The Eternal State

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All right, come on in.
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Let's finish our class, finish our course.
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Eight weeks comes and goes.
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It did, it did.
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I hope you guys have felt like you've gotten something out of this.
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Well, I'll ask Jackie to give me a report card.
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Since she got to see the long and short version.
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Was that helpful, though, to shorten it up some? Good.
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I've seen the long version.
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You've seen the longer version? Yeah.
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Yeah, I know.
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I've seen that class.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I like this one better.
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You like the shorter version? Well, the longer version explains more, but this one I understood better.
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Well, good, good.
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Yeah.
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Well, let's, two things, we'll round out the class, and that, of course, is the subject of heaven and hell.
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And if you want to put next to, if you're writing notes, the last heaven and hell, you could write the eternal state.
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Because we've already talked about the intermediate state.
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The intermediate state is what happens between our death and the resurrection.
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And what happens after the resurrection, whether it be preceded by a thousand year millennium or whatever, what happens after the resurrection is what we would refer to as the eternal state.
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And the eternal state will be either an internal state of joy or an internal state of terror.
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So we will say the two places are either heaven or hell.
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Now, I do not have time to argue all of the various nuances that go into questions about heaven and hell, but I'll, just for a few things, one of the big arguments that comes is people will say, well, hell isn't the right word.
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Because in Greek, the word is Hades or Hades, and we shouldn't say hell, we should say Hades.
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And if you look at your newer translations of the Bible, a lot of them don't use the word hell, they use Hades.
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And another word that is used is Gehenna, that is the Valley of Hinnom outside of the walls of Jerusalem, which was like a dung heap, which was used a place where they would burn refuse.
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And that was compared to hell at one point, and therefore, there are those who say hell is not real, it's just an example used as a, of a dung heap, of a place that's always smoldering and burning and stinky and awful.
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And there's another phrase, Tartaros, used by the Apostle Peter in his writings, which used for the phrase for the underworld, right? But let's just simplify it, it's the bad place.
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I mean, it really is, I mean, if you, not to make it, not to put too fine a point on it, but hell is bad.
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And whether you define it with Hades or Tartaros or with Gehenna, it is bad.
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And there are men who have tried to argue against its existence, Rob Bell, in his book, Love Wins, tried to argue against hell.
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God ultimately loves so much that he's not going to judge anyone.
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That has been very popular, not only recently, but throughout church history, there have always been people who, in comparing God's attributes, put one above the rest, and that is love, and say, this is his ultimate attribute.
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And if I would argue, if there's any ultimate attribute of God, it is his holiness.
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Because it is the only attribute that is ever referred to in the threefold form.
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He's never called love, love, love, mercy, mercy, mercy, or justice, justice, justice, but he is called holy, holy, holy.
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So the superlative is only used for one of his characteristics or his attributes, and that is holiness.
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So, and what does his holiness remind us of? It reminds us of his judgment.
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Remember when Nadab and Abihu brought strange fire before the Lord? Leviticus chapter 10.
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These are the sons of Aaron, and God takes the fire and he consumes them in the fire, and then Aaron is told by Moses, God has said, those who approach me must see me as holy.
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You don't fool around with the holiness of God.
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So judgment is an expression of God's holiness, and therefore hell is the reality of God's eternal justice.
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I use the term when referring to hell, I use the phrase ECT.
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ECT is an acronym which stands for Eternal Conscious Torment.
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That is the biblical teaching on hell in its simplest form.
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There are other views such as what is known as conditional mortality and annihilationism.
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Conditional mortality is the view that the only people who will live forever are those who are believers, and therefore those who are not believers will simply cease to exist.
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They will not live forever.
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Their life will simply end at judgment or some point after judgment, but usually the idea is shortly after judgment.
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They may suffer, but it won't be long, and they will simply blink from existence never to be conscious again, and that again is referred to as conditional mortality or annihilationism.
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Yes, sir.
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Yeah, bad to worse.
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They would go from a continued consciousness in a state of misery waiting for judgment and a final state of torment.
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It's what we see in Luke 16.
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That guy's not in the lake of fire yet, but he is still in a tormented state.
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He's miserable and he's conscious.
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So yes, it would go from continued consciousness, misery to final lake of fire.
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Some people believe the pouring out into the lake of fire, that's when God annihilates them.
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That's when they finally burn up and go away, and I understand why people would want to believe that because if you just stop for a minute and maybe before you go to bed tonight, just close your eyes and try for just a minute to think about people who are actually in hell, it's one of the most grueling exercises that you can do spiritually.
