A Material Heaven

The first is the cloud. In this version, heaven is thin and vague. There is nothing solid to stand on and nothing real to do. People float somewhere, harps are playing, and the whole thing sounds like an endless Sunday afternoon with no supper. I have talked to grown men who told me, a little sheepishly, that they were not looking forward to it. They believed it was real. They just could not make themselves want it.

The second is the subdivision. In this version, heaven is exactly what we already have, just nicer. Same meals, same routines, same biology. Nothing changes. Everything just keeps going.

Finis Dake went after the first picture hard, and I think he was right to do it. The Bible never promises a cloud. But then he built the second picture, carefully and in great detail. He drew up the blueprints, printed the measurements, and taught them to his students. Here is how he opens the subject in God's Plan for Man, the fifty-two-lesson course that carried his teaching into print.¹

Read that first line again. He does not say heaven is like a planet. He says it is one. And the lesson that follows fills it in. Heaven has a location in the northern sky. It has cities, rivers, furniture, and food. People eat there.³

Before I go any further, I want to say something plainly. Dake's opening move here is a good one. The cloud deserved to be torn down. The Bible does not promise us vapor. It promises a body raised from the dead, a table set for a feast, and a new creation with real ground under it. When Dake insists that heaven is solid, he is right. The church needs to say so without flinching.

My argument is not with that. My argument is with what he built on top of it. In his system, the age to come is not this world transformed into something greater. It is this world continued without end. Natural people go on living natural lives on the earth forever. They farm. They marry. They have children. And those children have children. The line never stops. This is not a stray comment in the margins. He argues it for pages, numbers his proofs, and takes on objections.

Three things belong in this chapter: Dake's material heaven, his everlasting natural order, and the bodies people carry through it. God's own dwelling place is a question for Chapter 9. God's body belongs to Chapter 8. The world before Adam is handled in Chapter 15.

Why It Matters

I have stood at enough of them, and so have you, or you will. In those moments nobody wants a lecture. What they want to know is whether the thing we say about the person they just lost is actually true. Whatever your doctrine of the future really is, that is what comes out when the casket closes. It either holds weight or it does not.

So the shape of our hope matters. If the age to come is only this age with better weather, then the strongest word we can offer the grieving is more. More years, more meals, more children. That is not nothing. But it is not what Paul reached for when he ran out of words. Dake himself quotes the verse where Paul runs out of words, and it sits on the very same pages where he flattens the future into a longer version of the present.⁴

There is a second reason this chapter matters. It shows a method doing what it always does. Chapter 4 laid out Dake's rule of reading: take everything as literally as you possibly can. Chapter 15 watched that rule build an entire civilization before Genesis 1:2. This chapter watches it build one after Revelation 22. Same tool. Same result. A detailed history the Bible never gave, held with the certainty of Scripture.

And there is a third reason, the one that weighs on me the most. Dake's eternity is warm. It is busy, crowded, full of ordinary human pleasure. Nobody is bored. The trouble is quieter than you might expect. In his picture, the center slowly drifts. The furniture gets described at length. God becomes the greatest resident of the planet, living in a capitol building on the tallest peak. The amenities fill up page after page. And the Lamb gets a little smaller.

Dake in His Own Words

1. A Real Planet, and Where to Find It

Lesson Forty-Two of God's Plan for Man gives eight numbered points about heaven. The first two set the frame. Heaven is a created place. Heaven is a planet. The third point sorts the three heavens mentioned in the Bible, and the sixth gives an address. Heaven, Dake says, is in the northern part of the universe. He gets the idea from Isaiah 14 and Psalm 75.⁵

Then comes the inventory. Point eight lists what is found on this planet, one Bible verse at a time: cities, mansions, trees, rivers, fountains, food, animals, furniture, altars, tongs, coals, incense, musical instruments, clothes, books, crowns, palm leaves, trumpets, hail, mountains, keys, chains, measuring sticks, doors and doorposts, walls, gates, streets, and fruit. Then he gives the rule that built the list.

