, used their everyday religious vocabulary. We suggest that Jesus original hearers understood something like this in what he said: You who havent cared for the poor- go into the fire prepared for the devils messengers - because thats who you are, and thats where you belong!

[Actually, the Enoch literature is of additional interest to our theory. In this genre of sectarian writing, the authors take on the persona of the antediluvian Enoch and take him on tours of heaven and hell and their attendant angels and demons. Their descriptions of them are of course completely imaginary, and provide completely incompatible and contradictory pictures from text to text - and are nothing like the Biblical visions we discussed in the Throne Room chapter. This is further evidence for the reality of the experience of the true prophets over the centuries!]

And 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude v6? Same principle. If we translate angels here as messengers with the special sense of spokesmen then the story seems to allude to the Levites who followed Korah, the rebel against Moses, referred to in Jude v11. (Numbers 16:8-10, 31-3; For further insight into this epistle, we recommend John Bentons excellent book, Slandering the Angels: The

Message of Jude.) The use of angel in the expressions the angel of the
church in Sardis, (etc.) in Revelation 2-3 is rather odd; wouldnt spokesman or messenger be more relevant, in the same way as here? In any case, these angels are chained, and cannot possibly be the demons that apparently roam the earth.

In the surviving Enoch texts the wicked angels were imprisoned in a pit 249

before the flood - so whence the demons, according to the Jews who produced and used this literature? 1 Enoch 15:8-12 provides the surprising answer: And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth [after drowning in the Flood], and on the earth shall be their dwelling. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are born from men and from the holy Watchers [i.e. sinful angels] is their beginning and primal origin; they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called. (As for the spirits of heaven, in heaven shall be their dwelling, but as for the spirits of the earth which were born upon the earth, on the earth shall be their dwelling.) And the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth, and cause trouble: they take no food, but nevertheless hunger and thirst, and cause offences. And these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women, because they have proceeded from them.

The Book of Jubilees 10:1-14, another apocryphal book from the same
period, also gives this version of the demons origin. Since these giants are described in the texts as being the size of multi-storey buildings (over 130 meters!) we think most readers will join us in not taking such literature very seriously. (In fact later on we will explore what misunderstanding the later Jewish writers were basing this identification with the giants on.) But it does give us a useful insight into what many Jews believed at the time of Jesus, and sheds light on the unique nature of the way Jesus spoke about the devil and demons.

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In the various Jewish apocalyptic writings, written in the last couple of centuries before and after Jesus, we find a plethora of different ideas about the devil and demons. Some books talk about typical End-time themes without any reference to Satan or demons at all. In others, he seems to be Gods angel who simply has the unpleasant role of denouncing sinners; in the surviving Enoch literature, there is no war in heaven, nor are the rebel angels led by Satan or the Devil, and in any case they are judged and imprisoned before the Flood. One text says all the stars are demons, while another exhorts its readers to practice astrology. Judaism at the time of Jesus and the Apostles was very diverse indeed! (Another interesting discrepancy is that sometimes the Angel of Death or Ruler of this world/age is seen as a servant of God, and sometimes as a Satanic Enemy.) However, we do not find the Lucifer thrown from heaven story anywhere in the surviving texts.

And all these texts were written by people who hadnt really traveled into heaven, or had revelations from God - they are pious fiction! On the other hand, the unique way Jesus discusses these themes is from God himself.

Further reading for Stepping Stone 3: Benton, John Slandering the Angels: The Message of Jude, 1999 Evangelical Press (Benton argues that Judes apparently odd selection of allusions are addressing specific aspects of the teaching of particular Gnostic heretics, with much relevance for today.) Charlesworth, James H. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha:

Apocalyptic

Literature

&

Testaments,

Volume

1983

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Doubleday/Random House

Expansion of the Old Testament and Legends, Wisdom and Philosophical Literature, Prayers, Psalms and Odes, Fragments of Lost Judeo-Hellenistic Works, Volume 2 1985 Doubleday/Random
House

(Many of these texts are available on earlyjewishwritings.com) Healy, Mark, The Ancient Assyrians; 1991 Osprey Publishing, London (For a brief account of Sargons life and death.) Kelly, Henry Ansgar, Satan: A Biography; 2006 Cambridge University Press (Kelly gives a fascinating account of the origin of the Lucifer myth. He even names the exact Church Fathers responsible, and the basis of their blatantly dodgy exegesis!) Milton, John Paradise Lost, 1665

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Chapter 9 Evil spirits

Who the devil is he?

horough Bible students - and sensible practitioners of deliverance ministry - will be surprised at how little information on Satan and demons there is in the

Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, especially when we consider the endless lurid tomes on demonology churned out by unwise Christians (and, indeed, in the earlier centuries, Jews) over two millennia.

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Some possibly surprising quotes from the respected writer on this subject, Canon Michael Green:

There is a good deal of reserve on the subject [of the devil] in the Bible There are, therefore, many gaps in our knowledge (pg 33) How did this great spirit fall? We do not know in full (pg 35) These hints are not extensive; they do not answer half our questions (pg 41) (I Believe in Satans Downfall, 1981 The Devil and All his Works, Hodder & Stoughton)

And while we are at it, lets hear from Pope Paul VI:

It is all a mysterious realm, thrown into confusion by an unhappy drama about which we know very little.

(Deliver Us from Evil, The Pope Speaks 17, 1973, pp 315-319, originally Liberaci dal male, LOsservatore Romano, November 16, 1972, cited in Kelly, H.A., 2006, pg 316)

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Conversely, we would conclude that the limited range of passages talking about spiritual evil do take the concept very seriously indeed, and so must we, if our theory is to stand up.

Accordingly we must point out that this section is rather more speculative than the rest of our argument, simply because there is far less scriptural information to go on. However, there is enough for us to make an attempt. You may find our ideas surprising, but we think you will find they fit the Biblical and the phenomenological evidence, and at the very least provide a plausible alternative to the Lucifer hypothesis. In the process we will consider in more detail the nature of the Godhead, and the nature of humanity in more detail, and indeed tie up a few loose ends!

The Serpent In Genesis 1:26 God gave humanity dominion over all the earth. And we leave Genesis 1 with the creation very good, with no description of it being haunted by a malignant angel. Then in

Genesis 3:1 we encounter the serpent. The conventional Christian

take on this is that it was a fallen angel masquerading as a snake, but that is simply not what the scriptures say, and the way they

do phrase the account points to a different concept:

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Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. (NIV)

It reasoned and talked, but it was a creature, an animal nevertheless. And when we read of its condemnation in vv14-15, it is as an animal it is punished: "Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. (NIV)

And yet this is a prophecy of Jesus destroying the devil on the cross (Hebrews 2:14), and in Revelation 20:2 it is spelt out that the devil and the serpent are one and the same. How can this add up? How can the premier evil spirit be an animal? It makes no apparent sense.

Introducing unGod Remember how in our second stepping stone we talked about the difference between the Brahman-conception of God
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described in the Yogic tradition and the Yahweh of the Bible. So, to the more monistic Hindus, as the supreme consciousness Brahman contains all opposites, good and evil, truth and deceit. Our God, by contrast, will not lie, break promises or murder, all traits however which the Bible ascribes to the devil. We suggest that this is no coincidence.

Humanity is made in the image of God, and possesses a degree of free will. Humans have the option to imitate either Gods standards, or those ascribed to the devil.

You may find this model helpful; if the godly imitate God, who do the ungodly imitate? Logically, unGod! Obviously before the creation, unGod had no reality, but once God created man in his image, with free will and spiritual nature, suddenly when humanity pursued sin, unGod acquired actual existence.

A second factor needs to be taken into account. God is spirit, but man is also an animal, flesh. The scriptures speak of the flesh in such terms that the NIV in Romans 7 and 8 prefers to render it the sinful nature rather than a biological thing with no moral connotations.
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A snake in the glass What does this mean? Lets contemplate the nature of the human animal. Freudian psychologists speak of the id as a model describing that part of the human unconscious mind that provides our physical urges. Biologists have little difficulty defining the part of the brain responsible - the limbic system, hind brain or reptile brain. It is called the reptile brain because it is indistinguishable from the whole brain of a lower organism - a snake, for example. Unconscious, instinctive and self-serving, it governs our basic drives, and also our automatic processes, such as heart-beat and breathing.

Now, in a reptile such a brain causes no moral problem. The creature does what God created it to do, with no blame attached, even if crocodiles occasionally eat people or venomous snakes bite them, to our dismay! But in man this reptile brain is part of a whole with our higher cognitive functions, moral sensibilities and spirituality. And as part of our being, it can be identified as the source of our base nature- deceit, exploitation, cruelty, malice.

When we consider our central nervous system, consisting primarily of spinal cord and brain, wired in to our higher
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functions, is not the talking snake an excellent description of the human condition? So the Eden myth is a profound explanation from our creator of the human dilemma; do we conform to the agenda of the image of God, or of the serpent who reasons, talks and deceives? The Eden story, so often vilified as unscientific, turns out to be right on the mark. With no concept of time, no grasp of consequence, and unable to change, and yet essential for our physical life, we can look on the flesh in Romans 8:7-8 in a new light.

Just a metaphor? So is that it? Satan merely as a metaphor for human tendency towards base and unGodly behaviour, as argued by some liberal/rational theologies? No, it has much greater implications than that. Humans have spirits, and a semblance of the divine nature. Therefore Satan exists in the spirit realm, (if readers will excuse the phrase; we use it to describe the whole matrix of spiritual existence, whether divine or infernal; more on this below) alienated from God but unable to change, or to conceive of a different way.

Similarly it (We use the neuter because we like Pecks comment that It is hard to determine the sex of a snake!) needs
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humanity for its existence, yet despises the individual human as merely its tool. It is a corporate entity, made up of all the parts of the human condition, across time, that are in opposition to God. This Great Serpent considers itself divine, and cannot tolerate the existence and operation of the True God on its territory. It strikes out at God and his followers and everything of his by blind instinct. It can comprehend the idea of future judgment, but not be convicted by it, like the heroin-user who knows all about overdose, or the alcoholic who knows about cirrhosis, but who exist in denial that it will ever really and actually put an end to them. As Ephesians 2:2 describes, it is the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.

