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Light Of The World (Season 6, Episode 8)

Neal Pollard

In 1997, the Cold Harbor Road church of Christ in Mechanicsville, Virginia, where I was preaching, started a Bible lectureship. The theme selected was “The Bible Doctrine of Unity.” Such men as the now deceased Bobby Duncan, Garland Elkins, David Sain, Perry Cotham, James Watkins, Maxie Boren, along with many more, addressed Bible contexts and subjects that encouraged unity, God’s way. 

I wrote the foreword (misspelled “forward”) for the lectureship book which is now out of print (some brethren have made it available digitally; the link is at the end of this article). In our age of continual division, we benefit from the powerful, persistent message of Scripture to hold unity as a precious thing. Truly, unity is pleasant (Ps. 133), to be preserved (Eph. 4:1-3), is patterned (John 17:20-21), and is prescribed (1 Cor. 1:10-13). Please consider the words I wrote back then in light of what is going on today: 

Rugged individualism, alternate lifestyles, multiculturalism, and the age of tolerance are the tainted springs of the world. From such all-accepting ideologies flow streams coursing violently through the continent of our culture. The unity for which Christ prayed and died seems stranded over on the opposite bank of righteousness. At times, it is scarcely visible due to the overflow of society’s sins.

The final plea of the Christ, in thinking about disciples even yet unborn, was that “they all may be one…” (John 17:21). Pleasant and good in the sign of the Lord is unity based upon what God has taught and revealed (d. Psalm 133:1). The divine pattern has laid out the command for oneness upon the foundation of God’s word (d. Ephesians 4:1-13; 1 Corinthians 3:11). One of, if not the greatest of the scourges of, denominationalism is that it fosters and promotes the very division God hates and Christ longed for believers to· avoid. Division hurts the cause of Christ.

Disunity so hurt a congregation earlier in this century that the church, now two warring factions, would not meet together for worship. They worshipped in the same building at different times on Sunday. Because of their geographical location, coal was the fuel of choice during the winter months. But, how would they determine if the coal was being equitably distributed? With uncharacteristic cordiality, they formed separate coal piles. Each group would use only their respective pile of coal. A boy from the neighborhood, having heard of this schism, somehow got possession of the letters from the church sign and posted this message: “One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism– And Two Coal Piles!” (McCord)

From an obscure incident during the Restoration Movement comes an attitude, the courage of one man, that all Christians should desire to possess. Over petty differences, a congregation was divided on some opinion. In the heat of infighting, the leader of one faction gathered his followers to sit on the left side of the building. Another brother, likewise, gathered his cronies to the right side. There they sat, fuming and glaring at one another. One brother had lingered outside, but now entered the auditorium with a folding chair under his arm. The two divided leaders each asked him to join their side of the building. He unfolded the chair, sat, and exclaimed, “Everyone  who is on the Lord’s side meet here in the middle.” A church was saved from division by a brother’s ability to know the difference between faith and opinion.

It is sinful to make God’s laws incidental in the name of compromise, as it is wrong to equate incidentals as being on par with God’s laws. Unity requires a great many things, while it prohibits a great many others. Thus, in an age where division is glorified by the world, urged by false teachers, accepted and tolerated by too many, and a cause of stumbling to precious souls, there is a dire need for renewed instruction about the Bible doctrine of unity. God sets forth His expectations for unity, but He also gives, through His word, guidelines and an outline to assure the possibility for its accomplishment.

The fine work and research done by the brethren whose written materials comprise this lectureship book, whose zeal and clarity in presentation are so appreciated, will serve the reader well in ascertaining the importance that we be one and know that oneness is acceptable to the God who sent His Son to make religious unity a reality. His death caused the end for the need of religious division (d. Ephesians 2:14). It is man that has reconstructed the faulty walls of religious division.

May we be encouraged to present the clear lines of fellowship drawn by God (d. I John 1:7, II John 9-11) and call the lost and erring to live therein. Our prayer is that this is one step, however small, in that direction.

