Everyone has difficulty believing in a God who rules the universe. People are always discovering forces, gods if you will, of one kind or another that, in their mind, successfully oppose God’s rule, that successfully thwart Yahweh God’s plans for his human creatures. These gods, according to many Christians, defeat the One God’s determination to save all of his human creatures from death and to bring them into the fullness of life.
Paul writes:
Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men (Rom. 5:18).
…God our Savior…desires all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Yeshua, who gave himself as a ransom for all… (1 Tim. 2:3-6).
…We have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe (1 Tim. 4:10b).
Yeshua said:
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32).
John writes:
And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world (1 John 4:14).
Yahweh God proclaims:
“By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance’” (Isaiah 45:23. Cited in Romans 14:11 and in Philippians 2:10).
“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout…so shall my word that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I propose, it shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:10-11).
“I, I am Yahweh, and besides me there is no savior” (Isaiah 43:11).
The three gods that many Christians believe are more powerful than the One True God in the matter of saving human beings from eternal death are: Satan (also known as the Devil), human free will, and death itself. One major reason for Christians disbelieving either God’s stated intention to save everyone or his power to save all is their total misunderstanding of what salvation is, what human beings are saved from and what they are saved for. This paper will cover these subjects beginning with the first god, Satan.
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Chapter 1
Satan (also called the Devil)
Many Christians believe in a self conscious being possessing personhood whom they call Satan or the Devil, whom they credit with leading an angelic rebellion against his Creator. This is in spite of the lack of any description of this rebellion in the Bible. There are hints of this rebellion in 2 Peter and Jude’s diatribes against false teachers, but these authors do not cite any Scripture to support their offhand comments about an angelic rebellion. Ironic. That is the extent of biblical support for an angelic rebellion. It is this Christian god, Satan, who gets much of the blame for God’s failure to save most of mankind, let alone all. And Satan is used to take much of the blame for the existence of all types of evil including disease in this universe. He is a handy instrument in the theodicy tool box. The other god that takes much of the blame for evil and sin in the universe is human free will, a subject discussed in the next section.
When Christians remove God from having any responsibility whatsoever for human suffering in this life and life in the hereafter by placing all responsibility on Satan or human free will or on death, they preserve God’s reputation as a good and loving God, but they remove the need for faith and trust in God. If God is not responsible for my having cancer, then I do not need to trust in him and in his decision to place this burden on me. If my cancer is cured or goes into remission, my relationship with God improves. But if my condition gets worse, I am then faced with the quandary of my God wanting to see me cured but unable to do so for some mysterious reason. Many Christians do not allow me to believe that God has chosen to give me this challenge to my faith for a good reason. Such a belief, according to these Christians, questions God’s goodness. But my reaction to this defense of God’s goodness is that it makes God irrelevant in my struggle with this disease.
There are two opposite tendencies among human beings in their understanding of who and what God is. On the one hand, the gods of the earthly pagans are very much like human beings at their worst. They are angry, violent and jealous beings who like to make trouble for their human offspring. They demand of human beings both animal and human sacrifice to appease their anger, an anger that human beings are responsible for. The rituals surrounding the worship of these all too earthly gods must be performed with absolute exactness and with the participation of the entire populace, otherwise the gods of the city or state will make the people pay dearly for their error. The refusal of the Christian believer to participate in the ritual of worship of these gods was especially unnerving for these pagans, because the gods would punish the whole population, not just the Christian rebels, for this show of disrespect. These earthly gods were very much involved with the lives of their human subjects looking for any excuse to vent their rage against them. These gods are not at all like the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who declared:
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9).
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On the other hand, the all high supreme god of the philosophers, the Gnostics, including Christian philosophers, is absolutely transcendent. He is so far above humanity that human beings cannot at all detect his activity. He is not involved in their lives. He is impassible, meaning that he experiences no suffering or pain and is completely unmoved by the suffering of his human creation. Some of these philosophers even denied that the all high God created this physical universe. For these philosophers the material, physical world is evil so a lesser god or demiurge created this physical universe entrapping human souls in despicable animal bodies. This creator god seems very much like the Satan of Christian theology who Christians blame for all the evil in the universe.
This absolutely transcendent god of the philosophers slowly over the centuries became the god of the deists such as the American founding father, Thomas Jefferson. Deism morphed into the full blown atheism of the nineteenth century. These atheists worshipped the god of Nature, the true creator of the universe. This ancient religion of Nature worship was made attractive to the modern mind by the false science of evolution.
