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I have always felt that this time my real discovery of the unselfishness of God began. Up to then, while I had rejoiced in the salvation for myself that I had discovered, I had been secretly beset from time to time with a torturing feeling that, after all, it was rather a selfish salvation, both for Him and for me.
How could a good God enjoy Himself in Heaven, knowing all the while that a large proportion of the beings He had Himself created were doomed to eternal misery, unless He were a selfish God?
I had known that the Bible said that He was a God of love, and I had supposed that it must be true, but always there had been at the bottom of my mind this secret feeling that His love could not stand the test of comparison with the ideal of love in my own heart.
I knew that, poor and imperfect as my love must be, I could never have enjoyed myself in Heaven while one of my children, no matter how naughty, was shut out; and that He could and did enjoy Himself, while countless thousands of His children were shut out, seemed to me a failure in the most essential element of love.
So that, grateful as I had felt for the blessings of forgiveness and of a sure and certain hope of Heaven for myself, I still had often felt as if after all the God I worshiped was a selfish God, who cared more for His own comfort and His own glory than He did for the poor suffering beings He had made.
But now I began to see that the wideness of God's love was far beyond any wideness that I could even conceive of; and that if I took all the unselfish love of every mother's heart the whole world over, and piled it all together, and multiplied it by millions, I would still only get a faint idea of the unselfishness of God.
I had always thought of Him as loving, but now I found out that He was far more than loving: He was love, love embodied and ingrained. I saw that He was, as it were, made out of love, so that in the very nature of things He could not do anything contrary to love....
The opiate of the religous masses. It sounds so right.....a loving God who in the end will throw open the gates of heaven and let everybody in. NOT gonna happen. It's a partial truth God is love but HE is also JUST. His justice demands a fair hearing at the great white throne for all who don't believe, they will all kneel before Him and acknowledge HE is God. A short rewards overview in heaven for those who DO know Him and trust Him with their names in the Lambs Book of LIFE. Everybody will be in one of those two groups, there is no 3rd door marked Universal Salvation.
The opiate of the religous masses. It sounds so right.....a loving God who in the end will throw open the gates of heaven and let everybody in. NOT gonna happen. It's a partial truth God is love but HE is also JUST. His justice demands a fair hearing at the great white throne for all who don't believe, they will all kneel before Him and acknowledge HE is God. A short rewards overview in heaven for those who DO know Him and trust Him with their names in the Lambs Book of LIFE. Everybody will be in one of those two groups, there is no 3rd door marked Universal Salvation.
V6 -Cruiser has a gas peddle and brake, it's either, or - now throw in a clutch and it confuses him.
You have to actually think, instead of believing something is automatic like that of heaven or hell?
"Under the instruction of these great teachers many other theologians believed in universal salvation; and indeed the whole Eastern Church until after 500 A.D. were inclined to it."
"In the West this doctrine had fewer adherents and was never accepted by the Church at large. In the first five or six centuries of Christianity there were six known theological schools, of which four (Alexandria , Antioch, Cæsarea, and Edessa or Nisibis) were Universalist, one (Ephesus) accepted conditional immortality; one (Carthage or Rome) taught endless punishment of the wicked. Other theological schools are mentioned as founded by Universalists, but their actual doctrine on this subject is unknown. Doederlein says that "In proportion as any man was eminent in learning in Christian antiquity, the more did he cherish and defend the hope of the termination of future torments." In the dark ages Universalism almost disappeared, but in the ninth century it had one great representative, John Scotus Erigena (see Scotus Erigena, Johannes), who was the chief Christian luminary of his time. In the Middle Ages, some of the lesser mystics and probably Johann Tauler and Jan van Ruysbroeck (qq.v.), and one leading scholastic, Albertus Magnus (q.v.), were Universalists. In the times of the Reformation Universalists were found among Anabaptists, Lollards, and Protestant mystics; and later there were increasing numbers of individual believers in this doctrine in all northern European countries, including such men as Kant, Schleiermacher, Ritschl and many of his followers, Archbishop Tillotson, Tennyson, the Brownings, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
Career of the man whom theologians regarded as one of the greatest teachers on Church History
"For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was in preparation, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water....Who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead. For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit."
"After all, even though we all die, and we're all like water being spilled on the ground that cannot be recovered, nevertheless God doesn't take away life, but carries out his plans so as not to cast away permanently from him those who are presently estranged." -ISV
Restoration =
An act of restoring to a former position & condition.
Return to an unimpaired or improved condition.
"Then I will restore to you the years that the locust swarm devoured, as did the young locust, the other locusts, and the ravaging locust, that great army of mine that I sent among you."
Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.
”It wasn’t so long ago that we ourselves were stupid and stubborn, easy marks for sin, ordered every which way by our glands, going around with a chip on our shoulder, hated and hating back. But when God, our kind and loving Savior God, stepped in, he saved us from all that. It was all his doing; we had nothing to do with it. He gave us a good bath, and we came out of it new people, washed inside and out by the Holy Spirit. Our Savior Jesus poured out new life so generously. God’s gift has restored our relationship with him and given us back our lives. And there’s more life to come—an eternity of life! You can count on this. -MSG
”When the extraordinary compassion of God our Savior and his overpowering love suddenly appeared in person, as the brightness of a dawning day, he came to save us. Not because of any virtuous deed that we have done but only because of his extravagant mercy.” -TPT
”For the creation was made subject to futility, not willingly, but by reason of Him who has so subjected it in hope.”
