Afterlife | Conditional Immortality, Soul Sleep and Annihilationism
The Conditional Immortality Association of New Zealand
The text of an address given at the Conditional Immortality Conference, June 21 1997
Part One: The Human Condition
“Reclaiming the Gospel”. I hope you groaned a bit when you saw the title of this address. I hope you felt some resistance to it. There are far too many people these days claiming to have rediscovered the “real” Gospel or the “full” Gospel. [Read more...]
If God endlessly torments the unsaved this raises many problems:-
1. The tormenting by God is worse then the German holocaust whose victims’ torments had an ending.
2. Many reject Christ because they cannot believe in a God who asks us to be kind, but is himself worse than Hitler.
Matthew’s account of the death of Jesus is peculiar in that it alone records the opening of the graves at Christ’s death and the raising of many sleeping saints along with the Lord at his resurrection ( Matthew 27:50-54).
The raising of certain dead ones is given as one of three happenings that follow the death of Jesus on the cross as Calvary. It comes after the tearing of the temple veil and before the Centurion’s awe-inspired confession of Jesus as the “Son of God”. Inasmuch as these events are narrated immediately following Christ’s death, Matthew very likely intends them to be seen as results of his atoning death.
The tearing of the temple curtain which walled off the Holy of Holies, where God’s presence was manifested signifies that by his death Christ made possible for all direct access into the very presence of God-apart from all ritual and regulation of Old Testament priesthood and sacrifices.
The opening of the graves at Christ’s death reminds us that only by Christ dying on the cross in our place was sin, “the sting of death”, defeated (1 Cor 15:56) The rising of the dead at his resurrection signifies that Christ alone by his resurrection became “the first fruits of them that sleep” (1Cor 15:20) in that his resurrection guarantees the eventual resurrection of all.