Death in the Bible does not equal separation – summary
DEATH ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURES SERIES – TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Intro and purpose. What death is not equal to.
- Death is not separation from God
Death is not separation from the life of God - There’s no such thing as “spiritual death”
- Death is not separation of soul from the body
- Death is not separation – summary
- Physical death is not annihilation
- Divine bio-engineering. How Jesus Christ solves the problem of death of fleshly bodies
- Death according to the Bible: lack of life, loss of life
SEPARATION IS THE OPPOSITE OF UNION
To arrive at the meaning vested by the author into a word, we could examine the antonym pairing that a given word participates in, to be able to more precisely see what exact semantics makes the antonym pairs stand opposite of each other.
In dozens of Scripture passages, “death” is juxtaposed with “life”, and thus has to have a meaning opposite of life. In a quick search I brought up over 40 scriptures where “death” is directly presented as a word meaning the opposite of “life”, and that’s not counting word derivatives.
Now, if death was equivalent to “separation”, then it would be juxtaposed with the verb “join” or “unite” in all these passages, but it isn’t. If it were, then “life” would have to mean “union”, and we would be in an even bigger mess linguistically, since by now we would have redefined 2 important words to mean something that they weren’t intended to. Then every time we would discuss scripture bring up the subject of life, we would have to preface it (as we often times do with death): “In the Bible, “life” really means “union””. Well, union requires an indirect object denoting what the subject is being united with, whereas “life” doesn’t … And we are now in the same predicament as we were when we redefined the word “death”.
(more…)