Consider this passage from Lewis, discussing the flesh in terms that strongly equate with the devil:

The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual
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world, just as people who have been brought up to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right. It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and selfwill are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that. (Pg 178, Mere Christianity 1942 HarperCollins)

Ephesians 6:12 neatly demolishes the idea of the diabolic

as a mere metaphor for carnality: For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. As Francis Frangipane writes: How then do we explain the scriptures which allude to a devil in Heaven? ...when the Bible says that Satan is in heaven or the heavenly places (Eph 6:12, Rev 12:11) we believe it is with reference to the spirit realm. This heaven, which immediately surrounds the consciousness of man, is the spiritual territory from which Satan seeks to control the world (The Three Battlegrounds, 1994 New Wine Press pg 96) Emphasis ours.

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Whos in charge around here? It was Man who was given dominion (Genesis 1:26), and yet the devil in the wilderness (Luke 4:5-6) claimed that he held all authority; nor did Jesus contradict him, on the contrary in John

16:11 he refers to him the ruler of this world and Paul calls him
the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4) and the ruler of the kingdom of the air. (Ephesians 2:2) Who died, and left him in charge?

Christians have routinely got round this by arguing that at the Fall, Adam and Eve somehow surrendered their dominion over the earth to Satan the fallen angel. This is fine if we say it quickly, except that the Bible simply does not teach this. If our dominion was never stripped from us, however it was corrupted, and if in the New Testament Satan is described as possessing that dominion, then the serpent must be one and the same with Adam, a term most commonly used in the scriptures as a collective noun for sinful, mortal humankind.

This casts the temptation in the wilderness in a very different light. The Incarnation created an awesome arena for the clash of God and devil in the person of the Son of Man. In the
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wilderness he faced the Eden challenge; the agenda of God or the serpent? The stakes were terrible, and yet he pressed on to perfection on Golgotha:

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Colossians

2:15)
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of deaththat is, the devil (Hebrews 2:14) (NIV) (Notice how that last verse identifies the devil with the Angel of Death, who as we discussed above, in Jewish thought was titled the ruler of this world [age].)

How did Jesus destroy the devil? Perhaps you will agree that the language is more consistent with the Son of Man achieving eternal immunity for the new creation against a spiritual virus than the conventional idea of him fatally embarrassing a fallen angel? As Athanasius writes (cf. Romans 5:17):

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Naturally also, through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of mankind is such that, by virtue of the Words indwelling in a single human body, the corruption that goes with death had lost its power over all. (pg 35, St Athanasius on the Incarnation: the treatise De

Incarnatione Verbi Dei c.318 AD in translation, A.R. Mowbray & Co

Ltd, London 1944)

Lewis (who provides the foreword in the above translation!) makes much the same observation: Remember what I said about good infection. One of our own race has this new life: if we get close to Him we shall catch it from Him. (Emphasis ours) (Pg 181, Mere Christianity 1942 HarperCollins). Good infection- is this not the language of vaccine and antibody?! Jesus was raised from the dead in a transformed spirit body, one in which Satan no longer had the power to be heard, still less obeyed.

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In 1 Corinthians 15:50 Paul says, I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. We assume this was as true for Jesus as it was for any other human. And what the First-born has achieved, his brothers can inherit. Brian D. McLaren observes of the Kingdom: Just as the disease spread virally, now the cure will spread. (The Secret Message of Jesus, 2006, W Publishing Group, division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Nashville pg 144) This neatly settles the vexed paradox, commented on by many writers, (e.g. Green, op.cit. pg 16) that the devil seems to be taking a dreadfully long time to die! We will return to resolving that idea metachronologically in more detail, below.

Cynics like to find fault with God for creating the devil. We are happy to vindicate God in this. He created the serpent, we made the devil! Our theory is quite consistent; just as the angels of heaven are human in origin, so too are the forces and messengers of evil. And sin remains squarely our, human, responsibility.
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Brian D. McLarens view of a continuum of the Kingdom of Satan is, we feel, in sympathy with our own; we think a long quote is merited: What do I mean by corporate and cosmic evil? Weve all heard terms like team spirit or school spirit, the soul of a nation or

corporate culture, the crowd mentality or feeding frenzy - terms

that express how a kind of groupthink can emerge in a group and then take it over, possess it, drive it. Weve all heard stories or had experiences in which people were caught up in an evil spiritoften expressed in terms such as ism, such as Nazism or terrorism. What if, beyond referring to the possession of individuals by evil spirits, the demonic gives us language to personify and identify those covert forces that enter into groups of us, possessing and influencing and even controlling us - dirty, ugly, sick, but unrecognised motivations and drives that take us places we would never have gone otherwise? What has become most striking to me about Jesus

confrontations with demonic powers is this: individual evil spirits may be behind the scenes (whispering through Jesus disciple Peter or putting thoughts of betrayal into Judas Iscariots mind), but by and large, Jesus deals with them pretty straightforwardly. His dominant opposition arises not from dirty personal demons
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crouching in darkness but rather from dirty systems of power and violence operating in powerful people who operate in broad daylight. Just as he draws out and drives out hidden demonic invaders, Jesus must draw out, expose, name, reject and banish this systemic, transpersonal evil - incognito beneath robes and crowns, hiding in temples and palaces, camouflaged behind political slogans and images on coins, covert in policies and traditions, seeming to possess groups so that they think and move in an awful choreography. Jesus signs and wonders of demonic deliverance seem to signify that very real and dangerous forces of evil lurk and work in our world - as common in groups as the demonic torments of disease and insanity are in individuals. This transpersonal evil can possess, oppress, sicken, and drive insane whole nations, religions, and other social networks just as personal demonic spirits possess, oppress, paralyze and convulse

individuals. (ibid, pg 63-64)

We have seen sectarian tellings of the Lucifer story where humans are just made to be pawns in the spiritual game, either for Satan to get one over God or God to prove a point to Satan. When we are exposed to this sort of theology, we are left with the impression Wouldnt we be better off if they just cleared off and left us alone? (Atheist Michael Moorcocks fantasy novel The
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King of the Swords, where the hero releases 2 wild-card gods out
of Limbo who not only destroy the devilish Chaos Gods but also their pantheon of good opponents before inviting humanity to enjoy their freedom from celestial interference, illustrates this point rather well)

Lay-by 3 What is Spirit?

What is spirit, or a spirit? The Bible does not give a precise definition, but we can look for some implications from how the word is used. Both the Hebrew ruach and the Greek pneuma bear the following range of meanings:

Wind Breath Spirit

Incidentally, the original Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, the Septuagint, uses pneuma for ruach. It is not always obvious which of these translation options is appropriate; some translations of Ecclesiastes 2:26 talk about the apparent futility of life as vexation of spirit and others as striving after wind, and in John 3:8 it is not conclusive whether Jesus is comparing the activity of the Spirit to that of the wind or simply talking about the
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Spirit throughout the verse. Incidentally, the same Greek word pneuma is always used for the Holy Spirit, God as spirit, (John 4:24) Jesus as spirit, (1 Corinthians 15:45) the angels as spirits, (Hebrews 1:14-15) the spirit of each mortal human (James 4:5) and the evil/unclean spirits. From this range of meanings we can deduce something about spirits; both wind and breath are inherently active forces, if wind ceases blowing or breath ceases moving after leaving a person, it simply becomes so much air. If you catch wind or breath in, say, a sealed jar, its just not wind or breath anymore; by its very nature it cannot be inert. We can only assume this is also a characteristic of spirit or there would be very little point in it having such dynamic connotations. This suggests something significant about the spirit that is separated from a mortal body at death, (Ecclesiastes 12:7) it cannot simply be inert information, or it would it would not be spirit. However, it does not imply that a disembodied spirit is actually alive, in the sense that the mortal person was alive, or the even greater sense that a resurrected person in an immortal spiritual body is alive, or indeed the supreme existence of the Living God. In 1 Corinthian 15:44, Paul talks about the mortal natural body and the immortalized spiritual body- the whole passage bears close examination. The word translated natural in the NIV is in fact psychikon, related to our Greek loan-word psyche, and the related psychology, psychiatry, psychic etc- not terms we normally equate with fleshly existence or the physical! In the technical sense we use psyche for mind/mental and in the spiritual sense for soul. How interesting a mental body? A soulish body? (Genesis 2:7,
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Revelation 20:4) Not much sympathy for immortal souls here. Well see some implications of this under the section entitled Eternal torments further below.

This concept does not create any problem for the many scripture passages speaking of the dead as being unconscious. A huge percentage of the mental processes of mortal beings seem to proceed from the unconscious mind, and we note with interest the great psychologist C.G. Jungs concept of a collective unconscious (or later, the objective psyche), a fathomless realm not merely active in each individual but common to, and of a whole with, the entire human race, akin to the Brahman/Atman concept of the Yogis.

The error of the Yogis, and of related transcendental and occult practitioners like the Gnostics and Jung himself, (who at one point in 1925 claimed to have channelled a text called VII Sermones ad Mortuos [7 Sermons to the Dead] from Basilides the Gnostic for the benefit of a crowd of ghostly entities when he found his house crammed full of spirits- unsurprisingly the message is thoroughly anti-Christian) is that this sort of introspective delving into our higher selves will only access not divine enlightenment, but human falleness; voices echoing from the Abyss insisting that the Highest Truth is that Man is All, and All is God. (2 Corinthians 11:14, 1 John 4:2-3) Solomon was probably of this ilk - in his wisdom steeped in insights into the nature of the heavenlies, and just forgetful of a few details that would let him navigate, like the holiness of God. The spirit realm isnt just a benign playground for curious humans, how ever
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optimistically the New Agers proceed- the Bible tells us that its a war zone, and there are wolves. More on this under Really bad ideas? in the main text below. Just because a spirit is dead, or sleeping or unconscious from our mortal viewpoint, doesnt mean it is not doing something, experiencing some process or otherwise possessed of some potency. We will investigate some ideas leading on from this deduction in the next section. Jung, C. G., Memories, Dreams and Reflections, 1962 Fontana (Contains VII
Sermones ad Mortuos)

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. (1936,1981 2nd ed. Collected Works Vol.9 Part 1), Princeton, N.J.

Evil Spirits? What then of the demons or evil spirits? We have discussed that spirits, the life force and imprint of the persons nature persist after death, available to God for resurrection should he so desire. (NB: we mean by this something very different from conventional ideas about immortal souls, the spirits we are discussing are possibly but one facet of the human being, not the person simply disembodied, and not immortal but timeless or at the very least not experiencing time in any way comparable to mortals.) Crucially, if the spirit retains its will and
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spiritual character, then obviously some spirits would be resting in God, while others would be repulsed from him.

