156. Question Answer XIV
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We had intelligence that a truck bomb was going to be driven onto the base. At some point there was a plan to hurt us. Our job as the Special Forces was to provide force protection to the base. We got intelligence, we managed to locate the truck bomber and he was removed as a threat. And I still remember coming back to base, getting off the helicopters and once it was confirmed that we'd got our man,

Everyone was able to take their armour off, their helmets off outside the base and there was just a release of tension. And I thought that was, you know, I was caring for my neighbour. My troop was caring for our neighbours and that was a good thing. That was Australian federal politician and former Special Forces soldier, the Honourable Andrew Hastie, MP. Speaking on Undeceptions episode 55, we titled it Just War back in 2021.

That was a pretty confronting part of the interview actually. It's a really confronting episode where Andrew opened up about one of the most complex parts of being a soldier. Sometimes having to take a human life. Andrew's actions were in self-defense and despite that awful aspect of the job, he told me in that episode that he saw his former career as an act of love towards neighbor.

We've linked to the episode in the show notes, make sure you check it out. The Bible is clear, murder is wrong. It's the sixth of the Ten Commandments. And Jesus' teaching to love your enemies is one of the most famous anecdotes.

But the Bible is also filled with stories that seem to contradict those teachings. One of the most fascinating and brutal comes from Judges 4, when Jael, a woman, murders the enemy Canaanite army captain, Sisera, in his sleep. The news of Sisera's death leads to rejoicing. In fact, the whole next chapter is a song of praise led by Deborah, who's a real boss woman in the Bible. She's a heroine and...

and a judge of Israel at that time. The scriptures cast the murder of Sisera as a good thing. Jael had defended the nation of Israel and was perhaps defending herself against assault. So what do we make of self-defense, biblically speaking? When is it okay? How far is too far?

It's a complex set of questions, but you've asked it and I'm going to have a crack at answering it, plus a bunch of others. I'm John Dixon and this is our Season 14 Undeceptions Q&A. Music

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. You can get discounts on their special Master Lectures video courses and free chapters of many of the books we talk about here on the show. Just go to zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Every episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics undeniably.

that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth... MUSIC

Hi, John. I wanted to ask y'all today what your position was on the issue of self-defense. So, I've had some debates with friends recently about what could be biblically justified in a self-defense situation, and ultimately we had to say...

Let's agree to disagree and still be friends. You see Jesus say in Luke 22 to go out and buy a sword, but you also see Jesus say in places like Matthew 5 to turn the other cheek. I come from a region of the U.S. that both culturally and our legal system encourages self-defense.

So with that cultural regional bias in mind, my personal stance is that I'm prepared to defend myself and my household with any means necessary, including lethal force. I wanted to get your take on what is a scripturally sound stance to have on the issue of self-defense. Thanks.

I've never thought of the turn the other cheek saying as referring to actual violence as we'd understand it. It's most likely a reference to the open-handed slap, which was a form of interpersonal shaming or insult in antiquity, rather than an actual attempt to beat someone up. We are to return the insult with blessing, as the Apostle Peter would later put it.

Then there is that weird instruction you refer to where Jesus says, buy two swords just before his arrest. It does seem like an indication that Jesus wanted his disciples to be able to defend themselves against that unjust treatment. Then again, remember, he told Peter to put his sword away when he cut off the ear of one of the servants. Is that a contradiction?

I don't think so. I take it that this was an act of aggression, not self-defense on the part of Peter, going for the servant in anger rather than using the sword to protect himself from the armed soldiers. In short, I do believe that defending yourself or someone else with force is permissible.

I don't believe the church acting as the people of God are permitted to use violence to further the cause of Christ in the world, the cause of the gospel.

That seems to be the point in Romans chapter 12, which we reflected on in that Just War episode. Because there Paul insists that Christians, as Christians in the world, are to leave vengeance to the Lord, not to take vengeance into their own hands. But that's what makes Romans 13, the very next page, so interesting.

It plainly says that state actors are permitted to use the sword against evil, that they are an earthly embodiment of God's own vengeance. So in one chapter, you've got leave vengeance to the Lord. In the next chapter, you've got state actors who, in fact, are the vengeance of the Lord, or at least part of that vengeance. Now, this might set up what seems like a contradiction, but I think Paul is quite coherent here.