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One is to think that people are there now, but it's gonna get worse, and then the idea of people you know, people you love, maybe you if you're not a believer.
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Everybody in this class is supposed to be a believer, but are you? This is real.
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This is real.
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That's the thing that we have to remind ourselves of.
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This ain't a storybook.
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This is real.
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And hell is real.
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People ask the question, why does hell last forever? Because people don't get saved when they go into hell.
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They continue to hate God.
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They continue to be opposed to God.
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They continue to deserve his wrath for all eternity.
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Nobody goes to hell and gets sanctified.
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They go to hell and they stay haters of God forever, and their hatred, which lasts forever, endures an eternal punishment.
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Dr.
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Sproul talked about the fact that weeping and gnashing of teeth are two different exercises.
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We usually weep when we're sad, but we gnash our teeth when we're angry.
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And he said, so there'll be two attitudes in hell.
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One will be sadness, and the other will be anger.
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And he said, this was R.C.
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Sproul speaking.
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I talked about this in class a couple weeks ago.
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He said, I tell you what, if I wake up in hell, I'm gonna be sad to know that I thought I knew Christ to find out I didn't.
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I would be desperate anguish.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Of course, I believe Dr.
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Sproul's in heaven, but I thought it took a lot for him to say that, the reality of it.
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Yes? Is it not true that Jesus spoke more of hell than he did of heaven? Oh yeah, absolutely.
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Jesus talked about hell more than anybody.
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Even Paul, and Peter, and all the Old Testament apostles, or prophets.
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Jesus is the reason why we should not not believe in hell.
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If you deny hell, you have to deny a lot of what Jesus taught, or explain it away as mere allegory or symbol.
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And again, the danger of that is if the allegory, or excuse me, if hell is allegorical and symbolic, why is heaven not allegorical and symbolic? Because he used the same analogies.
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I'll give you a verse to write down.
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We don't have time to go through it.
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But Matthew 25, 31 to 46.
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Two weeks ago, I actually did an exposition of that text on Wednesday night.
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That was when we talked about hell.
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If y'all want to go back and listen to that, I would encourage it.
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Just go to our sermon audio page, and look up, Is Hell Real? That was the title of the message.
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And that message, I go through Matthew 25, 31 to 46, because that's where it says he separates the sheep from the goats.
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The sheep go on his right, the goats go on his left, and the sheep go with him, and the goats are punished.
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Everlasting torment, he says.
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The ones on his right go to everlasting blessing, and the ones on his left, everlasting torment.
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The word everlasting is the same.
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So, very important text.
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So, is hell real? I would say yes.
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Is it annihilationism? I would say no, even though I understand why people would want to believe that.
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Interestingly enough, you made the connection earlier, Mr.
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Frank, about continued consciousness in ECT, or maybe, was that you who said that, or one of y'all asked that question? But soul sleep is almost always connected with annihilationism.
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That's the view of the Jehovah Witnesses.
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That's the view of the Seventh-day Adventists.
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That's the view of the Advent Christian Church.
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They all believe in soul sleep, and they all believe in annihilationism.
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And I'll tell you what they do.
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They basically deny hell.
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They say, yes, if you don't believe in Jesus, you simply cease to exist, which is, I guess, bad, but it's better than existing in an awful condition.
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Would you rather exist in torment or not exist? It's a difficult question, but it is, they would say just not exist.
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That's hell, and I say I don't agree.
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Heaven is promised and pictured It's promised in John 14, one to six.
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It is pictured in Revelation 21 and 22.
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I preached those verses last night.
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If you want to go back and listen, you may well do so.
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The promise of heaven comes from the mouth of Jesus himself, and what he tells us is, he says, if it were not so, I would have told you.
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I tell you, that's the verse that lets me lay my head down at night in comfort.
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If it were not so, I would have told you.
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Jesus said, if heaven wasn't real, I would have told you.
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If this is all pie in the sky, if this is all made up, if this is all a myth, I would have told you.
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It's John 14, one to six.
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Yes? Revelation 21 and 22.
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It's two chapters.
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I preached 21, one to four last night, but it's actually two chapters that go over.
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Yes, Ross? Which passage are you referring to? Well, yes, there's a lot of, John certainly alludes a lot.
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Revelation is one of the most Old Testament-like books in the New Testament.
