The Evangelical Universalist Forum

JRP's Exegetical Compilation: Hebrews 9:9-10

Evangelical Universalism
#1

This is part of my Exegetical Compilation project, which I’m verrryyy sloowwlly posting up here.

Heb 9:9-10: if I just went through the Bible tagging every time something translated as “everlasting” turned out to not be “everlasting” after all (typically thanks to God, Who Himself is truly everlasting), it would get boring quickly even for me. :wink:

But this is an interesting example for evangelical purposes to non-Christian Jews. The Hebraist declares that the sacrifices, even the ones declared “everlasting” as typically translated in English, only counted until the time of Reformation (or {di-orthôsis}).

Note that non-Christian Jews reject Christ upon one such ground, that He abrogates things God declared to be everlasting! In effect, that’s same ground lodged by ECT proponents and annihilationists against universalists, that some terms used as “everlasting” in one context don’t mean that in another.

There is a lot more to say about Heb 9 than this, of course, in relation to the topic of Christian universalism.

#2

Thanks for all these new additions to your exegetical compilation, Jason :slight_smile: I’ve got them saved for a closer look at some point. There’s a couple of verses/passages I’d be interested to read your responses to but I can’t remember them off the top of my head right now.

#3

I’ve been holding off posting new threads for several months so that, even though as an admin and guest author I’m allowed by the owners to post more than one per week, I (hopefully) won’t go over the average. :slight_smile:

Still have several in Hebrews to go. I’ve been meaning to post them up for a long time, just never got around to it.

#4

That’s why I think it is important to explain aion/aionios by referencing olam. There are so many varieties of application for that word in its 430+ OT occurences, I think it becomes even easier to see, that everlasting rarely lasts forever :slight_smile: To me it seems better to bypass the Greek and go directly to the Hebrew whenever possible(as with sheol and ge hinnom, because even if Greek is authoritative in the sense that it is closer to the root, the Helenization of ideas that has occurred by using Greek words to translate Hebrew concepts is still a step away from the root(even if english is three steps away, hebrew, greek, latin, english