It's a warning in chapter 12 to the church that the church can't progress the kingdom of God through violence and vengeance. But then in chapter 13, it's a concession that in a fallen world, state actors must use force to protect others against evil. The tricky question facing the church in the fourth and fifth centuries, though, was what happens if one of those state actors happens to be a Christian as well?

Should they resign their post if they're ever called upon to use the sword against evil? Or should they, in that moment, consider themselves not as an actor of the church and the kingdom of God, but as a secular actor, halting evil by the use of permitted force?

This was the thinking that someone like St. Augustine had to wrestle with. And his answer, specifically to a governor named Boniface, was that Christians may use the sword only when acting as state authorities. And importantly, he insisted that even this state authority will enact violent force with tears, never rejoicing.

Hey, Producer Kayleigh here. Our next question comes from Dan, and he's going to ask it himself. If you want to hear your question on the show, head to our website, scroll down and click the big orange start recording button to record your question so we can play it on an upcoming episode. Good morning, this is Dan. I'm from Grand Rapids, Michigan in the United States of America. Just sending a question.

about trust versus what we do know. So we have a young, my wife and I, we have a young son. He's three years of age. He's born with a lot of health complications. And just wondering how we balance trust and again, what we're told by, let's say, science or what we know about viruses in terms of do we take him to church when he's at risk of getting sick? Do we trust God in that or do we keep him at home during flu season and not go to church?

You can extrapolate from there. Thanks so much. Love the podcast. Well, first up, Dan, I'm really sorry to hear about your kid. Bless you guys. My strong feeling is that you shouldn't risk your child's health. There is no magic protection. In this fallen world, we are all subject to disease, cancer, car crashes, and so on.

Let's say you suffered from frequent blackouts or fits. You wouldn't dare take up driving under the rubric, I'm going to trust the Lord that I won't have a blackout before I get to my destination. No, wisdom would suggest that in this fallen world, you are very likely to injure yourself or someone else in that context. So I think something like this seems to apply to our vulnerable children.

By the way, this is precisely the teaching given by the great third century Bishop Cyprian of Carthage. He wrote during a plague in the 250s AD that Christians shouldn't imagine they're going to be spared from the groaning of this corrupted creation. We, just like the rest of humanity, he said, are subject to this fallen flesh.

Our hope should be in the future kingdom of God, not this earth. So stay at home, Dan. Protect your kid. But at the same time, make sure you make a big deal of online church and create loads of opportunities for your kid to experience Christian community and Christian teaching in a safe context. Only you know how to pull that off best.

Hi, I'm Catherine and I'm just wanting to know the history of why the church meets on Sunday and not Saturday. Though now Christians do meet at all sorts of times. Just what's the history of meeting on Sunday? Thank you. Well, there's actually very little evidence for why church met on Sundays, not Fridays or Saturdays as the Jewish synagogues did. It just suddenly appears in all of our sources that Sunday was the day.

There are some good speculations, though. The first and most obvious one is that Sunday is the day of Jesus' resurrection. What better day to celebrate the faith together? We find some subtle passing references to church gatherings on the first day of the week. So in Acts chapter 20 and in 1 Corinthians 16, there's a reference to gathering on the first day of the week. But even there, it's not clear this is the formal church service.

The first really clear reference is in what's called the Epistle of Ignatius. He was the Bishop of Antioch, and he wrote to the Magnesians in Asia Minor around the year 115. So it's super early, just a generation after the apostles. And he explicitly says, we no longer keep the ancient practices of the Sabbath, but we live in accordance with the Lord's day on which our life also arose through him.

But all of this might be post hoc theologizing. The other reason for Sunday gatherings might just have been practical. All of the first Christians were Jews. Unless an entire synagogue converted, it just made sense to move the Christian gathering, the Jewish Christian gathering, to a day that didn't clash with synagogue.

Jewish Christians appear to have continued to go to synagogue and then the next day they'd go to church. In fact, this was happening right through to the fourth century at least. We know this because some Christian preachers like John Chrysostom begged his listeners to stop doing synagogue the day before they came to church.

One interesting tidbit of information we get from a very early pagan letter. This is that famous letter written by the governor of Bithynia named Pliny the Younger. And he mentions in passing amidst telling the emperor that he tortures the Christians and so on. He says, oh, those Christians, they meet before dawn to sing hymns to Christ.

