JEAN'S BIBLE STUDY

Chapter 9:

Re-Creation of Man

God created the new heavens and the New Earth, and since then God’s people had been worshipping Him, and Jesus worshipped the Father with them (Heb 2-11,12), mingling in the crowd and fellowshipping with His brethren. Life continued in heaven, while the creation throughout the universe had reached equilibrium, a maximum state of life. Everything that could grow did grow to its fullest extent. The trees reached their peek height and stopped growing; the animals reached their peek populations, then stopped reproducing, and the flowers offered their fragrances to the air and never tried to take over the forest, their reproductive ability subsided. God hadn't been  waiting for His creation to reach equilibrium; it didn’t take that long, a couple million years; rather, He was waiting for His people to reach equilibrium regarding unity. Over the eons they all became one big happy family; everyone knew and loved each other. There were no strangers in heaven, and their worship of God was perfected; they were networked together and were all in one accord. If God revealed something to one person, the knowledge spread to others through the Spirit, until everyone was on the same page. Some of the most profound knowledge about God came from the ungifted, whose maturity level was stunted from a lack of commitment to the faith in their former lives. For this reason they couldn’t go on great adventures, because they couldn’t fly or teleport or communicate with Jesus through prayer, but were confined to the New Jerusalem and had to speak to Him in person, which meant they had to get in line. When they asked Jesus questions, He answered them in great truths about God; and when they joined their friends, they would divulge to them what Jesus said, and the knowledge would spread throughout heaven like wildfire, though everyone interpreted the knowledge differently, which added variation to the body and expanded the truth, so what the people thought collectively was the mind of Christ. They all had different gifts and callings, having perfected unity over the course of billions of years, unity being God’s goal for the Church; but when people lived in the flesh, they never came close to achieving it.

On the four-billionth day of the new creation the Lord sitting on His glorious throne made a proclamation, causing silence to spread over the New Jerusalem, which was a strange sound indeed. “Today is the day that my Father and I have anticipated from eternity past.” You could hear a pin drop. “In these last four billion years you have become My human soul, and we have been making love together through our spiritual union. Just as in your former life when you made love to your spouse it produced children, so we too will produce children together.” He spoke to His Church in heaven, the bride of Christ, “You are currently pregnant and about to give birth to twins” (Rev 19,7-9). This was news to them. “Do you see what’s coming?” They looked and there before them was the New Earth coming into view. “The New Earth is at the center of the universe, and it is the place where you will give birth to a man and a woman, and they will be our children; we will start a family and watch them grow.” 

The the New Earth came closer as Jesus was speaking these words, until the New Jerusalem rested upon it. A person could go to the top story of the New Jerusalem and overlook the earth 1500-miles high, and see for thousands of miles, until the curvature of the earth ended their field of vision. Since the people were primarily spirits with a body overlying it, they didn’t have good eyesight or bad eyesight but photographic eyesight. That is, they could look at a scene and take a snapshot of the image in their mind, and then expand it and study small details hundreds of miles away, such as a beetle crawling on a tree.

Jesus continued to speak, “God created the first Adam and Eve from the cursed ground of the earth and then placed them in the garden" (Genesis 2-7,8). Reiterating, "God didn't make Adam and Eve from the soil of the garden, which was blessed. Rather, He made them from soil of the earth that was cursed. That is, they needed a garden because the earth was previously cursed from Lucifer’s rebellion. For this reason it says that Eve would suffer mild pain at childbirth even if she had not sinned" (Genesis 3-16), pain being an aspect of the curse (Rev 21-4). After they sinned, God spoke to Eve and said, "I’ll greatly increase the pain of your labor during childbirth" (ISV). Increase means there would be some pain in childbirth even if they had not sinned, proving that God used cursed soil to make them. They also had to eat to replenish their strength and nutrients (Genesis 2,15-17), which is another aspect of the curse. 

