As adjectives the difference between brimstone and sulfuris that brimstone is composed of or resemblingbrimstone; about or pertaining to hell while sulfur is of a yellowish green colour, like that of sulfur.
Sulfur? It melts at 115.21 °C (239.38 °F), boils at 444.6 °C (832.3 °F) and sublimes easily.
Brimstone?
Brim·stone/ˈbrimˌstōn/noun
- ARCHAIC sulfur.
- A bright yellow butterfly or moth.
If the stench is of rotten eggs, it might just be the fault of sulfur. This bright yellow element, known in theBible as “brimstone,” is abundant in nature, and was used for a variety of purposes in ancient times. … For example, sulfur compounds called mercaptans give skunks their defensive odor.
We here must describe things as we see them. It has amazed me that The Bible is written by those moved to ‘share’ the inspiration they have been blessed with. Just what is said? What is written is understood and written by Man. Would you say you are error free?
Was Man writing at the time of Adam? Yes! Learning is and was key. Art? Are there records of art from those times? The earliest undisputed artoriginated with the Homo sapiens Aurignacian archaeological culture in the Upper Paleolithic. However, there is some evidence that the preference for the aesthetic emerged in the Middle Paleolithic, from 100,000 to 50,000 years ago.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/73716/15-gorgeous-cave-paintings
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-9-most-baffling-passages-in-the-bible-and-what-the-1481755445
Let us re-examine His-Story. Adam’s name appears first in Genesis 1 with a collective sense, as “mankind”; subsequently in Genesis 2–3 it carries the definite article ha, equivalent to English “the”, indicating that this is “the man”.
In God’s Image. A Six-pack? Hands? Feet? We started off with the realization that we cannot understand many of the things that are now.
Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! 1 Corinthians 13:9
The Essence of God passed by where Moses was placed in the cleft of rock.
When My glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with My Hand until I have passed by.
Exodus 33:22
Again, ‘Hand?’ Our limited understanding. https://www.treadingwatertiljesuscomes.com/2016/03/04/moses-covered-by-the-hand-of-god/
Again, our understanding is limited. I have sought to attempt to understand exactly what is shared, and have come away with a limited understanding. Again, from our perspective we attempt to understand The Creator. God’s Word Created ALL! We are created in His image. Differences among man? Color, height, weight… We are stuck on the physical!
We all have a “Mind”; associated are feelings, emotions… No matter where we are from! We have touched on where what ‘feels’ goes after we pass away in the physical? Deep? Yes. But, a valid question. If God does not have a Six-Pack, difficult to understand Him, or the Concept of God.
We understand per our grasp of concepts that are known to us. A Throne? The Throne of God is the reigning centre ofGod in the Abrahamic religions: primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The throneis said by various holy books to reside beyond the Seventh Heaven and is called Araboth in Judaism, and al-‘Arsh in Islam.
How does an Essence ‘sit’. The Essence IS everywhere. When we as believers attempt to understand something as ‘simple‘ as The Spirit!
1. The Spirit of God like a fire is burning!
The latter-day glory begins to come forth;
The visions and blessings of old are returning,
And angels are coming to visit the earth.
We’ll sing and we’ll shout with the armies of heaven,
Hosanna, hosanna to God and the Lamb!
Let glory to them in the highest be given,
Henceforth and forever, Amen and amen!
2. The Lord is extending the Saints’ understanding,
Restoring their judges and all as at first.
The knowledge and power of God are expanding;
The veil o’er the earth is beginning to burst.
3. We’ll call in our solemn assemblies in spirit,
To spread forth the kingdom of heaven abroad,
That we through our faith may begin to inherit
The visions and blessings and glories of God.
