Many have noted that the eternal dwelling place for believers in Jesus Christ is not heaven, but the new earth. Revelation 21-22 makes this clear. Heaven is where believers go if they die before the Rapture. But that is not our eternal home.

Many have also noted, though I am just now catching on, that it is not quite right to speak of hell as the place where unbelievers will spend eternity. I’m writing a book on the ten most misunderstood words in the Bible. One of those words is hell. I had intended to write about the wrong views about the nature of the torment. While I do discuss that, I also came to see that the word hell is not normally used of the lake of fire, especially if by hell we mean Sheol (OT) and Hades (NT). Sheol/Hades is the place where the unbelieving dead are being held until the Great White Throne Judgment (Rev 20:11-15). But it is not the place where they will spend eternity. Sheol/Hades is often translated as hell. Thus hell is really the place where unbelievers are now. But hell is not where unbelievers will spend eternity.

Now the situation is a bit complicated because the Greek term Gehenna (used only 12 times in the NT and only once outside of the Synoptic Gospels) is also translated as hell and Gehenna may well be, at least in some passages, a synonym for the lake of fire. I say that because the references to Gehenna are to a place where future torment will occur, not to a place where torment is going on now.  However,  it may well be, as Dr. Jody Dillow argues, that Gehenna refers, at least at times, to future temporal judgment. In any case, since hell is more commonly used to refer to Sheol/Hades, we probably should not call Gehenna hell, but simply transliterate it as Gehenna.

The suffering of unbelievers now in Sheol/Hades, explained briefly by the Lord in Luke 16:19-31, is not necessarily identical to the torment that will occur in the lake of fire.

It should be noted that we have very little in Scripture that tells us what the torment in Sheol/Hades is like now and even less to tell us what the torment in the lake of fire will be like. If we are to teach the Word and not teach medieval concepts, we should back off from acting like we know precisely what the torment in the lake of fire will be like.

I am not at this point going to walk through various passages on this topic. You’ll need to wait for the book. But I can prove from Scripture that we know there will be torment and that it will be everlasting and conscious. We know the torment will be worse for some than for others. And I can show from Scripture that we do not know precisely how that torment will compare to torments experienced in this life and we do not know exactly what the lake of fire will be (a planet, the center of the new earth, a separate universe, etc.).

Some think that preaching about what the torment will be like in the lake of fire motivates unbelievers to come to faith in Christ; others think it moves people away from Christ. Thus preachers today tend either not to preach about hell and the lake of fire at all, or to preach about them a lot and to say more than the Bible says about them.

Why not limit ourselves to what the Bible says and why not actually teach that? Doesn’t God know best what people should know?  We don’t need to hide Bible truth from people. And we also shouldn’t be making things up and declaring our own ideas as though they were what God has revealed in Scripture.*

*Of course, it is appropriate to speculate based on what God has revealed. However, when we do that, we must distinguish clearly between our speculation and what is clearly revealed.

Due to an increase in missing packages, we’ve decided to change the bulk of our shipping over from USPS to UPS.  Many of you who have placed orders over the past few weeks may have already been upgraded to UPS for free.  Starting today, when ordering from our website, the following will take effect:

• Only orders of $20 or less will be able to use Media Mail for shipping.
• Everything over $20 will be sent UPS.
• If you enter your email address at the time of order, you will receive tracking updates in real time.
• We will no longer be able to mail packages (over $20) to PO Boxes.
• All orders over $100 will receive FREE SHIPPING!

If you have questions about these new policies, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

We received a great review on our New Testament Commentary on Amazon.com from Scott Larrison:

Have you ever been confused or frustrated when you read a commentary on passages like Ephesians 2:8-9 that say that salvation is a free gift from God on the basis of faith in Christ alone and not on the basis of works, but then read the same commentary on passages like James 2:14-26 where it implies that good works must accompany genuine saving faith in Christ? If so, then this is is the commentary for you!

The authors of this commentary believe that eternal life is a free gift received simply by faith in Christ. This is the gospel and clearly stated in the Bible throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Justification before God has always been on the basis of faith not works (Old Testament saints were saved by faith in the Messiah to come while New Testament saints are saved by faith in the Messiah who came, namely Jesus Christ). As such, this message of grace and gift of salvation by faith in Christ is a crucial cornerstone in Christian theology that must be understood and considered when interpreting the remainder of Scripture. This commentary does not stray away from the basic truth of salvation when explaining some of the more difficult passages that seem, when taken at face value and often out of context, to advocate a message contrary to faith alone in Christ alone for salvation, namely passages suggesting good works are required for salvation or other adding additional conditions for salvation beyond faith (i.e. Matthew 7:15-23, 10:32-33, Acts 2:38, Romans 10:9-10, 1 Corinthians 6:9, Galatians 5:4,19, Hebrews 6:4-6, 10:26-29, James 2:14-26, 2 Peter 2:20-21, 1 John 3:6,9-10). Each of these passages has a reasonable explanation when explained in context and that remains true to the gospel message of grace through faith in Christ for eternal life. You will be blessed by having this commentary and understanding more fully the amazing grace of God!