"God made them so they would not die, though they were made of cursed ground; but when they sinned and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God removed His blessed anointing from their lives and they died. God made Adam imperfect, and then breathed life into him so he became a living being and protected him from death; then He made Eve from his rib (Genesis 2-7,22). They didn’t need any clothes, because God clothed them with His glory that radiated brightly to hide their nakedness. The Shekinah glory was their covering; but when they sinned, their glory was removed, and they saw that they were naked.

“However, the new Adam and Eve will not be made of cursed ground but from the dust of the New Earth, which is not under a curse, hence the woman will not suffer pain during childbirth, nor will they be required to eat to replenish their strength and nutrients. Pain is something the new Adam and Eve will never experience, along with all the other weaknesses of cursed flesh. For this reason the new Adam and Eve are perfect, unlike the first Adam and Eve. God made them better than the original, which indicates that God had it in mind from the beginning that the first Adam and Eve should sin; that's why He didn’t bother to make them perfect. God intended to purify their offspring through suffering, trial, hardship and difficulty, requiring them to believe in God, instead of having the privilege of looking directly upon His glory and seeing His face, a privilege their parents had and traded for a chance to be like God in ways He did not approve, for they were already made in His image.

“We created Adam and Eve and set them in the garden with the expectation that they should be fruitful and multiply and expand its perimeter to fill the whole earth. That was My Father's intension, but they failed. They were fruitful and multiplied, but they didn’t do it within the perimeter of the garden, nor did they turn the earth into a garden paradise. They populated the earth outside the garden, but that was not God's command. The old earth grew thorns and thistles and people ate by the sweat of their brow. Man coaxed food from the ground by adding toxic chemicals to the soil that poisoned the earth. When Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, the wilderness didn’t want them either. They had nowhere to go and no way to live, so they took the materials they found in the wilderness and made havens for themselves and created cities, transforming the wilderness into a suitable habitat for them."

Jesus then said to His people, “My Father and I are resuming the original plan we had with Adam and Eve. We made them susceptible to sin, but God will make the new Adam and Eve perfect, and there will be no Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to tempt them, and they will not be tested  (2Pet 3,12-14). God tested you so you could teach the new creation about God, without them having to learn the hard way, like you did. That is, God created you so you might teach His next creation about good and evil. God could not personally teach them right from wrong lest they sin against His word and end up in the same position as the first man. Consequently, their knowledge of God will be based on something more like a paper and pencil test. In contrast, God experientially tested you in the real world far more comprehensively. He made you answer questions written in your own blood, sweat and tears, making hard decisions with intense suffering from the world, the flesh and the devil. You were called to endure and persevere to the end, so you could teach the new creation the ways of God (2Tim 2-12).

“God will command the new Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, and since there is no curse and the earth is already a garden planet, we will give them new directives. We will command them to turn the earth into an interplanetary station, from which they will colonize other planets and solar systems and eventually other galaxies (Lk 1-32,33; Jd-25; Rev 1-6; Rev 5-13,14; Rev 22-5). Moreover, God wanted the first Adam and Eve to remain farmers, but God will call the second Adam and Eve to become technologically advanced for the purpose of space travel. If you recall from your former life, when man changed the earth to make it more suitable for himself, the planet suffered, but in the new creation, man will live with the plants and animals, so the changes he makes to the earth will benefit all life, improving the garden planet. God commanded the first Adam and Eve to subdue the earth, that is, to subdue the curse, but He will command the second Adam and Eve to inhabit the entire universe. Furthermore, before colonizing other planets, their residential purpose is to oversee the plants and animals, as it was the former Adam and Eve’s occupation. For this reason God gave Adam the job of naming the animals, but he sinned and was forced to eat them instead of caring for them. Now that God sacrificed His Son to pay for the sins of man, He selected certain people throughout the millennia to be His worshippers, and you are those people and have graduated from managing plants and animals to managing people, managing the offspring of the second Adam and Eve.”

