We return again to the issue of salvation. As was noted in the last article salvation is one of the center pieces of the scriptures. In both the Old and New Testaments the language of salvation is an integral portion of the narrative story as well as the theology of the letters of the Apostles. Needless to say then we ought to examine what we believe the final outcome of this salvation process to be.
Last week I wrote, "The most frequent use of "saved" in the American religious tradition was and is that people are saved from hell and to heaven. " With that in mind let's begin with a short tour of hell. Hell was a concept that developed over a long period of time. The Old Testament begins with no sense of after-life at all. Dead was dead and thus salvation always had to do with saving one's life in the here and now. Slowly as a belief in life-after death began to take hold of Jewish thought, Sheol began to be the place of the dead. Depending on which source you read, Sheol was either the place for all of the dead (good and evil alike) or merely the final home of those who were evil. At this point punishment was not part of the plan. The final vision of hell as we know it took shape in and around the time of Christ. We can see this view in Jesus' parable of the rich man and the beggar (Luke 16:19-31) in which the rich man is suffering in hell and thirsting for water because he failed to help others as the Torah demanded. Thus the Bible has no consistent view of hell.
We now turn to heaven. Once again we need to realize that the scriptures do not offer us a consistent view of heaven, just as they do not offer us one of hell. In the Old Testament "the heavens" are the home of God, the angels and God's heavenly court. There is no sense that human beings ever end up there. There are a couple of exceptions (Enoch and Elijah) but other than these two holy men all people die and are buried with their ancestors. Under the influence of Persian thought as gained during the exilic period (588 BCE - 538BCE), Judaism developed new concepts of heaven and hell. Heaven became a place in which the souls of the righteous dead temporarily resided until the resurrection of the dead at the great judgment of God. Though this view was not shared by all of Judaism (the Sadducees did not believe in an after-life) it was popular during the time of Jesus. The Book of Revelation offers us a glimpse of this belief in that those who died in Christ are seen as living in heaven, in the very presence of God (6:9-11). Again though, the Bible has no consistent view of heaven.
What we do have in the New Testament however is a clear view that our final destination is not hell or heaven, but here; the earth. The Book of Revelation, along with other parts of scripture, tells us that God's plan is to redeem not only our souls, but our bodies. In other words, in the end all persons are resurrected (given new physical bodies) in order to stand before God and be judged according to what they have done (Rev. 20:12). Human beings are resurrected with bodies which do not die and are guided internally by God's spirit (I Cor. 15:35-44). In these new bodies people live on a renewed earth which is intimately linked with new heaven (Rev. 21:1-4). And what about hell? The Book of Revelation (20:14-15) makes clear that in the end even hell is destroyed by being thrown into the "Lake of Fire." The only persons who end up in the Lake of Fire are those whose names are not "written in the Lamb's Book of Life" and those who reject God's new heaven and earth (More about that next week).
Salvation then becomes not about leaving earth and being beamed up to heaven, but about being resurrected and renewed at the end of this age, in order to live with God into the new age of God's Kingdom. Salvation is about physical life, death and new eternal physical life. The bottom line for God is that life is good and thus God wants to restore every human being to the fullness of life for which God originally intended them. Heaven is the interim location of our post death existence as we await the resurrection of our bodies and the new life which that resurrection brings.
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