That sentence is the engine of the whole lesson, so let me restate it plainly. Dake reads Romans 1:20 as a transfer rule. Earthly things show us heavenly things. So anything good on earth can be assumed to exist in heaven. We have no right to leave anything off the list. The burden of proof flips. Now you have to explain why something is not there.

He makes the same argument in his lessons on the New Jerusalem. Some readers, he says, take the mansions of John 14 as a picture of the saints themselves. He has no patience for that reading.

And the detail keeps building. The city is a range of mountain peaks, not a cube. The capitol building sits on the highest peak. The throne room floor is like a sea of glass of unknown size. Somewhere inside the city is a hall big enough for the marriage supper of the Lamb, and for other banquets throughout eternity.⁸ Years earlier, in Revelation Expounded, Dake had asked why we cannot think of the mansions as real material buildings in heaven that will come down to the new earth.⁹

2. The Table in Heaven

Notice what he is claiming. Two men are alive in heaven right now, in unglorified bodies. They are eating and drinking. They have been doing it for thousands of years, and Dake supplies the math.¹¹ Heaven is not just furnished. It is catered.

He goes further. He extends the table to God Himself. In a supplement lesson he writes that "God eats," citing Genesis 18 and Exodus 24. Elsewhere he says that Abraham "made a dinner for God and two angels and they actually ate food."¹² I will leave that claim where it sits, because the divine body belongs to Chapter 8. The point here is narrower. In this system, eating is not a picture of fellowship. It is a meal.

3. The Everlasting Natural Order

Now we come to the heart of it. I want to be honest: this is the material that surprised me the most when I first read these lessons carefully.

Dake teaches that the redeemed fall into two permanent classes. The first is the glorified saints. They were raised before the Millennium and they rule as kings and priests forever. The second class is the natural people. They pass through the Millennium into the new earth without ever being glorified. They keep living ordinary human lives on the earth without end. He opens the argument this way.

Go back and read that second one again. Marry and have children forever. That is not a loose word. It is the whole argument. He grounds it in a picture of the world Adam lost and then projects that picture forward into eternity.

The logic is tidy. I want to state it at full strength before answering it, because it deserves that. God's original plan for man was natural life on a good earth, going on forever. Sin interrupted the plan. But God cannot be defeated. So the plan picks up exactly where it left off. The interruption even produced a bonus: a class of glorified rulers who would not have existed if Adam had never fallen.¹⁶

Dake knows this raises a practical problem, and to his credit he brings it up himself rather than waiting for somebody else to ask.

His answer comes in three parts. The first is modest and fair. The mechanics of God's plan belong to God, and we are asked to believe what is written. I have no quarrel with that sentence. The second part suggests that redeemed humanity will hold dominion over other planets, so God can settle the overflow on other worlds. The third part reaches for a pencil.

He gets the figure by subtracting water from the earth's surface, setting aside two and a quarter million square miles for the New Jerusalem, and dividing what is left. He offers Japanese smallholdings as a working model. Then he adds that the birth rate will slow anyway, because Genesis 3:16 says the curse was what multiplied conception in the first place.¹⁹

I am not quoting this to embarrass a man. He was doing what his method told him to do, and he did it carefully. I quote it because it shows what the doctrine costs. A teaching that needs a housing estimate for eternity has already decided what kind of eternity it is describing. The question was never whether God could sustain such a world. Of course He could. The question is whether God told us He would. Once you need a table of square miles, you have walked past the last verse and kept going.

Dake knows how far this teaching stands from what most Christians believe, and he says so. In his lesson on the renovation of the earth he lists the ideas he considers false. The list is worth reading slowly, because a great deal of ordinary Christian hope is on it.

Take the two clauses in the middle. The belief that all the redeemed will be glorified is called unscriptural. The belief that we will spend eternity in heaven is called unscriptural. I am not overreading him. He is telling his students, plainly, that the ordinary hope of the ordinary believer is wrong. And he is offering them a replacement.