4. How blessed the day when the lamb and the lion
Shall lie down together without any ire,
And Ephraim be crowned with his blessing in Zion,
As Jesus descends with his chariot of fire!
https://www.epm.org/blog/2018/Jun/13/gods-presence-essence-heaven
All children have the powerful capacity to imagine. It’s what makes their early years so interesting, surprising, delightful, captivating, innocent and wonderful. Sadly, as we grow into adulthood and the real concerns of life – like relationships, employment, finances, diet, and so forth – fill our minds and control our hearts, our ability to imagine dims.
IMAGINATION AND FAITH
When it comes to the Christian faith, a religious system centered on surrendering your life to a God whom you cannot see, touch or hear, imagination becomes a vital element.
Let me give you a brief definition of imagination as it pertains to faith: imagination is not the ability to conjure up what is unreal, but the capacity to see what is real but unseen.
To enable us to imagine, God has given us a dual sight system. We not only see physical things with our physical eyes, but we have another set of eyes: the eyes of the heart. God has given us this set of eyes so we can “see” the unseen world of spiritual reality.
The problem, though, is that the sin that infects our heart also renders us spiritually blind. What the eyes of our hearts need to see they cannot see, so God blesses us with the light-shining, sight-giving, eye-opening ministry of the Holy Spirit so we can “see” what cannot be seen with the physical eyes, but is every bit as real.
All of this is critical to understand before I begin to unpack the doctrine of holiness. Why? Because I’m very aware that what we’re about to consider is dependent upon the illumining ministry of the Spirit of God to open the eyes of our heart to see.
The doctrine of holiness is so far beyond anything in our ordinary experience that we have no comparisons or categories to help us understand it.
HOLY, HOLY, HOLY
If you’re a Christian and at all biblically literate, you will know that the Bible, without equivocation, claims that God is holy. Isaiah 6:3 provides the most potent declaration. The prophet Isaiah, at the moment of his calling, received of vision of the Lord sitting on his throne with seraphim on either side, and one seraph called to the other seraph and said, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (ESV)
Don’t cruise past the repetitive emphasis made in this declaration. It wasn’t enough for the seraph to say, “God is holy.” No, the seraph had to employ the word “holy” three times to capture the depth and breadth of God’s holiness.
It’s as if I were to say to you, “I saw this guy at the ballgame who was huge, huge, huge!” You would know right away that this was not an average big guy. Because of my repetitive emphasis on the word “huge” you would be forced to imagine that this guy was the biggest guy I ever saw in my life!
In the same way, “holy, holy, holy” is meant to stretch the boundaries of your imagination. Whatever you think of when you hear that God is holy, you need to know that God is in an entirely different category of holiness; he is much holier than you ever thought holiness could be.
But even “holy, holy, holy” was not enough for the seraph as he tried to capture God’s holiness. He had to add, “The whole earth is filled with his glory.”
How great is the holiness of this Lord of hosts? Great enough to fill the whole earth! Again, these words are crafted under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to take your imagination where it has never gone. They’re meant to blow your mind with the thought that God is unlike anything you have ever encountered. They’re meant to humble you with the realization that God is fundamentally different from you. They’re intended to help you understand that who you’re dealing with is Someone greater than anyone and everyone you have ever dealt with before.
The Lord of hosts is holy, holy, holy, earth-filling and gloriously holy. He is holy, holy, holy.
I want you to stop reading for a moment. Pray right now that the eyes of your heart would open, and that somehow, someway you would get even a little glimpse of the mind-blowing grandeur of his holiness.
Seeing his holiness will change you and the way you live forever. I’ll explain how in a minute, but we still have some doctrine left to unpack.
WHAT IS HOLINESS?
Our translation for holiness comes from the Hebrew word qadowsh which means “to cut.” To be holy means to be cut off, or separate, from everything else. It means to be in a class of your own, distinct from anything that has ever existed or will ever exist. Qadowsh means a second thing: to be holy means to be entirely morally pure, all the time and in every way possible.
When you put these two elements of holiness together, you’re left with only one conclusion: that the Lord of hosts is the sum and definition of what it means to be holy. He occupies a moral space that no one has ever occupied before, and as such, we have no experience or frame of reference to understand what he is like because there’s nothing like him.