Interestingly, the Greeks understood the word daimonion to refer to the divine part of man. This could refer to any individuals higher self, imagined as a guardian angel or genius or a departed spirit affecting the living for good or ill. Perhaps if we think of these spirits as only part of a living human, however much the spiritual part of that original being, we will concur with that original meaning of the word.

Readers who may be thinking they could comfortably dismiss Messrs. Launchbury and Cooper as a pair of mavericks may be surprised by the following quotes from leading and respected Christian authors on the devil and deliverance:

Diocesan Exorcist Canon Ken Gardiner:

I do not believe that [evil] spirits are persons as we human beings are persons, but I do believe that they have the ability to think and express themselves The biblical description of demons may be similar [to the anthropomorphic descriptions of God] using
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terms familiar to us but which are not intended to be taken entirely literally, although, nevertheless, they relate to something very real. (The Reluctant Exorcist, 2002, pg 94 Who or What Are Demons?)

Pastor Derek Prince:

I have heard 2 main theories concerning the origin of demons.

1. They are some of the fallen angels associated with Satan in his rebellion against God 2. They are disembodied spirits of a pre-Adamic race that perished under some judgment of God not recorded in scripture

I do not believe that scripture provides us with sufficient evidence to say with certainty which, if either, of these theories is correct. I must say, however, on the basis of my experience, I find it hard to believe that demons are fallen angels

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Demons, as I have encountered them, display a wide range of character traits. Some are vicious, violent, supernaturally strong. Others are weak, cowering, even ridiculous-

characteristics one would not expect to find in angels, even when they are fallen. I find it hard to believe that any angel would have the intense desire- which is characteristic of demons- to occupy a human body or, failing that, the body of an animal such as a pig. Surely for an angel that would be a place of confinement, not one through which such a being could express itself the New Testament seems to picture daimonions (demons) as earthbound. There is no suggestion of their ever descending from, or ascending to, the heavenly regions. (They Shall Expel Demons, 1998 pg 99-102 What are Demons?)

[NB- so that we do not misrepresent Prince, we should point out that he believed that Satan and the principalities and powers

were fallen, heavenly angels, although part of a chain of command

with these non-angelic demons, which seems a little incongruous? To rely on a notion of a pre-Adamic race upon which the scriptures are utterly silent upon seems unnecessary- what possible reason is there for the demons to not be Adamic?]
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Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck:

The spirit I witnessed at each exorcism was clearly, utterly, and totally dedicated to opposing human life and growth There was absolutely nothing creative or constructive about it; it was purely destructive exorcisms can reveal not only extraordinary demonic brilliance but also extraordinary stupidity Were it not for its extraordinary narcissism and pride, Satan would probably not reveal itself at all. Its pride overcomes its intelligence, so that the demon of deceit is also a show-off. If it had been thoroughly clever, it would have left the 2 patients long before their exorcisms. It wanted only to win, so in both cases it hung in there until the bitter end- with the result that I and others today now know its reality. In the same way, Satans intelligence is afflicted by two other blind spots I have observed. One is that by virtue of its extreme self-centredness, it has no real understanding of the phenomenon of love Enamoured by its own will and hater of the light of truth, it basically finds human science incomprehensible refusing ever to lose, Satan forever rejects the humiliating hands of friendship and suffers its icy solitariness until the end of time. A friend who participated in one of the exorcisms with me said afterward, You know, Scotty, you had told me about the dreariness of evil, and how it is to be more pitied than hated, but
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I did not believe you. Yet one of my most profound impressions of the exorcism was of how boring it was- that endless string of silly lies. And when I saw that beast writhing in stupid agony for all eternity, I knew what you had meant. (pp 232-40) There is, however, some evidence to suggest that there is less freedom in the world of demons than in the world of human beings- that, by virtue of their cowardice and terror and belief in their own lies, lesser demons act in such strict obedience to their superiors that they tend to lack individuality as we ordinarily think of it. (Pg 241) (People of the Lie, M Scott Peck, 1990, Of Possession and Exorcism) [Note that Peck also accepted the Lucifer story.]

Canon Michael Green, again:

But what do we mean by saying that Satan is a personal devil? What most people mean by that is to claim that Satan is an organising intellect, a single focus and fount of evil inspiration. That seems to me to be a very proper inference to draw from the teaching of the Bible. But it is doubtful if we can call him personal in any other sense. To be sure he is brought before
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us with the masculine article in Greek - but that could be because of the gender of the word devil. Scripture depicts him as a spirit; as a fallen angel; as a ruler of this world; but not, so far as I can see, as personal in any meaningful sense. Unlike Jesus, Satan has never become incarnate, though there have been many people down history who have so sold their souls to him that they have almost become living embodiments of his beastliness. Satan has never been one of us. He has not shared our human condition. Counterfeiter to the last, he even counterfeits personality. Satan stands as the personification for God and mans spiritual adversary, utterly devoid of compassion, of caring, of all the qualities that make us personal. He is, rather, a personification of the implacable evil against which we are called to contend. An intelligence, a power of concentrated and hateful wickedness: that is how we are to think of him. If the pronoun he predominates in English (and it will in this book) that may be entirely proper, so long as we neither underestimate Satan as an insubstantial figure of fun, nor glorify him with the feelings and understandings of human personality. The great It is in every way the pale imitation of the ultimate He. (pg 30) [We find it incongruous that Green can define the devil in this way while continuing to embrace the idea of him as a fallen angel!]

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Obviously these spirits [i.e. demons] are not personal in the same sense as man is personal, let alone the same sense as God is personal (pg 126) (Emphases ours throughout.)

We also note that not only is Satan spoken of in animal terms- the serpent or dragon- but other evil forces are described as various forms of beast. (e.g. Luke 10:19) It is noticeable that all the evil powers, from Satan himself down to the most wretched little spirit all use the same limited, selfdefeating tactics, again and again. Is not their behaviour more like that of animal instinct?

So rather than demons being super-angels who merely fell morally, they are actually inferior, less-than-human entities, whatever their strengths and powers, as the above quotes concur.

Luke 4:33 literally talks about a spirit of an unclean demon and it

is apparent that demons, and the unclean, or evil, spirits are one and the same.

Writers like Milton have lent the Prince of Darkness a certain tragic grandeur in their epic treatments. We think
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readers will agree that our alternative ideas strip the devil of any vestige of celestial romance and highlight the detestability of its nature in contrast to the awesome reality of the Living God. And rather than Satan being some marvellous seducer of us poor mortals, he stands revealed as the symptom, perhaps even the catalyst, but not the cause, of our rebellion.

Monsters from the id The Old English word for a demon, imp comes from a root meaning relating to an engrafting, in the sense of each generation adding a branch to the family tree. So each little devil was an offshoot, a chip off the old block of the Great Satan. Oddly enough this may be describing precisely what is going on with the devil. Legion (Luke 8:31) seems to have involved a composite of at least 2000 spirits. (We note that driving one wretched man mad would seem a poor use of resources for 2000 fallen angels!) This capacity to function as composite beings would explain the differences in entities encountered, from the inane pests that try to distract those ministering deliverance right up to the principalities that steer the wickedness of nations, such as, possibly, the Prince of Persia in Daniel 10:13. Satan comprises the whole, and can direct any of the individual parts. (Perhaps holy angels sometimes act in such a composite way too as needed, and
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this might explain some of the more bizarre spiritual forms described in the various visions.)

They must needs go, that the devil drives Is there a scriptural basis for this? Most readers will be familiar with the idea of the body of Christ being made up of the members of his Church; the Lord is the head of this multitudinous Christ. This idea is famously dwelt on in 1

Corinthians 12, for example.

Nor is this concept confined to the Christian era, and Christian baptism. The Israelites were baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea (1 Corinthians 10: 1-2) the body of Moses. (Compare Jude 9 with Zechariah 3:1-2.) This isnt a neat little devotional metaphor. Paul spells out again and again the spiritual realities, and responsibilities, involved in Christian discipleship; in

1 Corinthians 6:15-20 he emphasises that there is nothing casual

about casual sex, the immoral Christian is forging a spiritually enduring connection with his prostitute, one that places his equally real union with Christ under intolerable strain. (See also Romans

8:14)

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The Jewish Apocalyptic world-view that we discussed in Stepping-stone 3 had the idea of a world divided into exclusive camps, the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, with the former typically made up of zealous Jews and the latter by oppressive Gentiles and their Jewish quislings. Jesus sometimes used this type of language, (Luke 16:8, John 12:36) as did Paul,

(Ephesians 4:17, 5:8, 2 Timothy 2:26) although Jesus violently

changed the paradigm of whom God viewed as the holy ones; as Jesus summarises Pauls calling: I am sending you to [all peoples] to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.' (Acts 26:17-18)

Readers do not need us to spell out the sharp dichotomy presented throughout the New Testament in many passages, of every person coming under one state or another in this cosmic struggle: We know we are the children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. (John 5:19) The scriptures paint such a harsh picture because this is the practical reality of the spiritual realm.

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Really bad ideas? The occult practices that the scriptures so condemn would seem to be a key catalyst that allows wicked spirits across time to interact, derived both from the living and the dead. The forces of evil appear keen to entice the living away from God, to seduce them into occult practices such as mediumship and witchcraft, and generally to get control over people. Why is this?

We can observe that for the redeemed to enjoy eternal life they require a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:44) and the devil and demons are never described as having bodily forms of their own. In fact they can imitate Gods power to enter the human mind, but with false visions and tormenting dreams. Being aware of God and the angels, they are conscious of their lackhence their desire to influence or even demonise (the word often poorly translated as possess) the living. Legion seemed to view even bodily existence in a self-wounding maniac or in pigs as better than returning to the Abyss. (See, incidentally, how

Romans 10:7 equates the Abyss with the world of the dead)
Familiar spirits and spirit guides crave to lead people astray in the spirit world because away from Gods guidance, they are somehow useful to these greedy, manipulative parasites.