But the Christians have held on to their belief in an transcendent and aloof God by separating him from the evil in his creation and inventing the god, Satan, who is directly responsible for human illness and sin, not God. And they created several new gods, such as the Triune God and God the Son (as opposed to the human son of God, Yeshua) the Second Person of the Trinity. This God the Son does suffer and has walked the earth. Nevertheless, his godhood makes him somewhat distant for many Christians who in desperation have turned to the Virgin Mary as their mediator between man and God. In this Christian theology, the two lesser gods of Jesus and Satan battle it out for the souls of men and women, leaving the all high God as an almost uninvolved spectator of this war.
But if Satan was created by God how can God not be held responsible for the evil that Satan brings about? God escapes responsibility for Satan’s evil actions because another god takes the blame: Satan’s free will. Satan freely chose to become an evil god. Why God did not or cannot override Satan’s free will has never been explained except that God’s supposed devotion to human and angelic freedom cancels out any immediate destruction of these human and angelic rebels. This divine action must wait for some future time of judgment.
According to those who believe in an all powerful Satan, until this future time of judgment, God wants human beings and angels to love him with a love that is free. Why God is willing to see human beings and angels pay the price in pain and suffering for this love that he supposedly craves is not explained by the theologians.
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There is really no solution to what is called the Problem of Evil, that is, the problem of why human beings experience evil such as earthquakes, floods and death along with being the victims of human hatred, all of which cause pain and suffering in a world created by an all powerful good, loving and holy God. The Book of Job in the Bible confronts this question and its answer is that evil and suffering is a creation mystery, specifically a mystery concerning God’s intention of creating human beings into Godlike creatures who are made in the image of God. The creation of Adam and Eve was only the first step in God’s long journey to create a human family that reflects the holiness of God as Yeshua did and does. Yeshua’s crucifixion and suffering is at the center of God’s salvific work and is another answer to this terrifying problem. If God could save mankind from its attachment to lovelessness, from its hatred and jealousy of God without the crucifixion of his beloved son he would have taken that route. The problem is not God’s hatred of mankind for its sinfulness. The problem is man’s hatred of God for his holiness and power.
My thesis is that the use of a Satan or of human free will to explain the reality of evil in the world is unbiblical as well as creating more theological problems than it solves. There are evil forces at work in the world of human beings, forces that can be personified as Satan or the Devil. But there is little biblical evidence for an evil angelic Being who is God’s or Yeshua’s evil twin. In truth, there is no story of an angelic rebellion in the Old Testament.
The reason that Christian theologians embrace Satan and human free will as answers to the Problem of Evil is that these answers, coupled with their claim that death ends all hope for the salvation of the individual, uphold the viability of their beloved doctrine of the everlasting punishment of the wicked. This doctrine is beloved because it gives churchmen control over their congregations, and motivates unbelievers to buy their product since it promises salvation from such a terrible destiny. Bad News is better at getting people’s attention than Good News.
Surprisingly in view of their worship of an omnipotent and loving God, the majority of Bible believing Christians believe that most of mankind will either suffer an eternity in a place called hell or will be annihilated. Billy Graham once said that he believed that 85% of Christians were unsaved! If the majority of mankind will be condemned to hell or annihilation, who is more powerful: God or Satan? The truth is, even one permanently lost soul represents a loss for Yahweh, a loss that would indicate that Yahweh is not God. How is it that God will weep over his failure at saving all of mankind while a supposed Satan will be able to boast of filling hell with millions of his human victims? Is Satan God?
In any discussion of salvation and hell the first question that must be answered is: Who is primarily responsible for the salvation of human beings? The theology that most Christians believe in implies that the human being, himself or herself, is primarily responsible for their own salvation. How can this be correct? God is responsible for saving human beings because he created them. And he acknowledges his responsibility in his claim that he alone is savior:
“I, I am Yahweh, and besides me is no savior” (Isa. 43:11).
In regard to the subject of salvation this is the most important verse in the entire Bible. Human beings cannot be their own saviors. Human beings are spiritually impoverished, broken creatures who are totally dependent on God for their salvation. If a human being is, in the end, not saved it is God’s fault. If God is not 100% responsible for a human being’s salvation, he is not the only savior. He would be dependent on a co-savior, the human being himself. Yeshua is the savior of mankind only to the extent that Yahweh God has used him in his work of saving human beings.