Exodus 15:11 asks, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” (ESV) 1 Samuel 2:2 declares, “There is none holy like the Lord: for there is none besides you; there is no rock like our God.” (ESV)
There’s even more to be said. God’s holiness is not an aspect of who he is or what he does; no, God’s holiness is the essence of who he is. If you were to ask, “How is the holiness of God revealed?” the only right answer would be, “In everything he does.” Everything God thinks, desires, speaks and does is utterly holy in every way.
God is holy in every attribute and every action: He is holy in justice. He is holy in love. He is holy in mercy. He is holy in power. He is holy in sovereignty. He is holy in wisdom. He is holy in patience. He is holy in anger. He is holy in grace. He is holy in faithfulness. He is holy in compassion.
He is even holy in his holiness!
WHY HOLINESS MATTERS
At this point, if you’re anything like me, you’re probably thinking something along these lines: “OK, I get that God is holy. I’m not entirely sure how to define his holiness, but the Bible declares it to be true. So what’s next? How does this big doctrine impact my real life?”
First and foremost, the doctrine of the holiness of God sits at the center of the grand narrative of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Without the holiness of God, there would be no moral law to which every human being is responsible. Without the holiness of God, there would be no divine anger with sin. Without the holiness of God, there would be no perfect Son sent as an acceptable sacrifice for sin. Without the holiness of God, there would have been no vindication of the Resurrection. Without the holiness of God, there would be no final defeat of Satan. Without the holiness of God, there would be no hope of a new heaven and earth where holiness will reign over us and in us forever.
Yes, it really is true that the biblical story would not be the biblical story if it were not written and controlled at every point by One who is holy all the time and in every way.
But let me make this even more practical. God’s holiness impacts you in three life-shaping ways:
Holiness Provides Comfort
In a world that seems so out of control, that seems so evil, where wrong seems to be rewarded and right often seems to be punished, it’s vital to remember the holiness of God.
Every situation, location or relationship that you have been in, are now in and will be in is under the careful sovereignty of the One who is completely holy. At street level, it often won’t seem this way, but your Lord is ruling. What he does is always right. What he says is always true. What he promises he will always deliver.
You have to preach this message to yourself over and over again: evil is not in control. Injustice does not rule. Corruption is not king. Satan will not have victory. God is, and will always be, worthy of your trust for this one reason: he is holy.
With holy power he will defeat every evil thing that has made our lives sad and difficult and deliver us forever to a world free of all that is wrong.
Holiness Induces Rebuke
To discover another impact that the holiness of God has in real life, we need to return to Isaiah 6. Look at the prophet’s response to his startling vision in verse 5: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (ESV)
Isaiah doesn’t have a “wow” response to God’s holiness. Yes, he is blown away, but blown away in brokenness because he recognizes how morally separated he is from the Lord. It’s only in the face of the holiness of God that you and I, like Isaiah, will ever be broken by the disaster of the sin that lives within us.
You see, we have a problem: sin doesn’t always appear sinful to us; often, it’s attractive and magnetic. It’s only in the face of the holiness of God that you fully realize that sin is more than a list of bad behaviors and more than breaking a set of abstract rules. Rather, sin is a disastrous condition of the heart that causes us to willingly and repeatedly rebel against the authority of God and do what we were never intended to do.
It’s the holiness of God that tells us that since we cannot escape ourselves, we all need a Savior who can do what we can’t – rescue us from us. You simply cannot consider the holiness of God without also mourning your sin and crying out for the grace of Jesus.
Holiness Defines Calling
Because holiness is the essence of God’s character, it becomes our calling as his children by inheritance. Peter says: “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.'” (1 Peter 1:14-16, ESV)
Here’s the best way to understand it: you are holy, and you have been called to be holy. If you are God’s child, you stand before him as righteous because the perfect righteousness of Jesus has been given over to your personal account. But there’s a second aspect of this – you are holy because you have been bought with the blood of Jesus and you are not your own (see 1 Corinthians 6:19, 20.)
