Good Question

Does God harden people’s hearts so they won’t be saved? (Part 2)

Q. Peter clearly states in his second letter that “God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” Several statements in the Bible that seem to be contrary to this don’t make sense to me. Two examples are Joshua 11:20, “The Lord hardened their hearts . . . that they might receive no mercy,” and John 12:40, “He has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor turn, and I would heal them.” Wouldn’t God want to make it easier for all of us to get to Him? So why would God discourage some people from believing or make it harder for them than for others? Related to this is the way people or nations had their hearts hardened so that God could demonstrate his power. Pharaoh seemed ready to let the Israelites go, but instead God hardened his heart and the plagues came, including death to all the first born.

In my first post in response to this question I discussed the statement in the book of Joshua. Let me now consider the one you cite from the book of John. And next time I’ll look at the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.

This statement is actually a quotation from Isaiah, as John notes. In Matthew and Mark the same quotation is used to explain Jesus’ method of speaking in parables. John uses it instead to comment on Jesus’ method of revealing who he was through “signs.” But in both cases it refers to a method that can either conceal or reveal, depending on the state of a person’s heart.

In Session 2 of my study guide to Isaiah I explain the background to this statement. Isaiah has just had a vision of God in the temple:

“God asks, ‘Who will go for us?’ and Isaiah eagerly volunteers. But the assignment turns out to be a perplexing one. The new prophet is to bring messages from God to the people of Judah. But they will so persistently ignore these messages that they will become less and less able to understand what God wants. As a result, the nation will ultimately be devastated by its enemies. Only a faint glimmer of hope will remain in the end.

“Even though it sounds here as if God wants the people to resist and be destroyed, this is quite unlikely. We’ll see in the rest of the book of Isaiah, as we also see throughout the Scriptures, that God really wants people to respond positively to his warnings and invitations and so be rescued. Rather, the language here reflects God’s knowledge of the people’s confidence in their own strategies and his realization that they will choose their own way even more stubbornly when they’re challenged. And so God tells Isaiah, ironically, to go and make the people even more insensible and resistant. Whatever their response, the reality of the situation needs to be proclaimed.”

In the study guide I then invite groups to consider questions such as these:
~ C.S. Lewis once wrote, “It is better for the creature itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure.” Do you agree?
~ How can we distinguish between those times when a hard truth needs to be spoken to another person, even if they’re unlikely to be able to hear it, and those times when it’s best to say nothing and wait for the person to become more open?

This was the problem that both Isaiah and Jesus faced: They needed to proclaim something vital about what God was doing in their day, but many of the people who heard them were so set against God that this proclamation would only harden their resistance. But it couldn’t be abandoned on that account. So even though God tells Isaiah to “make the heart of this people calloused . . . and close their eyes,” and John paraphrases this by saying that God himself has “blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts,” it’s the people’s stubborn resistance, intensified by encountering this proclamation, that’s actually responsible.

It’s kind of a no-win situation for God’s prophets and his Messiah: say nothing about the new thing God is doing in the world because most people don’t want to hear it, or proclaim it for the sake of those who might hear, even at the cost of hardening those who are resisting? A difficult problem, caused by people, for a God who is not willing that any should perish.

Does God harden people’s hearts so they won’t be saved? (Part 1)

Thank you for these excellent questions. I’ll take some time to answer them. In this post I’ll talk about the reference in Joshua to God hardening hearts and showing no mercy. In my next post I’ll take up the passage you cite from John. And in a final post I’ll look at the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.

The question of people and nations being hardened, so that they are destroyed rather than saved, comes up several times (quite understandably) in my study guide to Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. As I tell groups when they first read through Joshua, “This aspect of the book . . . creates one of the greatest difficulties in the entire Bible for thoughtful, compassionate followers of Jesus.” So let me begin answering your question by sharing what I say about it in the Joshua study guide. I’ll take up the passages you cite from John and Exodus in subsequent posts.

In Session 4 of the guide, when groups consider the destruction of the city of Jericho, when no one is spared except Rahab and her family, I offer these observations:

Esteban March, "Joshua at the Walls of Jericho" — Esteban March, “Joshua at the Walls of Jericho”

“The Bible sometimes describes judgments of total destruction like this, but at other times God’s judgments are limited and tempered by mercy. The challenge for readers of the Bible is to determine which kinds of episodes are normative and which ones are exceptional, and why those occurred.