“Our Favorite Bible Chapters” (Season 6, Episode 7)

This week’s episode Of Light Of The World (Season 6, Episode 6)

Neal, Brent, Gary, Dale and Carl wish you a blessed 2026, serving the Lord and arming yourself for daily combat with the schemes of the devil (Ephesians 6:11). Enjoy some content from material we put out beyond the blog:

lifeandfavor.org

https://www.youtube.com/@markyourbible

https://www.youtube.com/@lightoftheworldbgky9784

https://www.youtube.com/@AndrewschurchofChrist

https://www.youtube.com/@scottsvillechurchofchrist

“What God Wants Us To Know About His Word”

Gary Pollard

[This is a continuing translation of Origen’s systematic theology in modern language]

If our opponents think they can refute us by appealing to expressions in the Old Testament where God is said to be angry, to repent, or to experience other human emotions or passions (and on that basis deny our claim that God is incapable of these emotions and completely free from that kind of disorder) we must point out that similar language appears even in the parables of the Gospel.

For example, in the parable of the vineyard the owner plants a vineyard and leases it to tenants. When they beat and kill the servants he sends, and finally murder even his son, the owner is said to act “in anger,” to take the vineyard away from them, destroy the wicked tenants, and give it to others who will take care of it. In the parable of the nobleman who went away to receive a kingdom, the citizens sent him a message that said, “We do not want this man to reign over us.” When he receives the kingship, he comes back angry, has them executed in front of him, and then burns their city to the ground. 

But whenever we read that God is angry (whether Old Testament or New), we do not take the language literally. Instead, we seek its spiritual meaning so we can conceive of God properly. And when we previously studied the words of the second Psalm, “He speaks to them in anger, and it fills them with fear,” we explained, as best we could, how such expressions are to be understood—not as strong emotions in God, but as accommodative language adapted to human understanding.

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Gary Pollard

[This is a continuing translation of Origen’s systematic theology in modern language]

Since those who promote this teaching often confuse simple believers with intelligent-sounding (but deceptive) arguments, it seems appropriate to lay out their claims plainly and then expose their errors. Their argument goes like this: Scripture says, “No one has ever seen God.” Yet the God proclaimed by Moses was seen by Moses himself, and also by the patriarchs before him. By contrast, the God proclaimed by the Savior has never been seen by anyone. Therefore, they claim, the God of Moses must be different from the God revealed by Christ.

Let’s ask them (and ourselves) this question: Do they say that the God they acknowledge, whom they distinguish from the Creator, is visible or invisible? If they say that he is visible, they immediately contradict scripture, which says that Christ, “is the image of the invisible God.” It gets even more absurd, since whatever is visible must also have form, size, and color — properties that only bodies have. And if God has a body, then he must be material. If he is material, he must be composed of matter. But matter is subject to decay. On this reasoning, God himself would be subject to decay. This is not a tolerable conclusion.

Let’s question further. Is matter created or uncreated? If they claim that matter is uncreated, don’t we then have to say that part of matter is God and part of it is the world? But if they say that matter is created, then the God they describe—being composed of matter—must himself be created. This, of course, neither their reason nor ours can accept. They will then respond that God is invisible. Very well—but in what sense? If they say he is invisible by nature, then he shouldn’t be visible to the Savior. Yet Christ says, “He who has seen the Son has seen the Father.” This would indeed present a serious difficulty—unless we understand “seeing” here in the proper sense, not of bodily sight, but of understanding. Whoever truly understands the Son also understands the Father.

In this same way, Moses must be said to have “seen” God—not with the eyes of the body, but with the insight of the heart and the perception of the mind, and even then only partially. For it is clear that the one who spoke with Moses also said, “You shall not see my face, but my back.” These words must be understood in a spiritual and symbolic sense appropriate to divine speech, and not according to crude and foolish stories invented by the ignorant about physical parts of God.

