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There are three
different words in the New Testament Greek that are translated
“hell” in the King James Bible. They do not mean the same thing, but
nonetheless, they are translated in the same way, because men did
not want to make the distinction. The three words are: Hades,
Gehenna, and Tartarus.
Hades is translated “hell” 10 times and “grave”
once; Gehenna is translated “hell” 12 times; and Tartarus appears in
its verb form, tartaroo (“to cast into Tartarus”) just
once in 2 Peter 2:4. Two of these words (Hades and Tartarus) are
from the Greek language. The non-Christian Greeks themselves applied
these terms in their own way according to their own religious view.
We cannot, of course, apply the Greek meaning of these terms to
Christianity or to the Bible.
Tartarus in Greek
mythology was a place below Hades, reserved for those who had
affronted the gods, which was considered to deserve a worse
punishment. For example, Tantalus stole Zeus' ambrosia and was
consigned to Tartarus, where he was made to stand in a pool of
water. But each time in his thirst he reached out to take a drink,
the water would recede from him. There were also trees laden with
fruit, but whenever he reached out to pick the fruit, it would
recede from him. We get our word “tantalize” from this Greek
myth.
We ought not to
conceive of Tartarus in the way the Greeks defined it, but we must
think of it in terms of the place where God confined “the angels
that sinned” in Genesis 6:2. This word Tartarus appears only once in
the New Testament, and it appears only in its verb form. 2 Peter 2:4
says,
4 For if God did not spare
angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell
[Tartarus] and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved
for judgment; 5 and did not spare the ancient world,
but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness. . .
. In Peter's first
letter he made reference to these “angels” without actually using
the word Tartarus. He wrote in 1 Peter 3:18-20,
18 For Christ also died for
sins once for all, the just for the unjust, in order that He might
bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made
alive in the spirit; 19 in which also He went
and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison,
20 who once were disobedient, when the patience of God
kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the
ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely
through the water. We have to make one correction in the NASB
translation above. The phrase “went and” in verse 19 is NOT in the
original Greek text. It does NOT say that He WENT AND preached, as
if to conjure up the image of a circuit-riding preacher. The text
actually reads that Jesus was “made alive in the spirit; in which
[resurrected body] also He made proclamation to the spirits
now in prison.” In other words He was raised from the dead as a
life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:45) and given a resurrected body, in
which He made His proclamation to the spirits in prison—that is, in
Tartarus. His very resurrection (or embodiment) was the
proclamation. His resurrection into a physical body made of flesh
and bone (Luke 24:39) was the proclamation of His enthronement over
all, including the angels that sinned (or “spirits in
prison”). It was proclaimed
that Jesus is King over all the earth, that all creation was subject
to Him, and that He had been given a Name above every name. A few
verses later, Peter confirms this in 1 Peter 3:22,
22 who is at the right hand
of God, having gone into heaven, after angels and authorities
and powers had been subjected to Him. His resurrection
subjected all things to Him, including the angels that sinned. In
essence, that is when the proclamation went forth into all the earth
and to Tartarus itself that He was Lord of all, that He had been
given a name above every name in heaven, in earth, and under the
earth (Phil. 2:10).
The angels that
sinned back in Genesis 6:2-4 were called “sons of God” in contrast
to the “daughters of men.” This term, “sons of God” refers to
spiritual beings that have access to the heavens—in contrast to
earth-bound fleshly creatures. Thus we see the “sons of God”
standing before God in Job 1:6. In the New Testament the term is
used to describe men and women who can “become the sons of God”
(John 1:12) through Jesus Christ.
Genesis 6:2 also says that these sons of God took
“the daughters of men” as wives and produced children by them. The
Hebrew word for “men” is awdawm, or Adam, which is the usual
word for men or mankind. When the Bible refers to the man Adam
himself, it says ha-awdawm, or “the (man) Adam.”
The article “the” makes the term specific. Dr. Bullinger points out
in The Companion Bible, Appendix 14,
“Adam,
without the article, denotes man or mankind in general (Gen. 1:26;
2:5; 5:1). With the article, it denotes the man, Adam. . .
.”
With this
in mind, let us read Genesis 6:1, 2,
1 Now it came about, when
Adam [ha-awdawm] began to multiply on the face of
the land, and daughters were born to them [Adam and Eve, Gen.