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I do believe in the existence of a Satan. Satan is a force or power that serves as an adversary to human beings. This adversary can be an angel working for God such as the angel featured in the Book of Job. In Job, Satan does nothing without God’s express permission. Furthermore, Satan is totally ignored by Job and his companions in their discussions of the calamities that have befallen Job. On the contrary, Job concludes that it is God himself who is responsible for the calamities that have befallen him: “‘Who among these [the living things of the earth] does not know that the hand of Yahweh has done this?’” (Job 12:9). But it is Yahweh’s answer to the why of evil and suffering in the world that should have put an end to Christians blaming a fallen angel for evil in the world. Yahweh’s answer is five chapters long (38-42) and does not mention Satan at all. This is in itself astounding inasmuch as the Book of Job is the Bible’s premier book on the Problem of Evil.
This is not the only thing about Job that goes against much Christian theology. The other thing is that Job’s reward for resisting the temptation to “curse God and die” as expressed by his wife is not eternal life in Paradise, but is a long happy life on this earth. My heart goes out to Mrs. Job who also has lost much. But she became hateful and bitter toward God and her husband. Nevertheless, my hope for her and her dead children and dead servants is that God will grant her and them a full life in the hereafter, that her death and the deaths of her children and the deaths of the servants will not have the last word. For me, the only satisfactory solution to the Problem of Evil as revealed in the story of Job can only be the salvation of all human beings––the good and the bad alike including Job and his angry wife along with the murderous Sabeans and Chaldeans. I assume that the Satan in Job is already beloved of God being the faithful servant that he is described as.
The Adversary (or the Satan) can even be God himself as revealed in 2 Samuel 24:1. Here the author reveals that Yahweh himself incites David to take an unlawful census of Israel’s people. This census was for the purpose of determining the number of fighting men that David had at his disposal in case of war. By this census, David was committing the sin of idolatry because it represented his belief that his nation’s security was to be found in its military potential rather than in God. God incited David to act on this idolatrous belief thus exposing it.
In 1 Chronicles 21:1, the author is telling the same story about David’s sin, but writes that “Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel.” Unless the Christian believer is willing to claim that Satan is God, he must conclude that Satan is simply a descriptive word for anything or anyone standing against a human being, including God himself. There is no evil fallen angel called Satan.
Because of David’s sin that God himself incited, God sends a plague against Israel killing 70,000 Israelite men. This story tests our faith in an all good and holy Yahweh God. We want to blame a fallen angel, the Devil or Satan, for the evil in this story. But the Bible forbids it. The true source of the evil in this story is David and his idolatrous trust in military power for his people’s security, an idolatry that God simply made evident to the people of Israel. What is disturbing about this story is God’s punishment of supposedly innocent people for David’s sin. But innocent people have been dying on account of the sin of others from time immemorial.
In another famous story in the OT (Numbers 22:22-35), the angel of Yahweh is the adversary, the satan, working against Balaam, the non-Israelite prophet, and his donkey. The donkey alone sees the angel blocking the road and goes into the field. Balaam strikes the poor donkey three times. The donkey complains, and only then does Balaam see the angel, the adversary, the satan, who tells Balaam that had the donkey not turned aside he, the angel, would have killed Balaam.
Although Balaam blesses Israel instead of cursing her, Balaam is the evil one in this story because he disobeys God’s command not to go at all. He believes that God has changed his mind and has given him permission to go with Israel’s enemies. He knows better for these are the words from God that he speaks: “God is not man that he should lie, or the son of man that he should change his mind” (Num. 23:19a).
Satan does represent a spiritual force for evil, a force released by the rebellious wisdom of man. This rebellious human wisdom is described in Genesis 3:1-24; 4:3-24, Isaiah 14:4-22 and Ezekiel 28:1-19. These stories of rebellion are not about angels. They are about the prideful rebellions of human beings. The human heart or mind is the source of the satans and devils of the world, and since God wishes to save these creatures of his, he does not end their existence.
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The strongest proof for the assertion that there was no angelic rebellion comes from Yeshua himself. This proof appears in plain view in the Lord’s Prayer, also called the Our Father, as found in Matthew 6:9-13. Yeshua asks those who love him to pray that the Father’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This prayer about the Father’s will being done in heaven would hardly make sense if the angels in heaven had participated in a rebellion, a rebellion that would echo down through the history of the universe to this very day. And many Christians believe that the Book of Revelation tells of a future war in heaven in which Satan, the Dragon and his angels are thrown out of heaven and down to the earth. The heavens are to rejoice over this expulsion (Rev. 12:12). These passages in Revelation are not about a war in heaven against disobedient angels. God’s will has always been done in heaven. This war is symbolic of God’s war against human pride and greed, a pride and greed that has ruled the earth, claiming to sit on God’s throne. It is Man who has claimed to be God from time immemorial, not one of God’s angels. It is the spirit of the Natural Man that rules the world. His pride and greed and rebellion make up the principalities and powers, the rulers and authorities that God has disarmed and put to open shame “by triumphing over them in him [in Yeshua]” (Col. 2:15; see also Eph. 6:10). It is through the church that the wisdom of God is made known to the ruler of this world, the Natural Man, the Man of Sin who wars against Yahweh God in the spiritual realm and not on the earth with guns (Eph. 3:10).