Death that just keeps going on and on and on without end. Infinite death. Now that's crediting death with a lot of power, especially considering that scripture credits Jesus with destroying him who has the power of death, and that death, the last enemy shall be destroyed.
I think it was while reading a study Bible with notes by Dr. Charles Ryrie---a very respected scholar at least within the Dispensationalist wing of western Evangelicalism---when I first ran across the notion that, while all men, without Christ, are dead in trespasses and sins, that state of death becomes eternal when they die without receiving Christ as Lord and Savior. This was given as the meaning of the second death in Revelation.
Think about that: Imagine that scenario.
Death existing along with life for all eternity. Though Paul saw the Day when God will become all in all, it seems -- according to the above theory -- that there's going to be another all where not only will God not be all, but His arch enemy, death, will have its own kingdom where it will reign forever.
They're not talking about death as annihilation, they're talking about an eternal state of anti-life existence without love, without grace, without mercy, abandoned by God to eternal darkness.
Stand this nonsense up against Jesus' claim that He is making all things new.
The re-making of all things new is by His resurrection life. That life, not death, goes on and on and on eternally. It's life that goes on and on, not death. To understand the operation of death, as opposed to life, our focus must be upon Jesus' experience of death, whose death is inclusive of all death.
Yes, that's what the Bible clearly teaches. Christ died for all, the just for the unjust that He might bring us to God. Possibly the most important verse in the Bible for explaining how Christ's death relates to all mankind's death, is found in 2 Cor. 5:14. Nearly every translation that I'm familiar with renders this verse with greater clarity than the KJV.
This is Paul's explanation from the Amplified Version of how Christ's death relates to all mankind's death: "For the love of Christ controls and urges and impels us, because we are of the opinion and conviction that [if] One died for all, then all died." That's what it means that Christ died for us all. We needed to die, finally, once for all; no more dying, so the death of all the generations past, present and future met its destiny in Christ, and death finally, fully died. You see, life is lived, and death is died. "For in that He died, he died unto sin once; but in that He lives, He lives unto God (Rom. 6:10)." The destiny of death is not to go on and on eternally.
The destiny of death is to die, finally. God's warning to Adam and Eve, in the original Hebrew was, ".....dying, thou shalt surely die."
Get that. Not dying, thou shalt continue to die without end; "dying, thou shalt surely die."
Death doesn't terminate life. Life terminates death. "Death is swallowed up of life," through Christ's resurrection. The Source of death's finality is the same as the Source of life's continuance: Jesus Christ our Lord, crucified, buried and risen.
As I recall--not having it with me at the time of this writing---the NAS translation of Rom. 6:10, makes very clear how death and life work, and Jonathan Mitchell includes it as an alternate rendering. From the NAS: "For the death He died, He died to sin once; but the life He lives, He lives unto God." Ah! There it is. ..."the death He died, He died....but life He lives, He lives..." Death is died; life is lived. Jesus gathered together all death into His death, and now lives, and " It's not that He merely lived; He lives, and we live in and with Him. As the lyrics go to that beautiful gospel hymn, Because He Lives: "Because He lives, I can face tomorrow; because He lives, all fear is gone. Because I know He holds the future, and life is worth the living just because He lives."
As death came through one man, spreading to all men, so death has come to its end in One Man. According to Paul in Colossians, all mankind shall be gathered together in Christ, for He sums up in Himself all humanity, as He is the fullness of the Godhead bodily. To extol the power of death, as does much of pseudo-orthodox Christianity, is an affront to the power of Christ's resurrection.
The effect is the same as saying to our Lord, "yes, You live forever, but death is your equal match. It has the same power as your life." -John Gavazzoni-
"After all, even though we all die, and we're all like water being spilled on the ground that cannot be recovered, nevertheless God doesn't take away life, but carries out his plans so as not to cast away permanently from him those who are presently estranged." -ISV
Restoration =
An act of restoring to a former position & condition.
Return to an unimpaired or improved condition.
"Then I will restore to you the years that the locust swarm devoured, as did the young locust, the other locusts, and the ravaging locust, that great army of mine that I sent among you."
Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.
Let's take a look at this verse that's been used here for universalism.
Acts 3:21
"Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began."
Now to show you what they are doing, let's take this verse in context to surrounding scripture to see what it really means.
Acts 3:20-23
And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you:
21 Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.
22 For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you.
23 And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.
Do you see that this has nothing to do with universal restoration, but exactly the opposite.
It's speaking of Jesus being in Heaven until all have accepted or rejected Him and every soul that will not accept Him will be "destroyed among the people."
See how they take scripture out of context to make you believe something that is a lie?
Let's take a look at this verse that's been used here for universalism.
Acts 3:21
"Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began."
Now to show you what they are doing, let's take this verse in context to surrounding scripture to see what it really means.
Acts 3:20-23
And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you:
21 Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.
22 For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you.
23 And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.
Do you see that this has nothing to do with universal restoration, but exactly the opposite.
It's speaking of Jesus being in Heaven until all have accepted or rejected Him and every soul that will not accept Him will be "destroyed among the people."
See how they take scripture out of context to make you believe something that is a lie?
Why do you never ask if the God portrayed by such an attitude is at all consistent with the God described, revealed, and unambiguously demonstrated by Jesus, Charlie? You make no effort to determine if the God of Jesus would ever say such a thing or do such a thing and you never question why on earth He would ever do such a thing. You pretend it doesn't matter whether or not you actually know this God described is actually the one Jesus described. You accept all descriptions as equally valid despite their contradictory or inconsistent attributes.
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