To say you are holy means that you have been set apart by God’s grace for God’s purpose. Your allegiance is no longer to the kingdom of your success and happiness, but to the progress of his kingdom of glory and grace. And where do you do this? You do this wherever you are, whomever you’re with and in whatever you’re doing.
There’s a third and final aspect: you have been called to holy living. This means that between the “already” of your conversion and the “not yet” of your home-going, obedience matters. Every thought, every desire, every word, every choice and every action must be done in a spirit of humble surrender to the commands of God.
As you consider the impossibility of this call, take time to remember that God never calls you to a task without enabling you to do it. God calls us to be holy, then sends his Holy Spirit to live inside of us so that we would have the wisdom and strength that we need to surrender to his holy call in all that we do.
CELEBRATE HOLINESS
Where does a discussion of the holiness of God lead us? It leads us to celebrate his grace.
Because of his grace, we know that our Lord is holy. Because of his grace, we’re accepted and not rejected by him. Because of his grace, we’re comforted by his holy rule. Because of his grace, we become aware of the gravity of the sin that infects all of us. Because of his grace, we run to God for help and not away from him in fear.
Because of His grace, God appointed his perfect Son to be the perfect sacrifice for imperfect people. Because of his grace operating within us, we experience both the conviction of sin and a desire to live holy lives. Because of His grace, we have been invited to live in God’s holy presence forever and ever.
The holiness of God decimates our autonomy and self-sufficiency and drives us to the Savior, who alone is able, by his life and death, to unite unholy people to a holy God. God reveals his holiness to us not as a warning that we should run from him in eternal terror, but as a welcome to us to run to him, where weak and failing sinners always find grace that lasts forever.
With the last sentence it wakes up another flake. In the period of unconsciousness, there is no knowledge or experience of what keeps the conscious world ‘scheduled’. Why? Is the question? We experience in wakefulness the warmth of the sun, light of day, dark of night. If there is the absence of changing stimuli – light, temperature all is the same ‘period’.
It is a bit complex to break this down! Daytime/Night define ‘Time’. In the absence of ‘change’, how are things measured?
https://www.compellingtruth.org/time-in-heaven.html
Benjamin Franklin reminded us that time is “the stuff life is made of.” Our earthly existence is marked by time. We “waste” it and “spend” it and “save” it; we have “time on our hands,” or we “make up for lost time”; we speak of those who have “all the time in the world,” while others are “running out of time”; and, then, “when our time is up,” we exit this world. What about in heaven? Will we still experience time as we do now? The short answer is we really don’t know.
First, let’s be clear that, when we say “heaven,” we are referring to the dwelling place of God. Revelation 21:3–4 says, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” The chapter goes on to describe the New Jerusalem, where believers will dwell for eternity.
Some argue that we will not experience time in heaven because we are told, “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp” (Revelation 21:23; see also Revelation 22:5). If the cycle of day and night is done away with, perhaps that signals the end of time—or at least our measurement of time. Also, we know that God exists apart from time (2 Peter 3:8), so perhaps those dwelling with Him will also be outside of time.
However, others point to what seem to be clear references to experiencing time in heaven. For instance, Revelation 8:1 says, “There was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” Was the “half an hour” simply John’s measurement of the period of silence from an earth-bound perspective, or did the residents of heaven also realize the passage of time?
Those in heaven appear to be aware of the passage of time on earth, and they may even describe it as “long.” Revelation 6:9–10 says, “I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’” Without a doubt, how long is a time-related phrase. These examples occur prior to the eternal state, but they may support the idea that time factors into our existence in the dwelling place of God.
Revelation 22:1–5, speaks of the New Jerusalem: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. . . . There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.” The mention of “every month” and “for ever and ever” indicates the passage of time. One might suggest that John was only able to explain his vision in time-bound terms, and that his words do not exactly represent the reality of the vision. However, month is still a time-related word.