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It uses a lot of Old Testament imagery, a lot of Jewish imagery, and specifically the picture of Jesus as being similar to Daniel.
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Yeah.
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But it's, some Jewish people have argued that the Old Testament doesn't have an afterlife, that the afterlife was made up by Christians, that the Old Testament doesn't teach heaven and hell.
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A lot of Jews still will say the Old Testament doesn't teach hell.
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I always point them back to Enoch.
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I say, look at Enoch, huh? Right.
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He walked with God and he was not, for God took him.
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But where'd God take him? If there's nowhere after this world, if there's no afterlife, what does that mean? I think Enoch is the first promise of something beyond this world.
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It's the first hope that there's more than just this world.
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So, the new heaven and the new earth, I'll tell you this, are there symbols used? Is the Lake of Fire symbolic? Possibly.
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Is streets of gold symbolic? Possibly.
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But here's the thing that we know, symbols are always less than what they symbolize.
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Your baptism is a symbol.
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It symbolizes your being regenerated, born again.
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It's not, it's less than what it symbolizes, right? Your regeneration is greater than the baptism which symbolizes it, right? The bread and the cup symbolize the body and blood of Christ.
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The body and blood is greater, the symbol is less than the reality.
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So, when you think about heaven and hell, if heaven and hell are indeed symbolic, that means hell is worse and heaven is greater than the symbols.
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But as Dr.
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Sproul said in his book, and I don't know how many of you picked it up, but he said, I wouldn't put it past God to actually have streets of gold and gates made of pearl.
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He said, I wouldn't put it past God to construct a city that looked just like it's described in Revelation 21.
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Because he certainly has the power to do so and wouldn't it be amazing to see such a city.
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And so that ends the class.
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We have five minutes.
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I want to spend the last five minutes finalizing the actual course.
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But before I do that, does anybody have any questions before we finalize everything? Yes, John.
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Do you believe there's layers of hell? Ooh, big question.
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Yes, and Dr.
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Sproul goes over that in the book.
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And I would tend to agree with what he wrote, that the Bible does describe in a sense, certain that hell will be worse for some than others, as well as heaven having rewards.
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Yeah, so I will be honest with you.
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That's one of the parts, John, that I've had, that I haven't taught on that a lot because I'm still figuring it out.
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But I do think that there's merit in what Dr.
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Sproul says.
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So I would lean on the book at this point and say I think I would agree with what he said, even though I might nuance it a little differently.
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But I think he's in the direction I would be heading.
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But that's definitely a good question, the question of rewards and punishments.
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The thing we have to be careful not to do is we have to be careful not to create something like the Mormons create, where they have a celestial kingdom and a terrestrial kingdom.
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Some people go to heaven, other people go to the new earth.
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And there's like a sort of elect and then super elect.
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We have to be careful not to do that.
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And then we also have to be careful not to, as the Jehovah Witnesses have done, create a some are saved and then some are kind of saved, because they've got the 144,000 that are really saved.
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But they got that number, right? 144,000 Jehovah Witnesses.
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So now they got to come up with a secondary salvation for the people that didn't make it into the first 144,000.
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So it becomes a sort of weird thing.
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So we just, whatever heaven will be like, I'll be happy.
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But I don't know that I fully understand the rewards and punishments as much as I'd like to.
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Yes, and I have to, for the sake of time, but go ahead.
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How do you creation? Oh, that's a good question.
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If a day is a day, then a millennium.
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Yeah, but the argument that time is expressed that way always would have to be the argument that time is always expressed in the terms of literal.
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Genesis is written as historic narrative and Revelation is written as apocalyptic literature.
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So right away, we're dealing with two different literary genres.
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Just need to write the reference out.
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Yeah, yeah, for me, it's simply this.
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Throughout not only the Bible, but in other, particularly the extra biblical sources, we have a lot of times where the term thousand years is used to reference a long period of time.
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So there's other places where we can find a thousand years not being 999 plus one, but rather a long period of time.
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And that's the way they saw a long period of time was as a thousand years.
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And here's an example, don't mean to go there, but when Peter is wanting to express a long time, he uses a thousand years.
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A day is like a thousand years.
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But he's not saying it's like exactly a thousand years, he's saying it's like a long time to God.
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And a thousand years is like a day.
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All right, very good question though.
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Ladies and gentlemen, this class is officially concluded.
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Let us discuss now who is going to go for credit.
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Who amongst thou is planning to write a paper? Rebecca, Nails, Mr.
