If the Bible teaches that the unbeliever will go to “eternal destruction” (2 Thessalonians 1:9) or “eternal judgment” (Hebrews 6:2), it is crucial whether this refers to a period of time with a beginning and an end, or rather to something without end.
Age, eternity, or world?
In our Bible translations, one and the same word from the original Greek text is rendered with three different Dutch words: age, eternity, and world. This concerns the Greek word aion. In Dutch, these are three essentially different terms.
In this blog post, I will limit myself to the Statenvertaling (States Translation). Other translations, such as the NBG (Dutch Bible), use even more renderings, which only complicates the matter. For example, aion is translated there as course (Eph. 2:2), time (1 Cor. 1:20), and from of old (Luke 1:70).
Below are three examples in which aion is translated with a different meaning each time:
Matthew 12 KJV
32… it will not be forgiven him, neither in this age, neither in the age to come.
1 John 2 KJV
17… but he who does the will of God abides forever.
Matthew 28 KJV
20 And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.
a hundred years?
This is a translation of a Dutch blog, so I must first note the following. The word rendered as “age” in English in Matthew 12:32 is “eeuw” in Dutch. This Dutch word “eeuw” has come to mean a period of one hundred years, the English concept of “century”.
An “eeuw” (century) is a period of time with a beginning and an end. In common Dutch usage, this refers to a period of one hundred years, but in the Bible it refers to a longer, often hidden period of time.
Eternity, on the other hand, is by definition without beginning and without end. These two concepts are therefore diametrically opposed, even though they are both used as translations of the same Greek word aion. This inevitably raises the question of how these concepts relate to each other—and, moreover, what they have to do with the concept of world.
world
The translation of aionas “world” is linguistically incorrect. In Greek, there is another, clearly defined word for world, namely kosmos. That aionshould not be translated as world is therefore virtually undisputed.
Ephesians 2
2 In which you once walked, according to the age (aion) of this world (kosmos)…
In Ephesians 2:2, aion and kosmos are both used as separate concepts, which shows that they must be distinguished from one another.