Let us remember

And just to review, remember: orthodox (on the mark) biblical doctrine states that when you are called and regenerated (born again) by the word and the Spirit and have faith in Jesus and His work on the cross and then die you will resurrect (this is the first resurrection) to be with God in Heaven. You will *go up.*

If you die, on the other hand, unregenerate you go to be in what the most on-the-mark biblical theologians can only term the 'intermediate state.' They call it this because the Bible doesn't give us direct teaching on where the unregenerate go at death. *They don't go to hell.* Many theologians and even confessions of faith say they go to hell (because ultimately they think they will eventually go there), but hell is a place one is judged to at the end of time, the great white throne judgment after Jesus' second coming. So they don't go straight to hell. They go to Hades. A different place. They go down, but to Hades, not hellfire. And if you know Plato's Myth of Er Hades is a place where humans go to when they die, they drink of the river Lethe and forget their previous life, then they eventually cycle back up into life. Plato presents it as reincarnation, but I say it is recurrence, and there is room in the Bible for this. This recurrence doesn't end until all time ends (or they become regenerate), and time doesn't end until the second coming of Christ.

The Bible uses the metaphor of fishing. Fishing for men (and women). Evangelizing. You hook them and they are pulled up out of the sea (into a higher world). The world they *were* in is actually a different cosmos. It has a different *time* even. Of course the metaphor really means we are drawn out of *this world* and up into the *higher world*. The Kingdom of God. But here now, after becoming regenerate, we are still obviously in this world, but we are also in the higher world. And *time* itself is different for us. We are no longer in the 'time world' that is recurrence. We are in a higher world with different time.

The issue of sanctification (which spiritual warfare is a subset category of) which the Work teaching is about, i.e. building being into the image of Christ, or conforming to the image of Christ, or having Christ formed in us. Godliness, all that. That is subtle too in orthodox biblical doctrine (and little understood in a complete way just as the 'intermediate state' is something that is little understood). But sanctification is both *definitive* and *progressive.* Definitive sanctification comes with faith and is given us just as justification is given us. It makes us holy enough *now* to enter Heaven. But *progressive* sanctification also has a place while we still live here in this world. It is the mortifying of the Old Man and cultivating of the New Man within us that the Work basically is all about and the Bible speaks of in different language. - C.