The Cosmos
There are some words we use when the only person who really knows what they mean by the word is the person using it. The problem is multiplied when we are thinking of words in another language. This chapter will be about the Greek word kosmos.
It is used a great many times in the New Testament, and the common translation is 'world'. It is the basis for the English words cosmic and cosmology, and the latter can be understood to mean 'the study of the universe in an attempt to understand its origins and how it works'.
So already we have a translation problem, and to remedy this, hopefully, I am going to use kosmos in every passage I quote, leaving the reader to think through what the best word in English might be. Or even to realise that possibly there is no exact English word that might do.
Here are just a few samples, using the RSV for all the other words:
What does it profit a man if he gains the whole kosmos and loses or forfeits himself? (Luke 9:25)
Jesus said to them, "You are from below, I am from above; you are of this kosmos, I am not of this kosmos." (John 8:23)
Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this kosmos to the Father. (John 13:1)
Jesus answered, [Pilate had asked, "Are you the King of the Jews?"] "My kingship is not of this kosmos; if my kingship were of this kosmos my servants would fight ... but my kingship is not from the kosmos." (John 18:36)
Now we have received not the spirit of the kosmos, but the Spirit which is from God. (1 Cor. 2:12)
There are also numerous uses of the phrases 'creation of the kosmos' and 'foundation of the kosmos', which echo more strongly the modern term cosmology.
Just these few instances of kosmos (out of many more that occur in the New Testament) should begin to make us realise that we are being presented with not only the 'whole perceivable universe' but also a category that is beyond this. Using the Greek preposition meta in its usual sense of 'beyond', it looks as though there is a metakosmos as well. Something, or somewhere, beyond the universe we can sense or measure.
Is the kosmos a good or a bad place? First we need to note that God made it and loves it.
'For God so loved the kosmos that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent his son into the kosmos, not to condemn the kosmos, but that the kosmos might be saved through him.' (John 3:16– 17)
God made the kosmos. God loves the kosmos. But there is something drastically wrong, and the kosmos needs saving.
What ails the kosmos? Some things Jesus said helps us understand. To his followers he said:
'The kosmos cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil.' (John 7:7) 'Now is the judgment of this kosmos, now shall the ruler of this kosmos be cast out.'
(John 12:31) '[The Holy Spirit] ... will convince the kosmos ... of judgment, because the ruler of this kosmos is judged.' (John 16:8-11) 'In the kosmos you have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the kosmos.' (John 16:33) As many as three times in John's Gospel the enemy is described as 'the ruler of this kosmos'. (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11)
These sayings, and there are many more similar ones, indicate the nature and extent of the problem. We live in enemy occupied territory. There is a battle being fought in the kosmos between good and evil, and although appearances may cause us to feel overwhelmed we should be reassured that the ultimate victory will be God's.
I have said little so far about the metakosmos, a term I introduced as a possible way to refer to what is beyond the kosmos, and so we move to thinking about it next, and it will surprise no one that we usually call this 'heaven'.
The trouble is that the word 'heaven' is used in three different ways in the Bible, as we have already noted. It means either where birds fly (e.g. Jer. 4:25), where the stars are (e.g. Deut. 28:62), or – most often – where God is.
But here saying where God is can lead to confusion. It tends to suppose that heaven is a place, somewhere in the universe, which might in theory be located by an astronaut. In fact the first (Russian) astronaut, Yury Gagarin, said that because he found no sign of God in his orbital journey in the heavens, this proved that there was no God.
We need to understand that the 'the third heaven', somewhere beyond the sky, beyond cosmic space, is truly beyond. When Paul experienced 'the third heaven' he had no idea whether it was in the body or out of the body.
We can only understand this 'heaven' if we realise it is a different mode of existence, beyond the cosmic physical reality we live and breath every day. It can overlap our daily experience, though it is very overwhelming when it does. If you are visited by an angel, who dwells normally in this metakosmos, all the precedents indicate you will be scared out of your skin.
The Bible tells us that God's plan is to redeem this spoiled outcome of His creative activity with a remade, a new Heaven and Earth. Paul tells us that we are eventually, after death for most of us, to be transformed in so dramatic a way that our current experience of being human has no words to express the change.