Thanks Scott!

Today (June 4) I completed the commentary (and translation, since Zane was providing his own translation of the entire book) through Romans 16:2. I hope to complete the entire commentary by the end of June. I started at Romans 14:15, where Zane ended. Fortunately he covered all of the hard parts of the book before he went to be with the Lord and left the easier portions to be completed.

Dr. John Niemela is working on the Introduction and making good progress. Even though he is in the process of selling his home and moving to Denver, he hopes to complete the Introduction by the end of this month. He will then dig into the scholarly footnotes which he will be adding.

I plan to edit starting in July and hope to have the manuscript ready to go to the printer by the end of October.

We would appreciate your prayers for this important project.

PS. The new Grace New Testament Commentary is selling briskly in the 7 weeks it has been out. We have received many excellent comments from those who have started using it. We hope you find it to be a very helpful tool for ministry.

I know that may sound outrageous. But it is true.

Recently a friend told me that he worked in a previous job with DTS students. One student was dropping out of seminary with less than one year to go to complete his Th.M. degree, a four-year graduate degree. He was walking away from over 3 years of graduate study.

Why? He told my friend, “I have more doubts now than when I came to seminary. I came to seminary to learn and grow. Instead, my doubts have grown.”

Many seminaries, including the one in this account, actually teach that we can’t be certain of anything and that doubts are healthy and honest, even doubts about cardinal doctrines of the faith like the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Currently the cost for one semester hour of seminary classes in between $375 and $465 at my alma mater, DTS. That means for one three hour class, which is 45 fifty-minute sessions, a student pays between $1125 (if full time) and $1395 (if just taking the one class).

Our conference offers 36 different sessions, 12 plenary and 24 workshops. Of course, the workshops run four at a time, so a conferee can only attend 6 workshops, for a total of 18 sessions. Of course, for a small fee the conferee can buy the entire conference on mp3 and can listen to all 36 messages as often as he likes.

Spending four days at our conference is about like taking one two-hour seminary class. For the person who listens to all the messages on mp3, it is more like a 3-hour seminary class.

Since a 2-3 hour seminary class would cost between $750 and $1395, the value of our conference is around $1,000. But what is the cost? The cost is just $85. That is quite a deal.

Ah, you say, but I have transportation costs, housing, and food. Thus the total cost for one person to come to our conference is somewhere between $100 for a local to say $50 for someone who has to fly in from across the country.

But remember that to go to seminary one also has those same costs for transportation, housing, and food. Most seminarians have to give up their jobs, leave their homes and families, move across the country, and struggle to make ends meet for four years. Our conference is far less costly both in terms of what we charge, $85, and the transportation, housing, and food costs.

Unlike seminary where many of the classes are not that practical, our plenary sessions and workshops are all extremely practical. We give more instruction on Free Grace theology in one conference that a seminary student would get in four years of seminary.

But it isn’t just Free Grace theology that we teach. We teach how to study the Bible, which is called exegesis. One pastor from Arizona who is a graduate of my alma mater told me last year that he has learned more about exegesis from attending our conference over the years than he learned in four years of graduate studies while earning his Th.M.

I would say that someone who attends our conference for five years is, at a practical level, much better grounded on Free Grace issues (the Judgment Seat of Christ, eternal rewards, the nature of faith, assurance, eternal security, the atonement, repentance, evangelism, discipleship, exegesis) than a seminary graduate.

Even if it cost someone $1,000 in transportation and housing and food to come to our conference, it would still be a great deal. The education we provide is fantastic. I know many men who have Th.M.’s from my alma mater and they never miss one of our conferences because they get so much out of it. I do too.

If you’ve never come, why not talk to some who have. I believe if you learn more about our conference, you will take the time and expense to come. And I believe that afterwards you will conclude it was well worth the cost and you will immediately make plans to come again.

Our conference this year is April 19-22 (Mon 1:00 till Thursday 11:30) in Fort Worth, TX at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Riley Center. It is a fantastic facility. Guest housing in the Riley Center has wonderful rooms, most for well under $99 a night, and that includes breakfast.

I hope to see you there.

At 4:30 PM Central time Kyle emailed the final file for the commentary. There were three files: one for the cover and dust jacket, one for volume 1 (Matthew-Acts) and one for volume 2 (Romans-Revelation).

Volume 1 ended up 615 pages.

Volume 2 ends on page 1334, using continuous numbering, and hence is 718 pages.

Wow. What a project this was. Twenty years worth of work.

If people who are with the Lord are able to see what we are doing, then I imagine Zane Hodges and Art Farstad are high fiving each other right about now.

Of course, we aren’t done yet. The printer still needs to do the printing and binding and shipping to us. There is plenty of quality control to be done. However, we’ve used this printer on 3-4 books now and they have always been very conscientious. Please pray that the printing process goes well.