1:27; 5:2] 2 that the sons of God saw that the
daughters of Adam [ha-awdawm] were beautiful; and
they took wives for themselves, whomever they
chose. Adam and Eve had both sons and daughters. Adam's
daughters were beautiful, and these angels took them as wives. Verse
4 says that they had children by them. Ultimately, the earth was so
corrupted by this genetic mixture that God sent the flood to destroy
them. Only Noah was found to be “perfect in his genealogy” (Gen. 6:9,
literal). God's motive is given in Genesis 6:3, which reads
literally,
3 My Spirit will not always
[olam] strive (as in court) with the
(man) Adam in their straying, because he also is flesh . .
. In other words,
though these other spirits (fallen angels) would attempt to fulfill
the prophecies by their own cohabitation with women on earth, the
Spirit of God will intervene and not allow this to happen. The
flood, then, was designed to thwart these fallen angels in their
design.
The question
immediately arises: How can spiritual beings (angels) have children
with physical women on earth? The answer is that all through the
Bible we have examples of angels manifesting as men. In Genesis 18
we read that three “men” came to Abraham on their way to Sodom.
Abraham fed them, and they prophesied that Sarah would have a child
in the following year.
Two of them then
continued toward Sodom, but one of the “men” stayed behind to tell
Abraham of Sodom's coming destruction. Hence we read in Genesis 19:1
that only two of them actually arrived in Sodom:
1 Now the tw o angels came
to Sodom in the evening as Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. .
. They had
manifested themselves in human flesh and were recognized as such
even by the people of Sodom, as the story shows. They even ate with
Lot (Gen. 19:3) as they had eaten with Abraham.
Angels are said
to often appear in human flesh. Other examples include the angel
that appeared to Balaam in Numbers 22:31 and another to Manoah and
his wife in Judges 13. If spirits have the ability to manifest in
human flesh, and if they can even eat food, then it follows that
they could also have the ability to have sexual relations with women
and even to produce children by them. Of course, they only had this
ability after taking human flesh.
These angels were called Nephilim, or
“giants” in Genesis 6:4. This is the plural form of nephil,
“a feller,” or one who cuts others down; hence, a bully or tyrant.
The root word is naphal, “to fall.” This is probably the
origin of the idea of “fallen” angels. Though Nephilim applies primarily to their actions
in cutting down others, it carries this secondary meaning of having
been felled by God in the flood.
The angels are
thus “fallen,” but this is not to enter into the debate about
whether or not angels have free will. That is a separate question.
If angels do have free will, then they fell of their own free will.
If not, then they were caused to fall for purposes known fully by
God alone. We must limit our scope for now to the simple assertion
that they are “fallen.” The nature of their “fall” in the sense of
their disobedience is given in Jude 6,
6 And angels who did not
keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper
abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the
judgment of the great day. In other words,
these angels desired to become flesh and dwell with the daughters of
Adam. Why? Because angels are spirits, and they have the ability to
manifest in flesh, but what they did not have was a soul. Nowhere in
the Bible do we find that angels were given souls. The soul is in
the blood, Leviticus 17:11 tells us. Angels do not have blood. They
coveted a soul in order to gain authority over the earth, for God
made man a living soul (Gen. 2:7) and gave man dominion over the
earth (Genesis 1:26). In that sense, angels “fell” from heaven to
earth—but then fell from earth to Tartarus.
Jude then relates the fallen angels to Sodom and
Gomorrah, where the people “indulged in gross immorality and went
after strange flesh” (Jude 7). The term “strange flesh” simply means
foreign flesh—that is, in the Biblical sense, forbidden sexual
relations or marriages. The angels were not allowed to marry the
daughters of men, even as the men of Sodom were not allowed to marry
other men in homosexual unions. This is, of course, one of the major
social and moral issues facing us today. In the name of liberty we
are once again going the way of Sodom.
Another intriguing question is the fact that Jesus
said the last days would be “as in the days of Noah” (Matt.