When God created the world, He created time—there was a “beginning” (Genesis 1:1). He called the creation, including the reality of time, “very good” (Genesis 1:31). It seems, then, that time is something good and well-suited for God’s creation. As part of God’s creation, we are subject to time. Will that change in eternity? We cannot be sure.
Heaven is beyond our understanding. But we can rest in the fact that our God is good and what He has prepared for us is good. “He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ He said to me: ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children’” (Revelation 21:5–7).
https://www.lifeway.com/en/articles/pastor-questioning-heaven
Heaven is hard to conceptualize in terms of space and time. For instance: What kind of memories will we retain? Given that our lives are riddled with sin, the bad things we have done, as well as the bad things that have been done to us, are a large part of who we are. That is true even when we accept God’s free offer of forgiveness, since we cannot simply eliminate our memories without falsifying our identities.
Some theologians picture heaven’s temporality as a timeless point of the pure presence of God, but an eternal now never changes and thus makes no room for making new memories and offers no reason for retrieving old ones. But if the resurrection is a resurrection of the body, then that body will move through a new kind of space—and, therefore, a new kind of time.
Redeemed time will liberate us from the ways in which we are bound to our past as well as anxious about the future, but we will still be the same person, which means we will still have basically the same earthly memory. Even assuming that we can make new memories in our eternal existence, the new will not simply replace the old. How will we be able to remember the past in heaven in ways that do justice to the sequential relations of time and yet do not grant the past any negative power over the present?
Surely we will be free to move through time in ways similar to how we will be free to move through space, although it is much easier to imagine spatial freedom than temporal freedom. On earth, we are more bound to time than space. We can travel in any direction, but the past is, as they say, a foreign country we can never visit. True, we can change how we interpret the past. When we give or receive forgiveness, for example, we can come to terms with sinful actions in our past, but the facts regarding past events remain the same. As much as we might wish that some event had not happened, or that we could change the consequences of some past action, the past remains both a part of us and something beyond our reach. Causality, simply put, does not work backwards. As a result, past sinful actions can still cause us to feel regret or resignation, even if we do not feel guilty of sin or judged by God.
The idea of temporal parts can go a long way toward making sense of the redemption of time. Also known as four dimensionalism and temporal perdurance, this idea assumes that just as we have parts that exist in space, we have parts that exist over time. We are the sum of our temporal parts, even though not every one of those parts is essential for our identity. Conversely, none of our temporal parts is the whole of who we are. As four dimensional wholes, we are never simply the person who exists at a single point in time.
Temporal parts theorists reject the idea that things are real only when they exist in the present. They argue instead that all the temporal parts of a person (or object) carry the same ontological weight, even though all of these parts exist at different times: The ongoing person that I am does not have access to all of these temporal parts in the same way that I have access to my spatial parts.
The idea of temporal parts challenges some of our intuitions about earthly existence, but it just might make a lot of sense about what life will be like in heaven. Think of heaven as the place where the ontological equality of temporal parts becomes absolutely real, or, in other words, where the spacetime continuum becomes the ordinary reality of our extraordinary existence, so that time becomes a functional dimension of space. In heaven, we will be able to move through time (in any direction) more easily than we now move through space.
How will our freedom to move through time help us with the problem of memory? In heaven, the past will become a land we can inhabit for as long as it takes to experience the healing power of God’s love. In other words, we will be able to change past events that need changing, and not just by reinterpreting them. We can change the past now, but only through our imaginations, and we could change it for real, according to the theory of relativity, if we were as fast as light, but in heaven we will be able to meet those we have hurt or been hurt by and let God make things right.
Just as earthly doctors can operate on one of our spatial parts (a limb, for example) to make us physically whole, God will be able to operate on any of our temporal parts in a way that will preserve and yet heal our memories. Memory will still matter, but matter will not limit how we experience time, so that we will finally be able to remember ourselves as God wanted us to be.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/how-to-tell-time-in-heaven