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Our

theory

would

explain

how

mediums

can

have

supernatural knowledge of the dead, and even, tapped into the timeless devil, foretell the future. (Of course, much occult practice is simple fraud and conjuring.) Jesus spoke of the demons as unclean spirits', utterly unacceptable to God and alienated from his will. (God calls occult practices detestable and abominable.) However they are without question dreadfully aware of God, his nature and their ultimate fate. (James 2:19,

Mark 1:32-34, Luke 4:40-41) Ironically, while they crave to enter

bodies, they often end up not merely harming their hosts but destroying them. A parallel could be drawn with the ineffective parasitism of rabies or other lethal viruses. The misery and death created however appears to somehow feed the composite entity. C.S. Lewis uses this concept in The Screwtape Letters in a manner which is lightly humorous but with serious overtones. We suspect it carries a strand of truth.

We want to point out that we do not conceive the unclean spirits as being basically ghosts or unquiet dead although as we have discussed they do masquerade as the departed or draw on their knowledge of them. Many demons seem to more closely resemble neuroses so developed that they have taken on a life of
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their own, entities constructed within peoples personalities rather than

being their own personalities. What is the

difference between pathology of someones own spirit and a demonic entity with a life of its own? Probably only degree! Perhaps it will forever be impossible to totally discern exactly where the human Shadow leaves off and the Prince of Darkness begins (Peck, ibid, pg 240) Lewis analyses this brilliantly in his satire on heaven and hell, The Great Divorce: But how can there be a grumble without a grumbler? The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the whole thing to be understood is nearly Nothing. But yell have had experiences it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. (pp 68-69, 1946, Collins)

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(The episode of the Dwarf Ghost and the Tragedian later in the satire illustrates this concept more graphically- a cowardly precious ego denies the possibility of goodness until the person dwindles away and only the persona that he projects, depicted as a separate entity on a leash, remains.)

Lay-by 4 The Medium at Endor

We cannot draw too many conclusions from the witch of Endor incident (1 Samuel 28) as it is unique in the scriptures, and we cant be sure that God didnt specially intervene to rebuke Saul. But note the following: Some Christians interpret the incident as a demon imitating Samuel, but the passage does say that it was the deceased Samuel. The medium seems to have been genuinely able to contact the dead. She saw Samuel. Samuel doesnt seem to have been enjoying heavenly bliss. "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?" (v15) Also in v19 both the faithful Jonathan and the (apparently) damned Saul are described as going to the same place as Samuel. Another passage that ties in with Stepping-stone 1. Samuel was not yet embarked in our time on the immortal phase of his PES.
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As gods but So when New Agers assure us that men are gods, we concur. But mortal, wicked, doomed gods, with forked tongues. Just because a root is made of tree, it doesnt mean you can carve it, work it or sit in its shade. Mankinds main creation, in the divine sense of the word, seems to be the powers of spiritual wickedness that oppress and destroy them. There is only one true and living God, so it is rather obvious that all the rest must be false and dying gods! We prefer the advice of Hebrews 12:9: How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!

Lay-by 5 The Sons of God

But what about Genesis 6:1-4? When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the
LORD said, My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is

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mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those daysand also afterward when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. (NIV) These brief, ambiguous verses have caused much speculation down the centuries; as we have discussed, the Enoch literature identified the sons of God as the wicked watcher angels who came down from heaven and created giant hybrids with human women. This idea seems to have been taken up during the earlier centuries of the Church, then sternly reacted against with a dogma that angels could not breed, and that the passage referred to the righteous descendants of Seth compromising their holiness with the ungodly line of Cain. This latter interpretation would tie in with our comments on the sons of God in Job, as discussed above. We note the following subsequent verses: 6:5 The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6:11-12 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. (NIV) Emphasis ours. Just as in Genesis 3:14, there is no discussion of fallen angels yet if such were involved would we not expect 6:12 to read for rebel angels had corrupted the ways of all the people on earth, just as the Enoch texts do?

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Interestingly, the clay texts from Ugarit/ Ras Shamra show that at the time of the Judges of Israel the Canaanites viewed the rephaim as chthonic deities, i.e. the mass of departed spirits who could be called on as the gods below. (Much like Jungs unwholesome parlour-full of spooks that we described in the lay-by What is spirit? above.) Isaiah 26:14, Psalm 88:10, Proverbs 2:18 Job 26:5 and possibly 2 Chronicles 16:12 (if this reads rephaim not ropheim - physiciansthen Gods anger against king Asa seems more understandable!) all use a word rephaim and in the Septuagint, both Nephilim in Genesis 6 and rephaim throughout the Bible were translated as gigantes, giants modern translators often render this now as shades. Note that both in the Canaanite and Israelite sources, these are the generic departed, not specifically equated with the giants before the Flood. Later on, in the intertestamental period the Jews had lost sight of this concept from a now long-buried culture, and laid greater emphasis on the Watcher Angels story and its attendant giants. We can see little credibility in the idea of a divine angel being tempted from the bliss of heaven by feminine charms, which after all are, in their most basic sense, dependent on our primate instincts for their appeal! We suggest that it is more reasonable to assume that Genesis 6 is consistent with the wider testimony of the scriptures that evil is an ultimately human problem. Obermann, J. Ugaritic Mythology, A study of its leading motifs, 1948 New Haven, Yale University Press Driver, Godfrey Rolles, Canaanite Myths and Legends, 1956 Clark,

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Edinburgh A good basic account of the rephaim of Ras Shamra: http://www.theology.edu/ugarbib.htm

The War in Heaven Let us consider 2 passages, the odd message of which is usually skimmed over: And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled downthat ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him. (Revelation 12:7-9) There are a number of facts about this passage which go overlooked when it is discussed in association with conventional ideas of the devils origin: Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: "Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. (vv10-12) (NIV)
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This passage states a number of facts which make no sense unless we think metachronologically: The accuser is thrown down when Salvation and the kingdom come (v10) - the Second Coming.

He is conquered by the blood of the lamb- Christs death

He is conquered by the word of their testimony- the preaching of the Gospel and martyrdom of believers throughout history (cf. Luke 10:17-18 for the same context!)

We have already identified Michael with the Lord Jesus, and his angels are the redeemed saints. This passage simply reinforces that interpretation.

So Satans fall doesnt seem to occur at one fixed time in history, as we think of sequence of time. It seems to overlap with different times in our history. More on this below.

Matthew 27:51-53

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At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people. (NIV) This passage is unique to Matthew and its oddity and brevity may indicate that the writer did not fully understand the significance of the awesome events he was describing. This raising of the dead makes little obvious sense, yet it is equally obvious that it must have great import. We suggest that, in some strange metachronological sense, the past death in degradation of the Son of God and his future appearance in glory overlap- so that his cry of It is finished!

(John 19:30, Mark 15:37) is the cry that wakes the dead across time.

John 5:24-26
"I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father
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has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. (NIV) Was the effusion of power at the moment of the Sons triumph so great that not only the earth and sky but time itself was shaken, with some of those rising at the Resurrection yet future to ourselves spilling over into the time of their redeemers death? We can only speculate, but this does help explain what is otherwise a very perplexing passage indeed! The devil, we suggest, was also destroyed in this moment, the Sons act, neutralising sin, removing the practical barrier to those associated with his death and resurrection rising again. The devil dies, and falls by inches, the more people are cut off from the influence and effect of sin.

Eternal Torment This theory clears up two important anomalies created by the conventional theologies on the rebel angels and damned souls- why cant they repent? In the case of the demons, the resort is to rationalisations on how angelic thought processes work; their decisions are so profoundly reasoned they cant repent! In the case of the damned, the rationalisation dictates a justice on Gods part whereby grace is extended during life then arbitrarily withdrawn at death. We simply suggest that the ability
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to change is a capacity of a living soul, that interface of body and spirit. (Genesis 2:7; We assume a soul is constrained by time, a spirit is not.) The disembodied spirit that persists after death, or perhaps exists within a timeless matrix that renders the idea of after redundant, is not alive enough to have that capacity- its not the repenting bit! Note that if Aquinas was right in his

reasonings on bodiless spirits, in the context of his beliefs that angels were such, there seems no reason for it to be untrue of disembodied human spirits too.

If this is so, then it neatly takes away one of the most unappealing facets of Gods character as it is traditionally presented, that of the ruthless presider over eternal torments;

Revelation 14:9-11:
A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: "If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink of the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever. There is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name." (NIV)
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Read at face value, this creates a most unappealing image of a torture-pit in the divine throne room, with the damned writhing in deathless agonies as the heavenly choir looks on. But read another way, and the unGodly spirits torment consists in the presence of the holy ones. These are spirits that could brook no higher God than themselves, or whatever unholy ideology they chose to obey. And yet they find themselves in the same spirit-realm as the Living God. The power and light that are the joy and comfort of the elect angels is a lake of fire to them, not because of what God inflicts on them, but because of what they have chosen to be. The outer darkness is a far more bearable place for them, as far from the light as they can get while, we may imagine, gnashing their teeth that so many had escaped them.

This quote of Lewis carries the seed of that idea by implication: Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not the sort of prize which God
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could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die? (pg 176, Mere Christianity 1942 HarperCollins) Some entities, we are suggesting, are desperate to avoid that spray. To them it is burning sulphur. The Rev. Dr. Thomas Binney penned a hint of this idea in the 1820s: Eternal Light! Eternal Light! How pure the soul must be When, placed within Thy searching sight, It shrinks not, but with calm delight Can live, and look on Thee! The Spirits that surround Thy throne May bear the burning bliss; But that is surely theirs alone,

Since they have never, never known A fallen world like this.
Oh how shall I, whose native sphere Is dark, whose mind is dim, Before the Ineffable appear, And on my naked spirit bear That uncreated beam?...

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Emphasis ours. We obviously contradict Binneys view on the angels that we have italicized, yet how realistic is his concept of the terrible power of the presence of God! The sheep and the goats Many of Jesus parables are phrased in terms of the righteous and wicked being judged together, yet Revelation 20 paints a rather different picture, of a first resurrection and a second death. v5 states: The rest of the dead [the unrighteous] did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. (NIV) Of what order is this raising to judgment of the unGodly? Are their spirits given bodies? The question arises of what purpose that would serve.

