The pathetic translation style of the King James Bible calls Sheol/Hades/the grave, Tartarus, and Gehenna hell, which can contribute to some confusion about what exactly Sheol is despite other passages being clear. In the belly of the fish, Jonah prays to God, and God does hear and deliver him. Jonah says that he called out to God from within Sheol prior to this (2:2). The fish itself was rescue from what could otherwise have been death in the storm while he was still on the boat with pagans in the first chapter. The prophet says he was in Sheol in a verse that has been misunderstood by some, like author of 23 Minutes in Hell Bill Wiese in that very book, to mean that Jonah, if he did not literally die and see hell, encountered a vision of a realm of agony and saw its torments and alleged bars within. The end of the chapter also has Jonah say he was delivered from the pit (2:6), a phrase often used in other places alongside the mention of Sheol.
Like in Isaiah 38:18 and Psalm 30:3 and 88:3-4, Jonah 2 is using "the pit" as a figurative or even literal reference to the physical holding place of a corpse [1]. Even if Jonah had died and received resurrection from God in the fish, the Bible is very direct in saying what Sheol is. No one who goes there, righteous or wicked (Job 3:11-19), experiences suffering or bliss. The collective human dead are unable to perceive even the self-evident logical axioms and the direct contents of their own mind (Ecclesiastes 9:5) and sleep (Daniel 12:2, see also the aforementioned Job passage) without perception or activity of any kind, physical or mental/spiritual (Ecclesiastes 9:10). All of this is very different than what is commonly equated with Christian doctrine by the likes of Bill Wiese. This is not even everything they get wrong.
This sleep only ends at their resurrection where the body is restored and their spirit is awakened again (Job 14:10-17, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Revelation 20:11-15). The righteous or repentant rise to eternal life free of pain and the impact of sin and the wicked or unrepentant rise to condemnation and eventually destruction, or true eternal death: the permanent nonexistence of the soul (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Isaiah 66:22-24). Not everyone is given immortality, but only the righteous (Romans 2:7, John 3:16, Romans 6:23), and only God is immortal on his own (1 Timothy 6:15-16). For everyone in the meantime, there is unperceiving, dreamless sleep before resurrection to face either an everlasting life of reward or a likely very painful death in hell.
The dead cannot praise God because they cannot think in order to do so (Psalm 6:5, 88:10-12, Isaiah 38:18-19). Since Jonah says he called out to God from within Sheol, and other verses state that Sheol is not a realm from which a person can think, remember, pray, or experience anything whatsoever, he only came close to death. Again, had he died, the Bible clarifies that he would not have gone to any immediate afterlife. Sheep and humans alike go to Sheol (Psalm 49:14). It is not a hellacious or heavenly afterlife people reside in before Gehenna and New Jerusalem. It is the grave for the body and unconsciousness for the mind. Moreover, tormenting people for longer periods of time before the final judgment based on when they lived and died (some would suffer far longer than others) would be unjust anyway.
Jonah did not go to an afterlife while in the stomach of the great fish, and certainly not to hell or a hell-like place. Bill Wiese is a fool for either mistaking his hallucination which does not align with the real Biblical doctrine of the afterlife for an experience with the Biblical hell or for contriving the story completely for the sake of money or notoriety. Anyone else who reads Jonah 2 and makes assumptions about Sheol or hell (which are not the same things), especially ones that so obviously contradict other parts of the Bible, is likewise a fool. The chapter teaches that Jonah was near death but was delivered only to soon spurn the mercy of God, which he himself was a recipient of, when it was shown to Nineveh. Little to nothing about Sheol is clarified in this passage alone and what is taught in other places is not what many have likely heard.
No comments:
Post a Comment