Why would it be before dawn? Well, perhaps partly out of secrecy, but it's more likely it's just because Sunday is a workday. So everyone went to church on the first day of the week, the workday, before dawn. So you could then go off to work. Sunday didn't become a free day until Emperor Constantine mandated Sunday as a day off for everyone in the summer of 321.

You owe your weekend to Constantine. One of our sources actually suggests that Constantine did this not just to give everyone a day off, modeled on the Sabbath, but partly to make it easier for people to go to church. Sorry, I can't be any more specific.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academic and their new book, Boy Jesus, Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times, by the wonderful Joan Taylor. The Gospels don't tell us much about Jesus' childhood. They tell us that he was a child of Joseph and

and Mary from the line of King David that he was born in Bethlehem and that after his birth his family fled to Egypt for a period before returning to Judea and settling in the north in the town of Nazareth. With so much of his childhood shrouded in mystery, scholars approach these early stories with some scepticism.

That's where Joan Taylor steps in. In this rich historical analysis, which I've really learned a lot from, Joan fills in the gaps for readers, explaining how the volatile situation in Jesus' homeland, his status as a Jew in Judea of the tribe of Judah, and growing up under Roman occupation, all influenced his outlook and his teachings.

She also does a wonderful job of showing why some of the elements of the story that have been traditionally viewed as unlikely by some scholars actually deserve to be taken very seriously.

very seriously from a historical perspective. Like Jesus being born in Bethlehem, being born of the line of David, Herod's infamous massacre of the innocents, and so on. Boy Jesus is out now. So head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Don't forget the undeceptions, where you can find discounts, free chapters, and of course, the book itself. York was the staging point for every invasion of my country.

And that royal cousin hanged innocent Scots, even women and children, from the city walls. Well, Longshanks did far worse the last time he took a Scottish city. Sanguinarious Homo Indomitus est. Et sempititens mendatium. Ego nunquam pronunciare mendatium. Sed ego sum Homo Indomitus. Ou en français, si vous préférez.

Director Mark here. That was Mel Gibson as the medieval Scottish warlord William Wallace in the 1995 blockbuster Braveheart. In that scene, a member of English King Abud I's court tells the king's daughter-in-law, who's negotiating a potential peace deal with the marauding Scots, that Wallace is a lying savage.

He says it in Latin, not expecting Wallace to understand, but to everyone's surprise, Wallace replies to him in Latin, "I never lie, but I am a savage." Just to drive the point home, he adds that he can speak in French, if that's what they'd all prefer, and as you heard, he says that last bit in French.

It's a fun but entirely fictional portrayal of a wartime diplomatic summit. It does raise an interesting point though. Throughout history, some of the most consequential meetings ever would have been hindered by language barriers. Only the most privileged members of ancient society would have been afforded an education that allowed them to be bilingual.

So what would have happened when, for example, the leader of a new Jewish religious movement came face to face with Roman authorities? How would they have understood each other? That's the heart of our next question, and it comes from Lindsay. When Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate, which language did they speak? Would Jesus have known Greek or Latin? Obviously, some of his disciples knew Greek.

Would Pilate have been expected to learn the local languages spoken within the province he was ruling? I have heard and read the Easter accounts countless times, but the thought never occurred to me until a more sceptical friend asked the obvious question. Thanks for that. I love these tiny, tangential, historical questions. They often uncover really significant issues. The simple answer is, we don't know for sure.

There are multiple possibilities. The first is simply that Pilot had a translator. He absolutely would have had a translator. That just went with any foreign assignment.

The gospel writers wouldn't need to have mentioned that there was a translator there because they just tell the events of the trial and everyone reading in the ancient world would have assumed that if a translator was needed, the translator was there, but you can just talk about the dialogue as if the translator isn't there. But there's another possibility. Quite a few people think Jesus had at least rudimentary Greek.

Clearly, three or four of Jesus' inner circle had Greek. There's Philip and Andrew, for instance. They actually have Greek names, which is a pretty clear giveaway. And Andrew was the brother of Simon Peter. So if Andrew had Greek, there's a very good chance Peter had Greek as well. Maybe not literary Greek, but arguably spoken Greek. Remember, it's much easier to learn to speak a language than it is to write a language.

