Friday, June 25, 2021

The Great White Throne

At the grand judgment of Revelation 20:11-15, God resurrects humans who have died, whether their bodies are buried in earth or drowned in water, and the dead are forced to stand before God's penetrating presence.  Every human soul that has not made itself right with God by sincerely committing themselves to him (which is literally all that "believing in Christ" means, and anything else would actually be irrational of God to demand of us [1]) has no more refuge from the sole being of intrinsic moral authority in existence.  Perhaps some of them will be offered a chance to accept salvation they ended up previously avoiding for whatever reason, but perhaps not.  The passage does not state this one way or another.  What it does say is that the dead are judged according to their deeds and those whose names are not written in the book of life are transitioned to the lake of fire.

Now, only in verse 10, just before the great white throne is mentioned, Revelation 20 already declares that Satan, the beast, and the false prophet will face eternal torment for their offenses against God.  Is this what also awaits the resurrected dead of Revelation 20?  Not according to the chapter itself and many other Biblical passages.  As always, the way to best understand what the Bible actually teaches is to read it, grasp the concepts tied or seemingly tied to the words, and reason out what does or does not follow from those concepts.  There is no other way to approach any text without choosing assumptions over evidence and, more importantly, alignment with a rationalistic stance towards the text's contents.

Does Revelation say that the resurrected humans who have not reconciled themselves with God will suffer "day and night forever and ever," as it just specified will be the case with Satan, the beast, and the false prophet in Revelation 20:10?  Not only does it not say this, but it reintroduces a phrase from earlier in Revelation that could only be fully applicable when talking about actual death.  Revelation 20:14 calls the lake of fire the second death, which corresponds to Jesus calling the normal, just fate of humans in hell death in Matthew 10:28 and to Paul calling the wages of sin death in Romans 6:23.  Ezekiel 18 and other Biblical chapters or verses only affirm that this is the standard destiny of humans who have not received salvation.

The small part of Revelation 20 detailing the judgment said to occur before a "great white throne" only remains entirely consistent with the numerous other descriptions of the cosmic punishment for human sin.  The second death means exactly what the phrase would literally suggest: unsaved humans will face a resurrection, stand before the deity who rejects them for their voluntary moral flaws, and then place them in hell, where they will ultimately be dismissed from existence at some point.  Nowhere does Revelation or another part of the Bible say that the everlasting conscious punishment of Satan and demonic beings is the same as the eternal punishment of death that it assigns to general humanity.

As soon as someone who has given himself or herself over to the fallacies of eternal conscious torment stops making petty assumptions or looking to the stances of imbeciles aligned with false traditions, it becomes quite clear that the typical human punishment imposed after the great white throne judgment is torment of finite duration ending with permanent death of the soul.  The Bible actually teaches things about hell that many Christians would be relieved to find out.  It is not hostile to God's moral nature to announce that death, what Paul calls the last enemy of humans in 1 Corinthians 15, is a grave penalty all its own and that God plainly prescribes it to the unsaved again and again.


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