Biblical Cosmology in the ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) World
Biblical cosmology describes reality as structured into three realms: heaven above, the earth where humans live, and the depths below, associated with the grave and imprisoned rebellious beings. In the Old Testament worldview, humans live between heaven and earth and descend to Sheol in death, though there is an expectation that the grave is not the final destiny. The New Testament presents a shift after the resurrection of Jesus, opening the way for believers to ascend to heaven and redefining the grave so that the place of judgment becomes what is called hell. The Garden of Eden is portrayed as a mountain-temple where heaven and earth meet and where humanity originally lived in communion with God before descending into exile and death. In the final restoration, the new Jerusalem descends, and heaven and earth are united again, returning creation to a garden-like order in which Christ reigns over all things and God’s sovereignty extends over every realm of existence.
Let's talk cosmology. Cosmology refers to the way that the cosmos have been constructed. When we talk about a scientific cosmology, we often think about the globe that is the earth, and it goes around the sun. Then we think about solar systems and the vast expanse of space with all the stars and everything else. And that is the basic sort of cosmology that we've all learned growing up, especially if you went to public school and things like that, that this is how the world has been constructed. Well, it might surprise you to know that a biblical cosmology, a cosmology that comes from the ancient world, is depicted a little bit different than what we understand.
In fact, one of the clearest places that we see a biblical cosmology laid out is in the Christ hymn in Philippians 2. If you go to Philippians 2 and we're learning about how, after Jesus' humiliation, he was exalted to the right hand of the Father, we read, “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.” Here it is—this is the cosmology: “in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9–11).
You'll remember that in the Great Commission Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). That's also what we call a marrying of the ends in order to say Jesus has all authority everywhere. Perhaps the reason that he doesn't mention the under the earth there is because there already is no authority under the earth. But here is a way of saying, look everywhere and everything that exists in the Christ hymn, which Paul is probably quoting here, the Apostle Paul. He's probably quoting something that existed in the early church. Perhaps he wrote it himself. I'm not sure we can be sure. But he chooses to describe cosmology as all-encompassing. Everything that exists is tied up in heaven, earth, and under the earth.
Old Testament Cosmology
I've got my cheat sheet here just so I can remember to talk about everything. I want to first briefly describe an Old Testament cosmology. If we're going back to perhaps not the garden—I’m going to talk about the garden in a minute—but back to the cosmology of the days of Israel, basically the way that the ancient person thought is that when they died, they went down to the grave. So they have heaven above, and heaven above is kind of the abode of the gods or the abode of the divine. Heaven represents the spirit world and the goodness of the creator. They look up to the heavens and they believe that God is in heaven or in the heavens, and they see the sun and the moon and the stars.
I don't think that they necessarily thought that that dot of light up there was a god per se or anything like that. But the ancient person is thinking about these as representing divine beings. Perhaps in some cultures and at some times, perhaps even in Israel, they're thinking about them as actual divine beings sitting up there watching over them. Sometimes it's like the souls of our ancestors are up there. In some cultures that wouldn't be the case for the Israelites.
The Israelites have this concept of Sheol, and to die meant to go down into the grave. I want to create a clarification here that not everybody always thinks about. A lot of times people go, okay, heaven—the abode of the divine. Earth—the abode of man. Actually that's not true. There is something in the creation of man. Man is actually created between heaven and earth. I think that's an important theological point to make, that humans are created reaching toward heaven. Yet with this understanding that in death we go down to the earth, we go down into the grave, into Sheol, or by the time we get to the Greek world we're calling it Hades. Not to borrow the whole theology of Hades from the Greeks, but just to use the word that largely coincides with this idea of the grave.
So in death, one that might look to heaven and hope for interaction with the divine in life knows that in death they will go down into the grave. Yet not everybody thought about the grave as an eternal resting place. In the Israelite mindset, consider David—and this shows up in some of the prophets too—but David in Psalm 16 says, “I know that you will not abandon my soul to Sheol.” You get this idea that he knows that even though he goes to the grave, he's not stuck there forever. That's an important observation to make, that even though an Old Testament cosmology doesn't immediately hope for heaven, there's an anticipation that the grave is not the end.
