While laying awake in bed last night listening to my hubby snore, he has been sick a few days and so we have been home for a few days, I was tortured in my thoughts as I lay there. Being in Chronic pain and my ability to be mobile becoming less and less a fact of life, I laid in bed with worry and fret over what lays ahead in the future for me, it wasn’t comforting to say the least. I feared how I was going to make it, what if my hubby died before me? what was I to do then, how was I going to be able to live in my home when I am not able to do the things as I use to, in fact my hubby has been taking up the slack,because I am almost unable to do alot of what I use to do, so what then? I laid there thinking I had no hope for a good outcome. I even thought of taking my life if that fear came to pass. Then I thought about God and how within Christianity, only a few will make it into God’s paradise the rest would either live on in eternal torment or God will cast them in to the fire after Judgement never to be remembered again. I thought about how it would be at that time with this theology. God raises from the dead all the mass of humanity who were either non believers or never have heard of Christ, so God will wake them up only to judge them and then either kill them or torture them. How in God’s name can anyone justify that ? I am thinking to self, why even wake them up if God is only to kill them again? How stupid and cruel is that ? Listen for a moment, why bother to even wake the unbelievers up in the first place, if they all don’t make it then let them be dead and gone and over with it, what is the cruel purpose to raise the condemned in the first place if there is no hope for them in doing so? Is this a cruel joke being played out, if so I don’t want this cruel beast of a god. If they are condemned and with no hope then for God’s sakes leave them be!!!But they are raised and for what other purpose? But yet the Christians who believe in annihilation believe that is exactly what God will do. Or God awakens them only to judge them guilty and then throw them into the fire and the Second Death only so they will be consciously alive and be tortured through out all time for what they did or did not do in their extremely short life time compared with the final verdict of torture for all time. Can any one see the mercy, justice and love of God in that picture? Not me.
Some different thoughts came to my mind as I was fretting over this theology of eternal death or eternal torture ,that the many in Christianity believe and teach. Who was right? who are wrong? Can I ever know?What is the truth here?
Consider this story/parable: You have a wealthy man that has all the money and power in the world and then you have all the rest of us who do not . All of us in time ,owe this man many thousands of dollars , we are indebted to this wealthy man to the extreme. Then one day this wealthy man’s son comes along and pays off all of our debts. No one now owes this man’s wealthy father anything whatsoever. But only a few find out that this was done, they find out they no longer are indebted to the wealthy man and are now able to live life without fear of slavery or prison or death because they can not pay or can ever get out of this indebtedness to the Wealthy man. So now after being told the good news that their debt has been paid in full by the Wealthy man’s son, they are now able to live the rest of their lives full of gratitude , thanksgiving and love towards this wealthy man’s son for all he did for them, he literally saved their lives. Now the rest of the people which are many never hear the good news of their debt being paid in full, their lives continue as it has been, full of fear, and worry, and hatred towards the wealthy man’s power over them and their indebtedness to him. They live their lives and die without ever hearing the good news that their indebtedness has been paid in full. My question to you is this, even though they have no clue that their debt is paid in full, do they still owe the wealthy man ?Are they still in debt to this Wealthy man even though the Wealthy man’s son paid it off? So in like thought, Christ paid the debt and died for our sins and the death that it produced in us , for ALL of humankind from Adam to whomever at the very last day He died for All, God is no longer attributing sin to us, we do not owe the sin debt any longer, that debt has been paid in full, the good news is that the Son has cleared us from all sin and the eternal death it produced!
The truth is this that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.”(2 Corinthians 5:18-19) We Christians have been given the ministry of reconciliation. The whole world is God’s. And it is entrusted to us to tell others this Good News so that they can in this life live it with out fear or shame or guilt! So that they can be truly thankful and full of gratitude and joy towards God.
The modern Christian concept of hell is not only unbiblical, but the fact of the matter is that it is straight from the devil himself and blasphemes the marvelous sacrifice Christ made on the cross of cavalry. The bible defines hell as separation from God. If you don’t know God, or have a personal walk with Him, my brother and sister, you are in hell, and can ir not get any darker in darkness than that. You walk in darkness no matter how you may look by the world’s standards. This is truth,if you don’t have a personal relationship/communion with your creator, you are in hell, and are the walking dead. The bible describes the situation of people that don’t know God this way.
” … ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world:”(Eph 2:12) You have no hope and are without God in the world. That’s hell, and your end is death.
But that is not the end of the story!
So as I laid there in bed last night God revealed to me in my spirit that He is in charge, and has been from the beginning, I need not fear, and that I have been given the GOOD NEWS in that God is NO LONGER IMPUTING SIN TO ME it has be taken care of by the work of Jesus Christ in his life and death and resurrection, it is a DONE DEAL, and I have been given this news so that I no longer must fear life here in hell,the darkness within me has been overcome by His true LIGHT !!!!!
“The truth hurts.”, the truth kills. It kills the lies, it kills death. Understanding and truth will be used by God to destroy utterly darkness and lies. Love will be used to destroy hatred.
“This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”(1 John 1:5) If you are darkness, and have lies, deception, murder, greed, jealousy, envy and hatred in you, you will be consumed by the light of God and have all truth revealed to you. The way to preserve your soul is to ask God to show you His truth in this life, because only then do you get rid of the garbage in you and get it replaced with truth. Then, with the truth, you have eternal life because only pure truth can stand before God and not be destroyed. Only when you have truth do you begin to be alive. People with no knowledge of God don’t have eternal life because life itself begins with the knowledge of God. If you don’t have God, you don’t have any life at all according to the bible. When the man asked Jesus if he could first go back and bury his father before following Him, Jesus replied,
” Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead. “(Matt 8:22), meaning that those who are Spiritually dead are the same to God as those physically dead. The definition of eternal life is preserving your soul from this existence into the existence to come. If you have no life in this existence, you have no life to carry over into the next. The soul full of darkness will be destroyed, or the soul that sins shall surely die, by being filled with God’s light.
The bible declares in Isaiah 45:22 – 24
” Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I [am] God, and [there is] none else. I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth [in] righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. Surely, shall [one] say, in the LORD have I righteousness and strength: [even] to him shall [men] come; and all that are incensed against him shall be ashamed.” The end of all the earth is to see Jesus and bow their knees and confess that He is Lord, to the Glory of God. There will not be a forced show of worship here by some big angel pushing them down to their knees . They will bow and worship God because they will have the truth revealed to them.
Listen the only reason Christians are in the earth today is to show the world what their future is. We are the first-fruits. Not just the early church but all of us as Christians are just one church, always has been and always will be. The church of Jesus Christ. We Christians today are just as much part of the church as the apostles were at the beginning of all this. The church is the first fruits along with Jesus for the church is His body. First is never used unless there is a second. We are in the earth to be an example. James 1:18 says,
” Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures.”
All the earth belongs to God and everything in it. The Good News we are to bring to this world is that God has sent His Son to be the sacrifice for the world. God has reconciled the world to Himself and your end is determined. You will go stand before God. Wait, you say. What about the verses which say those that have done evil will be cast into the lake of fire? Well I will leave that for next time. I just want to make it clear that most of us are all ready in Hell, here on the 3rd rock from the sun, many of us are tortured by our thoughts and our fears and our worries, already. The fear of a future Hell is nothing compared to the Hell most of us face or see each day, most of us with out Christ are already dead,dead, dead, and there is no life in us. Don’t threaten me with a future hell, I have experienced that already, but praise God I have seen a great light in Jesus Christ and now I am saved from this life of death in this hell here in this life. I was dead and now I am alive for it was not Christ alone who died on that Cross, but I and every person did too, but the joy is that I know I was buried with him already and I am raised with him already and the life I now live I live by the power of His life in me , amen and halleluyah!
shalom in Christ.
The Serenity Prayer
Matter
Light
Space
Time
Forces
Atoms
Life
The nature of man is expressed as mind, body and spirit, analogous to, and in the image of, the triune nature of God. It’s interesting to note that Genesis relates man being made by “us” in “our” image when referring to God, indicating the plurality in His nature.
WHERE THE WILD ROSE GROWS 