Shalom chaverim and welcome to the last-but-one of my talks in this 'Resurrection Narratives' series which we began at Passover and have been working our way through during the Passover Season.

Today is the day in the orthodox Christian world - Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Mormon, Adventist and tens of thousands of other man-made denominations - they celebrate the resurrection, calling it 'Easter', named for the pagan fertility goddess of spring known in the Bible as Ashtoreth and Astarte, represented by an egg-laying bunny, and roundly condemned by Yahweh as idolatry. However we're not going to rehash all of that now and those who sincerely want to know how a demon's name came to be blasphemously fastened onto the most important event in the Christian/Messianic calendar can research the matter out on our website and elsewhere.

This year, 2020, today is the fifth day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Chag haMatzah), and the actual anniversary of our Master's Resurrection took place three days ago - on the Day of Firstfruits (Yom haBikkurim) - that is, for our particular location [1] based on the biblical Creation Calendar which the world and Christendom has long forgotten but which is being restored to us in these latter days by those carefully observing this mitzvah (commandment).

Yesterday we got into our proverbial time machine and went back on an imaginary trip to Jerusalem and to the day Yah'shua (Jesus) actually rose from the dead when graves started opening up and a representative sample of the Tanakh or Old Testament qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones) moved around the city interacting with the surprised (and no doubt shocked) local population 2,000 years ago. After discussing what a resurrection body is probably like, we speculated somewhat on what the Millennium would be like with mortals (like ourselves) and the resurrected qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones) co-mingling in everyday life. Would they be like two alien species or so similar in appearance, behaviour and physical properties as to be virtually indistinguishable?

There is tremendous confusion about the resurrection in the different denominations for reasons we also partially discussed, with some people even disbelieving that the resurrection is physical. When you ask most Christians what their future hope is, they have been conditioned to think by the churches to view it in terms of a spiritually disembodied state in a place called 'Heaven' which will be 'forever and ever, worlds without end.'

That view is now slowly but surely changing to the original one held by both the ancient Israelites and the first believers from the New Testament era. Practically everyone, except the Sadducees and maybe one or two cultists like the Gnostics, believed that they would be back on earth one day 'forever and ever, worlds without end' but only in the disembodied world for a fixed æon or age. They believed, particularly in the light of the revelation on the resurrection, that what would happen one day, is that Heaven would come down to earth and fuse with it eternally. There would, at this juncture, no longer we a world of disembodied spirits called 'Paradise' or 'Heaven', to which the righteous have been going since the first human beings started dying, as it too would receive a 'resurrection body' of sorts called the glorified earth.

They also believed that something similar would happen, though elsewhere, to what is known as 'Spirit Prison' or 'Tartarus' where the unsaved wicked go when they die, confusingly called 'Hell' as the result of centuries of theological layering of fantastic orthodox Christian speculation [2]. It's inhabitants will, as we have seen, also be resurrected, but at the end of the Millennium, not at its beginning, and shall in their turn dwell on other physical worlds of a far lesser glory once they have served their long and agonising prison sentences. These places are not named in Scripture and about all we know is they are not earth. They will have glories which Paul compares to the brightness of the moon and the stars, respectively (1 Cor.15:41).

This means, as I explain at great length and in considerable detail elsewhere, that there is no such thing as a doctrine of annihilation of the wicked (such as the Jehovah's Witnesses teach) but neither is there a place of eternal torment, 'worlds without end' - a place of torment, yes, absolutely, and largly self-inflicted, but not forever [3][4] (as most orthodox Christians teach). This was the belief of the qodeshim (saints, set-apart ones) of the first five centuries before pagan notions took hold of the Western Roman Catholic Church, thanks to the distorted theology of Augustine. Then it was taken to its grotesque, and frankly blasphemous, conclusion by John Calvin who went as far as to claim that Elohim (God) predestined the wicked to this fate with no choosing on their part allowed in either direction (good or evil), because Calvinists, as determinists or fatalists, deny free agency.

That is why a correct understanding of the resurrection in its wider context of eternity is so very important indeed and a reason why we, in this ministry, have devoted so many hundreds of hours to it over the last few years and why we have been prepared to make many enemies of those desperate to cling on to their false traditions. What I am doing in these short series of Resurrection Narratives is really just presenting a few chatty summaries in the hope it will encourage you to dig deeper. If you go to the website afterwards you will find this talk linked with dozens of important URL's taking you to numerous other websites of ours. So if you're listening to me today, please go to the website within about 12 hours where you'll find the article posted.

Because this is such a big subject, I'm having to make lots of summaries expressed in slightly different ways. Our goal is to bring the 'big picture' into sharp focus. The resurrection is the hope of mankind and so it is right we devote plenty of time to it.