Human beings live in a spiritual universe which is invisible to them. We see only the physical universe. Our thoughts and desires flow out of our immaterial souls and into the entire spiritual universe affecting all other human beings for good or for ill. Adolph Hitler’s evil desires seemed to have possessed the souls of millions of Germans. Charles Darwin is one of Satan’s messengers or angels, and his atheistic ideas have possessed the minds of millions.
I mentioned that 2 Peter and Jude do speak of an angelic rebellion. They may have gotten their information from the Book of Enoch. And, furthermore, they write that these rebellious angels were cast into the deepest pit of Tartarus soon after their rebellion to be kept in chains until the judgment. This rather amazing statement about the imprisonment of the rebellious angels throughout most of human history contradicts the other biblical accounts of the activities of these supposed rebels and/or their leader such as tempting Yeshua (Mt. 4:10) and tempting Ananias to lie to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:3) or accusing the high priest, Joshua (Zec. 3:1-2). But neither Peter nor Jude were writing on the subject of bad angels. These bad angels were simply given as examples of God’s punishment of the ungodly (2 Peter 2:7, 9).
If Satan is an evil angelic person with selfhood, he would have a name as the good angels, such as Michael and Gabriel, have. Anyone who has read the Bible knows how important names are to its authors. Chapter 10 of Genesis and most of the following chapter has dozens of names of people who have little or no importance to either Christians or Jews. The Bible provides the names of over 3,000 people! God’s name, Yahweh, appears almost 7,000 times in the original writings of the OT, but Jews and Christians have replaced God’s name in the copies of the OT books with the word, “Lord”. And yet, in spite of this emphasis on names, the Bible has no name for either Satan or the Devil?!
“Lucifer” is not Satan’s name unless the Person who gave him his name spoke Latin prior to creating human beings. The name “Lucifer” found its way into the English language by way of the Catholic Latin translation of the Bible known as the Vulgate. The translators of the King James Bible used the Vulgate Bible as a guide, as can be verified by any King James Bible with its original preface. These translators got the Latin word “Lucifer” from the Vulgate. Lucifer is made up of two Latin words used by Saint Jerome to translate the original Hebrew of Isaiah’s description of the king of Babylon as found in Isaiah 14:12 into Latin. Lux, lucis meaning light and ferre, to carry or bear. Lucifer means “Light Bearer” Modern English translations of Isaiah 14:12 do not use the King James Bible or the Vulgate, but instead translate the Hebrew into English as “O Day Star, son of Dawn”.
The “Day Star, son of Dawn” of Isaiah 14:12 is, in reality, not a star but is the planet Venus, which appears just before sunrise at certain times of the year (and just after sunset at other times of the year, but often thought to be a different “star”). And the “star” Venus (named after a Roman goddess) can be seen by the naked eye in daylight, thus the title, “Day Star”. The Romans called it the Light Bearer or Lucifer as did the Greeks with the Greek word, “Phosphoros”. In the first part of Isaiah 14 is a God given taunt against the king of Babylon. One can readily see that God, in speaking these words about the king of Babylon, he is using sarcasm to mock him: “O Day Star son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low” (Isa. 14:12). Lucifer or Day Star is not Satan or the Devil. It is the king of Babylon. This king is cut down for his prideful wisdom which oppressed the people of God (Is. 14:1-4). The King of Babylon is himself a symbol for the hubris of rebellious Man or Adam.
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Jewish authors of the OT had the habit of personifying various human traits, especially those human traits that cause problems for human beings. The word “satan” is a Hebrew word for “adversary”. It is not anyone’s name. But the biblical authors personified this concept and used it as though it was a person rather than a trait attributed to a person or psychological condition of a person. So Yeshua’s temptations coming out of his own mind become a separate being called an adversary or satan. The English translators simply transliterated this Hebrew word into the Roman alphabet and gave it a capital “S”, and suddenly the word appears to refer to a self-conscious being with personhood.