The great historical Jesus scholar, John Meyer, surveyed all of the evidence and indications about the language and education of Jesus, and he concluded that Jesus likely had enough Greek to conduct business with Gentiles in his role as a carpenter, or more accurately, a builder.

And friend of the pod, Peter Williams, he's got another book out. I think it's called The Genius of Jesus or something. And he's made a pretty strong case that Jesus had very good Greek and actually crafted some of his teachings in Greek. Now, I'm not entirely convinced by all of Peter's arguments, but I think it underlines the possibility that Jesus may well have been able to converse in Greek with Pontius Pilate in the simple dialogue recorded in the Gospels. It's not very complex, but

Roman governors often had Greek. So let's just say there's a 20% chance Jesus could speak reasonable Greek. There's a 50% chance Pontius Pilate could speak Greek. Either that, or there was a professional translator. At the start of this season, we did an episode on Mary Magdalene with friend of the podcast, Jennifer Powell-McNutt. One of the many things discussed in that episode was the nature of Jesus' relationship with Mary.

While John was clear that Jesus and Mary weren't romantically involved, as some like to claim, he did have this to say: Personally, I think it would be lovely to discover that Jesus had been married. It would underline his humanity and earthliness, and no Christian doctrine I can think of would be affected in the least by news of a happily wedded son of God. I was actually really surprised to hear JD say that, and so were lots of you.

This next question is a response to John's thoughts on Jesus' potential marital status. It comes from Dom. I was surprised when John said that he didn't see an issue if Jesus had been married. To me, Jesus remaining celibate is an eschatological sign of the new creation, when marriage will be superseded by the union between Christ and his bride, the

the church. He wasn't married on earth because he's waiting to be united with us. If Jesus had been married, I think it would have undermined the potency of the parables where he was in the role of the bridegroom. Another reason I feel like it would be problematic for Jesus to have had an earthly marriage is that the Son of God, the only truly perfect, holy and sinless human, would have had to have been married to a woman who was tainted by original sin. Talk about being unequally yoked.

Finally, it's not just the Catholic priesthood that put a lot of stock in Jesus' celibacy. Plenty of single Christians of all denominations, whether because of circumstance or because they desire to be faithful to God in spite of their same-sex attraction, yours truly included, take great comfort and encouragement in serving a celibate Saviour who showed by his own life that we can live a life pleasing to him without having marriage or children. In Christ, Dom.

Well, I first want to say God bless you. I don't know your exact situation, but it sounds like you're striving to be really faithful in your setting, and that's fantastic. But I have to disagree with you on every point. Sorry. Given that all those references to the marriage feast and Jesus as the bridegroom are metaphors, there's just no way this would contradict an actual historical marriage for Jesus.

Even if we're thinking overly literalistically, given that there's no marriage in the kingdom of God, the so-called wedding feast in the kingdom wouldn't involve Jesus having another wife. So there's no problem there.

And your use of the expression unequally yoked doesn't have relevance here. That comes from a statement of Paul where he's talking about believers having intimacy with unbelievers and evildoers. There's no way that would rule out Jesus marrying a pious Jewish woman like Mary Magdalene. A pardoned sinner is not unclean. After all, didn't you say that the church will be married to Jesus in the kingdom?

Given the history of the church, that would be unequally yoked, wouldn't it, on your reasoning? No, it just doesn't work. Personally, I think there's very little chance Jesus was actually married. I'm pretty sure he was single. But my point was simply a throwaway line that if he were married, it poses no theological difficulty.

Given the likelihood that he was celibate all his life, I think it is right for single people today to imagine that one can live a completely fulfilled and godly life without marrying and having a family. And on this point, I totally agree with you. But this doesn't work backwards as an argument for why Jesus must not have been married.

It's just a simple encouragement we can take from the likelihood of his lifelong singleness. This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Speak Life and their new video-based course 321, presented by the wonderful Aussie, now living in England...

Glenn Scrivner. G'day, mate. Glenn is a fantastic public advocate for the Christian faith in the UK. And in this course, he walks you through the core beliefs of the Christian faith. Glenn provides a basic Christian perspective on life, the world, and our place in it. 321 is a fantastic new way to explore Christianity. And it's also a brilliant way to share and deepen your faith if you're already a believer. So we

So it's both for skeptics and for believers. You can do 321 online in just a couple of hours, or you can space it out over a few weeks. I'm really excited about this because honestly, Glenn is an awesome bloke. Head to 321course.com forward slash underceptions to give it a go. There's no spam and no cost. That's 321course.com forward slash underceptions. You won't be disappointed.

