Content to let the previous discussion end where it did, I was surprised that Buford suddenly resumed correspondence six weeks later. This one lasted from March 24 to April 1st. Below are its crucial portions.
Buford to Gary:
I was reviewing your emails and have a question about something you wrote: Concerning those whose names are in the Book of Life from Revelation 20:11-15, you will note that they have LIFE. Now if people remain alive in the lake of fire, don’t they have life also?? Why shouldn’t everyone’s name be in the book of LIFE if everyone is going to be alive SOMEWHERE??? Evidently the ones destined for the lake of fire won’t have life because according to Luke they burn UP. Peter wrote they become ashes, but maybe you don’t understand???
These verses you cited reveal that the result of the lake of fire is DEATH. Nowhere does it speak of how long this fire burns. You ADD to the Word?? Are you aware that you are adding to the Word?? Your position on the true nature of God MUST contain some wresting of scripture. Now then, which of us has “a problem with the English language”??
Thank God He is not as you picture Him to be in your mind. Are you among the old “Church of Christ-ified” that don’t believe you can be wrong about anything?? Evidently you haven’t read Homer Hailey’s last book he wrote prior to his death on the judgment of the nations and the individual. He had the courage to admit that he and that most of the church’s position on this has been wrong. Are you capable of admitting your point of faith in this matter is wrong, or is your pride and ego too large to eat crow in front of others that have a distorted view of God?? I hope you learn better in time and have the guts to admit your view of God was from what you heard and not what you read in the Book.
Gary to Buford:
You are reading the words but missing the significance. Eternal death is an ongoing process, and it is not LIVING by God’s definition. The Lake of Fire (Rev. 20:14), which burns forever, is attended by the smoke of their torment ascending forever (Rev. 14:10-11). The Lake of Fire has no reason to burn forever, if everything placed within it had already burned up. Notice: “The smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever.” I did not ADD to the Word; this is what the Word says.
The first death is the separation of the spirit from the body (James 2:26); the second death is the separation of the spirit from God (2 Thess. 1:6-9). In neither case does the spirit cease to exist.
Peter says that the earth and all things in it shall be burned up and dissolved, but he is not speaking of the spirit but of things fleshly.
Although you scrupulously avoided the word spin (which is commendable), you could not avoid making your usual insulting comments. How odd that you have read Hailey’s book but feign complete ignorance of Fudge’s book, The Fire That Consumes, which is recognized as the definitive work on the subject by those outside the body of Christ (denominationalists)! Anyway, if Hailey wrote what you think he did in a book (unnamed by you), then he was as wrong as he was on Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage. And he contradicted what he wrote in his marvelous commentary on Revelation in 1992: “As the day of the righteous is a glorious, eternal day, the night of the wicked is a dreadful, eternal night; the two abide side by side, continuing simultaneously” (310, emphasis mine).
Are you still as confident in your error as when you began reading this e-mail?
Buford to Gary:
Read some more of what Peter wrote. In 2 Pet 2:6 he said that God condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ASHES, and made them an EXAMPLE of what is going to happen to the ungodly….
True, in 2 Thess 1 the destruction is everlasting, completely destroyed. There’s no coming back from ashes. No purgatory. No reincarnation like some of the Greeks taught.
Would you read Homer’s book? Do you want the title and source where you can order one? I will give you both if you will read the last 160-something pages. I order many of them and give them away locally. They help people escape the “Church of Christ-ified” support of the teachings of the popes, Gary. If you wish you can check this out on the web. Catholicism is the main source of the teachings that God is a sadistic torturing monster. Here is a part of the column I wrote for the local paper and received only two negative responses—both from atheists!
“Various philosophies claiming soul immortality were taught by Greek philosophers before, during, and after Jesus’ coming. Two highly recognized were Socrates and Plato. Unfortunately this philosophy was later reinforced in the 16th century at the 5th Lateran Council (1512-1517) held in Rome. Pope Leo X stated in Session 8 on December 19, 1513:
For the soul not only truly exists of itself and essentially as the form of the human body, as is said in the canon of our predecessor of happy memory, pope Clement V, promulgated in the general council of Vienne (1311-1312), but IT IS ALSO IMMORTAL; and further, for the enormous number of bodies into which it is infused individually, it can and ought to be and is multiplied.