Jesus’ life and teachings provide, for his followers, the interpretive key to the entire Scriptural record of God’s dealings with humanity. In light of them, believers identify what things are normative and what things are exceptional.

Jesus taught that we should love even our enemies, and that we should show mercy to others so that we will receive mercy ourselves. He died to save people who were, at the time, his own enemies. So his life and teachings show that judgments of total destruction, like the one described here, are exceptional. So why did exceptional events like this occur as the Israelites took possession of Canaan?

“This is a question that thoughtful interpreters have offered different answers to, but here is one possibility to consider. It may be that God had determined that Canaanite society had become so corrupt that it couldn’t be redeemed. This society was particularly violent, oppressive, and degraded. . . . If this society was never going to change, then it had to answer the demands of justice. Moreover, if the Israelites imitated the Canaanites, they’d rapidly be corrupted themselves. So their influence had to be removed completely.

As God had earlier used flood and fire to purge away irredeemably wicked societies from the earth, now God chose to use the Israelite armies for this purpose. This was not an ordinary war; these armies were on special assignment as agents of divine judgment. This is why, in the case of the opening battle of Jericho, the soldiers weren’t allowed to take any plunder.”

I then invite groups to interact with these comments, to say whether they think they might be on the right track, even if they don’t completely agree with them, or whether they’d account for episodes like this one in some other way.

Then, in Session 7, groups take up the part of Joshua that summarizes the conquest of the nations living in Canaan. There we find the statement that you asked about: “It was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy.” When we read this statement on its own, it does sound as if God wanted all the Canaanites to perish, in direct contradiction to what Peter writes. But we need to understand this statement in its context. I suggest the following in the Joshua study guide:

“The author’s primary concern here is to document that Joshua faithfully carried out what ‘the LORD commanded Moses.’ Canaanite culture was so corrupt and oppressive that God didn’t want it to supply any part of the model on which the new Israelite society would be built. But this meant that Canaanite influence had to be completely eliminated.

So God led the Canaanites ‘to wage war against Israel so that he’—Joshua—’might destroy them totally . . . as the LORD had commanded Moses.’ The fundamental goal is the complete removal of the corrupting Canaanite influence, so that a new society can be built on God’s laws, as a model for the rest of the world. Everything else–the hardening, the war, and the destruction–follows from that.”

If this is the case, then paradoxically the indirect but ultimate goal here is to make it possible for people to follow God, not to prevent them from doing so. And so, as I observe further:

“If the ultimate goal is to make it possible for the Israelites to model God’s ways for the rest of the world, then it’s consistent with that goal for some people outside Israel, at any point, to choose in favor of God. But this means that the hardening must have been general, on the Canaanites as a whole, and not specific, in each one of their individual hearts. (The text uses the collective singular: ‘It was from the LORD to harden their heart.’) To seek the God of Israel, an individual person or city would have to make a choice contrary to what everyone around them wanted to do. In this culture of corporate identity, this would not have been easy. But as the cases of Rahab and the Gibeonites show, it wasn’t impossible.”

Indeed, if we understand the episodes of total destruction in the book of Joshua by analogy to the judgment of the flood, then only the earthly destiny of the Canaanites was at stake, not their eternal destiny. In an earlier post I’ve explored the biblical statement (also by Peter) that Jesus went and preached to the imprisoned spirits who perished “in the days of Noah.” This is only speculative, I must emphasize, but it’s possible that the spirits of those who perished “in the days of Joshua” might also have been “imprisoned,” awaiting a proclamation of the gospel that they could understand from Jesus himself.

Will the signs at football games just read “John”?

Q. If The Books of The Bible has the desired impact, in the future will we see the guy at the football game holding up a sign that just reads, ‘John’?

I’m sure we’ve all seen the “John 3:16” signs on televised football games. There may even be some signs like this at the Super Bowl on Sunday.

This question provides a great illustration of how The Books of the Bible, the version these study guides are designed to be used with, encourages referencing not by chapter and verse, but by content and context.