He teaches the same thing elsewhere. In a supplement he asks his students whether they know "that both Jews and Gentiles will live on the Earth forever." He answers that God created all people to live forever on the earth, and that the final restoration puts them back there as natural subjects under the resurrected saints.²¹

4. The Bodies That Never Change

This brings us to the bodies. If natural people live forever without dying, something has to keep them alive. Dake's answer is the tree of life. They eat from it and go on.²² The glorified saints do not need it. Their bodies are already deathless. The natural people need it because theirs are not.

A careful reader will already be reaching for 1 Corinthians 15:50. Dake got there first. In a supplement he takes the objection head-on.

His reading turns on a split between entering and inheriting. Flesh and blood cannot inherit, he grants. But Enoch and Elijah walked in with the bodies they had. So the barrier, whatever Paul meant by it, is not about what you are made of.

One more piece completes the picture. This one comes from an earlier lesson, where Dake says what a spiritual body actually is.

There is the definition. In his usage, "spiritual" names a material. A spiritual body is a body built out of spirit-stuff. Hold on to that sentence. It is doing more work than any other single line in this chapter.

Before I answer any of this, let me gather what Dake has actually claimed, so the answer lands on the right target and not on something I wish he had said.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

1. What I Gladly Grant

I want to start with what Dake and I agree on. And I want to be generous about it, because the agreement is real and the church has often been careless on exactly this point.

The resurrection is bodily. Jesus rose in the body He died in, and He went out of His way to prove it.

Then He asked for something to eat and ate it right in front of them. Dake is right that this matters. A risen Lord who picks up a piece of broiled fish and eats it is not a ghost. Any teaching that leaves us with a ghost has lost the gospel.

The new creation is real, too. The Bible does not end with souls floating away from earth. It ends with a new heaven and a new earth, and God coming down to live among us.

And the feast is a feast. The marriage supper of the Lamb is not a nice way of saying a warm feeling. So when Dake tears down the harp-and-cloud picture, I am with him. The historic creeds are with him too. The Apostles' Creed does not confess the survival of the soul. It confesses the resurrection of the body.²⁷

2. Sown Natural, Raised Spiritual

Two things happen in those lines at the same time, and you have to hold them both. There is continuity. The same body that goes down is the body that comes up. And there is change. What goes into the ground is not what comes out. Corruption becomes incorruption. Weakness becomes power.

Dake agrees with the first half. He uses Paul's own seed picture, the grain of wheat, to prove the resurrection is real.²⁸ But a seed illustration is not really about sameness. Ask any farmer. The point of a seed is that what comes up looks nothing like what went in.

Now the word itself. Paul's term for the raised body is pneumatikos, "spiritual." It sounds like a word about substance. It is not. Paul uses the same word a few chapters earlier for a person: "he who is spiritual judges all things" (1 Corinthians 2:15). Nobody thinks that man is made of spirit. He is a man governed by the Spirit.²⁹

So pneumatikos tells you who runs the body, not what it is built from. The natural body is run by appetites and the clock. The raised body is run by the Holy Spirit, forever. It is more solid than what we have now, not less. It is not a body made of some unknown substance. It is your body, made deathless.

Look at the second half of the verse. Paul explains his own phrase. "Flesh and blood" is paired with "corruption." It is a Jewish way of saying frail, mortal humanity as it is right now.³⁰ Paul is not banning matter from the kingdom. He is saying that mortality cannot be carried over unchanged. And that is exactly the claim Dake's eternal natural order requires.

Paul is not talking about some special minority, either. He says so in the next breath.

Not some of us. All. Whatever else that passage settles, it settles this much: the change Paul promises is not the privilege of a ruling class. It is the common inheritance of everyone who belongs to Christ. It is exactly the change Dake's natural people are told they will never receive.³¹

3. Neither Marry Nor Are Given in Marriage

Now comes the sentence we have to set on the table. The Sadducees came to Jesus with a trick question about the age to come, built around marriage and children. He answered it in one line.