Matthew 24:39-41 paints the same picture:

That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left (NIV) By conventional logic both the Godly and unGodly should be called to judgment, as described in some of the parables- but it seems only the redeemed are caught away. But of course, all are
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ultimately judged, as the parables describe. (Actually, this passage can be read as referring to the wicked being the ones taken away, as the weeds were in the parable of the sower, the fish thrown away in the fisher parable, - weeds taken to the bonfire, bad fish to the rubbish heap or the wicked as carcase for vultures, respectively - the main point remains that there is a separation of wicked from good.) These ideas are offered for peoples consideration only; for the Bible to devote so little space to explaining the devils origins it cannot be of crucial importance. It does not leave us in doubt about his character, purpose and destiny. Readers will no doubt obtain greater profit and satisfaction from dwelling on the themes of divine salvation in our theory, and we encourage them in this. Bibliography for this section Binney, Thomas Eternal light! Eternal light! c.1826; in The New

Oxford Book of Christian Verse, 2003 Oxford University Press

Frangipane, Francis, The Three Battlegrounds, 1994 New Wine Press Gardiner, Ken, The Reluctant Exorcist, 2002 Kingsway Green, Michael, I Believe in Satans Downfall, 1981 Hodder &
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Stoughton Kelly, Henry Ansgar, Satan: A Biography; 2006 Cambridge University Press Lewis, C.S.

The Screwtape Letters, 1942 Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce ,

1942 1946 Harpercollins

Maharaj, Rabi Death of a Guru, 1977, Harvest House Publishers USA (includes discussion of the morally ambiguous nature of Brahman,
which dilemma provoked the start of the authors journey from Yoga to Christ; however Maharaj talks about his original beliefs as if they were the only Hindu view-point, and the facts are rather more complex!)

McLaren, Brian D. The Secret Message of Jesus, 2006, Thomas Nelson, Nashville Moorcock, Michael The King of the Swords, 1971 Berkley Books Peck, M. Scott People of the Lie, 1990 Arrow Prince, Derek, They Shall Expel Demons, 1998 Derek Prince Ministries

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Chapter 10 Lets talk about some scriptures which could

challenge our view

he following passages have, in discussion, been raised as difficulties for this thesis:

Matthew 24:36: "No-one knows that day or hour, not even

the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

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This is one of the very few scriptures that have been produced by some as evidence against this thesis, particularly in connection with the role of the angel-saints in the Lord's second coming. We think that this is, in fact, a very much misunderstood scripture which does not say what it is commonly thought to say does it actually constitute even a difficulty for the case?

Firstly, we are certain that once the Son was resurrected to his Father's nature nothing was kept from him. The Father and his only begotten Son are too much one in spirit and in purpose for that, as we have tried to show in the chapter on the Lord Jesus. So, we conclude, these words of Jesus refer to himself in his mortality as the Galilean preacher. That being so, would it not be reasonable to think that the "angels" are also being spoken of in their mortality, namely as the disciples of Jesus tramping the roads of Canaan with him?

But does it not say: "the angels in heaven"? No, it does not! At least not in the original. Here the translators have done us no service by allowing their interpretation of this passage to colour their rendering in the NIV; on this occasion the AV and RAV are more faithful to the Greek in rendering the phrase: "the angels
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of heaven". And that is just what the disciples were, every bit
as much as the "angels" of the seven churches - messengers of heaven.

Neither the Son in his mortality, nor the messengers of heaven in theirs, knew of the day or hour of the coming of the Son of Man. So, far from constituting a difficulty for the thesis, this passage is entirely consistent with it, particularly in the way it draws attention to the way in which the term "angel" or "messenger" is used of both mortal and immortal saints - more than just a little suggestive of some continuity between the two.

Hebrews 2:5,16: "It is not to angels that he has subjected

the world to come...." "For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham's descendants."

It has been suggested in preliminary discussions that the above passages might seem at variance with the theme being developed. We do not think so. It seems to us that the point of such passages is that angels were not sufficient of themselves to be given the Kingdom, and this is precisely the point. Jesus is the key, first and foremost, since without him there would be no way to angelhood. Further, it was necessary for him to work
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among his human brothers, or, again, there would be no angels. To be even more precise, it was not just to any child of Adam that Jesus came to help, it was to those who were also Abraham's children - and of some of these (those who were willing to accept him) he "took hold" or "helped".

The world to come is subjected to Christ, and he shares it with his angelic redeemed; this, it seems to us, is the basis of these passages. The identity of these "angels" is again, as we see it, established by v10 of Hebrews 2: "In bringing many children to glory...make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering."

We have already seen that these sons/daughters whom God is bringing to glory are those who will be revealed in their true sonship by the redemption of their bodies (Romans 8) and that they are the same "sons" as those who God told Job (Job

38:7) rejoiced at creation. Again, though, it could not be so

without the redemption in Jesus. To think it might be would be putting the cart before the horse -"it is not angels he helps but Abraham's descendants." Without the work, and particularly the death, of Jesus there would simply be no angels.
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When the Lord, in the garden, said, "Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled..." (Matthew 26:53-4) he touched upon the point. Without his fulfilling of the scriptures those called to be angels would never attain unto angelhood, without his obedience, there would be no angels - at least, not from this creation. Comment: This saying of Jesus is, though, the one passage, referred to earlier, which might just be taken to suggest that there are angels who did not originate from among the descendants of Adam. However it is just one small passage among many and should be interpreted in the light of the rest. The one outstanding point about this saying is that the legions of redeemed were there precisely because he would not, and did not, fail.

Isaiah 65:17: "The former things will not be remembered, nor

will they come to mind" This is another passage which has been raised as a difficulty for this thesis: "How can the saints be working in the past if all that is blotted out of their minds?" Well, let's think about it, reasoning from what we know of the case of Jesus once

he was made immortal. What happened in the case of Jesus?

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We have looked at his involvement with Old Testament times, we know that his own past was not blotted out - he showed them his hands and feet as reminders, and they will yet, it seems, be shown to Israel (Zechariah 12:10) and, probably many others. So for Jesus his own terrible suffering in his own past is very much "remembered" and will "come to mind" and will be brought to the minds of others, too. No doubt, though, the memory of those terrible sufferings is tempered by the serenity of divine perspective which his triumph achieved, and by the joy of eternal fellowship with his Father and with those he saved. As Jesus himself put it: "A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world." The "forgetting" is not in the sense that it can never be recalled; the pain is forgotten in the sense that it does not spoil the joy which followed, and falls into perspective in the light of the ensuing joy. So, it seems, it was with Jesus - and will be with us.

If then Jesus is the pattern why should his people be any different? And if the saints do remember, as ministering angels, the past and even work in it, how do we understand the words through Isaiah? What is meant by "remembering" and "bringing to mind"?
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The ideas of "remembering" and "bringing to mind" have at least two distinct connotations:

1 Simply recalling the past in mental pictures, i.e. as memories.

2 Remembering, commemorating, in ceremonials and feasts that which happened in the past. We suggest that the latter is the sense in Isaiah 65. They had kept, and would for some time commemorate God's doings in the past in feasts such as the Passover which remembered God's dealings with them in the Exodus and which they coupled with pagan remembrance of Fortune and Destiny (v11). Jesus' people remember the related, though far greater, deliverance in him by weekly breaking bread and drinking wine.

In the Kingdom, however, such backward-looking feasts will be taken away and will be replaced by rejoicing and commemoration of what is to come: "But be glad and rejoice for ever in what I will create..." (v18). The Feast of Tabernacles

(Zechariah 14:16), looking forward to the great ingathering at the

end when God will be "all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:23-28) will be one of such forward-looking feasts. It seems to us, therefore, that this passage poses no difficulties at all for this thesis.
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1 Corinthians 6:3: "Do you not know that we shall judge

angels?" It might well be wondered how this question through Paul fits into the framework we have been constructing; it has been raised in discussion as suggesting that "we", i.e. the saints, and "angels," appear to be distinct, the one able to judge the other.

Does anyone seriously think that the ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to those who will be heirs of salvation, are really going to be called to account by those they are working to save? To put it at its most ludicrous, is Gabriel really going to stand before Peter and give an account of his doings?

If this is not the meaning of the words through Paul, what is? We think we must return to the fact that "angel" or "messenger" is used of mortal humans as well as of the immortalised redeemed. Who then might be judged by whom? Without in any way being dogmatic we would suggest that following the return of Jesus "we" will become the glorified, angelic, judges of the Kingdom. We will then be responsible for the spiritual care of those who are still mortal and among them will be those who choose to go the divine way and work for the
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Lord. They will be the Millennial equivalent of the "angels of heaven" (Matthew 24:36 vide sopra) or the "angels of the seven churches". At some point, and many would say that this will be at the close of the thousand years (or however long it is), they will be judged - by whom? The words through Paul seem to convey the impression that the judgement will be carried out, in practice, by the angels/saints, though since they operate in the Name of and with the Spirit of Christ their judgement seat is also the judgment seat of Christ.

A few remaining items... We include here a selection of matters which have come up in discussions and correspondence, just as a matter of interest:

Luke 17:21 "The Kingdom of God is within/among you"

How true this is! It is true firstly because the King was "among" them (NB: the "you" was, in the first instance, the enemies of Christ - principally Pharisees!) when Jesus spoke these words.

Secondly, he was enrolling, and has (through his disciples) continued to enrol ever since, disciples as citizens of his kingdom
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(see Psalm 87 re the register of those "born in Zion"). He expects those disciples to act as citizens of his kingdom now . "Our citizenship is in heaven" (Moffatt: "We are a colony of heaven") says Paul, (Philippians 3:20) and that privilege is expected to show in the way we live in this our mortality - just as the citizens of colonies of Rome were expected to live by the standards and laws of Rome and defend its interests. Hence, the kingdom is both "within" its citizens as the guide to their conduct, and "among" them in their gatherings as citizens.

Thirdly, it is even more true because the angelic citizens of the Kingdom are everywhere among us. They come out of the future into all human history and work for the perfection of a people for the Lord.

Angels are generally anonymous When Old Testament characters asked the name of an angel they were told it was "secret", "beyond understanding" (e.g.

Genesis 32:29; Judges 13:18 - but on this one see next paragraph).
Is it being too simplistic to suggest that their identities are at present hidden so that we do not know for certain (except where

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the Lord has specifically stated it) who will be in the kingdom? At any rate, a "new name" will be given on attainment of immortality.

Over the last few years we have begun to wonder about the angel who came to Manoah and his wife ( Judges 13:18, mentioned above). When asked his name he replied (our translation): "Why do you ask my name? It is Wonderful". The word translated in the NIV footnote as "wonderful" is the same as the one in Isaiah 9:6: "And he will be called Wonderful..." We wonder, is this just a coincidence, or was it really the glorified Son who came to Manoah and his wife?