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Frank, Ross, gonna give it a shot? All right, couple things.
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I used to prefer you turn it in paper wise, but the last few times it's come by email and that actually is better for me.
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If you send it an email, I can print it, I can grade it, and I'll give you back the paper that I grade.
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But rather than trying to meet up with you to get a paper copy, just email it to me, it's easier.
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But I do ask that you still try to format it properly when you email it, because it makes it easier for me to grade it.
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The formatting description is on your sheet.
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Title page, which includes the course title, number, student name and professor name.
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Body of the project should be well organized, no less than three pages, no more than five pages.
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Three pages at least, because I want to make sure you dive into the subject, but not more than five, because I gotta read all this.
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So don't give me a 20 page paper.
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Properly cited bibliography page, that is key.
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Guys, I know that it's not easy, but citing your sources is important.
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It's important for accountability, but it's also important to ensure me that you're not just cutting and pasting things off the internet.
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And if you are citing the internet, that's fine.
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Cite your source.
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Don't just wiki this stuff and send me what you find.
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And I'm not saying anybody's done that.
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I'm just, we want to do our best and make sure that we're doing our best, right? So citing your sources is a part of being, remember that academic character? That means doing what's right.
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Here's how the paper should go.
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Each student will choose one doctrine to research, explain, and defend.
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Now by that, I don't mean like Christology, because that's pretty big.
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What I mean is look at Christology and say, okay, I'm gonna look at the doctrine of the deity of Christ.
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That's a specific subset.
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I would say if you did Christology, you'd do three pages and no problem.
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I want you to have to dive in a little deeper.
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So something in that.
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So if you're doing, let's say you do eschatology.
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You know, you could do the amillennialism or the millennial positions.
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That would be a good three to five page paper explaining the different millennial positions and why you hold the one you hold to.
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I'd love to read that.
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Like to, especially if you disagree with what I read.
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You know, Ed, you brought books tonight to talk to me.
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That's cool, man, if you want to write a paper.
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I've had people in previous classes and I was proud of them.
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They disagreed with something, so they wrote a paper disagreeing.
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I was happy to fail them.
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No, I'm just kidding.
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I'm just kidding.
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No, they got an A because they did the work.
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That's what it is.
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If you're gonna disagree, bring your A game, you know? And remember, your paper should include relevant biblical citations, references to important historical disputes, meaning this, if you're writing on, let's say, the doctrine of the Trinity and you don't mention the Council of Nicaea, you will get a bad grade because that is one of the most important historical moments in regard to the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity.
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So important historical citations must be included.
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Finally, a comparison of denominational positions.
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If you really want to shine in your paper, tell me not only what the position is, but why Methodists and Baptists disagree about it because it's pretty much everything.
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No, I'm serious.
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Like, let's say you choose, well, I was gonna say eternal security.
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Methodists believe you can lose your salvation, Baptists believe you can't.
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Eternal security is the doctrine, right? Or what we call- I thought Methodists taught that.
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I thought Methodists taught that.
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Sure, yeah.
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I thought it was only like- Well, but Charismaticism is an outgrowth of Methodism.
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They trace their roots back to what- Is that every Methodist church in general or is that like part of their- It's just the doctrines of Methodism is that salvation can be lost.
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Oh, right.
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Yeah, because they're classic Arminians and Arminianism teaches that you can lose your salvation because it's a choice.
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Yeah.
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So- That's a- Yeah, I'm just saying, if you can lose your salvation, why would God save you in the first place? Again, don't argue.
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Write the paper.
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No.
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I got a lot going on.
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Yeah, I know.
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I love you.
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But I'm saying, this is what I want you to do.
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If you're gonna do something, especially if you know, like you said, Baptism, talk about why different denominations hold different positions.
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You have one month.
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Basically, let me just say this.
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You have until the start of the next class, because we've taken a month break.
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We'll be here, we'll be back here on the 8th.
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Actually, that's not a whole month, is it? You have until the second class of next semester.
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So I'll just say that.
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The final, your final paper must be in by the second class of next term.
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Got it? All right, let's pray.
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Let's finish everything.
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Father, thank you for this time.
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Lord, it has been such a blessing to be with your people, talking about your word.
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I pray it's been a blessing to them as well.
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And I thank you for it.
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Thank you for this class.
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May what we believe and what we teach both honor and glorify you.
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Through your son, Jesus Christ, and by the power of your Holy Spirit.
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Amen.
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Let me stop.