Luke's version adds the reason. And the reason is the whole argument of this chapter.

Read the logic backward. Why does marrying stop? Because dying stops.³² In this age we marry and bear children partly because the race has to be renewed against death. Take death away and you take the engine away. Jesus is not saying the age to come has fewer weddings. He is saying it has a different structure.

Dake's system needs that engine running. It needs marriage forever, birth forever, generations forever. And the Lord's answer to the Sadducees closes the door on all of it as plainly as anything He ever said about the resurrection life.

Let me be fair. Dake could reply that Jesus is only talking about the glorified class, and that the natural people are a separate group the Sadducees never asked about. That is the shape his system would need. But look at the cost. The reply asks us to believe that when Jesus was asked what happens to people in the resurrection, He described only a small ruling minority and said nothing about the great majority of the redeemed. Meanwhile Paul, writing the Bible's longest chapter on the resurrection body, never mentions a permanent unglorified class either. Neither does John, whose vision of the new earth Dake relies on most. A doctrine this large should leave fingerprints somewhere in the New Testament. It does not.

4. Reading Revelation the Way Revelation Asks

Most of Dake's furniture list comes from Revelation. So we need to ask how Revelation wants to be read. The book answers that question for itself, again and again.

In chapter 1 John sees seven stars and seven lampstands. The Lord explains them on the spot: the stars are the angels of the churches, the lampstands are the churches. In chapter 5 John sees this.

Here is the test case for a strict literal rule. And it is not a cheap trick, because the Lamb stands at the very center of the throne room. If we must take the furniture literally, we have to take the Lamb literally too. Nobody does. Everyone understands that a seven-horned, seven-eyed Lamb is a sign. The verse tells us what the sign means.³³

So the question was never "literal or spiritual." The question is what kind of writing Revelation is. And the book itself keeps answering that. Chapter 4 of this book works through Dake's reading rule in full. Here I only need the narrow point. A method that refuses to let Revelation speak in its own voice will always bring back an inventory instead of a vision.

None of this makes the new creation less real. Real does not mean measured. My grandfather's love for my grandmother was real, and it had no dimensions in feet. When John reaches for gold and pearl and a river of crystal, he is not handing us a surveyor's report. He is telling us the reality is bigger than any words he has.

5. The Center Is a Person

Ask what makes heaven heaven. Dake's lessons answer with contents. Ask John, and he answers with a Person.

Two of the grandest fixtures are missing on purpose. No temple. No sun. Not because the city is poor, but because God is there. His presence makes the fixtures beside the point. That is the opposite of an inventory. It is a subtraction that turns out to be the greatest gift of all.

John says the same thing in a letter. This is the verse I would pin to the front of this whole chapter if I could.

"It has not yet been revealed what we shall be." John had seen more of the age to come than any living man, and that is still his sentence. He is not being vague to guard a mystery. He is being honest about a glory that has not arrived yet. And the one thing he does say is not about the place. It is about a change in us, caused by seeing a face.

Dake's method cannot write that sentence. His reading rule requires him to fill the silence. So the future gets described in detail. The detail is all furnishings. And the promise ends up smaller than the one John could not describe.

Answering the Defenses

The second defense comes from the other direction. It accuses me of the very error I have been pointing out.

"The new earth is physical. You are re-spiritualizing what Dake rescued." I understand why someone would say that, and it deserves a straight answer. I am not confessing escape. I am confessing new creation. Romans 8 says the creation itself will be set free from the bondage of corruption.³⁴ That is more physical, not less. What I deny is that the coming world is this world stretched out without change. Transformed matter is still matter. A raised body is still a body. What Paul describes is not thinner than what we have now. It is more.

"You are tearing apart the things that comfort grieving people. Tables shared again. Children raised. Families together." I hear that, and I want to be careful with it. Reunion is promised, and promised in plain words: we will be caught up together, and so shall we always be with the Lord.³⁵ That is not the part I am questioning. What I am questioning is whether the comfort gets stronger when we fill in more detail than God gave us.

