52. UNIFORM GREEK USAGE: "SHEOL" & "HADES"

readers to our separate pamphlet on this subject, in which will be found every passage in the Bible where these words occur, with their renderings.

These renderings are so various that, they are not only confusing to the mind, but misleading as regards the truth.

The Hebrew Sheol, and the Greek Hades are rendered thirty-one times the grave, thirty-one times hell, three times pit; sixty-five times in all. Four times the grave is put in the margin for hell, which increases the rendering the grave to thirty-five times and reduces the rendering hell to twenty-seven times.

On the face of the matter, this gives the preference to the grave, not "A grave," for which there are other words: but "THE grave," for which there is no other word. Grave-dom, or the state of the dead as being in the dom-inion of the grave, is the idea associated with the word. Not the act of dying, but the state of the dead, the present condition of death.

The Old Testament Biblical usage must settle the meaning of the heathen (i.e., the Greek) usage of the word Hades, because the Holy Spirit uses it of His own Hebrew word Sheol in Acts ii. 27 by quoting Ps. xvi. 10.

From these last two passages it is clear that Sheol or Hades is the place where "corruption" is seen (Acts xiii. 31-37); and from which Resurrection is the only exit (Rev. xx. 4, 5). Those who are raised in the First Resurrection "live and reign with Christ a thousand years." Of those who are not raised then it is written they "LIVED NOT AGAIN until the thousand years were finished."

This is conclusive as to the Holy Spirit's own usage of these words.

6. "Mystery," μυστήριον (mustērion).—This English word is a transliteration of the Greek word μυστήριον (mysterion), but its usage by us to-day in no sense corresponds with the meaning of the Greek word.

The Greeks used it of a secret, pure and simple; a secret which can be perfectly well understood when made known; whereas we use the word "mystery" of what cannot be understood at all; and is past comprehension

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III. BIBLICAL USAGE ESSENTIAL even when it is revealed. Thus our usage of the word to-day is quite different from the Biblical usage.

We must be careful, therefore, not to read our present usage of the word into the past usage. Not so very long ago the word was used in its true sense. This was in legal language, when an apprentice was articled in order to learn the "mysteries" or secrets of a certain trade or business. This is the sense also in which we still use it when we speak of the Greek "mysteries," i.e., the secrets of that religion into which persons were initiated. This is the usage of the word in the Greek Testament, and in our transliteration of it.

No matter what the context may relate to, the usage of the word is uniformly secret.

(a) It is used in connection with the duration of Israel's blindness (Rom. xi. 25). That blindness itself was not a secret: for it was clearly foretold in Isa. vi. 9, 10. But the duration of that blindness was not revealed (Isa. vi. 11. Rom. xi. 25).

(b) It is used in connection with the rejection of the kingdom, the fact of its remaining in abeyance, and the duration of that abeyance. The Lord revealed this secret to the Apostles "in the house" (Matt. xiii. 11, 35), while it was still hidden from the people "out of the house." (Compare verses 1 and 36.)

In this revelation, the duration of this present interval between "the sufferings and the glory" was also kept secret (1 Pet. i. 10, 11).

Hence, the secrets which the Lord then revealed, concerned the kingdom only; and all that He said about it must be read on, leaping over this (as yet, to them, secret, and unknown) present interval: and taking up the kingdom again, as though such interval had no existence.

(c) It is used in connection with the counsels and purposes of the lawless one (2 Thess. ii. 7), which, though secret, were already beginning to work themselves out.

(d) It is used in connection with the word Ecclesia. There was nothing to show that that word was going to be used in a sense altogether different from any in which it had before been used.¹

¹ See above, pp. 141-149; 248, 249. Also our pamphlet on The Mystery, price 6d.