Are you among those with such an ego that you think you know how to properly interpret Revelation with all of its figurative language? Surely not! Yet you choose to believe all the spin that’s been attributed to that letter? Your writings to me do not harmonize with what Jesus taught, Peter taught, or what Luke wrote that John the Baptist said. Don’t you care? Why do all the speculators on Revelation disagree so much?? The answer is simple. They were not in Asia. They don’t get it! Instead they sit around and speculate, write books, and make money off the ignorant people that think the authors “have the God-given right answers” while the answers are pure speculation. Of all the garbage I have heard from pulpits Revelation takes the cake. Such arrogance!
I have read Fudge’s book, given to me by two preachers. BUT I didn’t agree with all he wrote. That’s why I wrote you that whatever he wrote or whatever you wrote about what he wrote carries little weight with me. I have gone PAST the stuff that Fudge wrote. Neither Fudge, Hailey, Al Maxey, tracts about God not being a sadistic torturer, or ANYTHING ELSE man writes carries more weight than scripture.
You seem to be defending an old point you accepted years ago, prior to your own personal research into the matter and you must defend that notion!
NONE of those above mentioned the declarations of the popes. I found it on the Internet doing research. Thank God He is not the monster many make Him out to be. He can burn up in a nano-second or as long as the blows or stripes last mentioned in Luke 12:48. NO MENTION OF FIRE HERE!!! Who besides Judas would it be better for to have not been born? It is my opinion that Judas is in for a BAD destruction process.
Believe it, Gary, God is not a monster. He created man and He can uncreate man. OTHERWISE His power is limited to the false reasoning of mortals—that Jesus is wrong, the soul and body cannot be destroyed. Do you believe all ungodly will be thrown into the garbage dump in Jerusalem? No, but this made the point to His listeners what He meant by “destroyed”—both SOUL and BODY. What the worms didn’t eat burned UP in geenna. Think about it. So those that insist that death is separation from God (not biblical), would have God at point “A” and a stack of ashes at point “B,” separated by a billion miles I suppose.
Relax and think about what you read. Forget most of what you’ve been told that you may feel necessary to defend. You will be amazed. There was a time I had a mistaken understanding of God’s nature, but it was not a biblical understanding. It was a “preacher presented” idea. In an effort to scare people I have heard many times, “Save your immoral soul from the everlasting pain of burning in the fires of hell.” I heard that for years. Nobody ever said anything about “burn UP” that Luke wrote about.
Oh, and what verse do you find the phrase eternal death, or is that what my uncle that taught me the gospel called “preacher talk”? And what verse do you find the phrase eternal soul. I can’t find that either. Is that, too, “preacher talk,” part of “church of Christ-ified” vocabulary? I’m not too proud to learn, but I have discovered, since becoming a Christian, that different religious groups have a vocabulary that contains a lot of “preacher talk,” and as my old aunt said, “chimney corner scripture.” Now I have found “eternal punishment,” death, the wages of sin.
Gary to Buford:
You make a few points concerning ashes, Luke, and Fudge, but you overlooked what I wrote, choosing to say that people view Revelation differently. Is there anyone who does not know that? You also overlooked the quote from Hailey that you were supposed to provide. This is non-responsive.
You seem hung up on “ashes.” The physical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, along with all who lived there were burned up with fire and brimstone—reduced to ashes. Peter is not talking about their spirits, or are you a materialist? Jude, commenting on the same event, says that “they are set forth as an example, suffering (present tense) the vengeance of eternal fire. The fire is eternal, and so is the suffering. Jude did not get this doctrine from the Catholic Church.
If what men write is irrelevant, then why are you promoting Hailey? I would read his book, but I cannot say when; it depends on other things in my schedule.
Since you are so keen on Luke, you may recall that the rich man woke up in torments—not extinction. That too was an ongoing punishment. Luke 20:34-36 is a fine passage; Jesus is talking about the resurrection of the righteous there, which is obvious to all. In John 5:29, however, Jesus taught that there will be a resurrection of life (which He discussed in the Luke passage) and a resurrection of damnation (which He did not discuss in the Luke passage to which you constantly refer).