“God’s next creation of man will know neither good nor evil. They will be perfect, incapable of either. If they do good, they won’t know it; if they do evil, they won’t know it, like babies who are incapable of knowing good and evil. For this reason God created you to teach them right from wrong (Eph 2-6,7); for if they directly transgressed My Father's command it would inadvertently reinstate the curse. For this reason My Father will not give them any commands. Instead, they will create worlds according to the standard that you will lay down for them, based on goodness, righteousness and truth, though they will never understand what these things mean like you do. Their knowledge of these things will be like the chemistry student who reads in his chemistry books about electrons that revolve around the nucleus of atoms but have never seen one. He only understands the atom’s structure by faith, so the new creation of man will understand good and evil by faith. They will never experience it for themselves, though it is all around them, even within arm’s reach.”

Jesus took His wife (the Church) and together they walked out of the city gates to a place on the New Earth that He had designated, and the people surrounded Him. Being that the city was a 1500-mile cube and that His throne was in the center of the city, He walked 750 miles to the city gates. Walking at 2.5 miles an hour it would have taken two weeks to walk to the city gates; instead, it took Him over four hundred years, because He visited with His people all along the way. He finally exited the gates of the holy city and placed His foot on the New Earth for the first time, and there was great rejoicing and celebration, and the people invented a new annual holiday to commemorate the event. Jesus said to His people who surrounded Him, “There are two people inside of you, a man and a woman; they are not brother and sister, but husband and wife, and you are about to give birth to them right here and now. My Father has instilled these two in your heart, and you have been thinking about them for the last four billion years, and My Father and I have been thinking about them much longer than that. “You will give birth to them according to the image you have of them in your collective mind.” Jesus reached to the ground and picked up a handful of soil and spoke the words of His Father, “This vision that we have had from eternity past is coming to fruition. From the soil in My hand, the first two people will emerge, who will populate the earth. They will be the mother and father of those who will come after them, and they will be honored forever, because they were the first.”

Jesus continued praying to the Father, “For this cause We have created the Church, My wife, that she might teach them right from wrong, and We will be their Father and the Church will be their mother, and we will be kings and priests to them, and I will be King of kings, and Lord of lords. We will reside above all; and you Father are above Me (Jn 6-38). I will direct My people in the way they should go, and they will direct the new man and woman and their offspring in the way they should go and teach them the ways of God.” He looked at his people and said, “Recall all the wars that were fought in your former life, how many people died at each other’s hand. How many sins were committed throughout man’s evil reign on earth and all the devastation it caused, all the pain and suffering? It was all for this moment.” He took them to the mouth of the abyss, and they all looked into it, and saw the people tormented in the Lake of Fire. Jesus said to His people, “These have sacrificed their lives for this cause, for they are here as a reminder of the vast cost and consequence of rebellion. This man and woman, this new Adam and Eve, will never know sin; they will not be capable of it, because we will not give them a commandment to violate; for where there is no law, neither is there violation (Rom 4-15); where there is no Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, neither is there a way to rebel.”

He looked at His people and said to them, “In the eons to come their children’s children will look up to you, and they will think that you are gods (Jn 10,34-36), but remember the tremendous cost that went into realizing that you are not God. You have come to a point in your life where it is impossible to believe or even conceptualize that you are God. Nevertheless, the people that we are about to create will believe it about you, their children’s children will believe that you are gods, but you will convince them otherwise by bringing their princes to the New Jerusalem and introducing them the one true God who created heaven and earth and all things in it. They will return to their land and tell their people to worship My Father and your Father and no other gods, for your Father and My Father is God, the only God. Therefore, all of the lessons you learned, that man has learned, are for this cause: you will not become arrogant and tell the people a lie that you are a god.

