End of the World 4 - The Last Day"
I thought that we had finished looking at “the end of the world” in the previous three articles (Part One, Second Coming?, Real Coming), but lately, on ChristWords.com, I have been working through Jesus’s verses from John 6:26 to John 6:58, which deal with the “bread of life” and “eternal life.” Five of those verses (John 6:39, John 6:40, John 6:44, John 6:54 and John 12:48) mention “the final day.” Jesus always uses this phrase, as is appropriate, at the end of the line, so it is his “impact” statement.
First, let us see the Greek words that Jesus used so we can see there are no real problems with translation. All of these verses use the exact same words in the exact same form. These words are te eschate hemera or, for the purist, τῇ ἐσχάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ. This is translated as “at the last day” or “on the last day.” In two verses (John 6:44 and John 12:48), the “on” and “at” come from a preposition en, ἐν, but in all the others it comes from the dative case of the words alone. The dative is translated into English using a prepositional phrase. Since this phrase references time, “at” or “on” are the best. Jesus makes this clear in the two cases he uses the preposition. The word for “last” is from eschatos, which has many different meanings, but, of time, it means "last" and "ending." The word for “day” is hemera, which, as a noun, means "day" "a state or time of life" or “a time” in general. This last word determines the meaning of the first two.
An Individual Experience
What is surprising is that Jesus never uses this phrase to refer to a group of people. Every verse that references “the last day” is written about a single person using singular pronouns and verbs. He is always using it to refer to individual deaths, not the death of everyone. This makes perfect sense because “death” is experienced only by each consciousness, one at a time.
This starts rather oddly with Jesus’s first use of the phrase in John 6:39. The NIV translates its last clauses as “I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.” But, actually, all those plurals are singular. There is no “all” “those” or “them.” And Jesus was also not people but a thing, “every,” “thing,” and “it.” What it really says is “every thing he has given me, I should not lose from him, instead, I should raise it up on the last day.” This use of the neuter is striking. This would naturally raise the question in the minds of those listening to him, “what is this ‘thing’ you have been given? This thing you are raising up?”
This question is never really answered, but Jesus follows this with John 6:40. In this verse, all those “things” are translated into singular pronouns referring to individuals, “all the ones viewing the Son and trusting in him should have a life ongoing and I should raise him up, I myself, on that last day.” The “all the ones,” and “him” are masculine, not neuter, and all the words are singular, referring to individuals.
This patter of singular pronouns is continued in John 6:44, “No one has the power to come to me unless the Father, the one sending me, pulls him, and I myself should raise him on the last day.” This is captured in the traditional KJV translation, but more modern translations convert the singular, “him” to the plural “them” completely losing the main idea, that this is about individuals, not groups of people.
This pattern of referring to individuals is continued in John 6:54, but the switch to the singular is a little more jarring because it follows a verse, John 6:53, where Jesus was addressing the group in the plural “you.” In Greek, we can see when Jesus is talking to an individual with “you” or a group because all the verbs and pronouns reflect the singular and plural. Unfortunately, we cannot see this in English because our singular and plural “you” looks the same in both the verbs and pronouns. This actually makes the southern “you all” somewhat beneficial in translation.
If we look at this section of John, we cannot help but notice that Jesus relentlessly uses the singular to describe who comes to him, who he has been given, who gets on-going life, as well as who he raises on the last day. The process of salvation that he described in such detail was one involving individuals, not groups of people.
This brings us to the final reference to “the final day” in John 12:48. Again, everything in this verse is in the singular, not the plural. It does not refer to an “end of the world” but the final day, the death of an individual. However, this verse is also a bit of a joke. Literally, it can be translated as “Someone denying me and not getting my remarks has someone cutting him off. The idea that I have relayed is going to cut him off during the final day.”
Conclusions
As with the earlier articles on “the end of the world,” I am forced to think that the day of judgment refers more to our individual deaths than to the mass destruction of all humanity at some point in worldly time. We all may come to judgment or avoid it, but Jesus seems to see it as happening one-by-one. However, he says it with a wink and a nod, as he says everything.
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