Hey everybody. I'm Tim Mackie, and this is my podcast, exploring my strange Bible. I am a card-carrying

Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you

have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 20 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've

been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission

of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can all be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts and classes about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find all those resources at Bibleproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week.

All right, in this episode, we're going to tackle part two of a four-part series on heaven and hell.

So if you haven't listened to the previous episode, I recommend you doing so,

or else this is going to feel like a bolt out of the blue. So this was a four-part lecture series

that I did a number of years ago, bringing together lots of years of reading and reflecting

on what the Bible is trying to tell us about these ideas of heaven and hell and eternal life and eternal

death. Most of these ideas aren't even mine. I just collected what I thought were a bunch of

the best scholarship and thinking and observations mixed with my own observations and kind of

synthesized it into these lectures. In this part two, after exploring and really pondering Genesis

1 through 3 and its concepts of human life and human death, what we're going to do in this

lecture is, first of all, tackle the biblical word heaven or heavens and what that means and what

it doesn't mean. From there, we'll go on to tackle the language

about life and death throughout the rest of the Bible. And what you'll see is, it's actually

...