Jesus reached down and took some soil in his hand, and He lifted His eyes and spoke the words of His Father, “Let a man and a woman come from the dust of the earth, ground that is not cursed; make an amalgamation of us in them. Combine our thoughts and create a new Adam and Eve in the image of our collective thoughts.” Jesus sprinkled dust from both hands on the ground, and from the dust came a man and a woman, and all the saints who encircled them gasped in wonder. The two of them looked at each other, and then they looked in the eyes of Jesus, and He said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.” That was the only commandment He gave them. They looked all around at the multitude of people that surrounded them, the wife of the Lamb; innocence gleamed from their eyes, and the voice of the Father boomed above the congregation, “This is very good.” Jesus said to His wife, “We will call them Ayin and Chath.” They did not need to eat or sleep or had any needs, because they were not made of cursed ground, but were made from dust of the New Earth that was devoid of any curse. 

Jesus had a little talk with the man and his wife, whom He had just made, “You are not the first Adam and Eve that My Father and I have made. The first pair were made from cursed ground, and then we made a garden and put them in it. We also set the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in front of them and told the man not to eat of it and told him to instruct his wife not to eat of it or they would surely die, and then We watched to see what they would do. The woman walked alone to the edge of the garden and looked beyond it into the curse and wondered what lay out there, and just then a serpent slithered to the perimeter of the garden where the woman stood and said to her, ‘This god of yours is so conceited that He will not talk to you, but I will.’ That immediately got her attention. ‘Your God lied to you; if you eat from the forbidden tree, you will not die.’ The woman said, ‘I won’t?’ ‘No,’ said the serpent, ‘he doesn’t want you to eat from it because he doesn’t want you to become wise like Him. He wants you to remain ignorant.’ So, she walked back to the middle of the garden to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and ate from it, and nothing happened to her, just as the serpent said. She ran to her husband all excited and said, ‘I spoke to someone who was wiser than god, and he told me that I could eat from the forbidden tree and not die, and so I ate and look, I didn’t die!’ Now Adam had to decide between his wife and his God, and he chose his wife and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, rebelling against God’s word, and they noticed that their luminescence weakened and then vanished, which acted as their clothing, and suddenly they discovered that they were naked. Just then they heard God calling for Adam, and so they hid. God found them and ejected them from the garden into the curse, and later they and their children died, just as God said, and so the serpent lied to them.”

Jesus said to the new man and woman, “These who are standing around Me are those who believed in Me in a former life; they are just a drop in the bucket of humanity who lived and died throughout the millennia; the rest of them rebelled against Me and cannot be here, because they would destroy My kingdom if given the opportunity, and so My Father and I made a place for them under My feet. Follow Me, and I will show you.”

Jesus took the man and woman to a massive hole in the ground, the mouth of the abyss. There was a railing built around it, and the man and woman hugged the railing and looked into the bottomless pit, asking what was down there. Jesus replied, “This is where all those who rebelled against Me are kept. There is a fiery core at the center of your planet, and the wicked have been thrown into it. Their bodies cannot die, and they are in constant torment day and night. This is what My Father thinks about sin. The children of the first man and woman rebelled against Me, and their offspring became lost in sin, so My Father sent Me to die a terrible death, and while dying My Father heaped all the sins of man onto Me, in essence blaming Me for their sin and thereby judging them through Me, which gave My Father reason to forgive them who would believe in Me for eternal life. Many sought forgiveness and restoration, who stand before you this day, and My word was fulfilled that whoever believes in Me will never die (Jn 11-26). However, most went their own way and ended up down there, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

“You are blessed to have no opportunity to sin; you have no Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to decide between it and Me, and you have no serpent to tempt you to rebel against Me. You will never comprehend good and evil; these things will be hidden from you. Instead, you were created free. All these people who stand around you now, they do know about these things, and their knowledge came at a terrible cost to them, to Me and to those suffering in the Lake of Fire. However, without knowing evil, you cannot fully appreciate goodness.” These things are hidden from your understanding; therefore, these are here to teach you and correct you and lead you in ways that are good and right. Their purpose is to teach you about Me and My Father. This earth I have given you; it belongs to you and to your children. The man and the woman listened intently to the word of the Lord, until He told them about death and good and evil; then they became confused, and they didn’t understand what He was saying, and they questioned Him about it, “What is this thing you call 'good' and 'evil'?” Jesus answered them and said, “I could explain it to you, but all you can understand is that they exist. You were created to strive for perfection; these My brethren will help you achieve it, and in the process you and your children will accomplish many wonderful things.”