I do not think it does. Detail we invent is detail that can be taken away. The comfort that actually holds at a graveside is not the floor plan. It is the promise that the person you love will be raised, that you will know them, and that you will both see His face. That promise does not need square footage.

"You are objecting to ordinary premillennialism. Everyone who holds a literal Millennium believes natural people live on the earth during it, under glorified rulers. Dake is just carrying that picture forward. Where is the error?"

That is a fair question, and part of my answer is a concession. A literal Millennium with natural populations living under Christ is a respectable evangelical position. Careful people hold it. This book does not call it heresy.³⁶ If Dake had stopped at the thousand years, I would not have a chapter to write.

But he does not stop there. In the usual premillennial picture, the Millennium is a stage. The stage ends. The last enemy is destroyed, the final judgment comes, and the age that follows is new in kind. In Dake's picture, the Millennium does not really end. The natural order inside it rolls straight on into eternity. The same farming, marrying, and childbearing continue with only death removed. What was a temporary arrangement becomes a permanent one. And once it is permanent, Matthew 22:30 is no longer a verse about a passing stage. It is a verse about the resurrection age itself. It stands squarely in the road.

I should also say plainly what I am not doing. I am not taking a shot at Pentecostal hope. The churches where the Dake Bible is loved sing about heaven better than most, and they are right to sing. My quarrel is not with the singing. It is with a lesson plan that answers questions the Bible left open, then teaches the answers as doctrine.

Conclusion and the Words

Here is what the pages showed us. Heaven in this system is a planet with an address. It has cities, furniture, and meals. The eternal state is this present order continued rather than changed, with most of the redeemed living natural lives on the earth forever, marrying and bearing children without end, and never glorified at all. The ordinary Christian hope of being changed is filed under unscriptural ideas.

Every one of those claims is quoted above with a page number. None of it is my summary of his position. It is his.

Two errors about heaven, then. One on each side. The cloud takes away the body. The subdivision takes away the glory. Dake saw the first error and named it. The church owes him a nod for that. He did not see the second one, because his method could not. A rule that fills every silence will always produce a crowded eternity and a smaller God.

Keep the solid things. Keep the risen body, the real earth, the real supper. Then let the Bible be quiet where it is quiet. "It has not yet been revealed what we shall be" is not a gap in our information. It is a mercy. God has not told us the details because the details are not the point. He told us the one thing that is.

We shall see Him as He is. And when we do, we shall be like Him. Everything else in that country is furniture.

Notes

↑ 1. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing), a course of fifty-two lessons with supplements, originally issued in twenty-six books of two lessons each. All page numbers in this chapter follow the printed page markers embedded in the resident digitized text. Hereafter cited as GPFM. The Study Bible's own notes on heaven, the New Jerusalem, and resurrection bodies are documented from page photographs elsewhere in this project; see Appendix F for the full source list.

↑ 2. GPFM, Lesson Forty-Two, 834, section III ("The Truth About Heaven"), point 2.

↑ 3. The reference printed as "Gen. 1:1; 11:8-16" in point 2 is a compressed citation; the "better country" phrase belongs to Hebrews 11:16, and the surrounding argument is drawn from Hebrews 11:8–16. Dake's habit of stacking references without repeating the book name accounts for the apparent slip.

↑ 4. GPFM, 996, section VI, quoting 1 Corinthians 2:9 in the KJV: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things and conditions that will be in the new eternal perfect state." The sentence sits two pages after the acreage calculation discussed below.

↑ 5. GPFM, 834, points 1, 3, and 6. Point 6 reads: "THE LOCATION OF THE PLANET HEAVEN IS IN THE NORTHERN PART OF THE UNIVERSE (Isa. 14:12-14)," supported from Psalm 75:6–7 on the ground that promotion comes from neither south, east, nor west. The located-dwelling question proper, and its bearing on divine omnipresence, belongs to Chapter 9.