The English word “devil” comes from the Greek, diabolos. According to Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, it means “a calumniator, false accuser, slanderer”. But again the biblical authors personify it. In a number of places in the Bible the words “Satan” and “Devil” are used interchangeably.
The singular words “devil” and “demon” do not appear in any of the thirteen English translations of the Old Testament that I checked on the Blue Letter Bible website. These two singular words are found in the New Testament only. In the English Standard Version of the NT, “devil” appears in 34 verses; the plural“devils” is not found in the ESV. The plural “devils” appears in the OT only in the KJV––in 4 verses. The singular “demon” appears in 26 verses in the ESV NT. The plural “demons” appears only in two to four verses (depending on the translation) in all of the OT English translations offered by the Blue Letter Bible website, but not at all in the KJV. On the other hand, the plural “demons” appears in 40 some verses in the NT.
And the word “Satan” appears only about 14 times in English versions of the OT that I checked. And all but three of these are to be found in Job. On the other hand, in the Hebrew concordance of the NASB “satan” appears 27 times in 23 verses. This means that the English translators of the OT transliterated the Hebrew word “satan” into the English word “satan” for only half of the verses in the Hebrew text that contain the word “satan”. The translators realize that English speakers have an incorrect understanding of the Hebrew word “satan” and therefore choose not to use it in half of the verses where it appears in the Hebrew Bible. They mostly use “adversary” with a small “a”. I also checked the Latin Vulgate against the KJV. The Vulgate has “Satan” in 1Kings 5:4, but the King James has “adversary”–– with a small “a”. In the ESV New Testament, “Satan” is in 33 verses.
The phrase “evil spirits” is found up to 9 times in some OT translations, mostly in 1 Samuel in connection with King Saul. And in all these cases this evil spirit is described as coming from God. The English Standard Version translates the Hebrew with “harmful spirit”.
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My conclusion is that the authors of the OT were not that much interested in the devil(s), or demon(s) or even Satan compared with the authors of the NT. The reader will not find one incident of demon(s) or devil(s) possessing a human being in the entire Old Testament. This is very puzzling.
One answer could be that the Mosaic faith of the people of Israel was contaminated by the monotheistic faith of Iranian Zoroastrianism. The Jews would have had contact with this faith starting with their Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC and continuing through the Persian period which included Israel’s “savior”, Cyrus, who allowed the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple (see Isaiah 45:1-13). This contact would have intensified after the conquests of that violent and drunken thug known as Alexander the Great. It is because of this thug that the beloved Christian Scriptures called the New Testament was offered to the world in the Greek language. This Macedonian, after conquering Judea went on to conquer Persia in 330 BC. In 301 BC the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire became Alexander’s successor in greater Syria, which included Judea. It was this kingdom that attempted to stamp out the Mosaic faith of Israel and replace it with Greek paganism, a paganism influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism.
In the Jewish books of Maccabees is the story of Antiochus IV profanation of the Temple in 167 BC and of his persecution of the Jews who refused to adopt the culture and paganism of Antiochus Epiphanes’s Hellenism. In 1 and 2 Maccabees one can find explicit teachings of the resurrection of the dead, reward and punishment in the hereafter and even prayer for the dead, teachings found in Zoroastrianism. It is difficult to determine if Jewish beliefs were instrumental in the formation of Zoroastrianism or vice-versa. But it is possible that the words that Jews used in their religious writings were borrowed from Greek and Iranian writings such as the words daevas or demons, meaning in Zoroastrianism: “maleficent powers who refused to do the will of the Wise Lord” (The Dawn & Twilight of Zoroastrianism, by R.C. Zaehner, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961 pg. 39).
R.C Zaehner writes this about the Magi and therefore possibly about the Magi who came to Bethlehem to worship the child, Yeshua:
It is they [the Magi], then, who would be responsible for the cut-and-dried division of creation into two mutually antagonistic halves––the creatures of the Holy Spirit on the one hand and the creatures of the Destructive Spirit on the other. Thus they can be regarded as the true authors of that rigid dualism that was to characterize the Zoroastrianism of a later period… (ibid, pg. 162).
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This dualism is similar to the Christian dualism in which Yeshua and Satan are practically twins with equal power, although Satan, according to many Christians, seems to be the superior of the two inasmuch as Yeshua saves only about 20% of humanity. This dualism is unlike the Gnostic dualism in which the spirit is good and the material universe is evil. The dualism that St. Augustine believed in before he became a Christian was of the Gnostic kind as promoted by the Manicheans.
