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February 7 - February 19, 2016
You may also be wondering what difference does it make whether or not we believe in hell if we all agree that salvation only comes through Jesus. I’ll tell you why we must question the teaching of hell. The very name, character, and purposes of God are at stake! What
It was only recently I noticed that the parable of the prodigal son is the third in a series of parables, all revealing the same crucial point: Something of great value has been lost—a sheep, a coin, and a boy—and that which is lost is helpless to rescue itself from its circumstances and must be sought after diligently, until it is found and restored to where it belongs. The owner or father is not satisfied as long as even one—one sheep, one coin, or one son—remains lost.
She couldn’t accept the seeming contradiction of God’s character that professed unconditional, sacrificial love for all people on one hand, but on the other hand declared an end to that love as soon as a person died without professing faith in Jesus Christ. She couldn’t accept the injustice that billions of people would be punished and separated from God eternally because of a limited
period of rebellion or unbelief during their mortal lives, especially when most of those people had no way of knowing about or entering into a relationship with Jesus or the Christian God.
“But My people do not know the ordinance of the LORD. How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us’? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie. The wise men are put to shame, they are dismayed and caught; Behold, they have rejected the word of the LORD, and what kind of wisdom do they have” (8:7–9)? Right there, in black and white, Jeremiah confirmed that the scribes had inserted lies into the OT writings, many centuries before a Bible was ever published or canonized.*
Savior-of-all.com, asking me to read the article, “The Work of the Cross.” She also
Depending on how we interpret what Jesus was doing, we might actually make a case for the Calvinist doctrine of election where only a small, privileged few are predestined—chosen ahead of time—for salvation while everybody else is chosen ahead of time for everlasting punishment and separation from God. However, the thought has always seemed pretty weird to me that God would go to the trouble of creating billions of people in His image, knowing ahead of time that He would endlessly reject and torture them. Not only does it fail to correspond with the forgiving and loving nature of God as
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“These twelve Jesus sent out after instructing them: ‘Do not go in the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter any city of the Samaritans; but rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’” (Matt. 10:5–6; 15:22–24). This has always bothered me a great deal. If Jesus knew the Gentiles of His day were going to hell—the worst fate a person could possibly imagine or experience—how could He ignore all of them? How could He ignore any of them?
For those of us who have adhered to the notion of salvation by free will, how many people over the course of our lives have we been responsible for sending to a never-ending BBQ, just because we were too lazy, or too scared, or too preoccupied to help them find their way? Why does the thought of hell not deeply affect most of us, changing the way we live our everyday lives? Sure, it’s up to God to convict and transform a person’s heart, but isn’t it up to those who are convinced hell is real to plant the seeds and spread awareness?
Have you ever wondered how the Gospel can be “good news” for all people if most people will not benefit from it? If most of the people who have ever lived are going to hell, wouldn’t the “good news” actually be really bad news for multiple billions? Perhaps if hell is true the angel should have said, “I bring you good news of great joy for only the people who receive it and believe it.”
Isaiah 26:9, to which Paul very well could have been referring, explains the purpose of God’s judgments: “For when the earth experiences Your judgments the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.” Here’s my experience. If you even suggest to people
If hell is the most powerful motivating factor for getting people saved, then they are only being manipulated into something out of fear and coercion, not out of love and desire. I daresay that those people are not really saved after all! This is the very kind of “faith” Jesus criticized when He quoted Isaiah, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Matt. 15:8).
If God is love, and if there is no fear in love, how has the primary doctrine of the most widespread religion on our planet become all about fear? How could such a fearful place as hell truly exist?
Throughout the OT, both good and bad people end up in Sheol at death. Rather than a literal grave (in the sense of a hole in the ground or tomb, which has a different Hebrew word), Sheol is the concept people devised in ancient times to imagine and describe the afterlife experience that they had no knowledge
KJV translates Sheol as hell whenever they want to convey it as the particular destination of the wicked. However, when portraying the fate of the righteous, they translate it grave.
One should wonder why Jesus would refer to a literal valley that the Jews were familiar with just outside their city gates, and expect them to infer that it really meant a place of eternal torment.
However, with the influence of Persian thought and the passing of time, the notion of ‘hell’ crept into Jewish tradition and became associated with the biblical word Gehinnom or Gei Hinnom, the valley of Hinnom (Joshua 15:8, 18:16; II Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31; Nehemiah 11:30). This view of hell was allegedly imported into Judaism from Zoroastrianism, and it appears to have supplanted the earlier concept of Sheol (mentioned in Isaiah 38:18, Psalms 6:5 and Job 7:7-10).
Traditional Judaism firmly believes that death is not the end of human existence. However, because Judaism is primarily focused on life here and now rather than on the afterlife, Judaism does not have much dogma about the afterlife, and leaves a great deal of room for personal opinion.[9] Most Jews even find it laughable
Jewish teachings on the subject of afterlife are sparse: The Torah, the most important Jewish text, has no clear reference to afterlife at all.[10]
if hell is really true, and God is actually losing most of His creation to evil and darkness, you could say that good is overcome, and darkness overtakes light.
He goes on to express his utter contempt of the idea that a God would torture people 30 trillion years for sins they committed over the course of thirty years, referring to a god like that as a “divine Nazi.”[22]
Without realizing it, the “god” we have put our hopes in and portrayed to the world is more like Hitler than Mother Teresa. The
I love how most Christians (including many theologians) interpret Revelation. They read about the woman riding on the beast, the red dragon with seven heads, the harlot sitting on many waters, and people standing on the sea of glass mixed with fire, and they all say, “Oh, obviously those are symbolic.” But as soon as they get to the lake of fire, aack! “That’s totally literal!” they say.
