THE TIME OF THE END QUESTIONS, Part VI
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Question: What is meant where the writer of Daniel penned just before presenting his last four prophecies pertaining to the Second Advent: “And many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life…” Daniel 12:2?
Answer: By examining what was meant by “everlasting life,” one sees that the Hebrews of the Old Testament and even the Christians in the New did not think of “everlasting life” or “eternal life” as a timeless life with no beginning and no ending (except when referring to God, and Christ). Those living in a more scientific age think of eternity with no beginning nor ending. (Symbolically, eternity is like a circle. A sphere is even a better symbol because it has an infinite number of circles cutting through each end of a diameter.)
In the ancient sense, eternity had a beginning, with mortality being a short experience at first and then eternity extending one age or aeon after another indefinitely. Symbolically, it is like a straight line starting at birth and extending through time with the line continuing to lengthen indefinitely. (To the modern mathematical or scientific mind such a line with a starting point actually has an end at the other end: the end is just changing or being stretched further in time.) The idea of just more aeons after more aeons helped the ancients in their imaginations of something lasting longer than what they could comprehend. (See Harper’s Bible Dictionary, 174-175; The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 4: 644-645.)
Could not the Almighty, who changed time by making the sun and moon stand still (“And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, …Joshua 10:13)
interrupt any individual’s timeline at any point? How can the One too pure to look on iniquity leave an individual in hell? Such a concept is inconsistent with a God that is Love itself.
In his lengthy poem Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton wrote these lines:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
(Book I, lines 254 and 255)
If Milton is correct, perhaps then that salvation comes by exchanging the mortal or human mind for God’s Mind of the universe in order to secure the kingdom of heaven. This seems to be in accord with what Paul wrote the Philippians (2:5): “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”