The waters compassed
me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were
wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth
with her bars was about me for ever (לְעוֹלָ֑ם); yet has thou brought up my
life from corruption, O Lord my God. (Jonah 2:5-6)
The word used to describe Jonah’s time in the belly of
the sea beast (verse 2: “belly of hell” AKJV, “the depth of Sheol” NASB, “belly
of Sheol” for NKJV, to give a few examples) is “forever,” and as stated, from
what I can tell, this is the word (“forever”) used in virtually every Bible
translation, ancient to modern: all of them discuss Jonah existing in some sort
of state of forever.
But what is quite notable is that Jonah’s time
(“forever”) of being in the underworld, where he is in a fainting-annihilation
state, is that this time of “forever” was only for three days. This is
precisely the situation we saw above: the annihilation of the consciousness
and/or soul is discussed as being forever (everlasting, eternal, etc.), but it
is not, since on the timeline, it is only a gap between two lives: a
corrupted life, and a life coming out of corruption. It does not appears that
Jonah’s time in the underworld, the deep, was leading into the Eschaton, and
this reveals that people can go in-and-out of annihilation phases, before the
annihilation phase that leads into the Eschaton (which is the annihilation
phase that immediately follows body-death). But our concern here is not that,
but rather is why Jonah was described as being in the underworld forever, when
he was only there for three days.
. . .
. . . in Jonah chapter 2, we see that a three-day span is
referred to as being forever, where critics of Scripture may claim this
is a contradiction: unending time happening within finite amount of time. But
the paradox appears only if one is only considering infinity of
experience to be to have a temporal duration, flowing across and through the
horizontal timeline, rather than being a break, a gap, in the
timeline, functioning as some sort of an underworld interruption to
Jonah’s traversing the timeline: a temporal deepening, of time moving
vertically downward, and into the timestream/timeline, or like a ceasing
(like a hole or pit) in the timeline, in the stream of consciousness. This
vertical infinity we are defining as being the underworld state, or
annihilation state, between the two time-points of (1) the fainting, or
the loss of consciousness and ceasing to exist of the consciousness and/or soul
before salvation, and (2) the resurrection of the self, the soul, for the
infinity of the afterlife on the other side. Regardless of its nature, it is
described as “forever” in Jonah 2. (Jeff
Grupp, "Evangelical Calvinist Universal Salvation: The Unchosen Saved by
the Consuming Fire (YHWH) at the Eschaton" [MA Thesis; The Seminary at
Lincoln Christian University, April 2023], 86. 87-88)
One was reminded of Mosiah 27:28,
31; Alma 36:18, 29, as well as D&C 76:33, 44 (the current text reads in
eternity, but
the original manuscript reads throughout eternity).
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