Notice that in my answers to your questions, I have only mentioned what the Bible teaches, but you keep talking about being “church of Christ-ified,” along with other derogatory expressions. Ad hominem attacks do not advance your cause. Neither does the fallacy of Guilt By Association. “Oh, popes ate roast, and Gary eats roast; therefore, he got the idea of eating roast from the Catholic Church.” The Catholic Church teaches that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary; I could probably find some quote to that effect. So are you getting your teachings from them? This is foolishness. What the Catholic Church teaches is irrelevant to this issue.
You have chosen to sit in judgment on God. Be sure to tell Him on the Day of Judgment that He is a monster for assigning the devil, his angels, and his earthly servants a place in the Lake of Fire.
Buford to Gary:
Thank you for your responding. What does all of this exchange boil down to? It boils down to a person’s view of who God is, one that destroys both soul and body or one that leaves many (that do not find LIFE) burning alive {with life?} during the age of the resurrection? Huh?? Have life without their names written in the book of life?
I have an atheist friend, Ph.D. very high (IQ 186), two masters from ACU, a Ph.D. from TCU. He baptized over 400 men in 3 different prisons while getting two masters at the same time. I kidded him about being “so smart for so long and not thinking he needed God.” He is now 47 years old. When in his 20s, he lived 2 years on the streets of Las Vegas on what he calls “wino-fajitas,” leaving Nevada so he wouldn’t have to go to prison for figuring out how to cheat slot machines.
Five or so years ago he studied the fate of the ungodly with me, hadn’t been a Christian all that long. He is brilliant and open-minded and had studied the world’s major religions for comparison. When it came to God’s biblical nature and the fate of the ungodly, he was surprised at what he read. At TCU he wrote about the most accepted lies relative to Christianity. One was the ego trip people have to think they are so precious that their souls are immortal and can’t be destroyed. I didn’t say this, but he said, “Anyone that believes God is going to burn anyone forever is stupid.” I told him, “No, they’ve been brainwashed by others, innocently ignorant, having believed preachers and seminary professors just like others believe their cult gurus, no questions asked.”
Gary, are you serious about the parable of the rich man and Lazarus? You write as if this is the final judgment. Come on, Gary. The rich man had 5 brothers still alive on earth. They were in HADES, and you know it. Come on. The point of the parable was that even though Jesus would rise from the dead many would deny it.
Gary, did you miss reading verse 28? Look at it. This one resurrection is for ALL. John 5:28: Marvel not at this: for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice. Then Jesus describes the results of that resurrection for all. Be sure your opinions about Revelation figurative language harmonizes with the plainer language of the other writings. Things like the book of LIFE are plain, written about in Psalm 69:28. Are names BLOTTED OUT AND STILL LIVE SOMEWHERE? NO!
About Homer’s ’92 commentary. What he wrote in ’92 shows his mindset, taking for granted what he had been told about hell before he did his personal study on the subject. He approached the subject with an open mind— not one bound on defending what he had been told in the past.
Jude wrote about ungodly men who will meet the same fate Sodom and Gomorrah met. It was Sodom and Gomorrah that underwent the suffering of eternal fire from God. Sodom and Gomorrah are gone; there is no more smoke coming up. These ungodly men will undergo the same kind of suffering following judgment. They are NOT undergoing this suffering now, but will, just as Sodom and Gomorrah did. Surely you know this. In Jude this is about what is coming to the ungodly characters who “crept in privily,” etc. This type is still doing such, BUT they are not burning up YET, but they will. One can write about someone having undergone suffering, but it doesn’t have to be going on presently. Sodom and Gomorrah underwent such suffering.
This would all come easy for you IF you would simply believe what you read, forget your previous programming on this subject, and stop looking for loopholes to defend your position in the matter that, thankfully, is becoming obsolete in Christendom except for Catholicism. Relax and think about it.
[Editor’s note: My response and the conclusion of the discussion follows next week.]