Objections to Enoch and Elijah being translated

Lex Meyer has raised some I want to address.

This post is not me objecting to his overall doctrine.  Where I agree and disagree with that I already addressed on my Sola Scriptura Blog.

Here I want to point out that he can keep his basic premise without being so contrarian on Enoch and Elijah.  I do NOT believe they've already obtained immortal glorified bodies.  And I agree that Jasher and the Book of Enoch should be rejected.  I believe they are the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11, which means I believe they are going to physically die in the future.

The first explanation for how this could work is what I already mentioned on this Blog in my main Two Witnesses identities post.  That they traveled through Time as well as Space.  I do not believe they ascended to the Third Heaven, but may have been taken to receive training on another Planet and then sent back, and for them it'll have seemed like only a few years not Thousands.  Because of the theory of Relativity.

The second option also still has them basically the same normal humans we are, but God has supernaturally stalled their ageing process.  We saw during the 40 Year Wandeirng that he did something similar in Deuteronomy 29:5, making it so the shoes and cloths the Israelites wore wouldn't wear out.  This could then also apply to the argument for The Apostle John being a Witness.

As far as his attempts to explain away the accounts of their translations.

His argument is ironically more difficult to buy with Enoch precisely because so much less is said.  With the Elijah narrative his arguments about the real point of what was going on being to get Elisha to go out on his own are quite valid, and without what's said in Malachi and The New Testament, I would be totally willing to accept that.

But with Enoch he just sites all the places where similar terminology is used of death.  That's all true, but context matters.  In the context of Genesis 5 a point is made to define Enoch's fate as not like everyone else, and everyone else is defined as dying.  Genesis 5 is unambiguous about what it is trying to say.

Now what he sites as proof of Elijah not being taken out of the Earth is the letter Jehoram received from him later in 2 Chronicles 21:12.  If Elijah himself were personally present in this story, I would consider it a slam dunk for his argument, but he.s not.

I don't have his book unfortunately, I just listened to the Rob Skiba interviews.  Rob Skiba is into science fiction like Back to The Future.  There is a trope that shows up in some Time Travel stories of a letter being written to be delivered to someone on a very specific date in the distant future.  Well maybe that concept originated right here?

God did a lot of pre-planning with Elijah.  The instructions to anoint Hazael and Jehu were originally given to Elijah in 1 Kings 19, but they were carried out in 2 Kings 9 after the mantle was passed to Elisha.  So I think God had Elijah write this letter way in advance, because He knows the End from the Beginning.  And delivering it at the appointed time was another responsibility passed on to Elisha or someone else.

A second explanation could be that our understanding of the Chronology is wrong, many disagree on the Divided Kingdom Chronology.  But I don't want to get into that here, the above theory works just fine for me.

Now on the subject of Elijah's foretold return.  He sites that John The Baptist preached in the Spirit and Power of Elijah to mean that the Two Witnesses will just do the same.  Problem is in John's Gospel 1:21, John The Baptist states blatantly that he does not qualify as the return of Elijah.  What Jesus says at the Transfiguration about how John could have been that was purely rhetorical.  What Malachi said in his closing verses was NEVER applicable to the First Advent, it is strictly about the Day of Yahuah.

The return of Elijah absolutely needs to be taken literally or else you open the door to not take Jesus promised Return literally.