Now the grave—this isn't just heaven and earth. Perhaps that's how many people were concerned about it. But there is also in Old Testament cosmology a great deep. There is the depths, and I think of Jonah 2. You can go watch my video on Jonah if you want to see how that works when Jonah's swallowed by the great fish. But there is an under the earth, an abode where the disobedient sons of God, the angels essentially who sinned in Genesis 6, are chained in the great deep because of their disobedience. They're chained in gloomy darkness, as the language of the New Testament says. Peter and Jude both reference this event. So you have heaven, earth, and under the earth, and humans know that in death they go into the earth. They leave their position between heaven and earth and they enter into death, into the earth, where there is some kind of hope of an ascent to heaven, to the divine.
New Testament Cosmology
Now let's talk New Testament cosmology here. The New Testament does actually hope in heaven, and I have a sermon posted on my website on Psalm 22 because something really important happens when Jesus rises from the dead. When Jesus rises from the dead, you have the event that we call the harrowing of hell. That's really not the right thing to call it, though. It's really the harrowing of Hades, or the harrowing of Sheol, or the harrowing of the grave. Because what happens between the Old and the New Testament is that when Jesus rises, you have in the grave everybody there, but it's thought of in the Israelite mindset. You can see this in the Jesus parable of Lazarus, where he's thinking of the lame man on the good side with Abraham and the rich man on the bad side where it's burning and he's thirsty and all of that. So there's two sides of the grave, two sides of Sheol.
But now when Jesus rises, he cracks open the grave so that he can bring the saints with him and rescue them up into heaven as he ascends to the right hand of the Father. They ascend with him. You can see that in Matthew. I'm not going to get into every verse about this—Google can help you with that if you need to find it. But New Testament cosmology now, because the grave has been opened, means we have access to heaven. So you have life that we receive as we believe in the Son. John 3:16 says we will not perish, go down to the grave, but have everlasting life. We rise with him. The Apostle Paul hoped in this. He said that he wishes to be absent from the body so that he can be present with the Lord, that sort of thinking.
So in a New Testament cosmology we have heaven, life or death, and earth below. It's really interesting because then you think about yourself as a living, breathing human being, and this means that you're caught up in this tension between life and death. All of your human life right now becomes an experiment in pursuing heaven, pursuing life through Christ, or in your rejection of Christ pursuing death in the earth, in the grave. That's New Testament cosmology.
And then of course we still have under the earth, because if you look at Enoch, for example—and I've written about this in my book The Watchers and the Holy Ones—there is still, even in the Old Testament mindset but definitely in the New Testament mindset, a time when those disobedient angels are released so that they can be thrown into the lake of fire. We'll get to that in our study of Revelation at some point as well. So here you've got life up, death in the earth below, and then this place of gloomy darkness even below that, and that's basic New Testament cosmology.
One last note on that before we move on to talking about garden cosmology is that Hades or Sheol becomes hell, or Gehenna, and this is something people miss. People think hell is the lake of fire, the eternal thing. I understand why they're mixing the fire imagery, but I would note that even in the Sheol imagery, in the Abraham's bosom imagery, those who are on the dark side still have that fire imagery. Those who die without Christ are still supposed to be thought of in some kind of fiery torment even now. You don't have to wait for the lake of fire at the end to have the fire.
And so I think that Gehenna, hell, is what’s left of the grave, that the only people who now descend are the people who descend to the fiery side, and that’s what we call hell, or Gehenna eventually. Death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. If Hades, Sheol, death is not a thing anymore already in New Testament cosmology, then it doesn’t really make a lot of sense that it’s thrown into the lake of fire. What that’s saying in the end, when death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire, is that hell—what’s left of Hades, the hell side—is thrown into the lake of fire. I hope that makes sense. You can see it here on the cosmology chart.