Jesus’s eyes are described as fire (Rev. 1:14; 2:18; 19:12). Fire acts as a testing, refining, and purifying agent, removing the chaff from our lives (chaff is on the wheat; it is not the wheat itself (Is. 48:10; Matt. 3:12; Luke 3:17; 1 Pet. 1:7; Rev. 3:18). The Israelites were refined in a fiery furnace (Deut. 4:20; 1 Kings 8:51; Is. 31:9; 48:10; Jer. 11:4). Fire “destroys” enemies,** lawbreakers, hypocrites, those who ignore the needs of the poor, and slackers (Matt. 3:10; Matt. 7:19; Matt. 13:40–43; Matt. 25:31–46; Heb. 10:27). Everyone who separates from Jesus is thrown into fire (John
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A case can be made that an enemy is “destroyed” when he or she has become a friend. Hence, fire is often portrayed in the Bible as reforming a person’s character to the point that they are no longer enemies of God or others, but friends.]
if it doesn’t make rational sense or fit the overarching, consistent character of a loving and inclusive God, it’s probably not true.
The more I study, the more I realize Scripture teaches of fire being a purifying agent, not a punishing, utter destroying agent.
If you believe that billions of people are headed toward everlasting separation from God in fiery torment, perhaps most of them out of ignorance, or because of their bad or misinformed choices, or because Satan successfully deceived them, you essentially believe that Satan wins and God loses.
So then…what exactly is it that God wants? For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior; who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time (1 Tim. 2:3–6, KJV). If it’s all true, that God wills all people to be saved, Jesus actually gave Himself for everybody—not just in theory—and hell is nothing more than a myth of men.
When Jews read the Bible, the God whom we Jews meet there is in the image of a father who loves his children with an overwhelming passion. This father has very high expectations of his children, but he also indulges them. He loves to treat them well and make them happy. Some Christians believe that the God of the Old Testament is a stern God of strict judgment without mercy, but a religious Jew would not be able to discover such a deity in the Hebrew Bible.[27]
Even God’s seemingly hardened and rebellious children are treated with patience. “He will not always strive with us, nor will He keep His anger forever.* He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103:9–10, NIV).
Perfect justice requires reconciliation and restoration. It requires, first, that sinners repent of their sin and turn away
Before my theological shift I used to wonder, what happens to the rescue workers who did not profess faith in Jesus before they died? Did they selflessly take the hit for others, cutting short their one shot at life, only to be doomed forever?
God asks me to forgive my enemies, to be kind to them, to show them mercy, and to overcome their evil with good, yet He’s ultimately not going to forgive His enemies, to be kind to them, to show them mercy, or to overcome their evil with good? How absurd and hypocritical is that?
Eventually, Datie’s love broke through. According to Jerome, “she loved the hate and rebellion right out of me.”[33]
Who is Jesus asking His Father to forgive? His enemies—the ones who had just rejected Him, condemned Him, spit on Him, cursed Him, abused Him, and nailed Him to a tree. Why on earth would He be asking God to forgive them at a time like this unless, #1: He genuinely desired it, and #2: He intended for His request to be granted? He wouldn’t possibly be asking forgiveness or showing love to people He was planning to condemn to hell forever. He wouldn’t have even bothered asking His Father to forgive them if they were hopelessly damned.
Totally wrong.
“So do you think it’s fair that the Jews who were led into the gas chambers, perhaps under the influence of Christianity, left hell on earth for hell in eternity? Whether we’re speaking of Hitler or the Jews he put to death (many of whom were probably nice, loving people), is it really fair to endlessly punish both parties the same? And would we really expect the Jews—fairly innocent victims who were put to death centuries after Christ, perhaps in His name—to want to put their faith in such a “loving savior”?
This was not just a nice little story with an inconsequential happy ending. This is the story of our enemies. This is our story. What is good for Nebuchadnezzar, and Paul, and Hitler, is also good for you, and me, and everyone we know that ever wandered in darkness, searching for anything and everything but God. Everyone is infinitely valuable and ultimately redeemable to God, no matter how seemingly hopeless.
They do not want to allow for the possibility that each person is on a different timetable in being drawn into a relationship with God, perhaps most not seeing this reality come to fruition during this lifetime.
present progressive tense was used intentionally to convey specific meaning
what is this tense? never heard of it.
The “chosen people,” have always been about a few being chosen ahead of the rest to assist in bringing God’s plan of salvation to all.
If you ascribe to Calvinism, it’s miraculously coincidental that most of the “elect” are born into the same general geographic location.
Universalism: The Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church During its First Five Hundred Years:
not one of them condemned his teaching that all men would be saved.]
not true
called, The Unselfishness of God.
To many Jews, this is why Jesus was insignificant. They had waited for a king to come and physically conquer their external enemies, not understanding or accepting the far superior, lasting victory over a much greater enemy in the inner, spiritual sense.
As you can see, “going to heaven” isn’t really about leaving earth, but about bringing heaven here.
Contrary to popular teaching, if you study carefully the place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” from a Hebrew perspective, it is not hell or eternal torment, but a place “on the outside looking in,” for a time of the necessary inner reflection that leads to longing and transformation. Outer darkness is a figurative description of living outside the light of the city—the New Jerusalem—away from the felt or experiential presence of the Lamb.
“God permits what He hates, to accomplish what He loves.”