24:37). We know that there were Nephilim
even AFTER the flood, for Genesis 6:4 says,
4 The Nephilim were on the
earth in those days, and also afterward [Heb. ken, “to
set upright; correct”], when the sons of God came in to the
daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the
mighty men [Heb. gibbor] who were of old men of
renown. So we see that even after God brought correction by
means of the flood, there were Nephilim who again took the
daughters of men and had more children by them. The
Nephilim's children thereafter usually were called
Gibbor, “mighty men,” and Rephaim, from rapha,
“to heal, invigorate.” The twelve spies in Israel saw these
Nephilim when
they spied out the land, and this is what made the people most
afraid to enter the land at that time. We read of this in Numbers
13:32, 33,
32 So they gave out to the
sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out,
saying, The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is
a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the men whom we saw
in it are men of great size. 33 There also we saw the
Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Gibbor); and we
became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their
sight. This verse equates the Nephilim with the
Gibbor. Joshua destroyed most of the Anakim in Joshua 11:21, 22,
21 Then Joshua came at that
time and cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron,
from Debir, from Anab and from all the hill country of Judah and
from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua utterly destroyed them
with their cities. 22 There were no Anakim left in the
land of the sons of Israel; only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod
some remained. Some yet remained
until the time of David. Goliath of Gath came from this family of
Anak, where some of these giants remained. David slew Goliath, and
in a later battle Goliath's brother was killed along with their sons
(1 Chron. 20:5-8).
If we are living
now in the days comparable to those of Noah, then perhaps this may
have bearing on the question of UFO's and so-called
“extra-terrestrials.” If these really do exist, claiming to be from
other star systems, then the most logical explanation from a
Biblical standpoint would be that they are a reappearance of the
conditions during the days of Noah. But it is far beyond the scope
of this study to continue down that path of inquiry.
By way of
contrast and comparison, in the New Testament the angel Gabriel
(representing God) came to Mary (Luke 1:26), and impregnated her by
the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:18, 20). She then gave birth to Jesus,
the Word made flesh. This was done at the command of God and at the
proper time according to the plan of God. So it was done in the
lawful manner.
It is apparent,
then, that the angels who sinned in Genesis had attempted to
counterfeit the incarnation of Christ. It was an attempt to usurp
authority in the earth, for this was one reason Jesus had to be born
through a daughter of Adam. Adam had been delegated dominion over
the earth (Genesis 1:26). He did not subject the world to angels
(Heb. 2:5), but rather to “the son of man (Adam).” But the purpose
of the fallen angels was to bring forth a seed (false Christ) having
a fallen angel as his father and a daughter of Adam as his mother
(Gen. 6:2).
Jesus was the
“Son of Adam,” called also the Last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45). Unlike the
angels that sinned, Jesus was willing to pay the price by dying on
the Cross, in order to give man immortal flesh. In His resurrection
Jesus had a body of flesh and bone (Luke 24:39) but was no longer
limited by this new spiritual flesh. He could change at will into a
spiritual form and, as it were, “go to heaven.” The purpose of
creation was to manifest the glory of God in both heaven and earth.
This He achieved in a lawful manner, whereas the angels who tried to
do this in Genesis 6 failed because they sinned—that is, they did it
unlawfully.
And so when He at last triumphed over death itself,
His resurrection proclaimed final defeat to the N
ephilim. Also, in Genesis
6 the angels' motive was to subject mankind to their despotic rule.
But Jesus' motive was to set men free by His rule.
So first, it is clear from 2 Peter 2:4 that the
angels that sinned were put into a prison of darkness to await their
judgment. We also read in 1 Peter 3:18-20 that Jesus' resurrection
proclaimed to “the spirits now in prison” that He was King
of the earth. The angels were the first to attempt to usurp the
throne by unlawful means. They took the daughters of Adam as wives
in order to lay claim to authority over the earth. But God destroyed
the earth by a flood and imprisoned them in chains of
darkness.
So it is obvious
in studying this more carefully that Peter was not talking about
Jesus preaching to men in Hades, but about a proclamation to the
spirits or angels enchained in Tartarus.
It has long been
taught—based upon these verses—that Jesus went to Hades and preached
a sermon to the dead. Hades, they say, is divided into two
compartments: Hell for the unbelievers, and Paradise for the
believers. Then after three days of preaching, Jesus rose from the
dead, emptying Paradise of believers, and taking them to heaven with
Him at His ascension.
All of this is a
nice legend, but unfortunately, it is based primarily upon Peter's
statements that we have already quoted. And here we run into a
problem, because Peter was not referring to men in Hades but of the
angels (or spirits) that sinned. But as we will see in chapter
three, Jesus went to Hades, but did not preach any sermons
there.
Tartarus, then,
is not the place where men are judged either before or after the
Great White Throne Judgment. Peter's Tartarus differs from Greek
mythology, yet the Bible borrows the Greek terminology in order to
describe a place that is different from Hades, the place where
“spirits” and “angels” are imprisoned.
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