Garden Cosmology
The next one I want to talk about is garden cosmology. I want to go back to Adam and Eve and the garden, and I want to talk about the design. You have heaven above and you have earth below, but they’re not well defined because in Ezekiel, for example—but the imagery is in all kinds of places—the garden is depicted as a temple. It’s a place where you ascend the tiers of the temple into the most holy place, which is probably where the tree of life is, right in the most holy place at the highest point of the mountain. You have the earth depicted as this mountain that reaches up toward God.
This is why temples are built in tiers, where the higher you go in the temple and the further in you go in the temple, the closer you get to God. It’s C. S. Lewis. It’s the Narnia series. It’s “further up and further in” as you get closer to God. So the earth is a temple. But we should also think of mountains as places where heaven reaches down. This is why in Enoch, just to think about the watchers, the watchers come down on a mountain. They come down at a mountain because mountains are a sort of soft spot between heaven and earth, where heaven and earth meet and where you can commune with the divine on the mountaintop. This is ancient cosmology. It’s the way that people think.
Think about it this way: Adam and Eve in the garden had this perfect communion with God. In Genesis 3 they walk in the cool of the day with the Lord. They have this communion, this meeting with God in the garden. That’s what’s broken. When sin enters the world in Genesis 3 and they’re told to leave the garden, we should think about them descending the mountain. They inherit death as part of their rebellion. I don’t like to call it the curse, but as part of their rebellion they receive death. What we call the curse is receiving the logical conclusion of their behavior. They are leaving the presence of God, descending the mountain, and they descend down into the wilderness.
When we think of wilderness, we think of flat desert lands with nothing in them. They are coming down off the mountain and going out into the desert. You’ll notice on the cosmology chart that it’s heaven and earth, and there is no abyss at this point. There is no great deep. There is no place at the pillars of the earth where we have disobedient angels chained in gloomy darkness or anything like that, because that hasn’t entered into the narrative yet. Garden cosmology really is just about heaven, earth, and the life that we have in God, in Christ, in the garden—or the life that Adam and Eve had in God, in Christ, in the garden.
But then they descend. Then we go back. We have Old Testament cosmology. Jesus rises from the dead. We have New Testament cosmology.
Kingdom Cosmology
This is why I put these together. I want you to think about kingdom cosmology. I want you to think about the consummation of the kingdom in Jesus’ return.
In Jesus’ return we have the same thing as in the garden. We think of the new Jerusalem coming down upon the earth, and it’s the mountain of God returned. Except now the garden is a worldwide garden. It’s the city of God. The dominion mandate given to Adam and Eve—that we’re supposed to build the city of God upon all of the earth—that’s what comes down now. All chaos has been conquered. The first Adam didn’t accomplish that. But the second Adam not only redeemed what was broken in the first Adam, but now he returns with the kingdom and comes down onto the earth. Now the new Jerusalem spreads to the extents of the globe.
So that—well, I shouldn’t say the globe, because they’re not thinking globe in biblical cosmology—but it extends to the ends of the land, the ends of the earth. This, again, is a place where heaven and earth meet. Sometimes people think of—I’ve even heard people argue for this, people in dispensational crowds—they argue that heaven is where Christians go, like some kind of spiritual float-around-with-harps heaven, and that the new Jerusalem on the earth is just for the Jewish people. If you know what dispensational theology is about, it’s about creating separation between the Old and the New Testament. The people of Israel are so distinct in this way of thinking—it’s an extreme dispensational thinking—that they actually have a different inheritance.
I would actually say that this extreme dispensationalism is heresy because it’s creating a second gospel. The Jews are saved by being Jews and they receive this eternal inheritance, but we are saved through Christ and we receive this other inheritance. So it’s creating two rewards and it’s creating two means of gaining that reward, which means that there are two gospels. That’s why I say it’s technically heresy. I’m not saying all dispensationalists are heretics. I’m saying if you take it to that great extent, then you’ve got a problem. There are not two gospels.
