It is very common indeed to hear someone summarize part of Christianity--the gospel is far from all of it or even its most central component [1]--by saying that Jesus took the punishment every human deserves for their sin by dying. This is often either vague or outright heretical depending on what is meant; no one Biblically could deserve the torture or general execution method of crucifixion even though every sinner deserves death, and the true, total nonexistence of the second death at that, as I will address below (to fallaciously distort Yahweh's moral nature is heresy). However, many people who thoughtlessly use this phrase also believe the Bible teaches that all sin deserves eternal torture. For multiple reasons, this is utterly unbiblical.
Did Jesus suffer an eternity in hell? No, for no one is or was in hell at that time according to Christian theology, as hell is only to be populated after the final judgment (Revelation 20:11-15), and even then only until the wicked are justly killed there (Ezekiel 18:4, 2 Peter 2:6) rather than tormented forever. Hell and God's power expressed through it are said to reduce them to a state of permanent death (John 3:16, Matthew 10:28). Sheol, where the dead go in the meantime, is a realm of unconscious existence, if the spirits of the dead exist at all before the resurrection of their bodies, that is; in either case they experience nothing whatsoever (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10). Jesus would have gone there or descended into phenomenological nonexistence if he truly received the same condition that the human dead do.
However, even if the Biblical Sheol was a place of conscious perception and agony for the wicked instead of at most unconscious sleep of the soul, Jesus still would have only suffered up until his own resurrection--far from the long but finite duration leading up to the final judgment and even further from the eternal conscious torment that is popularly assumed to be the ultimate penalty for sin. If this was the ultimate penalty for all sin, which would be unjust because it is logically impossible for the limited moral errors of general humanity to deserve endless suffering, Jesus could not at all have truly taken out deserved punishment on himself as so many insist he did.
Death is the ultimate punishment for sin (Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23), with some specific sins like rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27), sorcery (Exodus 22:18), kidnapping (Exodus 21:16), and murder (Exodus 21:10-12) deserving premature death through capital punishment. Even here, though, it is egregiously unjust to torture people as pagans have; Biblical corporal and capital punishment methods are contrary to the degradation and torment of crucifixion [2] (the idea behind Deuteronomy 25:1-3 alone excludes such tortures), so it is impossible for the Biblical position to be that anyone at all deserves to be crucified.
Jesus only received the punishment we deserve in the sense that he died, not in the sense that he was tortured by inhumane methods universally prohibited by Yahweh's nature or that he suffered eternally, or for any duration, while dead. Eternal torture is even more unjust than crucifixion with its myriad of inherent cruelties and yet both of these are thought of as morally good by evangelicals and others across church history! Jesus did not experience hell at all, for that is not what the unsaved dead will experience until after their resurrection and judgment. Sheol, the grave for the body and unconsciousness or nonexistence for the mind, is where he would have gone if he received what humans would. He absolutely did not suffer eternal torture while dead for three days and received the punishment of the first death, which mirrors the second death, as people truly deserve according to the Bible.
No comments:
Post a Comment