If you're talking about evolution, okay, you take it for granted that evolution means that over time, meaning many generations, you get changes in what we call the allele frequencies, which is just saying we get changes in the genes. The key thing there is that this takes place over generations. So what does that mean? That means that evolution

Each generation gives rise to a new generation, which is the same, more or less, with slight differences as the earlier one. In other words, all of life self-replicates. All of life, from the simplest bacteria to us and everybody in between, makes a very accurate copy of itself. That's critical for evolution, because if that didn't happen, you couldn't have evolution. You need that first.

That was biochemist Sai Gart speaking on our recent episode, The Chemists, about wildly complex chemistry that takes place in evolution. We've discussed evolution a bit here on Undeceptions, and we plan to dedicate a whole episode to it again at some point in the future. For Sai and lots of other Christians, evolutionary theory doesn't pose a problem to their faith, but it keeps coming up for questions in Undeceptions. So here's one from Oscar.

Hi John, I just finished episode 153, and I have a philosophical question or two on macroevolution and God. Young or old, the Earth was formed before humans, which means before a conscious rejection of God, and without the consequences of sin. But macroevolution requires extraordinary amounts of natural selection, the engine of which is death.

If death is the consequence of a fallen world, how could it exist before sin itself? Additionally, it would be logically inconsistent for God, who is life itself, to personally initiate a mechanism which defies his very nature to achieve something that was already in his power. In short, is a long-earth view reconcilable with the Christian faith, and, if so, how?

Of course, Christians can disagree about this one. I have loads of friends who are young Earth creationists and they're faithful, intelligent, they understand the issues and so on. But personally, I have no problem with an old Earth and with physical death being part of the story. To my mind, the best science is in full agreement with the idea that the universe just can't be six or seven thousand years old.

And I can't believe God put multiple lines of evidence for an old universe into the creation to, I don't know what, test our faith?

I don't think God's word, the Bible, commits us to an old earth or a young earth. I've said many times on the show that those opening chapters in Genesis seem to be written in a style completely different from the very plodding history that develops in Genesis from, say, chapter 12 onwards. The literary style of the first part of Genesis is far more literary and mythopoetical, to use a buzzword.

And I take from this that we can therefore read the text either in a young earth mode or equally in an old earth mode. It's a bit like how you might read the parable of the Good Samaritan. Now, it looks like a concrete historical story and it's not introduced as a parable. But then again, it does have the stylistic form of the parable genre.

That permits me to read it as history, if I want to, so long as I also get the ethical theological point out of it. And it permits me to see it as a completely made up story, so long as I also see the ethical and theological point in the story. As for the problem of death, you're right that an old earth view has to contend with the fact that before humans came along, there was much death.

The scientific evidence for that is clear. Many, many species, let alone individuals, died long before humans appeared on the earth. Now, if you think that Genesis chapters 1 to 3 are saying there was no such thing as death before the disobedience of Adam and Eve, then this scientific evidence is a real problem. But I just don't think that's what the chapters are saying.

Two quick thoughts. In the narrative world set up in Genesis chapter 2, Adam and Eve were meant to eat from the tree of life. They needed the life-giving nourishment that came from God in order to be sustained in existence in every moment. This

This tells me that by nature, human beings, even Adam and Eve in the garden, were not immortal beings. They were subject to mortality from the beginning. They were only protected from this death by the power of the tree of life. But this says nothing about what was happening outside the garden with other creatures.

Now, to be clear, I don't even take the story in Genesis 2 and 3 as a concrete historical story. I think it's symbolic at a very deep level. But I'm willing to accept that there was a first human couple in relationship with God who were promised eternal sustenance despite the mortality that surrounded them and that was in their very nature as created beings.

They defied that relationship with God and were, you might say, let go into their natural state of mortality and decline. But even here, I don't think physical death is the main point. Genesis chapter 2 says, in the day you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die. But of course, no such thing happens. According to the biblical narrative, they continue to live for hundreds of years more.

The death they experienced on that very day, according to chapter 3, is the threefold undoing or chaos they experienced. The disruption of their relationship with God, tensions in their relationship with each other, and frustration in their interaction with the physical creation itself.