Let no one suppose that we speak irreverently when we say that even the Father is not visible to the Savior. The distinction we are making is essential in answering these errors. To see and to be seen belong to bodies; to know and to be known belong to intellectual and incorporeal natures. Vision is a property of bodily creatures in relation to one another. It cannot properly be applied to the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit in their relations to one another.

The divine nature transcends vision. It grants the capacity for sight to creatures who live in bodies, but it itself is apprehended only by understanding. Therefore, for incorporeal and intellectual beings, the proper terms are not “seeing” and “being seen,” but “knowing” and “being known.” This is exactly what the Savior teaches when he says, “No one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son reveals him.” He does not say, “No one has seen the Father except the Son,” but “No one knows the Father except the Son.”

Gary Pollard

Gary Pollard (A Continuing Modernization Of This Work Of An Early Church Father)

This world (itself called “an age”) is said to be the end result of many earlier ages. Paul teaches that in the age before this one, Christ did not suffer. In the age before that, he did not suffer either. I don’t know how many ages there were before this one in which Christ “did not suffer”. I came to this conclusion from Paul himself, who writes, “But now, once, at the end of the ages, he appeared to take away sin by offering himself.” He says Christ was offered one time, and that this happened—at the end of the ages—to take away sin.¹

Paul also makes it clear that after this age, which seems to gather together or complete many ages before it, there will be more ages still to come. He says, “So that in the ages to come he might show the overflowing riches of his grace in his kindness toward us.” Notice that he does not say “in the age to come,” or even “in the two ages to come,” which suggests that he means many ages. Now, if there is something greater than an age, so that some ages belong to created, visible things, and other, even greater ages belong to higher beings—this may be what happens at the final restoration, when the whole universe reaches its complete and perfect end. That final period might be something beyond any normal age.

Scripture even hints at this by saying, “for an age and more.” The word more suggests something beyond an age. And maybe when Jesus says, “I want them to be with me where I am… that they may be one as we are one,” He is pointing to something greater than an age, greater even than “ages of ages”—a time when everything no longer exists within an age at all, but when God is everything in everyone.

After discussing the nature of the world as well as we can, it makes sense to ask what the word “world” actually means, since scripture uses the term in several different ways. The Latin word mundus translates the Greek word kosmos. But kosmos doesn’t only mean “world”—it can also mean “ornament.” For example, in Isaiah, when God warns the proud daughters of Zion, the text says, “Instead of a golden ornament on your head, you will have baldness because of your deeds.” The word used for “ornament” here is the same word used for “world”: kosmos. The same idea appears in the Wisdom of Solomon, which says that the design of the world was symbolized in the high priest’s robe: “For in his long robe was the whole world.”

Scripture also calls the earth with its people the “world,” as when it says: “The whole world lies in wickedness.” Clement, a disciple of the apostles, even mentions the Greek idea of the Antichthones—people imagined to live on the opposite side of the earth, separated by an ocean no one can cross. He says these distant regions may also be called “worlds,” writing: “The ocean cannot be crossed by humans, and the lands beyond it are worlds governed under the same rule of God.”

The universe—the whole system bound by heaven and earth—is also called a world, as Paul says, “The form of this world is passing away.” Jesus himself speaks of another world besides this visible one, although he doesn’t describe it in detail. He says, “I am not of this world,” as if he belongs to a different one. Earlier, we noted how difficult it is to explain this. We want to avoid the idea that we believe in invisible “ideas” or shadow-worlds like the Greeks imagined—purely mental, imaginary places. Scripture does not present an incorporeal world of ideas where Christ came from or where the saints will go.

But the Lord definitely points us toward something better and more glorious than this world, urging believers to set their hopes there. Whether this “other world” is separated from ours by location, or by nature, or by its beauty, or whether it exists within this world but is superior in its quality (which seems more likely to me)—is uncertain, and, in my opinion, not something human thinking can truly grasp.