The word count is pretty limited on those signs, but if you had the chance to speak with someone at slightly more length, think of how much more meaningful it would be to refer contextually to “what Jesus told Nicodemus when he came to see him early in the gospel of John,” rather than to use the chapter and verse shorthand. Or, by content, you could refer to how the Bible tells that that “God loved the world so much that He gave his only Son,” summarizing the message rather than just giving its address.

Along these lines, instead of reading simply “JOHN,” a sign at a football game might say something like this:

GOD LOVED THE WORLD – GOD GAVE HIS SON.

Or, in bigger letters:

GOD LOVED
GOD GAVE

I bet that would get the attention of the television cameras.

Do our prayers really get through to God?

Q. I don’t know if I’ve really ever gotten through to God in prayer. Some great things have happened to me over the years and I’ve said, “Thank you, God” for them. I’ve looked up at the stars and said, “Wow, that’s awesome, God!” But I’ve also been through some really tough things, and I’ve prayed about them, too, but I’m not sure what happened.

I knew I should never ask for anything selfish, like riches. I just prayed for God’s will to be evident, or for a really sick friend to be healed, or for some victims of a horrible accident, or financial problems to be straightened out. I’ve tried the “If it’s your will, Lord” prayers. Some worked out, some didn’t.

I’ve read many verses about prayer. One says to ask believing that it has already been done for you. Another says, “Ask, seek, knock.” There’s that parable Jesus told about the widow getting her wish because she wears the unjust judge out with her asking.

I’ve heard a lot of answers to this problem:
“Just trust God and He will reveal Himself.”
“We can never know the Mind of God.”
“He knows the best thing for us, even if we can’t see it now.”
“God wants us to speak with Him as a young child, so keep praying.”
“Jesus showed us how to pray, so follow His example.”
“Many people prayed for things and it came about, so don’t give up.”

I need some assurance at this point.

Thank you for this honest and heartfelt question, which I’m sure many, many other readers of this blog will feel as well. Prayer is central to the relationship we’re meant to have with God, but it’s also complex and mysterious, and I don’t pretend to be able to explain everything about it. But I can share with you some of the things I think I’ve discovered from the prayers in the Scriptures.

I think your question itself illustrates one essential point: prayer is not meant to be primarily a way of asking for things; rather, it’s a way of living in relationship with God. And you’re already living in relationship with God through prayer. You describe how you use it to express your thanks for his blessings and your praise for his wonders. In other words, sometimes there’s not an expectation that a prayer will be “answered” with a particular result. It’s just a way for us to express ourselves to God. I’m certain that in those prayers, you got through.

The Bible is full of prayers of praise and thanksgiving. In fact, biblical prayers typically contain a much higher percentage of praise and thanksgiving than ours often do. So one important thing we can learn about prayer from the Bible is to use it regularly to express our gratitude and wonder to God.

Another important purpose we discover in the Scriptures is this: talking to God in prayer enables us to move from a place where we are questioning God’s power and goodness to a place where we have a confident trust in God, even in troubling circumstances. The most common kind of psalm by far is the “psalm of supplication,” whose essential purpose is to enable the writer to make this move. (This is discussed at length in the Psalms study guide, in sessions 2 and 7-11.) In these biblical psalms of supplication we see people make it to all stages along the way from questioning to trust. It’s a powerful and helpful model for us.

So in this case the expected result is not so much in the world around us, but inside us. It sounds to me that prayer also “worked” for you when you were able to trust God with the really tough things that were happening to you.

But I recognize that your ultimate question is about those times when we are hoping for and expecting a result in the world around us: for someone to be healed physically, or for a material need to be met, or for a relationship to mended–things like that. We would know that we’d “gotten through” if we got the result we were praying for. And what I see in the Bible is that prayer is also meant to be a means by which God can use us as his agents to bring about results like these. In other words, God wants to work through our prayers to achieve his purposes.

We often see this happen in the Bible. For example, the early church in Acts was “earnestly praying to God” for Peter’s release from prison, and he was miraculously set free. We also see it in Nehemiah’s prayer for favor with his king, who let him go to Jerusalem to rebuild its walls. We see it in Daniel’s prayer for the return of the exiles, and in many other places.

However, we also have to acknowledge that in the Bible we see some petitions and intercessions (that is, prayers for oneself and for others) fail to achieve the desired result. Just before the apostle Peter was miraculously released from Herod’s prison, the apostle James was put to death by Herod. But I’m sure the early church was praying for the safety and deliverance of both men.

The clearest example for me is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He made a specific request: “May this cup be taken from me” (in other words, keep me from being executed). But he was crucified anyway. If even Jesus didn’t get what he asked for, how can any of us be sure that our prayers ever get through?

But I think Jesus’ experience in Gethsemane actually illustrates one more important thing about prayer. When God wants to work through our prayers, he calls us into an interactive process of speaking and listening. This process may last for days or even weeks, rather than take place in one concentrated night as in Gethsemane. (I think that’s what Jesus wanted to show us through the parable of the widow and the judge.) Over the course of this process, we come to discern the will of God more and more clearly, so that we can pray with more and more confidence for it. The ultimate goal is for us to receive bold faith from a clear assurance of God’s will, and to see the prayer that’s prayed in that faith answered. I think Jesus’ teachings about “ask, seek, knock” and “believing that we have already received” apply to these cases specifically.

But the description of this process suggests that we begin in a place where we don’t have a clear assurance of God’s will. That’s where the “if it’s your will, Lord” comes in. We begin by saying what we think God might want for us, but with the expectation that we will hear from God in response (if not in an audible voice, then at least in a change of heart, a new perspective, or something like that). In light of that response, we adapt our prayers, and the process of speaking and listening continues until we reach either a place where we are completely surrendered to God’s will, whatever that might be, or a place where we have a confident assurance of God’s will and a bold faith that our prayers will be instrumental in its realization.

It’s eye-opening and encouraging for me to think that, on this model, Jesus in Gethsemane actually began in a place where he wasn’t certain that it was God’s will for him to receive what he was asking for–an escape from the cross–and that he reached a place not where he knew his petition would be granted, but where he was yielded to God’s will, even if it wasn’t what he was asking for. I’d say he definitely “got through” on that occasion, and perhaps, looking back on your experiences, you’ll recognize some where you “got through” in the same way. But I hope you’ll also recognize some experiences where your initial impulse to pray for something turned out to be what God wanted, and that he used your prayers over time to bring about his purposes.

How could God traumatize Isaac by having Abraham nearly sacrifice him?

isaacsacrifice — Anton Losenko, “Abraham Sacrifices His Son Isaac”

Q. One of the things I struggle with most is God requesting Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. I get the dynamic between God and Abraham on this, but why wouldn’t God at least have done it when Isaac was a baby and couldn’t remember it? It just seems cruel to me to inflict lifelong psychological damage on someone from the terror and other emotions that your father tying you up, ready to sacrifice you, would cause. I’m not sure any level of faith in God would compensate for the damage that would do to a person.

In these study guides, I often ask groups to envision particular biblical stories through the eyes of one of their characters. Your question is a sensitive and compassionate one that arises from a perceptive reading of this story through Isaac’s eyes.

We typically interpret this story from God’s perspective and see in it a foreshadowing of the substitutionary atonement: “God himself will provide the lamb.” Or, we see it from Abraham’s perspective and read it as an object lesson in faith and difficult obedience. (Charles Spurgeon preached a famous sermon on this passage, using Abraham as a positive example, about the kind of obedience that faith produces: immediate, unconditional, complete, etc.)

But when we see the story through Isaac’s eyes, it is pretty terrifying. It would be bad enough to be tied up and nearly sacrificed by anybody, but for your father to do this, when he’s supposed to be your protector, would be devastating.

One possibility to consider is that Isaac might have experienced this event somewhat differently from the way a person would today. This story is, among other things, about Abraham and his family coming to understand better the character of the God who has called them into a covenant relationship in order to make them a blessing to the whole world. Considered in that light, it’s actually a polemic against human sacrifice, which was widely practiced in this place and time.

It’s not as though God thought up human sacrifice as an extreme way to test Abraham’s loyalty. Rather, God was asking of Abraham what it was believed the other gods were asking of their followers. When Abraham demonstrated his complete devotion, God then made clear that he didn’t want human sacrifices.

But going into the story, Abraham and Isaac don’t yet realize how different God is from the other so-called gods in this respect. This is why neither one of them balks when they realize that a human sacrifice is in view (Abraham at the beginning, Isaac later on): if you didn’t do what the gods expected of you, they would bring disaster on you and your family. In effect, Isaac may not have expected his father to protect him from a demand like this from the gods–no one was able to defy them, and trying to do so would only expose the family to greater danger and damage. Children today don’t have issues with their parents for not keeping a tornado from hitting their house.

But I think this is only a secondary answer. I agree with you that, whatever the cultural differences, for Isaac to be tied up by his own father and nearly turned into a human sacrifice must have been terrifying and traumatic on some level. So the primary answer must be that coming to know God deeply and truly as our Heavenly Father can and does bring healing from the psychological damage we suffer through things our parents do. If they fail to protect us, or if they actively harm us, this does more damage than almost any other person could cause. But even when this has happened, coming to know God, in a deep relational sense, as our Heavenly Father brings emotional and psychological healing by reassuring us of our infinite worth in his eyes and giving us renewed confidence in his love and protection. And this is what I hope all readers of this story from Isaac’s life will experience.

Do not “quench the Spirit” or “put out the Spirit’s fire”?

In your guide to Paul’s Journey Letters (session 2), you ask us which of the instructions at the end of 1 Thessalonians we’d most like to see put into practice in our community of Jesus’ followers. Our small group has a couple of questions about one of those instructions. It’s the one that the TNIV translates “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire,” but which other versions such as the ESV translate “Do not quench the Spirit.”

First of all, which is it, the Spirit or the Spirit’s fire? Why the difference in translation?

And then, if it is fire, how are we to understand what that means within the context of the letter? There are numerous references throughout the Old and New Testaments of God’s presence/Spirit coming in the form of fire, so it’s easy for a reader to project this kind of imagery here. I suppose this is a specific case of a more general question: To what extent is it appropriate/accurate/permissible to project extra-textual meaning into a specific literary context? It seems to me that the answer cannot be “never” nor “always,” which means that it’s somewhere in between.

In this instruction Paul uses the Greek verb sbennúo, which means “to put out a fire.” (This root is found in our word asbestos, which originally referred to a substance, quicklime, that couldn’t be put out when it was on fire; pouring water on it only made it flame higher. Ironically, the word was then erroneously applied to a substance that couldn’t catch on fire, and the name, even though opposite in meaning, stuck!)

In Paul’s sentence the Spirit is the simple object of this verb; the word “fire” as an attribute or possession of the Spirit does not appear. So “do not quench the Spirit” is the more literal translation. The reading “do not put out the Spirit’s fire” appears in the 1978 and 1984 editions of the NIV as well as in the TNIV, but in the latest update to the NIV (2011), the reading is now “do not quench the Spirit.” So leading translations are converging in their understanding of what the object in the sentence should be.

I’m not sure they’ve gotten the verb translated right yet, however. Sbennúo can be used in a more literal sense of putting out a fire (e.g. as in Ephesians, “Take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one”), but it can also be used in a more figurative sense, to describe doing to something what you would do to a fire to put it out. And so I think an even better translation of Paul’s instruction would be, “Do not stifle the Spirit,” particularly since the very next phrase (not necessarily a separate sentence) is, “do not treat prophecies with contempt.” In other words, if the Spirit wants to speak to you in your gatherings, let the Spirit speak, and listen. So the notion of fire, certainly associated with God’s Spirit in many places in the Bible, is not necessarily present here.

This means that this instruction may be an even better example than you perhaps realized of readers projecting extra-textual meaning into a specific literary context! I agree with you that we must expect readers to do this kind of thing sometimes, because words are full of meaning and they are bound to have associations for readers beyond what those who first used them intended. I’d say that we need to recognize that reading is a creative act, but that at the same time, like any creative act, it should be constrained by considerations that keep it from becoming so wild that it’s meaningless. I’d argue that these considerations include the author’s overall perspectives and social and historical context. These must exert some control over the meanings we bring in to an author’s words.

So while Paul probably meant “do not stifle the Spirit,” he was using a word figuratively that means more literally “put out a fire,” and in that word the rich biblical associations of the Spirit-as-fire can be heard echoing. This is particularly true since Paul was writing self-consciously within the biblical literary tradition, as evidenced by his frequent quotations from and allusions to the earlier Scriptures. So when we read the instruction not to “quench” the Spirit, I think we do have the freedom to think about what this means in light of the broader biblical imagery of the Spirit-as-fire, so long as we don’t miss Paul’s main point about allowing the Spirit to speak through individual members to gatherings of Jesus’ followers.

Do people choose or refuse to believe, or does God choose who is saved?

As my small group was using the guide to Paul’s Journey Letters, a question came up in 2 Thessalonians. In one section, Paul says that some will perish “because they refused to love the truth.” But in the very next section, he tells the Thessalonians, “God chose you as firstfruits to be saved.” The first statement seems to place agency in the hands (and hearts and minds) of individuals, while the second one seems to imply God’s agency in determining who is saved. How do we reconcile ostensibly contradictory statements that are right next to each other? What is the bigger picture we are missing?

This isn’t the only place in the Bible where God’s sovereignty and human moral responsibility are asserted in the very same place. For example, Peter says about Jesus in his message on the day of Pentecost, as recorded by Luke in the book of Acts, “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.”

Benjamin West, “St. Peter Preaching at Pentecost”

It seems to me that divine sovereignty and human responsibility are two sides of a mystery or paradox that we today have much more difficulty reconciling and living with than the biblical authors did. So how can we reach the place where we’re as comfortable with this paradox as they were?

I find it helpful to think about this by analogy to the understanding the community of Jesus’ followers eventually reached, after centuries of debate, about whether he was divine or human. The answer was, “Both.” The Council of Chalcedon proclaimed in AD 451 that Jesus was “fully divine and fully human, without separation and without confusion.” That is, he was somehow 100% divine and 100% human at the same time, without it being possible to say which things he said and did as God and which things he said and did as a man, and without either nature getting in the way of the other.

We might say similarly that when a person is saved, this is the result of a process or action that is “fully divine and fully human, without separation and without confusion.” Paul says in 2 Thessalonians, after all, that when people “refuse to love the truth and so be saved,” “God sends them a powerful delusion so they will believe the lie.” Divine and human agency working simultaneously—in this case, unfortunately negatively, but the same thing happens positively when a person is saved.

The practical takeaway is to acknowledge that we have a human moral responsibility to respond to God’s gracious offer of salvation through the gospel, but also to acknowledge in all humility that our salvation is a work of God achieved only through the incarnation, life, ministry, atoning death, and resurrection of Jesus.

What did Jesus do for three days after he descended into hell?

Q. I have a question. What do you think Christ “did” for three days after he descended into hell?

The Bible doesn’t tell us very much about what Jesus did between the time he died on the cross and when he was raised from the dead, but it does give us a couple of tantalizing hints.

Peter writes in his first letter, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit, in which also he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah when the ark was being built.”

This suggests that Jesus, between his death and resurrection, went in the Spirit and actively preached the gospel to those who had perished centuries before in the great flood. Perhaps these people, because of the great wickedness on the earth at that time, were considered not to have had a reasonable opportunity to respond to God, and so Jesus came and proclaimed the gospel to them in its fullness, in light of his just-completed death on the cross.

Even though Peter doesn’t mention people from other historical periods, since his concern in this part of the letter is to develop an analogy between baptism and rescue from the flood in the ark, it’s possible that on this occasion Jesus also proclaimed the gospel to other “imprisoned spirits” who had lived at different times. Peter says more generally later in this letter that “the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regards to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.”

Paul gives us a suggestion that some of those who heard the gospel under these circumstances responded positively. In Ephesians he quotes from Psalm 68, “When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train,” and then applies these words to Christ: “What does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended to the depths of the earth?” The “captives” would be the souls whom Jesus led out of their “imprisonment” after they responded positively to the gospel when he proclaimed it.

From these biblical hints about what Jesus did between his death and resurrection, the community of his followers later developed the doctrine of the “harrowing of hell.” To “harrow” means to despoil; the idea is that Jesus triumphed over hell and released its captives. This doctrine has a rich history in the art and literature of the church.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, "The Harrowing of Hell" — Duccio di Buoninsegna, “The Harrowing of Hell”

If someone’s prediction doesn’t come true, are they a false prophet?

Our church believes that the gift of prophecy is still available today. There’s one man in the church who recently predicted something that didn’t happen. The Bible says in Deuteronomy that if a prophet’s words don’t come true, they’re not genuine. I mean, we’re not going to kill this guy or anything (as it also says to do in Deuteronomy), but is he a false prophet?