Jesus chose one person from the citizens of heaven to be the primary mentor of the new man and woman and their future children, who would live on the New Earth. Everyone expected Him to choose someone like Moses or David or some other big name in the Bible, instead He chose a woman, Isabella, who was not a Bible character at all, one who blended into the crowd and wasn’t a big personality, but was the most humble of all God’s people. She was born in the year 322 AD; she was martyred for her faith in Jesus, and before that she suffered indescribable tortures and imprisonment for years, and through her suffering many of those who tortured her repented and adopted the very faith they were persecuting. In her teenage years she was bullied as a sole Christian of her family, yet her faith was never shaken; and by the time she became an adult, she won many of her friends to Christ, but her own family members ostracized her. She mentored the new man and woman and their children. She worked beside Jesus and taught them what they should know about goodness and righteousness and about God who created them. She gave them three main directives in life: reproduce, take good care of the earth, and excel in technology.

Ayin and Chath had their first child, a son, and they named him Pidyon-Haben. The citizens of heaven held a party, created a new holiday and celebrated their growing family. Jesus told Isabella, “As your family grows, you will choose fellow mentors from among your brethren whom you think is fit for the job, and by that create a hierarchy of authority that will expand and remain in place throughout eternity. As your family grows, you will choose leaders among your brethren and raise them to be mayors of cities (Lk 19-17), governors of states, kings of countries, magistrates of planets and adjudicators of galaxies. My Father is the final authority of all things; I will be second in command, and you will be third.” As their family grew she chose fellow mentors among her brethren, Moses being one of her first choices, King David and other Bible characters who served the Lord well in their former lives. Their reward was extremely great, and they shined like the stars of heaven. They were so proud to be a part of this great work that God was doing. 

Jesus disappeared and reappeared on His throne, and all His people teleported around the throne and worshipped God for the great things He has done, except those who lived for themselves in their former lives and didn’t bother storing up treasures in heaven, who merely believed in the doctrines of salvation and never sought to serve and obey the Lord, lived selfishly for their own interests and pursuits; they had to walk home. They were ungifted, and as a result their spiritual lives in heaven were stunted. Their only gift was that they escaped the fires of hell, which they confessed was their goal. In their former lives they said that squeezing through the pearly gates was all they wanted, and that’s all they got. Nevertheless, to be residents of the New Jerusalem is the greatest gift of all (Mat 20,1-16). Since they never sought to fulfill their calling that God had prepared for them, they didn’t have gifts that others had. They were unable to teleport, which is how people traveled in heaven; so if they wanted to go somewhere, they hoofed it. However, before they went home they talked with the man and the woman and told them many stories that they remembered from their former lives. They walked a distance from the abyss because of the stench that rose from it, and for that reason nothing grew around the mouth of the abyss for a distance of 500 yards, because of the sulfur content of the air. The smoke rose up straight into the nostrils of God the Father, who Himself lived in smoke and fire from eternity past, and in that way those who were tormented in the Lake of Fire could relate to Him.

Soon they had three children, and they lived and played in the area where they were born, and the man and woman had other children. The older ones explored beyond their home and pushed out the perimeter of their roaming. They had other children, and their children married and had children of their own, though it was not considered incest, and their genetic code was not compromised. Before long there were twenty of them, then fifty, then a hundred. Heaven (New Jerusalem) rested on the earth, and the saints came and went at will. They worshipped God and went on errands, explored the earth and neighboring planets and went on wild adventures to other solar systems and galaxies to see what was there, and they returned and worshipped God for their freedom and for His justice, righteousness and Truth. The New Jerusalem was their house of worship. The saints would often visit the people of earth and see how they were doing; they told them stories from their past, their successes and failures, and the people listened and were amazed at how different yet similar they were to their parents.

