Hebrews #50 - 6:1-3 (part 2)
Speaker Notes Baptism in Blood; The Resurection of the Dead, and Eternal Judgement
Hebrews 6:1-3
6.1 Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, 2 instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. 3 And God permitting, we will do so.
1 - Baptism in Water
2 - Baptism in The Holy Spirit
3 - Baptism in Blood
Mark 10:35-40
35 Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”
36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.
37 They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”
38 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”
39 “We can,” they answered.
Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, 40 but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.”
Revelation 20:11-15
11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. 12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. 13 The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. 14 Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. 15 Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1967, VI, 157, in Marino, op. cit., 67:
“There is something very specific that I have to say, and it weighs so on my conscience that I dare nor die without saying it. For the minute I die and leave this world, I will then (as I see it) instantly (so frightfully fast does it happen!) I will then be infinitely far from here, at another place, when even that very second (what frightful speed!) the question will be put to me: have you carried out your errand, have you very specifically said that specific something you were to say? And if I have not done it what then?”
John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (1994), pages 163, 164:
Chapter 9 Eschatology
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The Christian hope is, therefore, for me not the hope of survival of death, the persistence post mortem of a spiritual component which possesses, or has been granted, an intrinsic immortality. Rather, the Christian hope is of death and resurrection. My understanding of the soul is that it is the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing pattern, carried at any instant by the matter of my animated body and continuously developing throughout all the constituent changes of my bodily make-up during the course of my earthly life. That psychosomatic unity is dissolved at death by the decay of my body, but I believe it is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is me will be remembered by God and its instantiation will be recreated by him when he reconstitutes me in a new environment of his own choosing. That will be his eschatological act of resurrection.
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Our hope is of the resurrection of the body. By that I do not mean the resuscitation of our present structure, the quaint medieval notion of the reassembling of bones and dust. In a very crude and inadequate analogy, the software running on our present hardware will be transferred to the hardware of the world to come. And where will that eschatological hardware come from? Surely the ‘matter’ of the world to come must be the transformed matter of this world. God will no more abandon the universe than he will abandon us. Hence the importance to theology of the empty tomb, with its message that the Lord’s risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning within history of a process whose fulfilment lies beyond history, in which the destiny of humanity and the destiny of the universe are together to find their fulfilment in a liberation from decay and futility (cf. Romans 8:18-25).