They are the three things that happen there in Genesis chapter 3. They are death, the unwinding of the threefold blessings of harmony in the spiritual sphere, harmony in the social sphere, and harmony with the environment.

Read this way, I see no problem with an old earth, evolution and all the rest. I just think it was all under the sovereign power and artistry of God himself. We've come to the final question for the regular feed. Plus subscribers get to hear John answer a few extra questions. So head to the show notes where you can find the link to sign up. This question relates to our Hill episode from last season and it comes from Penny.

I'm sure you've been inundated with questions about the most recent episode, On Hell. My question is, John seemed to differentiate between the idea of total annihilation and eternal punishment, often referred to as eternal conscious torment. But could there be something in between?

While I do agree that hell will involve some sort of punishment, and that punishment will be proportional, I get stuck on a lot of the passages that talk about the wages of sin being death, which makes me think that there will be a final end to the punishment. I feel like there are more passages to back up this theory than the idea that people who go to hell will be punished forever. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks so much for that. Actually, I'm surprised there weren't more questions about the hell episode.

There is one passage that says the wages of sin is death. It's what Paul says in Romans chapter 6. But what does he mean by death? Now, there are those who think he means physical death. Therefore, the fact that we all die is the natural consequence of the fact that we're all sinners. Even forgiven sinners die because we're part of a fallen world. But if that's the case, that doesn't tell us anything about what happens after physical death.

Every human being passes through physical death, unless Jesus returns in the middle of our lives, of course. But then, of course, a bunch of us pass to the other side, beyond death.

What's to say that's not everyone, believer and unbeliever, passes through death to some other existence? The parable Jesus tells in Luke chapter 16 about Lazarus and the rich man certainly implies that the one under judgment, the rich man, has passed through physical death into something else that is real and unpleasant.

Incidentally, this parable is one of the reasons I could never accept universalism, as attractive as it might sound at first. That's the view that everyone ultimately is going to be welcomed into God's kingdom. According to that theory, or a dominant form of it anyway, people who die without Christ will experience a period of punishment or refining post-death,

And then they will be transformed in their will and enter into paradise. And that'll happen to everyone. This raises many, many problems for me. For one thing, it implies, despite protests to the contrary, that there are in fact two ways of salvation.

One is simple faith in the atoning death of Jesus, and the other is personally bearing your sins in a post-mortem punishment of refinement that makes you fit for the kingdom. And that seems very far from the biblical account of salvation. But more directly, in this parable of Luke 16, Jesus has the rich man in the unpleasant post-mortem existence pleading to cross over into the joy of God's kingdom.

And Jesus makes plain, I quote, Besides all this, between us and you, a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.

Now, it's true this is a parable, and so not every detail can be matched with a corresponding reality. That's not how parables work. But this line is pretty much the main point of the whole thing, that once you physically die, there is no possibility of moving from the place of punishment to the place of joy. Having said all that.

I'm not sure Paul means physical death in that passage you cited. The wages of sin is death. What if he means the same sort of thing that the writer of Genesis meant when he said that the Lord told Adam on the day you eat of that tree, you will surely die.

Well, Adam and Eve certainly didn't die on that day. What happened was they experienced the diminished existence of a fracture in their relationship with God and with one another and with the physical earth itself. Death in that context seems to me to mean something closer to an existence that is far short of the full life to which humans were properly destined. In this sense, death does not mean an end.

It means a falling short of the full life we were made for. And that is pretty much what I think hell is. In the episode, I hope I made clear that I don't believe God is going to be torturing people for eternity. I choose to imagine that it will be an existence that is hellish only in as much as it's far short of the sublime existence of the kingdom.

I even dare to imagine, you may remember, that those in hell will feel gratitude to God. That while they are duly and proportionally punished for their sins, their enduring existence is much better than they deserved or could have hoped for. That was my thought experiment.

The punishments of hell will not be torture, as it's commonly understood, but it will be the proportional loss of the wondrous life God intended for us. Music

There's a lot going on at the moment for our team at Undeceptions. Check out our new documentary called The First Hymn, available to stream now in the United States and coming soon for Australia and our global audiences. Head to thefirsthymmovie.com for all the info.

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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Alistair Belling is a writer-researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is Chief Finance and Operations Consultant, editing by Richard Humwee. Our voice actors today were Yannick Laurie and Dakota Love.

Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast.