Jack Pelham

1 When God began to create heaven and earth—2 the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—3 God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

Jewlish Publication Society Translation. 1985.

Dr. Michael Heiser gives an intriguing talk about this JPS translation of verses 1-3 in the video below. I’ve been considering it for some years, and will continue working on it for as long as I’m alive, I suppose. (And there is controversy about this—as there is about nearly everything.)

I have copied the passage here because it comes up so often that I needed a ready place from which to retrieve it. In case the video doesn’t render below, you can see it at YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diEzuGvDjU0

With a tone that showed her puzzlement, and perhaps a bit of apology, along with something else on which he could not quite put his finger at first, she admitted to him, “I just don’t know why anybody would want to think as much about as many things as you do.”

As he shuns that particular virtue called patience—

Thinking that while it might be nice to stop and get it,
He cannot afford any delay in his valiant quest to
Get on with the important business of life—

He has no idea that it is the very key to
The locked doors at which he will spend
Years of his life standing and waiting
In sour aggravation.

I’m writing this post simply to ask a pivotal question that affects the way we interpret Revelation 21-22:

What did the author mean to convey by the phrase in boldface below? Was he talking about one thing or about two things?

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

Revelation 21:1. ESV

In other words, is the idea here that there was a new system—a new whole, comprised of what used to be two separate parts? Or were the two parts still separate, stand-alone objects in his mind?

Coming soon.

Let us imagine the day
On which the world
Had finally tired
Of its lying.

I had been troubled
That an old friend was mad at me
For my slowness to do as promised—
And adding to my procrastination
About important matters,
In my delay, I had hoped alternately
That he his silence had been
Simply because he was busy—
And then again that he must be mad—

When he is called to heaven
To have that meeting of a lifetime—

He, being mistreated,
Is not content to attribute it
To wickedness alone,
But has learned by example
To frame it in terms of
The groups to which he
And the mistreater belong.

Thus is he ever ready
To assume this spirit of faction
Upon everyone in the other group,
And upon their every motive—
Even when they had come in kindness.

And this, of course, is wickedness itself,
Which he counts not as sin but necessity,
On account of belonging to his own group,
Victim that it always is.

What would it be like
If all the sin were suddenly to stop?