Matthew’s story of the Magi worshipping the child, Yeshua, is evidence for this Zoroastrian influence on Judaism. Is Matthew informing his readers that the Magi, in worshipping Yeshua, are declaring that Yeshua has come into the world to destroy the false belief in the power of evil, centered in Satan, as a successful opponent of the sovereign God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?
In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the author writes that Yeshua, after his suffering and resurrection, “he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs” (Heb. 1:3b-4). If Yeshua is superior to the angels, he certainly must be superior to a supposed fallen angel. Satan is not mentioned at all in Hebrews. And the devil is mentioned only once as the one that Yeshua destroys, and is described as“one who has the power of death” It is from death that Yeshua has delivered “all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:14-15). Yeshua will have total victory over death, a death which includes Satan and the devil (see 1 Corinth. 15:26). Yeshua tells his disciples, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). Again, Satan is not a person but is a symbol for the power of evil. And Yeshua has been victorious over evil. But this victory has not been fully realized. And Yahweh God has always been in charge of his universe. And with God and his Creation is where the mystery of evil is located.
The authors of the Gospels use of Persian and Greek words does not mean that the the Gospel writers believed in Zoroastrianism or even in its understanding of demons. It may be that they used this word for what we might call mental or spiritual illnesses of some sort that were causing psychotic breakdowns. These illnesses certainly existed in Old Testament times but were not described by OT authors as demon possession. Interestingly, John in his Gospel uses the word “demon” only in those instances where Jesus’s enemies accuse him of being possessed by a demon. John records no miracle of Jesus in which he cures a person of demon possession.
Another explanation for why demon possession is so prevalent in the Gospels but absent in the OT may be that the appearance of the Messiah in Judea and Galilee caused some sort of a rupture in the spirit world of the human mind. Much spiritual ferment goes on in the spirit world that human beings appear to share with one another on some unconscious level. (Note here that I am using the word “unconscious” a word associated with Sigmund Freud’s work even though I do not at all believe in any of his theories. This is similar to the Gospel writers’ use of the Greek word “demon”. They used this word without believing in any of the pagan or Zoroastrian teachings that lie behind it.) This spiritual ferment that characterized the time of the Messiah possibly caused some illness in an especially spiritually sensitive individual.
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I believe that Mary Magdalene was one such especially spiritually sensitive person and that is why she was both a devoted disciple of Yeshua and was bothered by seven demons. The authors of the Gospels are not saying that she was an evil person before Yeshua healed her of this affliction. Quite the contrary. She was simply involuntarily involved in severe spiritual warfare within her internal spiritual environment, an environment that may have been affected by all the anger and spiritual confusion floating around in the spiritual ecosphere of a society oppressed by both the Romans and the Jewish authorities (Matt. 23:4) both of whom lay heavy burdens on the people. And because these people who were bothered or possessed by demons were spiritually sensitive people they perceived that Yeshua was the Son of God (Mark 3:11). With their God given spiritual sensitivities they were tuned in to the signs of the times, the new spiritual realities (Matt. 16:1-3). They could read the signs that Yeshua was revealing by his miracles and teaching, signs that Yeshua enumerated for John the Baptist’s enquiring disciples (see Luke 7:21-23). And that Yeshua healed them of their demons should not come as a surprise either; the presence of the spirit of Yeshua in the human heart brings a deep peace and protection from the individual’s inner turmoil. The nagging question is how did these demon possessed or demon bothered people come to know that Yeshua is the Son of God, or even the Christ, whereas Yeshua tells Peter that Peter knew him to be the Christ and the Son of God only because the Father revealed this truth to him (Matt. 16:16)? Did the Father reveal Yeshua’s identity to these demon afflicted human beings or were they simply more observant of Yeshua’s uniqueness than Peter was? On the other hand, how does one handle the seeming contradiction between Matt. 16:16 and John 1:41? Perhaps Andrew told Peter only that Yeshua was the Christ and did not know Yeshua’s full identity as revealed by Peter: “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. The demons never say that Yeshua is the Christ, but Luke says that they knew that he was the Christ (Luke 4:41). I’ll have to leave it at that. However, note that the demons themselves are mute and can only speak or fall down before Yeshua through their human victims. They are literally nonexistent apart from their victims. There is no Gospel record of a demon walking around as some sort of ghostly creature independent of a human victim. Demons are the creation of their human victims by way of illness, spiritual struggle, or strong evil inclinations.
