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Purgatory + Locating the Garden of Eden
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes, Mr. Camping. I've got a couple questions I'd like to ask you. Do you know whether or not the Bible says anything about a place like Purgatory?
HC: The question is raised concerning a place like Purgatory. If you mean a place where there is a second chance, where a person goes and his eternal destiny has not yet been resolved, and there is the possibility that he can come out of that and still go to Heaven, absolutely not. There's nothing like that in the Bible.
If you mean by Purgatory a place where unsaved man goes to await the judgment of the last day, yes, the Bible does speak of Hades. It's called a place of silence. And all of the unsaved, whose sins have not been covered by the blood of Christ, go there. There's no way of getting out. There's no possibility of saving a person who is in Hades. He will be resurrected on the last day to stand for judgment, and then will be cast into hell.
CALLER: I see, okay. The other question I wanted to ask you was, do you know whereabouts the Garden of Eden was here on earth? And I'd also like to ask you a question which relates to another caller. You said that at the end of time there would be no children, and there would be no males and females. I don't understand that statement.
HC: All right. Let me answer your second question first. The question is, in Heaven there will not be males or females, nor will there be children. I answered this, first of all, because of what Jesus said. Remember the Jews tried to snare Him, and they said there was this man who was married, and his wife died, or, no. There was this woman who had a husband, and the husband died. And then, according to Jewish law her brother had to marry her, to raise up seed for her, and so he married her, and he in turn died. And then this went on until seven brothers had all taken their turn in marrying her. And so then they asked Jesus the question. Now in eternity whose wife will she be, having had seven husbands? And then Jesus answered. He said you don't understand the resurrection. In the resurrection there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.
The fact is, the Bible speaks of us as being sons of God when we are saved. The sexual relationship, male and female, the bearing of children, is in the context of time, when God is bringing into existence a great host of people, during a period of 13,000 years, so that all that He planned to save could be saved. This is all in the framework of time.
But once we leave this earth, we're outside of time, and we're in eternity. There is no procreation, there is no multiplication of the human race. We are sons of God, and we remain His sons eternally. Our focal point is not on a wife or a husband, or children. Our focal point is on the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our Lord and whom we serve totally, because we have been made perfect.
I find very frequently in our lives that we are so conditioned by this world that we always think in relationship to this world. We always try to bring our thoughts of this world to bear into eternity. We try to think of eternity in the sense of buildings and cities. We try to think of eternity in terms of marriage, husbands and wives and mothers and fathers, and all of this. But eternity is a new world. It's a brand new existence. We have spiritual bodies. I don't know what spiritual bodies are, but they're like Christ's spiritual body, not like His resurrected body. That wasn't His glorified body. But we will be Like His spiritual body. Remember on the Mount of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah appeared with bodies that glistened. And certainly the disciples didn't see them in their full glory any more than they saw Christ in His full glory at that time. Had they seen Christ in His full glory, they would have perished.
We will have glorious bodies. I don't know what it is, what they're like. only God knows. But it's something that we need not speculate about. It's too wonderful for any words of this world to describe.
Well, the other question is concerning the location of the Garden of Eden. Now the Bible uses some very interesting language that makes us think that we might know where the Garden of Eden was. We read in Genesis 2 that there were four rivers around the Garden of Eden. It says in verse 14, "The name of the third river is Idikel, that is, it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates." And then in verse 13 it says, "The name of the second river is Guyan, the same as that that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia."
Now these are names that are common in the world: Ethiopia, Assyria, Euphrates. They're all common names. And so immediately we think that the Garden of Eden must have been somewhere in the location of these countries.
We must, however, keep our bearings. We must keep our perspective. The Garden of Eden existed 13,000 years ago. It existed at a time when there was one continent. Later on, 6000 years later, in the Flood of Noah's day, the whole world was utterly destroyed by a flood that changed the appearance of the world to a very high degree, inasmuch as there was a great amount of mountain building, and so on.
A couple of thousand years later the earth was divided. We read about this in Genesis 10. In the days of Peleg the earth was divided. At that time the continent was split up into the continents that we have today. So there were vast changes in the continents since the days of the Garden of Eden.
The fact that we see these names—Euphrates, Ethiopia, Assyria—does not mean that it relates to present day Ethiopia, Euphrates River, or Assyria. But it simply means that these names were selected by the descendants of Noah when they gave names to a river or to a land, or to a people. These were names that were carried down from father to son through the generations as being identified with the Garden of Eden, and then would have been given to a river, which now is called the Euphrates River, or given to a land, which is now called Ethiopia, or given to a land which is now called Assyria, or as was called Assyria in the days of the Bible.
The river Euphrates that now exists, the land of Assyria, or the land of Ethiopia, does not relate to the Garden of Eden, not in any way, except that these names were chosen that originally related to the Garden of Eden. There's too much change in the continents that has occurred to permit this possibility.