Clement, though, hints at a bigger idea. When he speaks of “the worlds beyond the ocean” (in the plural), he suggests the beginnings of a view in which the entire universe—everything heavenly, earthly, and under the earth—may be thought of as one complete world. Within this greater whole, other “worlds,” if they exist, would be contained. For this reason, some early thinkers called the sun, moon, and the planets “worlds.” They even considered the great “fixed” sphere of the stars—the non-wandering (ἀπλανής)—to be a “world.”

They appeal to the Book of Baruch, where the seven heavens (or worlds) are more clearly described. Above the fixed sphere, they believed, is yet another sphere. Just as our heaven surrounds everything under it, this higher sphere surrounds all the cosmic spheres within its enormous and glorious expanse. Everything is inside it, just as our earth is under our heaven. Some believe scripture calls this upper realm the “good land” and the “land of the living.” It has its own heaven above it, within which, they say, the names of the saints are written by the Savior. And that higher heaven encloses the earth that Christ promises to the meek. They think our own earth—which was first called “Dry”—received its name from that higher earth, just as our “sky” took its name from the higher heaven.

We discussed these ideas more fully when explaining, “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth,” where scripture shows that besides the dome of the sky made on the second day, and the dry land later called “earth,” there is also another heaven and another earth. Some people say this world is corruptible because it was made, but it does not actually decay because God’s will keeps it from falling into corruption. This thought more truly applies to the non-wandering sphere—that highest and purest world—because God’s will preserves it completely. It has no causes of decay, since it is the world of the saints and the fully purified, not of the wicked like ours is.

Perhaps this explains Paul’s words,  “We don’t look at the things that are seen, but at things that are unseen. The things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are unseen are eternal. We know that if our earthly tent is destroyed, we have a building from God—an eternal house in the heavens.” And again, when he says, “I will behold the heavens, the work of your fingers,” and when God says through his prophet, “My hand has formed all these things,” he is showing the difference between the creation of visible things and invisible things. But, “the things which are unseen” are not the same as “the invisible things.” Invisible things truly lack the property of being seen—they are incorporeal (ἀσώματα). But the things Paul calls “unseen” are possible to see—yet they are not seen yet, because they are still promised and future.

 ^{1 “Ages” likely referred to distinct epochs identified by which of the twelve zodiacal constellations our sun rises against at the vernal equinox. It rises in the same constellation for approximately 2,160 years at a time, with each “age” usually beginning and ending with a world-changing event. Christ, for example, was born at the very beginning of Pisces (the fish), when the sun rose in that constellation during the vernal equinox. This is called Precession of the Equinoxes, and was very important to every great culture in antiquity, as it allowed them to keep track of ages (think “signs and seasons”). It functions almost exactly like a great clock, with each constellation representing an “hour” and the vernal equinox pointing to whichever hour the earth happens to be in.}

Gary Pollard

(A Continuing Modernization Of This Work Of An Early Church Father)

Here are some questions that people who believe intelligent beings may someday exist without any kind of body at all could ask. If it’s true that “this corruptible will put on incorruption, and this mortal will put on immortality,”and if it’s true that death will finally be swallowed up — what is death destroying? Death can only affect material bodies. Even brilliant minds locked in a physical body seem to be negatively affected by their bodies. 

However, if those brilliant minds were able to exist without any physical body, they would be immune to the negative interference of a body. This couldn’t happen all at once, though. We should think of this transition as being in stages — each one more bright and refined than the former. These bodies are no longer vulnerable to death or the sting of decay. So, through the gradual dissolution of the basic material form, death is finally absorbed and destroyed. Its power to sting is blunted by the transcendent grace that every purified, expanded consciousness is finally able to receive. This is how a soul attains incorruption and immortality. Then, in the words of the scriptures, all will be able to say, “Death, where is your victory? Where is your power to hurt? The sting of sin is death.” 