Demon possession as described in the NT seems to be especially connected with suicide. Those afflicted with such a condition were prone to harming themselves. And when a number of demons were cast into a herd of swine, they dashed down the hill and drowned themselves in the nearby lake. Such modern examples of demon possession such as alcoholism and drug addiction also have the element of a wish to commit suicide.
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It’s ironic that Christian defenders of the literal interpretation of Bible passages, ignore the Bible’s clear statement that Isaiah 14:3-15 is about the king of Babylon and that Ezekiel 28:12-17 is about the king of Tyre. But inasmuch as the OT does not say a word about an angelic rebellion against God, theologians ignore their own rules by drafting Isaiah 14:3-15 and Ezekiel 28:12-17 in support of their doctrine of an evil angel called Satan and his followers causing much of the world’s evil and frustrating God’s salvation plans in doing so. If a symbolic meaning is to be read into the words of Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 the symbolism should be about the pride of sinful man who believes himself to be God. After all, the kings of Babylon and Tyre were human beings, not angels.
I make a point of this because the Serpent in the Garden of Eden is symbolic for the rebellious wisdom of Eve (the Bible’s would be “goddess”) a wisdom good in itself before it turned to the dark side in its rebellion against God. Eve was conversing with her own inner wisdom. She was the Day Star, daughter of Dawn. Yahweh God prophesied that there would be enmity between this rebellious human wisdom of Eve’s, a wisdom that will be worthless as dust, and the woman (Mary?) and her offspring (the New Adam, her son, Yeshua?).
Yeshua used this symbol for human wisdom when he advised his disciples to “be as wise as serpents” (Matt. 10:16). Yeshua is not advising his disciples to be as wise as Satan or the fallen angels. The Serpent is simply a symbol for human wisdom as applied to worldly challenges.
The Bible speaks of human leaders, such as kings and judges, as though they were gods. We see this in Isaiah 14 in regard to the king of Babylon: “How you have fallen from heaven, O Day Star…” And just as interpreters of the Bible interpret Isaiah 14 as a story of a fallen angel called Lucifer so do they interpret Genesis 6:1-2 as describing the angelic rebellion. Ridiculous! Angels, rebellious or otherwise, are spirit beings having no animal bodies and therefore no genitalia, and they, therefore, cannot have sex with women, cannot father human offspring.
The “sons of God” in Genesis 6:2 are human kings who are, as the Bible describes, taking the daughters of commoners, the daughters of men with no status of nobility, as wives or concubines, thus initiating the terrible evil of polygamy. The many sons of these polygamous relationships competed among themselves for their father’s attention, a competition that often meant showing valor in acts of violence. “These [sons] were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown” (Gen. 6:4). They were not the offspring of angels and women.
Yeshua, in defending himself against the Judeans’ charge of blasphemy because of his words, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:31-39), refers them to Psalm 82. Psalm 82 describes the Judges of Israel as “sons of the most high” and by others words similar to that used in Isaiah 14 in describing the king of Babylon and in Ezekiel 28 in his description of the king of Tyre. The author of Psalm 82 is not committing blasphemy when he quotes God as addressing the judges of Israel, unjust though they were: “ ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you’ ” (Psalm 82:6). And their doom is the same as that of the king of Babylon (not a fallen angel called Satan or Lucifer) in Isaiah 14. God tells these human judges: “ ‘Nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince’ ” (Psalm 82:7). Yeshua concluded his argument from Psalm 82 with these words:
“Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said you are gods’? If he [God] called them gods to whom the word of God came––and Scripture cannot be broken–– do you say of him who the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming’, because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?”
And Yeshua spoke of himself as the bronze serpent that Moses attached to a pole (cross?) which healed those who looked upon it (him). See John 3:14 and Numbers 21:9. In going to the cross, Yeshua crucified the human wisdom in himself out of loving obedience to the Father, thus healing Eve’s and, therefore, mankind’s rebellious wisdom. Yeshua’s human wisdom was telling him that it was unwise for him to allow himself to fall into the hands of his enemies. Peter was expressing Yeshua’s own feelings, his own temptations, when he rebuked Yeshua for talking about his coming death at the hands of his enemies. Yeshua responded to Peter’s words of human wisdom: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Mark 8:32-33). Yeshua is not saying anything about a fallen angel in his use of the word “Satan”. He is rejecting Peter’s human wisdom which is in rebellion against the Father’s wisdom. And Yeshua is rejecting his own human wisdom that was tempting him to flee his enemies, to stay out of Judea.