Two exceptions to angelic anonymity are notable; Michael we have hazarded an opinion on, but who is Gabriel?

Who is Gabriel? Gabriel means "mighty man of God", or "God the mighty one", and is very close to the Son's title in Isaiah 9: "The Mighty God". However, while it could be that Michael and Gabriel are both Jesus (on the same basis as the Lamb brought to Jesus on the throne, discussed earlier) we think it unlikely.

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Who else then could be aptly titled "mighty man of God"? We can think of only one mighty man who was after God's own heart, David the forefather of the "Mighty God". If this, admittedly speculative, identification should prove correct, how much it would add to our understanding of the annunciation to Mary!

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Chapter 11 Some concluding thoughts

t is notable that Christians rarely, if ever, talk or write about the immortal state. We frequently, of course, refer to the risen Jesus as living for ever and rightly

believe that his saints will be like him in this when they rise from the dead or are changed at his coming. But we never, it seems, ask ourselves what the immortal state is really like - is it just a living on and on for ever, with time flowing in the direction we are familiar with, and at the same rate ? Or is there more to it?
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Many would say, "I know that we will certainly know when we reach the Kingdom and that we cannot really imagine, in our present state, what it will be like." We have some sympathy with this view because certainly it will be far more wonderful than we can imagine now; yet, as we have seen, we do have many glimpses in scripture of the lives of immortals, and there are many allusions to the subject in the words God put into the minds of the writers. We can therefore discover more about the immortal state than we might have thought possible at first. At least, that has been the basic contention behind this thesis.

Whether this has proved to be the case in practice will be for the reader to judge, our one plea being that this work be tested by the scriptures alone and judged solely on the basis of whether or not it is consistent with them. It may be tempting sometimes to let other considerations, including the pressure of well-meaning but unthinking orthodoxy or other pressure groups, take over from open-hearted searching of the Word of God; may it not be so in this case.

For example, after the vision of the rampaging beasts

(Daniel 8), in which what seems to be a quite straightforward

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series of images passed before the prophet, to be followed by a detailed explanation, he writes (v27): "I, Daniel, was exhausted and lay ill for several days. Then I got up and went about the king's business. I was appalled by the vision; it was beyond

understanding." On the face of it the explanation of the

succession of images was eminently understandable. We suspect, therefore, that it was the experience of moving among

immortals, seeing as they see and hearing what they hear that frightened the life out of Daniel. He says that a somewhat similar reaction overtook him after the revelations recorded in

7:28. Others, like Ezekiel and John, recorded analogous responses

to Daniel's on being confronted by spirit beings. Indeed, God's ways are not our ways, nor are his thoughts like ours - they are far beyond and above, and strange, wonderfully strange.

So God in his revelation to men mixes the basic and explicit with the wonderful and mysterious; and sometimes the two are marvelously intermixed. As the Lord permitted Peter to remark concerning the inspiration given to Paul: "His letters contain some things hard to understand...."

In early discussions with fellow Bible students it was once asked: If your ideas are correct, why aren't they stated
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explicitly in scripture?" Our answer is that they are, to some extent (and we hope that this will have become evident as you have read through the study) but there has had to be a limit as to how far the Lord could go. He had to write the scriptures in such a way so as to be comprehensible by mankind from Adam onwards, in language that was simple enough to explain to people of every generation how this world came to be, how it got into the present mess, and how there is a way out of the mess through faith.

It would not have helped, for example, if the early chapters of Genesis had contained a scientific treatise on the creation of the cosmos. Indeed, we are sure that even twentyfirst century humanity could not cope with a technical

dissertation from the Creator!

And so, we maintain, it is with immortality, with the Divine experience of time, or timelessness, or eternity. Only recently have men begun to extend their concept of time, to speak of the space-time continuum and the clock paradox, and to imagine what the phenomenon of time travel would be like and what its consequences could be. Even so, not even Man of the 2000s could
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cope with the full story, if the glimpses we have written of in this study are anything to go by. So God could not, without risking the putting-off of some he would love to save, go further than he has in being explicit about the life of immortals.

The evidence is cumulative It will now be obvious that there is no single passage of scripture on which this books argument stands or falls. There is no conclusive passage on which to base our case; if there were we would imagine that this work would have been written long ago by someone else. On the contrary the case rests on the cumulative evidence of large numbers of scriptural passages - and this is its strength. If it rested on just one passage, and then all the rest of scripture were to be interpreted in conformity with our understanding of that passage we might well be accused of being unbalanced, and with good reason.

As it is we are following a good exegetical maxim of taking the broad sweep of scripture and adding up the total of evidence to make our proposition. In addition, it so happens that encompassed in the evidence are very many scriptures that we customarily do not do very well at interpreting. Instead of the usual practice of trying to explain such passages one by one in a
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variety of ways, some of them rather contrived, we have been able to unify them all in a single concept.

Please do not judge the case on its weakest link - there have been some who have done that who, we suspect, were looking for an easy way out of their own psychological difficulties over some of our propositions. And they can create problems, if only because we all like to be on familiar territory; it makes us feel secure. Once this work has been read, however, much Biblical territory will never look quite the same again, and for some this has been upsetting.

By contrast, others have found the exposition developed here to be profoundly thrilling ("mind blowing") and for them it has resulted in great spiritual uplift. Many have commented on their great satisfaction at being enabled "at last" to begin to understand scriptures which have troubled them for years. Others have enthused over the broadening of their horizons of Biblical understanding which have come from reading the earlier versions of these ideas and pondering their import.

We hope that you find yourself among these.

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How does this theory affect Christian belief? People who are religious and who treasure the beliefs which mean so much to them are, quite naturally, very wary of anything "new". Some may be afraid that anything unfamiliar may have within it the seeds of their own rejection at the Judgement. Besides, most Christian churches have, for hundreds of years at least, inculcated a fear of "heresy", often accompanied by an unloving rejection of those charged with "departure from the faith". Religious bigots, among the most unlovely of human types, thrive in such a climate because heretic bashing provides a satisfying outlet for primitive emotions and is made respectable by dominant figures in church Establishments who see such aversive treatment of those who step over decreed lines as "protective" of the flock. It is worth noting that the false teachers condemned so violently in the New Testament were Gnostics- people promoting a total perversion and denial of the Gospel, yet these passages have so often been misapplied to Christians advancing the slightest divergence from the party line of particular denominational groups.

We would be seriously concerned for anyone who, without reading this book but hearing the summary of its ideas, accepted them as true. As believers and Bible students we need to exercise
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discernment

and

carefully

weigh

teaching,

especially

groundbreaking material like this. So please, add up the evidence, point by point, as we have set it before you, and see if, now we have reached the end of this particular work, you agree with us that the cumulative case is overwhelming - or at least, worth thinking about and testing by scripture.

Familiar territory? Talking of territory, we think geography provides an analogy which may help to set what we are proposing in the context of conventional belief.

If one looks at a conventional surface map of an archipelago of islands, one sees a chain of small areas of land each separated by water. Our theological doctrines are rather like that, each distinct from the others, and wrapped neatly by itself rather like islands in a sea.

If, however, one looks below the surface and takes account of the undersea contours, one becomes aware of the mountain range underlying the island chain, the summits of which constitute the islands, and can visualise the unity of the whole archipelago.
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So, we suggest, our proposals enable us to put our doctrines in context by providing an underlying unifying matrix as suggested in this Figure 4:

Underlying foundation for islands of belief

The metachronological approach reveals a unifying but normally not seen connection between doctrines of Christian belief, as underwater survey reveals the mountain chain of which islands are but the peaks.

Some examples by way of illustration:

Resurrection of the body The Kingdom of heaven

Undersea contours of the unifying mountain range Island peak symbolising an item of belief

God, the Father Almighty

The Holy Spirit Sinners to saints

Jesus, Son of God

In this diagram we have suggested some "sample" doctrines and visualised them in the context of the unifying proposals of this thesis to illustrate how what we are suggesting provides a context directly.
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for

basic

beliefs

without

altering

those

beliefs

Why would the saints go back to the past? This is a question which has been asked a number of times in discussion of this thesis. It seems to imply that the questioner feels that we have to have the answer to "why" before accepting answers regarding "if", "how", "when" and "where". On the contrary we think that this, in this particular context, is a question we should not need to ask; we have demonstrated that Jesus and the saints were present and active in past ages and this should be sufficient to make the case.

The clear evidence that the King and the citizens of the Kingdom did appear in the past should render the answer to the question "why?" an optional extra. If the angels are in fact of the number of the redeemed, and the scriptures examined in the earlier chapters do seem to lead convincingly to that conclusion, that should be sufficient for us, as Bible students, to accept in faith what the Lord presents as the situation. Of course it would be nice and satisfying to know why things are as they are in the Lord's arrangement of things, but it is not always given us to have our curiosity satisfied.

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In this particular case it would be quite understandable if a clear explanation were not to be found. As we say rather more fully in Lets talk, the scriptures were written with the needs and limitations of mankind of all ages in mind. Paramount among the priorities was the need to explain to the descendants of Adam how the world came to be in the present mess, what relationships exist between the Creator and those he created, and how the breach in the relationship can be healed. Anything which could impede man "feeling after and finding" his Maker was carefully placed in the revelation so as not to cause problems for the "little ones" while being accessible as "strong meat" for the more mature of God's children. Even so there were limits.

As we point out in Lets talk, even early twenty-first century people could not cope with a technical dissertation from the Creator on the mechanics of the origin of the universe. By the same token, discussion of the mobility in time of the immortals would have been out of place. Even in the early twenty-first century only a few of mankind can cope with the concepts of movement in time and the consequent disruption of "before" and "after".

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This is in fact, one of the basic problems facing Bible students, particularly in connection with the apocalyptic

scriptures. In these writings the Lord outlines, in words which would be, if not readily comprehensible, at least not impeding to the general purpose of drawing men to him, what it is like to be immortal, and how things look to those with immortal sight. The view out of the door (or was it a window) of the Throne Room, for example, is (as Daniel and John in particular make clear) wonderfully, even frighteningly, strange. We should not be surprised at this.

The view, from the immortal standpoint, is not a simple three dimensional panorama. To begin with, the vista is four dimensional, not three. Perhaps even more important, "the LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart" (Samuel 16:7). This gives rise to some fascinating transformations of the scenery (We touched on this also in Visions); the foment of godless peoples is perceived by spirit beings as the aimless breaking and foaming of a dirty sea, while aggressive marauding armies have the appearance of rampaging beasts. This is not the place to develop this idea, but the point has probably been made.