But that’s what happens when we start to think about them as separate sometimes, and it’s really not. When the new heaven and the new earth happen in Revelation 21 and 22, we should think back to Genesis 1, when “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” That’s what we should think about—that everything that was destroyed by sin, the cosmos, all of our thinking about cosmology between the garden and the consummation of the kingdom in the end, all of that cosmology has been tainted by sin. That’s why we need this state of death in the earth, and it’s why we need this place to chain the disobedient angels in gloomy darkness.
But now in kingdom eschatology—and you’ll have to toy with what to do with this because you have this sense of purification that happens—I’ve got this arrow pointing off to the side where those who have all of those, whether it’s the devil and his angels or those who followed him, those who took the mark of the beast instead of taking the mark of Christ—we’re going to talk about that whenever we get to that going through Revelation. Whoever has taken the mark of the beast is now thrown into the lake of fire.
Why Biblical Cosmology Matters
You do have to wrestle with this: if this is a return to the garden, note that the garden cosmology doesn’t have a lake of fire. It doesn’t have a great deep. It doesn’t have an abyss or a pit where we have disobedient angels and disobedient humans. In the very beginning, that wasn’t part of the design. It wasn’t part of the plan. So what does it mean to return to that? Does the lake of fire mean a purging and a return to the garden cosmology, or does the lake of fire become a place of eternal torment where they now continue to exist in some kind of abstract state of death?
Just something to think about, something to tease out. I’m going to pin a video about that at the end of the video. But this is cosmology, and I think it’s important for a couple of reasons.
As we think about cosmology, it’s important when you get to certain passages—Philippians 2 is one of these passages—that when you hear heaven, earth, and under the earth, that should create in your mind a sense of Christ’s authority over all things. Then you think about who has the keys to hell, or who has the keys to Tartarus, who has the keys to those shackles that the angels are chained in gloomy darkness. Jesus has them. It starts to make sense of things because then you get to the book of Revelation and an angel comes down and he’s got the keys. It makes you go, where did he get these keys from? Doesn’t the devil rule in hell? No. Everything comes under this grand purview of God’s sovereignty.
It’s funny because we don’t think about cosmology this way too much as Western Americans, but it’s not super old. If you go to Dante, which I think is the 12th century, he’s thinking about things this way. You can search for Dante cosmology charts and see that. I didn’t bring my Dante book or I would show it to you, but you can see in the cosmology charts that even for Dante there is a sense in which God is around all things, that all things exist within God—even in the earth, the grave, and even under the earth.
It makes you start to ask what God is doing in redeeming and purifying the world. It makes us think about how all of these different images fit together a little bit better so that you don’t fall prey to that Gnostic thinking of good God, bad God—or you could think Marcionite thinking more than Gnosticism—but that good God, bad God sort of thinking, where the devil thinks he’s going to win and we as Christians say we’ve read the end of the story and we know the devil doesn’t win.
But the narrative of Scripture is pretty interesting there, because not only does the devil not win, but where did the devil get whatever kind of authority he has at different points in the biblical narrative? He got it from God. God is so powerful that he can take this devil, this Satan, this rebellious divine being, and he can use him for his good purposes. Romans 8:28 says he uses all things for the good of those who love him, to those who are called according to his purpose. He even uses the devil in his extreme rebellion, the devil who is trying to dethrone God himself. God uses him within this grand scheme of cosmology. That’s how big God is. That’s how sovereign God is. Sovereign is a kingship word.
That’s all I need to say about cosmology. If you have questions about cosmology, there are lots of little details to fill in throughout all of these maps. This is not everything to say about cosmology. This is just the basic framework. Go ahead and throw those in the comments. I’d love to answer those and engage with you there. God bless. Remember, Christ is king, and that changes everything.