Having thus made another set of summaries for you, let's now get onto our main resurrection topic today. I am indebted to a brother and fellow minister in the UK who this morning asked me this:

"I have a question regarding the statement that Yah'shua (Jesus) made when He was on His way to raise Lazarus. "He who believes in Me, even though he dies, yet shall he live" and "Whosoever lives and believes shall never die". Actually, there are two different statements there. How would you explain both?"

This reminded me of that request by a talmid (disciple) to Yah'shua (Jesus) to go and bury his dead father and the surprising answer given by the Saviour:

"Follow Me, and let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the Kingdom of Elohim (God)" (Lk.9:60, NKJV; also the shorter version in Matt.8:22)

I cite that example because it highlights some important truths for 21st century readers like ourselves:

• 1. The way language was used back then is not always the way it is used today;
• 2. Taboos in our own culture against failing to appropriately honour the dead, for example, can create clashes of conscience that are not necessarily kosher and can make the Son of Elohim (God) appear 'unkind', 'insensitive', even 'callous' if we allow our taboos to have sort of sway over our feelings.

I know lots of believers (not to mention unbelievers) who are appalled by some of the Saviour's teachings. These days, of course, anything remotely having the whiff of patriarchy is viewed as practically of the devil himself. Today we are taught to hate white, Christian heterosexual males, amongst others.

Indeed, the modern Western politically correct 'woke' culture is now so far removed from the teachings of Christ in so many fundamental areas that nothing short of a total revolution of thought and feeling must now take place in new believers when they are discipled. Westerners are becoming raw, hedonistic pagans because that is the lifestyle they are being born into and raised in.

You can no longer automatically assume that the younger generation has many, if any, of the Christian values of their forefathers. They have to be taught from scratch much as missionaries a century ago had to teach converts from beyond the West the true value system of Christianity. Indeed, descendants of those African and Asian converts are now having to come to the West to teach them because the rôle of heathen has in many cases been reversed. We in the West are starting to become savages needing to be civilised.

I met a practicing Christian the other day who is living with his girlfriend. I'm not concerned that he has not taken out a state marriage licence or certificate as much as I am that he has not made lifelong committments to his woman, and vice versa, in the presence of witnesses as the Torah requires because that is what true marriage consists of. That's the way marriage was conducted for thousands of years before our modern era.

Yet there are many so called 'conservative' Christian 'traditionalists' who believe that if you don't have a state licence to be married that you are living in fornication and therefore sin. Without going into a long discussion as to whether the government has any business being involved in marriage at all (personally I don't believe it does, since that makes it a polyandrous partner in the marriage with the right to decide all sorts of things rather like a 'supra-husband' No.2 - then the couple becomes a kind of 'wife' subject to the state who says what they can and can't do).

So as not to wander too far off topic, let me just say that the problem we face in the churches today is that in wandering from the Torah and in most cases outright rejecting it, modern Christians have simply substituted in Man's Law for Yahweh's, and that is the reason for the chaos. We have to take back for Yahweh what is Yahweh's alone and guard it fiercely. We are either subject to Messianic Israelite Law in areas that it alone can administer or we are subject to those parts of the Law of Babylon in which it has no business administering [5].

With that rather long aside we come to the brother's question, because there's a similar situation going on here with an equally puzzling response. Lazarus, one of Yah'shua's (Jesus') best friends, has died, and his distraught sisters - Mary and Martha, who had begged Him earlier to come and heal him while their ill brother was still alive, knowing that Yah'shua (Jesus) had the power to cure the sick because of all the miracles He had already done the length and breadth of the Holy Land - get their hearts stretched to breaking-point. Yah'shua (Jesus) has purposefully delayed coming to Lazarus because He knows he will die and that He will perform one of His greatest miracles to date: he will resuscitate him from the dead - thaumaturgise him - to demonstrate that He is the Master of life and death. Here are His exact words to Martha:

"Yah'shua (Jesus) said to [Martha], 'I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?" (John 11:25-26, NIV)

Now to a 21st century Westerner trained to think in the ways of the Enlightenment, the Master has said two contradictory things. But it didn't apparently confuse Martha:

"She said to Him, 'Yes, Master, I believe that You are the Messiah, the Son of Elohim (God), who is to come into the world'" (John 11:27, NKJV).

So what did Martha understand that we, with our Western-trained minds, struggle over? Why do we see an apparent contradiction when she did not? Part of the problem is that we are trained to not allow two apparently contradictory statements be simultaneously true just as many are still baffled by Yah'shua's (Jesus) instruction to an unnamed talmid (disciple) to 'let the dead bury the dead'.