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If even in the early twenty-first century people have problems assimilating even these essentials of immortality, what use would it have been for the Creator to have given us a treatise on the whys and wherefores of spirit life, the technical details so to speak, of immortality and the work which will occupy immortals. As we have tried to show however, he has given us enough to enable us to make substantial progress if we will but read with open minds and let go all our prior fixed notions.

Nonetheless, if we return to our question as to "why" the saints, as angels, should work in the past, we think that we have largely answered the question. We commonly and, we think, rightly visualise the immortal redeemed working for Jesus in the Millennium for the instruction and salvation of the mortal population. All that we are suggesting over and above this is that their ministrations are not confined to mortals of that age but rather they are extended to mortals throughout the ages of time - an extension which would be particularly natural for beings who are free of the constraints of time. It would be unnatural, in fact,

for them to be restricted to one period of history.

As we said in the early part of the chapter on Angels, what we are discussing is the origin of the angels, not their nature, not
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their powers, not their authority, not their work. All these other attributes are just as Bible believers have always thought them to be. Nothing has changed except our understanding of their origin . The work of the angels has always been understood, correctly, to be the care of those who will be heirs of salvation, throughout history. Nothing of this understanding has been changed. So if angels are indeed immortalised redeemed saints, these glorified ones must be active in the past as well as in the future, since the past is full of records of angelic activity.

The time loop: Return to Eden and beyond A repeated theme in scripture is that of the final rest for God's people being in Paradise, that is, in Eden. Some speak of Paradise regained; we think of a return to Eden.

If, instead of drawing, as a representation of human history, a straight line from Eden to Eden, as though there were two Edens, we close up a curve which begins and ends at Eden we have a representation of a time loop. This is the end result of the curve we have used in this thesis to represent the relationship between time as we know it ("earth time") and the immortal experience beyond our (kind of) time. We see no reason to think
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of the Paradise spoken of in Revelation as being a different Paradise from the one written about in Genesis.

The time loop from Eden to Eden is represented in Figure 5:

Grey arrows symbolise the freedom of immortals to access, any time period in history

Earth (cosmos) time

David Exile in Babylon Noah

EDEN
The Millennium; Final stage of the return to Eden

GOD Jesus Saints

Resurrection of Jesus

Jesus return. Resurrection. The saints made like him

We were driven out of Eden because of our sin. We believe it is still there, in the future to us (a bit further round the loop) waiting for our return as cleansed children of God.

In her fascinating book, The Gate of Heaven; the History

and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem, Margaret Barker

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analyses the writings of the prophets and rabbis and builds up a picture of the temple in Jerusalem as a representation of Eden, the original meeting place where the Creator communed with humans, Adam and Eve. The tabernacle of Moses day was, after a few hundred years, replaced by the splendid temple built by King Solomon of Israel in fulfilment of the plan God gave his father David. The importance of this temple as part of Gods revelation of himself is illustrated by Davids words to his son, Solomon, as he handed over the kingship to him

(1 Chronicles 28:18): "All

this," David said, "I have in writing from the hand of the LORD upon me, and he gave me understanding in all the details of the plan. David also said to Solomon his son, "Be strong and

courageous, and do the work. Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the LORD God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you or forsake you until all the work for the service of the temple of the LORD is finished.

Barker writes: ...when the Paradise theme occurs in the Old Testament it must not be separated from the temple with which it was synonymous... She then remarks, pointedly: The prophets looked forward to a time when the End would be like the Beginning and everything would be restored to its original state... this was not so much their view of linear history as an
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expression of their belief that the material creation was perpetually out of harmony with the divine original ...The future and the past were perpetually and potentially present. (pg 68

The Gate of Heaven; our emphasis)

It is instantly clear to readers of the Biblical texts describing this God-designed temple, that there is indeed a remarkable likeness to a garden depicted on the internal walls. The specified decorations for the interior of the temple were carved palm trees, pomegranates and flowers. The menorah, the branched support for the seven lamps which illuminated the first room, the Holy Place, was a stylised almond tree in flower which many saw as a symbol of the Tree of Life. There were also cherubs everywhere not the insipid infants of popular imagination, of course, but fearsome creatures associated with the movements of God. These must have been very familiar to Adam and Eve, though the record in Genesis is silent on this. We are told, however, that on expulsion from Eden, mankind was prevented from gaining unauthorised re-entry into the Garden by cherubs barring the way with a sword of fire. (Readers are referred also to our earlier discussion of cherubs and cherub craft in the sections on Visions of the Throne Room).

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All this makes sense and fits closely with our thesis, especially as she writes of the world image inherent in the Temple-Garden link (ibid pg 59) that it: envisages another manner of being, a dimension in which there is neither spatial limitation or time in our sense, but one which shares with this world the invisible forces of love, hate, obedience, rebellion and so forth. This other world is often called Eternity, which does not mean an unbelievably long span of time, but rather an existence

without time, something which, because it lies outside our

experience of time, actually underlies in its entirety every perception we have of time (authors emphasis).

In closing our references to this very thought-provoking book we cant resist one last quotation (though we may perhaps read into her words about angels rather more than Barker intended!):

The first Christians thought of themselves as branches of the true vine, but also as the new generation of the sons of God, angels upon earth living the life of eternity whilst still in this world.

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Beautifully put!

James Barr writes:

The tree of life is made inaccessible to humans, but it remains in existence. At some more distant time it remains possible that the way to the tree of life will once again be made available. From time to time, through the biblical texts, intimations of such immortality are to be felt.

Further, he comments: ...at the very end of the New Testament, in Revelation 22:2, exactly so does the apocaliptist sees the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations and note nations rather than individuals and rather than the world generally Immortality, then, was on the biblical agenda from the very beginning, with Adam and Eve. In the Garden of Eden was the tree of life. The human pair might just have got to that tree, but they did not, because God stopped them; no-one was to enter the Garden, and the cherubim with a flaming sword stood there to guard the gate. Humanity was not fit to come near the tree. Nevertheless, the tree remained there in the garden. Later one came to redeem the defect of humanity. Immortality was brought to light.
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(pg 115-116 The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality ; SCM Press Ltd; London, 1992) As we understand it, the "Millennium" will be the last stage of the approach to Eden as the world is progressively taken back to that stage of being "very good" and all the damage done by man put right. The loop will be closed and the whole purpose achieved when we arrive back at Eden before the creation of mortal man, and the cosmos is peopled by only spirit beings, the Creator, the Redeemer and the angelic redeemed.

It is at this point in the Divine purpose that we hear the

elohim say, after the fall of man, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing (i.e. by experience) good and evil" (Genesis 3:22), for had not the angels themselves known fall and redemption?

What then? Do we go round that dreadful loop again, in a kind of eternal torment? That would make a mockery of God's work with his people. No. we think the question only arises because we commonly think of time going only in one direction, "forwards". In this paper we have been trying to develop the theme that time can go, or be traversed, "backwards". But are
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these the only options? Why should there not be time vectors "sideways", "upwards" or "downwards"? This is outside our present awareness, certainly, but is known to theoreticians as a possibility.

We think that when we return to Eden the Lord will see to it that from then on time will take a different course, so that a new and holy "history" will develop from there, leaving the time loop of human history as a closed loop whose sole purpose was the generation of the sons of God. We say leaving this loop in view of this passage in Job, mentioned towards the end of our chapter Gods Mastery of Time, which at least suggests persistence of history, past and future, as a possible factor in considering mobility in time. We have tried to present this idea of development of creation beyond Eden diagrammatically in figure six:

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And, after the return to Eden, what then...?

Does God, with his family of immortals, leave the time loop via, eg, its axis, on their way to Eternity?

Eden

Calvary

Eden to Eden time loop

Did God, in setting up the time loop for the begetting of his family, approach the site from outside its intended plane?

More detailed examination of the concept of a time loop back to Eden will have to be left to another occasion, if the Lord wills. It will, however, be obvious to Bible students that since scripture begins and ends in the paradise of God, the idea that there is just one paradise, not two, with a curved time course out from Eden and back to it has the merit of simplicity. It is also beautifully consistent with our argument. C.S. Lewis pondered: Was Nature - space and time and matter - created precisely in order to make many-ness possible? Is there perhaps no other way
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of getting many eternal spirits except by first making many natural creatures, in a universe, and then spiritualising them? But of course this is all guesswork. (Pg185 Mere Christianity 1942 HarperCollins) This is just how we see it!

This concept of the closed time-loop also helps account for another strange Bible concept: The lake of fire. (Revelation 20:10) If only redeemed spirits can exit the time-loop, then all the condemned spirits- the devil and his angels- are left behind, stranded forever in their timeless (untimely?) existence. The frustration and rage of these ungodly wills, with no prospect whatever of enhancing their lot, and without any further scope for exploiting humanity, would be well described as torment. And meanwhile the immortals are enjoying Eternity, where sin, death and the devil simply no longer impinge on their reality.

The Throne Room: What goes on there? If the concept of a time loop out from, and returning to, Eden has any validity, one might conceive of the epochs of the history of mankind being accessible to the inhabitants of the Throne Room via a kind of "time corridor" running round the outside of the
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Throne Room. It could be, therefore, that each of the doors of the Throne Room open out onto different sectors of this 360 degree loop giving the Lord and his angels access to any period in history simply by going out of the appropriate "door". This is certainly a gross simplification and we offer it simply to help visualisation as to how immortals might have access to all human time periods. By the same token, certain prophets and apostles might have been in the Throne Room on the same occasion simply by being brought into the temple by the appropriate "door" from their own time sectors. Certainly some of them seem to have been witnessing much the same proceedings; they would not necessarily, of course, been aware of each others' presence as they could have been miles apart and separated by thousands, or even millions, of the angelic redeemed.

As to what goes on in the Throne Room we offer only a couple of brief notes, leaving fuller treatment of this fascinating study to another paper, if the Lord permits. For the moment we will offer the following two suggestions:

1 The Throne Room is the control centre for the Divine supervision of the history of the world.
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Daniel clearly saw this function in operation (Daniel 7) while in his tenth chapter he records how Michael and Gabriel were working from their base in the heavenly court among the peoples of Persia and Greece.