↑ 6. GPFM, Lesson Forty-Two, 835, point 8. The catalogue summarized in the body appears in full on that page, each item with its supporting reference. Dake's inference from Romans 1:20 reverses the verse's direction: Paul argues that the created order testifies to God's eternal power and divine nature, not that earthly objects may be catalogued into heaven.

↑ 7. GPFM, 988. The ellipsis spans an anecdote about a minister who, in Dake's telling, took the mansions of John 14 symbolically and was converted to literalism only on his deathbed.

↑ 8. GPFM, 990: the city as "a series of mountain peaks," the throne-room floor "like a sea of glass, clear as crystal, and of unknown dimensions," and "an immense banquet hall where the marriage supper of the Lamb and other large banquets will be held throughout eternity." The measurements at 989–990 follow Revelation 21:15–17 read as survey data.

↑ 9. Finis Jennings Dake, Revelation Expounded; or, Eternal Mysteries Simplified (1950 printing), 311: "why cannot we conceive of these mansions as material buildings in heaven which are to come down to the New Earth?" The same argument, in the same order, reappears in GPFM nearly thirty years later, useful evidence that this teaching was settled early and never revised.

↑ 10. GPFM, Lesson Forty-Two, 835. Scripture references for Enoch, Elijah, Paul, and John appear inline in the original and are omitted here for readability; the wording is otherwise as printed.

↑ 11. The arithmetic is not stable across the volume. At 835 Enoch has been in heaven "over 5,142 years" and Elijah "over 3,500"; in Supplement One, 35, the same claim reads "over 5,185 years" for Enoch and "over 2,600" for Elijah. The figures derive from Dake's chronology, which dates Adam to roughly 4225 BC and computes forward from a mid-twentieth-century present. Both passages assume continuous unglorified physical life in heaven.

↑ 12. GPFM, Supplement One (for Lessons One and Two), 34: "God eats (Gen. 18; Ex. 24:10-11), lives in a city, sits on a throne"; and Lesson Four, 53: "Abraham made a dinner for God and two angels and they actually ate food (Gen. 18)." The exegetical question of theophany and the divine body is developed in Chapter 8 and is not reargued here.

↑ 13. GPFM, 992, section V ("The New Peoples"), opening statement. The section runs to 997 and offers fifteen numbered arguments.

↑ 14. GPFM, 995, section V, point 10. The full point argues from Genesis 8:22 and Isaiah 65:21–25 that planting and harvesting continue while the earth remains, and reasons that glorified saints will not be the ones plowing.

↑ 15. GPFM, 994.

↑ 16. GPFM, 993, section V, point 5: "If the fall had not come all men would have continued as natural people forever and there would have been no class of glorified saints from the human race to help God administer the affairs of the universe forever." The same page states that "God cannot in the end suffer a defeat," a premise whose wider role in Dake's doctrine of divine power belongs to Chapter 11.

↑ 17. GPFM, 996, section V, point 15.

↑ 18. GPFM, 997, section V, point 15 (2). The world population figure of "about two billion" dates the passage to the original composition of the course in the 1940s; it was left unrevised in the 1977 printing used here.

↑ 19. GPFM, 996–997, section V, point 15 (1)–(3). The planetary suggestion is argued from Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2:7–10 on the ground that man's restored dominion "would include all the planets"; the Japanese smallholdings illustration and the surface-area arithmetic follow at 996–997; the closing observation on conception appeals to Genesis 3:16.

↑ 20. GPFM, 972, section IV ("The Renovation of the Earth by Fire"). The ellipsis omits a clause about the New Heaven and New Earth never having existed before, which is a pre-Adamite argument handled in Chapter 15. The word "unscriptural" is hyphenated across the line break in the printed text.

↑ 21. GPFM, Supplement, 985, question 9. The supplement directs readers to "Supplement Two, Question 2" for the supporting Scripture lists, which indicates how systematically the teaching is cross-braced through the course.

