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Daniel 12:2
Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.

It would be reasonable to infer from this that:

Person A receives eternal life and person B doesn’t
Person B receives shame and Person A doesn’t.
Person B receives everlasting contempt and person A doesn’t.

This has something in common with Romans 6:23 and John 3:16. IT is a binary statement about two fates. One receives immortality and the other does not. When I listen to the bible for 2-3 hours a day for months on end, I am shocked at how often this occurs, especially in the new testament, all over scripture.

Once I gave CI serious consideration, a LOT of scripture that simply didn’t make sense suddenly came into clear focus.

The thing is, the bible is translated in English for me. That means it uses English words with actual dictionary meanings. I always had a hard time with some English words having “special meaning” for the bible only.

And one of the most interesting studies is to look at everywhere in the bible where it is translated “everlasting”, “eternal”, “forever and ever”, etc. You’ll find that in many cases it was actually describing a VERY finite event. It’s kinda like saying “Joe was a baseball player ‘forever’”, when what you mean is that the only career Joe had was being a baseball player.

I think a lot of the bible is “dog whistle” for believers, but a lot of people with an agenda have their own “dog whistles” in their interpretation. An example of the latter is when the word “death” doesn’t really mean death. And the former I believe is supported by all the scripture that discusses God confusing the wisdom of the wise, spreading His word through “fools” etc. I think of it as that old Yogi Berra comment about a certain restaurant: “Nobody goes there any more because it’s too crowded.” The “wise” person says, what a dolt. The statement is an oxymoron.” Yet you and I know exactly what Yogi was saying, because we are attuned to the frequency of the dog whistle.

Same thing with the ECT vs CI debate. I used to be ECT, but the more I read the bible, the less it meshed with the personality of the God of the bible. And when I read the very first article about CI (the one on FR in 2009 that I posted here), it caused me to further study the issue. I became an adherent to CI.

And again, what is fascinating is that when I accepted CI, suddenly everything meshed with the personality of the God of both old and new testaments.

But I’ve also become quite hostile to ECT. I believe it was created by “possibly” well meaning people a long time ago to “scare” people to God. It may be why the KJV discusses “fear” regarding our attitude toward God when a better translation would be “respect Him for who he is”. Kinda like “fearing” nuclear power or “fearing” the momentum of a fast moving truck. You don’t fear it. You respect it as quite powerful and able to do great good or great evil.

And that is another one. Evil. The KJV discussed God causing evil. But the word translated “evil” really means “bad thing happening”. So when God destroyed the two cities, He did a great “evil”, though what He did was not evil at all.

And this is also important: If you find yourself constantly returning to Revelation to get your doctrine, it may not be all that sound. It is a book steeped in symbolism. It is interesting that people think the second death is torture forever in a lake of fire, but they don’t argue that the seven churches are literal lamp stands.

And Jesus never mentioned Hell. He mentioned the garbage dump in the valley of Gehenna as an allegory of the lost essentially being “thrown away”. And his comments about the worm not dying and the fire not being quenched was to answer the idea that a lot of stuff in that dump is not totally destroyed because it’s hard to completely burn a body to where there is nothing left but ashes. Likewise the worms. But he makes it clear that in THIS case, they will do their work.

And about an unquenchable fire: It is not a fire that never goes out. Rather, it is a fire that you cannot put out. Think of a house on fire and there is no water nearby. You could call the fire unquenchable, because you can’t put it out. However, when it runs out of fuel, it will have done its job and go out on its own. Yeah, an unquenchable fire can still go out.

The biggest problem I have with ECT is that it is CRITICAL to “anti-Christians” that it is what the bible teaches. It is their biggest argument against the Christianity of a “loving” God. When you remove it, they fight bitterly so support ECT, lest they no longer can complain, effectively, of a “mean” God.

And some say, “but if death is all we are saved from, where is the incentive in following Christ.” Two things:
1. Is the message of Christ, “You’d better follow me or else!”. i.e. fear of what He’s gonna do to you. Or is the message of Christ called the good news because it is: The fate of man is the fate of Adam for eating of the fruit. Death. But I offer a better way. Follow me and receive immortality in my eternal kingdom!”

The latter is, in my opinion, the message of the whole bible.