John too saw this centre of operations at work, while Micaiah (1 Kings 22:19-22) had the privilege of being permitted a glimpse of the "ministering spirits" ( Hebrews 1:14) in what is to us the unfamiliar guise of participants in the Divine Council (perhaps in just a committee room of the complex, since it only affected one or two small nations?), with a decision being taken and put into effect. Amos (Amos 7:1-6) seems to have been shown something rather like computer modelling of outcomes of different

judgements, on a "what if" basis. Maybe this was in a specialised unit of the Throne Room complex?

2 At some point in the saving of mankind, probably at the end of the "Millennium", a great Heavenly Oratorio, the New Song, the Song of Moses and of the Lamb, will be the centrepiece of a great ceremony to mark the final Ingathering of the Harvest: "It is done!". We believe that Isaiah, David, and John, among others, were given glimpses of parts of this magnificent
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oratorio, retracing God's work of salvation and judgment from the foundation of the world, each vista from each time sector's happenings being accompanied by appropriate lines of the oratorio.

Part of this great work is the "holy, holy, holy..." chorus of the seraphs, this "glory to God in the highest" being perhaps given to in fuller text in Psalm 99 with its thrice "holy" to the Lord and its recounting of the Lord's glory in his justice and in his salvation of those "on whom his favour rests."

Implications for the interpretation of the Apocalypse If the ideas advanced in this paper have any substance, then they clearly impinge on our view of what John recorded when he was given the Revelation since of all books of scripture the

Apocalypse most clearly concentrates on the Throne Room and on

the time vistas surrounding it. This is another aspect which would require another paper (possibly as long if not longer than the present one).

We will therefore content ourselves with suggesting that from chapter 4 the revelation does indeed proceed on something of a continuous historic basis - but not from a time base
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commencing from the end of the first century. We propose that John was shown, in spirit sight (see our notes on this under the heading "Visions" and "Why should the saints go back to the past?"), the whole of human history from Eden back to Eden.

One immediate question will spring to mind: "What about the opening of Revelation chapter one - does it not speak of "what must soon take place", namely after John's time?" No, in fact, this is not what John wrote though the translation is reasonable enough given the fact that the translators are as time-bound as the rest of humanity. The Diaglott gives another translation: "the things it is necessary to have done speedily." The original says nothing about the starting point of what had to be done, only that it had to be done urgently. From the immortal standpoint these "things" encompassed all human history.

One final observation for those who want to read the Apocalypse with these ideas in mind: it is necessary to be aware that sometimes John is describing what went on inside the Throne Room and sometimes he is looking outside, through one of the doors (or windows?) at what is going on in one or other sector of the "time corridor" of human history. For example, chapters 4 and 5 clearly describe happenings within the temple
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while every time we read in chapter 6 that a seraph said "come!" " and I looked and saw..." John is being invited to look outside to see the happenings at precise points in space and time during the world's history. We might assume the highly structured sequence of events was in order of earthly chronology- but again, noting the curious perceptions of immortals, quite possibly not.

This is a huge theme that we must leave for the time being, but one meriting much further work.

So what have we learned about immortality? Most of what needs to be said here has been covered by the scriptures examined in this book and by the deductions made from them. We will now just add one or two thoughts by way of pulling the thoughts together.

We have seen that when worthies of the past saw "heaven opened" what they saw was the Throne Room, the Sanctuary, of the Millennial temple in Jerusalem (possibly the heavenly

Jerusalem in view of its having been seen throughout history; though after Jesus' return the distinction between heavenly and
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"earthly" may not be quite as clear as it now seems). The "heaven" they were shown was the future "house" to be established in Jerusalem when "the mountain of the LORD'S temple will be established as chief among the mountains" (Isaiah 2 and Micah 4). We stress that we think the Throne Room is the Sanctuary, the Most Holy, because it seems to us that this is a place accessible only to spirits, to immortals. It may be as unknown to mortals in that age as it is to most mortals now.

The outer courts (or some other, related, complex?) for the mortals of that age could perhaps be the place where the peoples "will learn of his ways" and be the "house of prayer for all nations" but none of these mortals will be allowed access to the sanctuary unless specifically invited to be "in the spirit" like the prophets and apostles of the past who were guests in that wonderful place.

It is possible that the sanctuary will be concealed from mortal eyes in the "immense cloud" filled with fires, cherubs and wheels that Ezekiel saw. However, the point is that "heaven" as it is presented to us, in which we have seen the glorified Son, the God of Israel, with his angelic redeemed, seems to be what we commonly think of as a very material structure in a fixed location
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over a defined span of time, namely the "Millennial" temple in Jerusalem.

This does at least suggest that spirit bodies, spirit temples, arks, altars and lamps are not made of the same stuff as the material universe we are familiar with and that translation to immortality will open to us a "whole new world". This "new heavens and earth", as we have suggested earlier, seems to interlace with the present space-time continuum, and to be a kind of "parallel universe" on a "higher plane"- "beyond our (kind of) time".

It is possible for the immortals to pass between these worlds but mortals can only see the spirit world when "heaven" is "opened" or they are lifted by Divine spirit to be "in spirit" and so able to hear and see as immortals do. Doubtless, once the number of the immortal redeemed is made complete and Paradise fully regained, the old imperfect and despoiled physical creation will be left behind in "the past", closed off in its time loop forever and never visited again, having served its purpose in the generation of the sons of God.

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The Lords of Time Some may still find it difficult to conceive of beings (i.e. angels) coming to us from the future, arguing: "but the future hasn't happened yet! It doesn't exist!" It might help such to visualise what would happen if we were given the means or technology to travel back in time, perhaps only a hundred years or so. The people we visit might well refuse to believe that we are from the future on the grounds given above, yet we could assure them that 2007 (or whatever) is very much in existence. Perhaps a more detailed image would be of more help.

We conceive of our journey through time as being rather like a long slow journey across a vast ocean towards a great country, the Kingdom. If we were to make the sea voyage to America, for example, we would, as we approached that mighty nation, be aware of its citizens traveling beyond its shores, in the air, on the sea and under the sea, going to and fro on business, and some, the armed forces, patrolling far from land to protect it.

So with our long journey across the sea of time, along the sweep of the time loop. The great Kingdom is away over the time horizon, but it is nonetheless there, and its citizens are busy about the King's business. They too go to and fro, through time,
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and as we get closer we may well see more and more evidence of the activities of the angelic citizens of that land. Its armed forces (described in Revelation 19:14 for example) may well be patrolling around the Kingdoms "shores" too, and will be involved in the developments that God decrees and the judgments that the world must undergo before we reach the end of time's sea and the shores of the Kingdom.

The one certain fact, as we understand it anyway, is that the Kingdom is "already" there, and functioning, just over the time horizon from us; the evidence of the activity of the angels (in the fulfilling of prophecy, for example) is to us confirmation that the Kingdom is already there. If we are among those "who overcome" by the grace of the Father and through the blood of the Lamb, we will be citizens of that Kingdom and our "future" glorified selves, our angels, will "already" be serving the King of Kings and Lord of Lords in the glory of that State.

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Epilogue: Where do we go from here?

f the concept of Metachronology is merely a clever theory, then it is likely to tickle a few ears and then be forgotten.

Readers need to pay close attention to what effect taking these ideas on board has on them in the long term. Pay attention to your ongoing searching in and reflection on the scriptures; if you find that frequently your best observations are made from the vantage point of metachronological thinking, then perhaps the Spirit is telling you something? If, on the other hand, readers
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weigh this theory by the scriptures and find it wanting, they will have had to engage with the Scripture in some depth, and will undoubtedly want to thank us in a backhanded way for the spiritual stimulus.

So if this is of God, why now? Well, first human science has developed to the point where people generally can grasp the concept, and more importantly, as we touched on in the Introduction, we have a hunch that, in the Last Days, the saints are going to be in need of every glimmer of insight into Heavens providential rule that they can obtain.

We have only scratched the surface of the Bible passages that could be discussed in the light of this theory. The various chapters and indeed many of the smaller sections would merit whole books in their own right. We hope that many will find themselves provoked by this discussion document to continue the work.

Steve Cooper October 2007

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Selected Bibliography

Athanasius, St Athanasius on the Incarnation: the treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei; (c.318) 1944 translation A.R. Mowbray & Co Ltd, London Aquinas, Thomas Summa Theologica (1274) (Available from several
online sources)

Barker, Margaret, The Gate of Heaven; the History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem; 1992 SCM Press Ltd; London Barr, James,

Biblical Words for Time; 1962, SCM Press The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality; 1992
SCM Press Ltd, London

Basilides, Gospel of Basilides; c.120-140 (A lost Gnostic book; discussion of its fragments at earlychristianwritings.com)

Benton, John, Slandering the Angels: The Message of Jude; 1999 Evangelical Press

Binney, Thomas, Eternal light! Eternal light! c.1826 (in The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, 2003 Oxford University Press)

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Chadwick, Henry, Pelican History of the Church 1: The Early Church; 1967 Penguin Books, London

Charlesworth, James H.

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Apocalyptic Literature & Testaments, Volume 1 ; 1983, Doubleday/Random House Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Expansion of the Old Testament and Legends, Wisdom and Philosophical Literature, Prayers, Psalms and Odes, Fragments of Lost Judeo-Hellenistic Works, Volume 2; 1985,
Doubleday/Random House

Clarke, Arthur C. Rendezvous with Rama; 1972 Pan Books

Cook, F.C. (editor) The Holy Bible according to the Authorised

Version of 1611, with an explanatory and critical Commentary and a Revision of the Translation, by Bishops and other Clergy of the Anglican Church; New Testament, Vol. IV, 'Hebrews to the Revelation of St John; 1881, John Murray, London

Lane, Time and Eternity; exploring Gods relationship to time; 2001, Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois Craig, William

Driver, Godfrey Rolles, Canaanite Myths and Legends; 1956 Clark, Edinburgh

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Frangipane, Francis, The Three Battlegrounds; 1994 New Wine Press

Gardiner, Ken, The Reluctant Exorcist; 2002 Kingsway Green, J.P. Sr (Ed.) The Interlinear Bible; Hebrew, Greek and English 1985 Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts

Green, Michael, I Believe in Satans Downfall; 1981 Hodder & Stoughton

Nicky, Is the Trinity Unbiblical, Unbelievable, & Irrelevant? 2002 (Also in Searching Issues, 1994) Kingsway Gumbel,

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