20. What Is Hades?
There is only one place, this heaven/earth in which we live. You and I are as much IN heaven, part of heaven through our spirit bodies, as those believers who have lost their physical bodies, though they continue in heaven as we do.Inside this one place, heaven/earth, there is good and evil side by side, bad neighborhoods not far from good neighborhoods. Since heaven and earth cannot be separated, we know that the experiences of all humans after the loss of the physical body continues in this same place following the same laws of reality in which we all live.
Christianity, in splitting apart heaven from earth as two totally separate and far apart "places," has also created in their imaginative literature, another "place" which they have named "Hell." We know, of course, that Hell is the Germanic corpse goddess, unknown by any writers of Scripture.
We have no concern for "Christian doctrine," knowing the extent to which tares are merged with wheat, as Jesus said. We want to know what God actually says. Yet inside our present knowledge of God and of reality, we can speculate, just a bit, as to what the New Testament word, Hades, might actually mean.
Lesson 20.1 Biblical Hades explores the ten times that hades appears in our New Testament and determines that no real definition can be found in those few references, especially NOT the dark fantasia of Christian thinking. At the same time, the Hebrew concept of Sheol is discussed, a term that is also far from the Christian pagan Hell.
Lesson 20.2 Justice and Restitution, rather than attempting to define something God does not define, explores the nature of God's justice and God's requirement for the restitution of all things.
Lesson 20.3 Judgment to Life brings in the clear New Testament assertion that God's elect will judge all things. The lesson then explores the nature and meaning of judgment inside our knowledge of God.