If any of these conclusions are sound, then it only makes sense that our destiny at the end is to be “bodiless”. And if everything is put under Christ’s control, then everyone under his control would also be bodiless. Everyone subject to Christ is also subject to the Father — and Christ will hand the kingdom to him. When this final order comes, there won’t be any need for a body, and material substances will return to nonexistence, as they were before creation. 

Now let’s see if we can refute this thinking. If material bodies were actually to be dissolved into nothing, wouldn’t they have to be restored and created again by a special act of God? Intelligent beings always have free will — so wouldn’t they decide to do stuff and make choices? Otherwise that constant state of non-change might cause them to forget that their stable condition is because of God’s grace and not their own actions. Whenever they start moving again, they will necessarily bring a whole new variety of bodies. We see this diversity on earth already. The earth can’t be all one thing! There’s always variety and differences, and these can’t exist without some kind of material form. Because of this, I can’t understand the reasoning of people who argue that the new worlds will be exact copies of the ones before them.¹ 

If the next world was identical this one in every way, then Adam and Eve would have to make the choice as before; the flood would come again; the same Moses would lead the same 600,000 out of Egypt; Judas would betray Jesus again; Paul would again hold the coats of those who stoned Stephen; in general, every event that’s ever happened would happen again. There’s no rational defense for this line of reasoning — unless we claim that souls don’t have free will, which is what they use to grow or decline based on their own decisions. 

We know that consciousnesses aren’t forced onto a circular path that returns them to the same beginning and the same decisions for infinity. Instead, their own choices determine the outcome of their actions. To argue otherwise is as crazy as claiming that if a medimnus (12 gallons) of grain was poured onto the ground again and again, each kernel would fall exactly where it had fallen before. Then the whole heap would be in the same arrangement and pattern as the first pour. This is impossible, of course, due to the sheer number of grains! Even if we poured over and over again for innumerable ages, we couldn’t get every single grain to fall in the same order as the first pour. 

Therefore, it seems impossible to me that any world should be identical to a previous one, with the same order, the same number of births and deaths, or the same actions. But that there should be a series of worlds — each fairly different from the other — seems perfectly reasonable. Maybe some would be better, others worse, and still others a mixed bag or happy medium. As to how many of those worlds there are, or what they look like, I freely admit that I have no clue. But if anyone can show it, I would gladly learn.  

 ^{1 Stoics argued that the world was cyclically destroyed by fire (εκπυρωσις) and reborn exactly like the previous world. Origen emphasizes free will (αυτεξουσια), proving that no two worlds can be identical if the intelligences in them have the power to choose.} 

Gary Pollard

(Continuing modernizing translation of this work by one of the early church fathers)

On this subject, some people wonder if, just like the Father generates an uncreated Son and sends out a Holy Spirit—not like they once didn’t exist, but because the Father is their source with no “before” or “after” between them—maybe there’s a similar relationship between consciousness and matter.

To explore this more, the discussion usually begins by asking if these material bodies are just as eternal as consciousnesses, or whether the material bodies will one day be destroyed for good. To settle this more precisely, we must first determine if it’s possible for a conscious being to exist apart from the body that contains it—which seems to me very difficult, if not impossible—or if consciousness must always be united to some kind of body.

If anyone could prove that it’s possible for a mind to exist without a body, then it would follow that bodily nature, which was created out of nothing and generated after intervals of time, could also cease to exist once it served its purpose. A completely incorporeal life should be understood as being God’s privilege alone.

So, as we said before, the matter of this world — which allows for every kind of transformation — is denser in low-order beings. This density produces the visible, changing forms of this world. But matter’s interaction with celestial bodies, angels, or the spiritual bodies of the resurrected is different. For those higher order beings, it has the brightness of celestial bodies and is less dense.

From all these together the varied and diverse condition of the one world is completed. If anyone wishes to explore these things more deeply, it must be done with reverence and the fear of God, by examining the sacred scriptures extremely carefully. Perhaps their hidden meaning, revealed by the Spirit to those who are worthy, will uncover something more about these mysteries after gathering many attestations on the subject.