Hey Guys/Gals, help me out with this one.

[Guest]

Me and the wife were talking about what happens to people when they die, and what happens at the return of the Lord to those who have died.

Here were some of the questions that arose.

1.) We believe that when a Christian dies, he goes immediately to be with the Lord, but the Christian does not receive his glorified body at that moment, rather he receives that at the resurrection. . So what happens at the second coming to the believer?

2.) What about unbelievers? Assuming the conditional mortality position, what do they receive at death, and what happens at the second coming to them?


Any help and discussion would be welcome.

[Guest]

1.) We believe that when a Christian dies, he goes immediately to be with the Lord, but the Christian does not receive his glorified body at that moment, rather he receives that at the resurrection. . So what happens at the second coming to the believer?

Hey

I think that in regards to believers who had died previously, you answered your own question: they receive their glorified body at the 2nd Coming. For believers who are still living at the 2nd Coming, they're bodies change quickly into glorified bodies at the 2nd Coming.

2.) What about unbelievers? Assuming the conditional mortality position, what do they receive at death, and what happens at the second coming to them?

This is where I question things too. If a wicked soul is dead/sleeping after death, then what sense does it make to wake them up just to send them back to basic extinction?

One option would be to take the position that they are NOW in torment and at the 2nd Coming they will be annihilated. A second option would be that they are now sleeping but at the 2nd Coming will begin to face torment. And that doesn't even get into the UR options.

But I don't know

[Guest]

Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop:
N.T. Wright TIME magazine interview
Thursday, Feb. 07, 2008
y David Van Biema

excerpts

TIME: Is there anything more in the Bible about the period between death and the resurrection of the dead?

Wright: We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text from about the same time as Jesus, says "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," and that seems like a poetic way to put the Christian understanding, as well.

TIME: That is rather different from the common understanding. Did some Biblical verse contribute to our confusion?

Wright: There is Luke 23, where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." But in Luke, we know first of all that Christ himself will not be resurrected for three days, so "paradise" cannot be a resurrection. It has to be an intermediate state. And chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation, where there is a vision of worship in heaven that people imagine describes our worship at the end of time. In fact it's describing the worship that's going on right now. If you read the book through, you see that at the end we don't have a description of heaven, but, as I said, of the new heavens and the new earth joined together.

TIME: Why, then, have we misread those verses?

Wright: It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very influential.

The Bishop, as always, has given us much to think about,

[Guest]

1.) We believe that when a Christian dies, he goes immediately to be with the Lord, but the Christian does not receive his glorified body at that moment, rather he receives that at the resurrection. . So what happens at the second coming to the believer?

Hey

I think that in regards to believers who had died previously, you answered your own question: they receive their glorified body at the 2nd Coming. For believers who are still living at the 2nd Coming, they're bodies change quickly into glorified bodies at the 2nd Coming.

So you would say that we are spirit beings in the intermediate state? We know that Jesus has risen from the dead, and that He has his glorified body, so we will be with Him as spirit beings and then receive our bodies at the resurrection? This topic really confuses me...

2.) What about unbelievers? Assuming the conditional mortality position, what do they receive at death, and what happens at the second coming to them?

This is where I question things too. If a wicked soul is dead/sleeping after death, then what sense does it make to wake them up just to send them back to basic extinction?

One option would be to take the position that they are NOW in torment and at the 2nd Coming they will be annihilated. A second option would be that they are now sleeping but at the 2nd Coming will begin to face torment. And that doesn't even get into the UR options.

The waters do get a bit murky here....Hypothetically speaking, lets say that Joe Smith back in the B.C days was a murderer and all around bad dude, and then he dies, and goes to be tormented until the second coming, (which remember, there hasn't even been a first coming at that point)...Now fast forward to 2010, and lets say Jim Smith(Joe's long lost cousin)is the same type of fella, and gets hit by a bus, and then he goes to torment, but Jesus returns the next day??? The duration of punishment that Joe received vs Jim is kinda crazy, don't you think?

[Guest]

this is starting to overlap with Matt's new post on the eternal torment, etc board.

TK