I wouldn’t apply a “one strike and you’re out” rule to the question of whether someone who speaks prophetically is genuine. The book of Deuteronomy offers us more than one test of a false prophet. One is that their predictions don’t come true. But another is that even if their predictions do come true, if they then say “let us go after other gods,” they are false prophets and are not to be trusted. The fulfilled prediction is a test of faith for believers. So we aren’t supposed to go exclusively by outcomes, but by whether a prophet’s words and actions point us to the true God.

Since prophecy is a spiritual gift, we should expect that for budding prophets, there will be a “learning curve.” As they learn to use their gift, they will become sharper and more accurate in their prophecies. The corollary is that those who feel called to develop a prophetic gift and calling should be more restrained at the outset, until they develop confidence in their gifting. That’s why I wouldn’t apply a “one strike and you’re out” rule in every case. To me the main test is whether the prophet is calling people faithfully to obedience.

That much said, I have to admit that I lost confidence in a man I had considered a prophet, who made much of the fact that “God had told him” everything he was predicting, when several of his predictions in a row didn’t come true. So there is still something to this test of accuracy.

Another thing to consider is that only a small percentage of prophecy in the Bible is predictive, or “fore-telling.” The rest is exhortation or “forth-telling,” a description of God’s perspective on how the community is conducting itself, rather than a prediction of what God plans to do, whether in mercy or judgment. I would therefore add that a (mature) true prophet will probably come close to these proportions in his or her words to the community.

(A guide to Deuteronomy and Hebrews is available in the Understanding the Books of the Bible series.)

Was Noah’s flood a worldwide event or a local one?

Q. In your Genesis study guide you seem to take for granted that Noah’s flood was a worldwide event. You write, “God must have used some extraordinary means to cause a flood of this magnitude, since ordinary rainfall, even a downpour of forty days, wouldn’t be sufficient to cover all the mountains on earth.” But I’ve heard some people claim instead that this flood was a local event. How would you respond?

You’re right, one school of interpretation does hold that Noah’s flood was a local event in which the waters rose 15 cubits (22 feet) above their usual height, or else this far above their flood stage. This would still be a tremendous flood, but local one. However, the statement in Genesis that the high hills (or mountains) were all covered with water would seem to rule this out.

The statement is actually made within a poetic couplet that’s based on the repetition of meaning, whose second line provides greater focus, as is typical of Hebrew poetry. The couplet can be translated this way:

And the waters were great, exceedingly, exceedingly, upon the earth
and they covered all the high hills that were under the skies;
Five and ten cubits upwards were the waters great
and they covered the high hills.

“All the high hills that were under the skies” are in view, and the claim is that these were covered to a height of 15 cubits, so I think the writer’s intention is to describe a worldwide event.

However, it’s important to remember that all of this is written from an observational perspective. The author of the flood account is reporting that all of the high hills out to the visible horizon (“under the skies”) were covered by the waters. So this would conceivably still allow for a local flood, although it’s being envisioned as a worldwide event.

In either case, however, this would still be a flood of such magnitude that the problem of its mechanism remains. Some extraordinary means must have been responsible, because as I go on to say in the guide, the description of the flood in Genesis, no matter how we interpret it, “doesn’t line up with our modern cosmology. Much of the universe is described here by analogy to things in human experience, so that there are ‘floodgates’ in the sky and ‘springs’ in the ‘great deep.'” So it’s a real challenge to get from the way the author envisioned the created world to the way we understand it today.

I think it’s more profitable to realize that the Genesis account here is describing a wrestling match between the waters and the earth. The waters “were great” or “prevailed” over the earth: “Prevail” in Hebrew is the root GBR, while the adjective “high” applied to the mountains or hills is GBH. Both roots convey the sense of strength and might. In other words, the greatest strength that the earth can muster—supposedly immovable mountains—cannot resist the force that God raises against it.

The flood was sent because almost the entire human race had turned away from God into violence and wickedness, but if they felt nothing could stop them from taking that path, their false sense of security has now been exposed. The story ultimately has a moral lesson, so if the only thing we take away from it is a conclusion about how widespread the flood was, or about how it happened, we’ve missed the point.

For a further discussion of the flood in light of the way the biblical authors envisioned the created world, see this related post.