This is Yah'shua's (Jesus') fifth 'I AM' saying - "I am the resurrection and the life" and everything else he says to Martha is explained by that statement. You may remember an earlier one in which He says, "I am the bread of life" (Jn.6:35) which was not some new, revolutionary concept or new literary genre because we find the same metaphor applied to 'Hochma' or 'Wisdom' in the apocryphal Book of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) written about 200 years before:

"Those who eat of me (Wisdom) will hunger for more, and those who drink of me will thirst for more" (Sirach 24:21, NRSV)

When Yah'shua (Jesus) says to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life", He uses the present tense, not, 'I will be the resurrection and the life [after the cross]' or something like that. He is saying that death is already overcome for the believer: the appearance of death remains ("even though he dies"), but its reality as annihilation or extinction is destroyed ("will never die") - indeed, without the resurrection, that would be our fate! In other words, what Martha looked for "in the resurrection at the last day" (John 11:24, NKJV) - in other words, the destruction of death itself - is available in the present as loaned 'resurrection life' to the one who believes in Christ - He is "the resurrection" because in His Divinity He is a timeless Being even if in His mortal, unresurrected flesh He is limited by time.

The 'contradiction' between the two statements is therefore only apparent, for just as Yah'shua (Jesus) was talking about two kinds of dead man - the spiritually dead and the physically dead - in that other saying I quoted earlier, so here He is likewise talking about two kinds of death - one that is only apparent (because physical death isn't the end of existence) and one that is indeed a terror - the second death, of which it is written in the Book of Revelation:

"He who overcomes shall not be hurt by the second death" (Rev.2:11, NKJV).

"Blessed and qadosh (holy, set-apart) is he who has part in the first resurrection. Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be cohenim (priests) of Elohim (God) and of Messiah (Christ), and shall reign with Him a thousand years" (Rev.20:6, NKJV).

"Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire" (Rev.20:14-15, NKJV).

"But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death" (Rev.21:7-8, NKJV).

In other words, there is a 'dying' which is the separation of the spirit from the body at the end of our mortal span (unless you are blessed enough to be transformed 'in the twinkling of an eye' when the Master returns (1 Cor.15:52, KJV), in which case you won't taste or experience the first death like the rest of humanity, unless you were physically translated like Enoch or Elijah), and there is a 'dying' which is your remedial punishment in the Lake of Fire that is required of those who refused to believe in Christ unto salvation or who of the saved were willfully disobedient.

Speaking of disobedient believers who do not inherit the first resurrection and do not live during the Millennium, the apostle Paul said:

"Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one's work will become clear; for the Day [of Yahweh] will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one's work, of what sort it is. If anyone's work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire" (1 Cor.3:12-15, NKJV). [6]

So if we look at Yah'shua's (Jesus') 'I AM' saying to Martha once more, hopefully we will see there is no contradiction. "He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies" - meaning, though he dies at the end of mortality, he will continue to live on the other side of the veil, and because he believes in Messiah, He will live with the resurrection chayim or life He spoke of at the beginning: "I am the resurrection and the life". Then He says, "and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die", meaning he will not experience the second death nor have to have his sinful nature burned out in those areas of his life which, during mortality, he didn't trust Yah'shua (Jesus) with.

Everybody will live beyond the grave but not everybody will enjoy the fullness of resurrection life who has not overcome - not fully submitted every area of his life to Christ - until the unrepented sins that remain in him after physical death (the first death) are burned out of him (in the second death). As for the wicked and unsaved, they too will be thrown into the Lake of Fire but for all of their sins, until the Cosmic Jubilee finally sets them free, until they learn that there is no salvation without Messiah.

I hope that this talk was in some small way a blessing to you. A big thank-you to the brother who primed it with a very interesting and important question! Tomorrow we shall wrap up the last in our seven-part series on the Resurrection Narratives. May Yahweh bless you in your aspiration to fully overcome through the resurrection life of our Messiah. Amen.

Endnotes

[1] This may be a day earlier or a day later in other locations around the world depending on the position of the moon. Additionally, Resurrection Day or Yom haBikkurim will appear on a different day each year on the Catholic Gregorian Calendar established by Pope Gregory which the world uses. If you are reading this article in a year other than 2020, that is why the fifth day of Chag haMatzah (Feast of Unleavened Bread) almost certainly isn't on '12 April' but on some other Gregorian date. That is because the Gregorian Calendar is man-made and does not reflect the divinely appointed times and seasons ordained by Yahweh for the world to follow.
[2] The word most Bibles translate as 'hell' - namely, Sheol (in Hebrew) and Gehenna (in Greek), is, in reality, a word describing the residence of the dead in general, both the righteous in Paradise/Heaven and the wicked in Prison/Tartarus.
[3] See our website on Universal Graded Salvation
[4] See our website on biblical concepts of Time
[5] See The Limits of Obedience to the State: A study of Romans 13:1-7
[6] You can learn more about this on the Hell, Annihilationism, Time , and Universalist websites.