When someone built something, it would last forever, unless he built it apart from God’s will; then it would crumble. Most everything on the New Earth went according to God’s will, but there was always a thing or two out of place that someone did that contradicted the will of God, and the thing he built in this manner crumbled over time. (This does not apply to God’s people who live in the New Jerusalem, who are incapable of sinning or doing anything against the will of God.) When anyone built something apart from God’s will, it got old and fell apart. If a person lived against his conscience that led him to do “evil”, everything they owned got old; their house showed signs of wear, and it soon became dilapidated; even their own bodies started getting old, and they became tired and sickly, until he repented, and then everything was restored, but it never led to death, because death didn’t exist in the new creation. All their neighbors could see just by looking at him and his property that he was living against his conscience. His neighbors would come to him and try to restore him, and it was usually enough; but if he refused to repent, they would call on the Lord and request assistance, and He would send the one assigned to that province to straighten-out the person, and if he still didn’t repent, the mentor would take him on a long journey to the Holy City and personally introduce him to Jesus Christ and escort him to the abyss to show him exactly how God feels about sin.

Since no one died, the family grew to thousands in only a few centuries, and then millions. Isabella elected mentors and the mentors elected other mentors. They developed a hierarchy of authority among the saints as God’s family grew, and Jesus monitored this great work while in constant contact with the Father, who counseled Jesus from a bird’s-eye view. Before long there were half-a-trillion people living on the New Earth, yet the earth was largely uninhabited, using only a small patch of real estate. The New Earth was so much larger than the old earth, and there were no uninhabitable places like oceans or deserts. People were turning the earth from a garden planet to paradise; it seemed they knew instinctively what to do. It was their world, and they were happy and free. Their purpose was to manage the earth, worship God and create machines for space travel. They also built villages, towns and cities, and in them they built houses where they lived and schools where they taught their children mathematics and how to read and write.

Those who were populating the earth would soon need to migrate to neighboring planets and solar systems through their developing technology, which they started almost from the beginning. The new creation of people were classified as “man”, made in the likeness of God in terms of having creative abilities. Since they were not born in a cursed universe, they were able to develop technologies without destroying themselves or the earth. Their technology evolved very quickly, as opposed to the first man, who took thousands of years just to discover electricity, much less travel among the stars. As a result of corruption the descendants of Adam took awkward steps forward and foolish steps backward. Conversely, the new man never used his inventions for evil; he didn’t develop weapons and use them to fight wars and kill each other; they only used them for good. They discovered electricity in the year 200 NB (New Beginning). Another reason they were more inventive than the first man was that no one ever died, meaning a person could accumulate knowledge indefinitely. In 700 NB they started toying with rocketry, launching rockets into outer space, exploring neighboring moons and even landing on a couple of them.

They researched more sophisticated ways of space travel, and by 2000 NB they invented fusion, which they used to power their spaceships. God gave them the life-purpose of technology so they could learn to travel the heavens; they would soon need to know these things, because their populations were destined to explode, and they would need ways to travel between the stars and colonize the galaxies within God’s infinite universe. This is in contrast to the first man, whose purpose was written in Genesis 2-15, “Then the Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it.” Added to being a farmer, God called Adam to name all the animals (Vs19,20). This indicates that God’s purpose for Adam was to cherish the earth as a farmer, turning it into a garden planet. Similarly, the purpose of man in the new creation was to care for their planet. In all their inventions and new ways of living they were not to do anything to harm the earth in any way, unlike the first man.

People of the new creation didn’t go through the many steps we did to achieve space exploration. Rather, they by-passed many steps and catapulted forward from a lack of sinful nature that in our former life sabotaged every move we made. Within five thousand years they perfected a spaceship that could break the light barrier, which means they had to tackle the problem of mass (gravity). This entailed disintegrating mass at the beginning of their travels and then reanimating it when they reached their destination. This was a problem for many years, though we should keep in mind that the new creation is not the same as the old one; they had many advantages compared to Adam’s many disadvantages, and they had God’s blessing to explore the heavens, as opposed to Adam living under a curse and encouraged to remain farmers. People of the new creation had problems that were not severe as those of the descendants of the first Adam, for they could not even consider attempting such monumental objectives in a cursed world, for the elements themselves that composed the new creation were better. This is what made it possible for the new creation of man to achieve their space-faring goals.