At times as I was doing the final proofing, I was thrilled by the quality of the commentary. I hope you will be as well. Of course, by today, I wasn’t so much proofing as speed proofing, so by the end I was fairly confused and having trouble concentrating.

My thanks to Kyle for all the hard work he put in. If it hadn’t been for his insistence over the past 4 to 6 months, there is no way it would have gone out today, or even in the next few weeks. He pushed especially hard this past week and convinced me we would get it out today. He was right. Semper fi, Kyle.

My thanks too to Holly and Mark. Both worked very hard today in the final proofing. And both have worked hard on the project over the past six months as well.

My thanks to Rachel Goss, who designer the cover, spine, back cover, and flaps on the dust jacket.

My thanks to all of you who have supported this project with your prayers and gifts.

And finally, my thanks to the Lord Jesus for the gift of life and for giving us the opportunity to do this important project. When I was in seminary I never even dreamed that I’d be involved in a project of this magnitude. God is good.

Hi All,

Well, we’ve hit lots of snags and setbacks. The biggest was that we found out that not a single bindery in the country would bind our commentary if it is over 1,050 pages. Because most of the commentaries came in over their word maximums, we actually are right at 1,300 pages! Yikes. We found out that only the big publishers have the ability to bind books over 1,050 pages.

What to do? We decided to print the commentary in 2 volumes, but sell it as one. Each volume will say, “Not intended for individual sale.” Volume 2 will carry the barcode and price for the two together. The printer is even shrinkwrapping the 2 volumes together.

In some ways, this is better. One 1,300 page book is enormous. It is probably better to have one 700 and one 600 page book.

Anyhow, we are finally at the very end of the proofing stage. We have gone over and over and over every commentary, checking the words in bold (the portions of the NKJV text cited exactly), the Greek and Hebrew transliterations (and making sure the words in the Greek text are spelled exactly as we have them in the commentary), making sure the outlines in the Introductions are identical to those in the texts of the commentaries, checking spacing between words and lines, checking the page breaks, checking abbreviations and capitalizations, etc.

This has been the hardest thing I’ve done in life. What an undertaking this has been.

While I have a hard time being objective since I am so close to everything, I have a feeling that this is going to make a great contribution to the Body of Christ until the Lord returns to rapture us home. It is truly exciting to read Free Grace discussions of passage after passage in the NT.

Please pray for us to get it to the printer ASAP and for the printer to get it back to us by the conference. Our lastest challenge is that the printer tells us that unless we get the entire manuscript to him by Thursday, he doubts he can get us the printed commentaries by the conference (Apr 19-22), which is where we plan to unveil it.

My thanks to all the authors who wrote commentaries, to all those who have helped with editing and proofing, and especially to Kyle, Holly, and Mark in the GES office as they have worked hard at typesetting and proofing.

In November we received the reprint edition of Zane’s commentary on 1-3 John, in paperback. That was followed in December by the reprint edition of his commentary on James, also with a new cover design. Yesterday we received the long awaited and long overdue Spring 2009 journal, which is a memorial issue of Zane Hodges, also with a new cover design. It contains 11 journal articles and one newsletter article that Zane wrote over the course of twenty years. At the back we even have a series of pictures of Zane.

In addition to all that, The Grace NT Commentary is in the final typesetting and proofing stages. It should go to the printer sometime in the next few weeks. If so, we should have it back from the printer by late March or early April, in advance of the annual conference, which is April 19-22 at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

Thank you for your prayers and gifts. December giving was a record and pulled us up from nearly $50,000 under budget to about $21,000 over budget. While January through July is typically that much or more below budget, that still means that we now have a great possibility of ending the year meeting budget. We are thankful to God for your fellowship in this ministry.

I’ve been editing the long-overdue Spring 2009 Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society. It is a special edition in which all of the articles are articles by Zane Hodges which we previously published. One of them I’m editing now, Legalism:The Real Thing, pointed me to the antinomian controversy in the 1630s in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. That led me to search the web and I found an excellent article on it you might want to read:

http://www.answers.com/topic/antinomian-controversy

In a nutshell the article says that Anne Hutchinson argued that works have no role whatsoever in the believer’s assurance of eternal life. We simply believe in Jesus for that life and we know we have it because we know Him to be trustworthy. While Anne did not deny the importance of good works in the life of the believer to please God, she denied their role in assurance. Indeed, she viewed this as a very bad thing.

The link cited above goes on to say the the minister’s of the MBC (minus her pastor, John Cotton, who agreed with her on this point, though he did later banish her over her claim to receive special revelation from God, a point Zane discusses in a different article in this issue of the journal) feared that if believers did not look to their works for assurance, then they would wander in lives of sin. Sound familiar! This is exactly what the modern Puritans have been contending for years. Interesting I also edited three articles by Zane for this issue of the journal in which he discusses books by D. A. Carson and Michael Horton. He suggests that these men represent the new Puritans.

Anyhow, if you have time, check out that link. I think it will find it very helpful.