Month: March 2018

The Pope is right…sort of.

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“Pope Declares No Hell”

Evidently in an interview with some Italian atheist, Pope Francis declared that there is no hell and that condemned souls disappear.   In response to a question about ‘where are bad souls punished?’, the head of the Roman Catholic Church said, “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.” 

You can find the article about the interview here.

Not surprisingly, this has caused quite an uproar in the RCC.  I am not here to defend Catholic Church doctrine at all.   I am not Catholic.  However, the pope is partially right.  He is wrong that there is no hell, and that unbelievers are not punished.  He is right that eventually they will just disappear and not exist. 

The Bible clearly teaches that there is a hell.  So the pope would be denying Scripture to say it doesn’t exist.  What the pope does seem to believe, or at least align with, and what most of Christendom does not, is that the condemned souls will be destroyed at the Great White Throne judgment (Revelations 20:11-15).  At that judgment, after the end of the Millennial Kingdom, they will be cast into the Lake of Fire (which is not hell) and destroyed.  They WILL just disappear and not exist.  They will not spend eternity in hell, in other words.  Hell is just a waiting place, and it is terrible suffering while they wait. 

And even if the pope does not believe there is a hell, and that condemned souls just disappear, the fact that they are not with God for eternity IS punishment.  So he is wrong that they are not punished.

Hell does exist, but there is no ETERNAL hell.  I won’t go into all of the Scriptural basis for this doctrine in this post.  Read my earlier post “Eternal Torment or Eternal Destruction”.

Dan Baker

The One Who Endures to the End

enduring to the end

“But the one who endures to the end, he shall be saved.” – Matthew 24:13

This post is a companion piece to the previous post “Two Gospels“.

After finishing the previous post, I looked a little longer at Matthew 24 and realized it is important to dig further into the context to better understand what Jesus is talking about with regard to “this gospel of the kingdom” in verse 14.

What I have concluded is that there are actually 3 Gospels in the New Testament.  There are two ‘gospels of the kingdom’ and one ‘gospel of redemption’.  As always, context is the key. 

Jesus said that whoever endures to the end shall be saved.  He was not talking about the salvation of the soul.  He was referring to the survival of the Jewish elect during the tribulation!  Right before Jesus said what He did about enduring to the end, He said that the righteous will be delivered up and be killed and that the love of most will grow cold.  What Jesus is saying is that only a few will survive and He tells them (Jews) what and how to do it in the next passages. 

He tells them to flee into the surrounding hills of Judea when the antichrist declares himself to be God in the holy place (Matt. 24:15; 2 Thess. 2:4; Daniel 9:27).  Then He tells them to stay put when they hear that the Christ has come (24:22-26) because it will be gloriously obvious when He does come to earth (Matt. 24:27-30). 

“This gospel” is for the elect Jews, but it’s also for every person who gets saved after the rapture, throughout the earth, that is enduring the sufferings of the tribulation.  The point is verse 13 IS the ‘good news’ that Jesus is referring to in verse 14.  But it is not about the salvation of the soul, it is about surviving and entering the Millennial Kingdom that Jesus is going to reign over.  The Greek word for ‘endures’ (hupomeno) literally means  ‘to survive’.

The first gospel of the kingdom preached before Jesus was killed was simply that the Messiah had come and therefore repent and turn your heart to God because Jesus was about to reclaim earth and establish His kingdom.  (I believe that message was a diversion – read “The Covert Mission of Jesus Christ“)  The second gospel of the kingdom in Matthew 24 is essentially for those who become believers in the tribulation.  The good news is that if you survive, you will live in the righteous kingdom on earth and never die.  This is the context of Matthew 24, particularly verses 9-14.  When Jesus says ‘this’ message of good news in verse 14, He is referring to the message of verse 13. 

Dan Baker