↑ 22. GPFM, 972: "The natural people will eat of the tree of life and live forever (Rev. 22:1-2). They will carry out God's original purpose of replenishing the Earth with sinless human beings forever." Compare 996, point 14, where the tree of life is described as "the medium of natural preservation," and where Dake notes that glorified saints have no need of it.

↑ 23. GPFM, 994. On the same page Dake states that both classes are permanent, "the natural people who will be the subjects of the kingdom forever, and the spiritual, immortal, resurrected, heavenly, glorified saints of all ages before the Millennium who will be the rulers and heirs of the kingdom forever" (995).

↑ 24. GPFM, Supplement One, 35, question 9. The Supplements carry their own pagination, distinct from the running lesson pages; the citation follows the printed running head.

↑ 25. GPFM, Lesson Four, 60, under the heading "God is Omnipresent." The printed text uses a dash before "something we know nothing about"; the punctuation is regularized here without change of wording. Compare 451: "There are heavenly and earthly bodies, and spiritual and material bodies. The spiritual bodies are just as real as the material ones."

↑ 26. Scripture in this chapter is quoted from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted. Luke 24:42–43 continues: "So they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. And He took it and ate in their presence."

↑ 27. Apostles' Creed, closing article, traditional English text: "the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." The Nicene Creed likewise confesses "the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come." Neither creed describes the furniture of that world, and the omission is instructive.

↑ 28. GPFM, 834: "The method of the resurrection of the just and unjust is plainly taught and illustrated by a grain of wheat or any other grain as explained above." The illustration is Paul's own (1 Corinthians 15:35–38), where its force lies in the difference between the seed sown and the body God gives it.

↑ 29. Greek pneumatikos, "spiritual," an adjective formed from pneuma, "spirit" or "wind." In Paul the term regularly denotes what belongs to, or is governed by, the Holy Spirit rather than what is composed of spirit: compare 1 Corinthians 2:13–15; 3:1; 14:37; Galatians 6:1. The contrast term in 1 Corinthians 15:44 is psychikos, "natural," from psyche, "soul," which likewise names a governing principle rather than a material.

↑ 30. "Flesh and blood" functions in Jewish and New Testament idiom for humanity in its present frailty and creatureliness: Matthew 16:17; Galatians 1:16; Ephesians 6:12; Hebrews 2:14. The synonymous parallelism of 1 Corinthians 15:50, where "flesh and blood" answers to "corruption," settles the sense in that verse.

↑ 31. The "we" of 1 Corinthians 15:51–52 is the same "we" that runs through the chapter from verse 49, "we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man." Paul draws no line within the redeemed between a changed class and an unchanged one, and the whole argument of 15:35–57 presumes there is none.

↑ 32. Luke 20:36 makes the connection explicit with the conjunction "for": they neither marry nor are given in marriage, for neither can they die anymore. The word rendered "equal to the angels" is isangeloi, used only here in the New Testament, and it concerns deathlessness and sonship rather than any claim about angelic anatomy.

↑ 33. Revelation 1:20 and 5:6 are the clearest of many self-decoding signs; see also 12:9; 17:9–12, 15; 19:8. The pattern is not an argument for reading Revelation loosely but for reading it as the kind of book it announces itself to be in 1:1, where the verb translated "signified" (Greek semaino) carries the sense of showing by signs.

↑ 34. Romans 8:21, "because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." The verse is the ground of the concession made in this chapter's second defense, and Dake cites it repeatedly for the same purpose (GPFM, 972, 996).

↑ 35. 1 Thessalonians 4:16–18, where Paul's stated purpose in describing the reunion is comfort, and where the description stops well short of detail: "and thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words."

↑ 36. On the general rule that in-house evangelical positions are not treated as heresy in this book, see Chapter 1. Premillennialism, including its expectation of natural populations during the thousand years, is held across a wide range of orthodox teachers and is not part of the case made here.