As already noted, it is a gross and misleading parody of Christianity to say that it is the answer to the question: 'how to get to heaven'. There is no physical journey to somewhere else, no ticket issued to those who earn it, or denied to those who fail to earn it. 'Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable ... we will all be changed.' (1 Cor. 15:50-51)
Heaven is a different mode of being, and we will have to be transformed. And what is more, there is to be a 'new heaven and a new earth' because the transformation we need will be applied to everything there is. (Matt. 24:35)
The New Testament often joins together Heaven with Earth, as essentially the sum of all things. The kosmos and the metakosmos are linked, and we may understand also overlap, as we read these short quotations of the words of Jesus. I have, for brevity's sake, chosen only those from Matthew's gospel, though there are parallels in the other gospels. The list that follows is only a selection of those verses that might be included.
For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. (Matthew 5:18)
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10)
Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (Matthew 18:18)
Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. (Matthew 18:19)
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. (Matthew 24:35)
And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. (Matthew 28:18)
The whole purpose of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection can be summed up in the words He taught His followers to pray for: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." This is the agenda for His followers throughout history, to do what can be done to ensure that God's will be done in the here and now of this kosmos, as it surely is done in God's eternal presence in the metakosmos.
However, there is a problem, and it looks as though God's entire creation, the kosmos and the metakosmos, is so radically flawed in its present condition that "Heaven and Earth will pass away."
This leads us to one of the New Testament letters:
But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist have been stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. (2 Peter 3:7)
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up. (2 Peter 3:10)
But according to his promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. (2 Peter 3:13)
The ultimate victory we are promised will be a New Heaven and a New Earth.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. (Revelation 21:1)
These quotations present us with a huge theme, as we are forced to consider where we are in the middle (or near the end) of God's plan for the redemption and remaking of His whole creative purposes.
The phrase 'Under the Earth' comes in this passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians:
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, (Phil 2:10)
Archeological evidence shows that as far back as we can trace indications of belief, the human race has presumed some form of survival beyond physical death. The burial customs of ancient peoples show remarkable attempts to equip the dead person with food, weapons, and suchlike, for their future life. For the Greeks there was an underworld ruled by Hades, and the name Hades came to be the name of the place as well as its ruler. Like other first- century Jews literate in Greek, early Christians used the Greek word Hades to translate the Hebrew word Sheol.
Thus we find several uses of Hades in the book of Revelation, of which the following is very clear:
The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. (Revelation 20:13)
There is even a reference to Jesus having suffered death and then preaching to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19)
Thus, the New Testament answer to the question 'What happens when we die?' is that we have a conscious and immaterial existence in a place of waiting, and at the end of the age, in God's time, we will eventually be resurrected for judgment.
Whole books have been written on this topic alone, and I have no desire to try to expound the various questions that this very simple answer to the basic question gives rise to. Paul's teaching about the resurrection emphasises that we do not have enough experience to find the right words for what our ultimate resurrected bodies will be like (1 Corinthians 15) but of one thing he was sure. The intermediate waiting in Sheol would be uplifting:
If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labour for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. (Philippians 1:22-24)
Having thought about the Greek word Hades and the Hebrew word Sheol, we need to bring in another Hebrew word Gehenna as well, and a further Greek one, Tartarus.
When Jesus was teaching the people in the Judea of his day, he would almost always have been using the contemporary Hebrew dialect of Aramaic. Very occasionally the gospel writers actually include these Aramaic words. And, as I noted in the last chapter, when translating Aramaic into the Greek which the gospel writers wrote in (since this was the language known very widely across the Mediterranean countries), Sheol was translated into Hades.
Hades was understood as indicating a place, or state, of conscious existence following physical death of the body. The problem comes in translating Hades into Hell, which is what the best known English translation, the King James Version (also known as the Authorised Version) did when it was published in 1611. And to compound the problem, these translators (they were a team) also translate Gehenna as Hell, and also the one use of the other Greek word, Tartarus. The result is that any reader of the KJV (AV) is led to think that the same word for Hell was used in the original books of the New Testament, when in fact there were four. Each of these four words would have had a distinctly different meaning for the original readers of the New Testament books.
I have included all this to make one very simple point. Every generation needs to have an up-to- date translation, since language itself is not static, and as time goes by historians begin to learn more and more about what the original users of any word, two or three thousand years ago, actually meant by it. We must develop our own understanding of deeply important theological concepts on the best possible evidence. In my own lifetime I have used the AV, the RSV (Revised Standard Version), the NIV (New International Version) and am now finding one of the latest, The New Testament for Everyone, by Tom Wright, particularly refreshing. He gets the four key words quite right, by the way.