Star Trek was a popular TV show, so much that people who binge-watched it were given a name: “Trekies”. Such a way of life the show depicted was interesting but impossible at the time, yet people in the next creation will have this life, minus their enemies; they will travel the stars without the restrictions and weaknesses and problems of our own experience. Think of all the vulnerabilities that plague us from day to day, yet these frailties are the very things that bring joy to our lives, such as sleep that allows us to escape ourselves for a little while, which is comforting, since our lives are relatively miserable. Food is one of the great joys of life, but if there is no food we starve. Shelter, we have a home, which is a safe and happy place, but if we don’t have a home or shelter, we are exposed to the elements. So all our weaknesses are a blessing if we can provide for them, but they become a curse if we can’t. The biggest curse is death, in that if we are able to meet all our needs, we still grow old and die. In contrast, people of the new creation don’t have all these needs. They can sleep if they want; they can eat if they want… but they don’t need to do these things. If they lost their home, there are people all around them that would take them in until they rectified the situation, whereas in this life the problem of homelessness is a far bigger problem.

The saints who lived in the New Jerusalem also didn’t need to eat, though they did a lot of eating and drinking at their many jubilations and festivals that melded into each other in an endless celebration of life. At the annual ceremony the whole body of saints took communion. Jesus led the proceedings and reminded the people about their former life regarding the laws of old covenant worship and all the temple services that the Jewish Levitical priests were required to perform day-to-day, revolving around animal sacrifices, culminating in a single annual sacrifice called Passover, which referred to a future sacrifice that would be made on a certain day set by the Father, the sacrifice of Jesus’ flesh on the cross. Believing in Jesus’ blood sacrifice was the only way God and man could see eye-to-eye and come into agreement by a covenant that He prepared for man to receive with the hope of forgiveness and eternal life. They all took communion together in memory of that sacrifice, eating the bread and drinking the wine in a state of solemnity and joy.

Afterward, Jesus led His people from the Holy City to the mouth of the great abyss as a final part of the annual ceremony, a reminder of what happened to people who rejected His blood sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin. They thought the temporal life they were given was the only one that mattered, according to their limited perspective. They didn’t think the life they had was worth sacrificing for a promised life they didn't believe they would never see. To them the old adage applied, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” They lived in the flesh believing it was the only life they would ever know. Unfortunately, using their temporal lives in the flesh as a seed to invest in a supposed life to come was not something that appealed to them, so when they died they had no life waiting for them, though their soul remained. Things would have been different had they believed in God who loved them. After they died, they wanted the angels to receive them into their new life, but God could not trust them, because He didn’t have their hearts.

For every citizen of heaven there were a thousand souls suffering in the Lake of Fire, representing God’s righteous judgment. They refused to submit to His sovereign rule. Jesus reminded His people that they were down there for their sakes (Rom 9,22-24), and that if it weren’t for the grace of God, they would be down there too (Rom 9-29). Every year they gathered around the abyss, and Jesus reminded them of God’s righteous judgment against rebellion, pointing into the abyss and saying, “Those in hell are a reminder to every created being that God is in control and not you.” Jesus made the point that everybody who rebels against God becomes sin; they don’t just do evil; they become evil. In that statement Jesus defined darkness and evil as the absence of God. He held out his hands and said, “Look at yourselves; you are light, just as I am light. Take your light that you received from Me and convey it to those I put in your charge.” Jesus again pointed into the abyss and said, “This is where darkness belongs.” Then He held out His hands to His people and said, “You don’t belong there because you believe in Me.”

Return to chapters