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In Matthew 4 we see the devil tempting Yeshua to use his God given powers for his own benefit. But it is obvious that these temptations come out of Yeshua’s own heart. Yeshua did not need a fallen angel to tempt him to use his powers to change the stones into loaves of bread. Yeshua was famished. But Yeshua was sent by God to give to mankind the life that comes from the Spirit of God, not the life that comes from eating bread. Yeshua would create enough bread to feed several thousand people, but this miracle was meant to symbolize his mission to feed them the spiritual food they needed to live the life of the Spirit.
Yeshua was also faced with the temptation to worship the god of political power, a god that promised to give him rulership over all the kingdoms of the world. This idolatry of the worship of political power has been practiced by the Christian Churches, Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic for centuries. Political Power has been Christianity’s satan or adversary, tempting the Church to trust in it rather than in God for its well being and success in saving the world.
Although Matthew places the temptation scene at the beginning of Yeshua’s ministry, Yeshua confronted temptations throughout his entire ministry especially as he hung in pain on that Roman cross. His enemies hurled temptations such as this one at Yeshua: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” Yeshua could also hear the priests and scribes mock him: “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.” But this verbal taunting was nothing compared to the raw physical pain that he was experiencing and the pain that the suffering of his mother, brothers and sisters and disciples gave him. How he must have been tempted to end this pain, to give in to his desire to miraculously remove himself from the cross. Unlike all others who have been tortured, Yeshua did indeed have the power to put an end to his suffering by coming down from the cross and putting his torturers and tormentors to death. But Yeshua refused to use his God given power for his own benefit. He would suffer in obedience to the Father.
One indication that Matthew, in his story of Yeshua’s temptation, is using figurative language is the part where he writes that the devil took Yeshua to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world. Such a thing cannot be done. Possibly on some mountains a person can see one kingdom. Even if the devil took Yeshua to the moon, he could see only about half of the earth in a moment of time. I’ve been at 40,000 feet above the United States and could only see a small part of one state; this limitation being mostly due to the curvature of the earth. Yeshua was not taken to the top of any mountain nor was there any devil talking to him. The temptations came out of Yeshua’s own human mind and heart. But Yeshua remained sinless not allowing these temptations to become evil attitudes resulting in sinful behavior. The temptations that Yeshua faced were real enough, but Matthew’s description of them followed the Jewish custom of using figurative language to describe spiritual or psychological realities.
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A supposed fallen angel called the Devil or Satan is not the cause of sin. The cause of sin is the human heart:
“This people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me…” (Isa. 29:13; quoted by Yeshua in Matt. 15:8).
“For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear; and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn and I would heal them” (Matt. 13:15 and Isa. 6:9-10).
The Bible tells of an historical event in which God destroys the whole human race except for eight people. Moses does not mention any evil god such as Satan being responsible for this great evil (not a moral evil but a natural evil). Moses tells the story of Yahweh God destroying Sodom and Gomorrah with all its babies and young children without attempting to lay the blame on an evil god. God, according to the prophet Amos, says this: “Does disaster come to a city, unless Yahweh has done it?” (Amos 3:6b). “I form light and create darkness, I make well being and create calamity, I am Yahweh, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).
But the Christian will object to this saying that the inhabitants of these cities brought this destruction on themselves by their own free will decisions to commit evil. And thus another God is called upon to “solve” the mystery of sin and suffering: human free will. I believe that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah as part of his plan to save these evil people who were enslaved by sin on account of their very nature as men of dust. Even the children needed to be re-created, needed God’s saving work, even though they obviously had not used their free will to sin. The eventual reconciliation of all people with the Father and his granting them the gift of eternal life is the only true solution to the problem of sin and suffering: In the end, all will be well. And the Father will reveal to us human beings that it was human sin and suffering that had helped to bring about the perfect universe that God is in the process of creating.
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Yes, shocking as this is, human moral failure is one of the Father’s tools in making us perfect as he is. Everything has a purpose in God’s salvation work including our sins and the suffering they cause. This mystery of an all good and loving God creating a universe with the evils of sin and suffering is not “solved” by inventing another god called Satan. Yahweh God is good and loving and holy, and he has created a universe where there is evil and suffering. It is this very difficulty that calls us human beings to put our trust in our Creator, a trust that believes that God is doing a good work that, in our limited knowledge and wisdom, we human beings cannot now understand. Believing that God exists means nothing at all. Believing that God is a loving God is everything. It is this trust that is put to the test when we human beings experience suffering, and when we recognize the evil that exists in our own hearts and in the hearts of others.
The Bible also calls Satan, the Accuser. This accuser can be an angel who is obedient to the Father such as the angel that accuses Job. Job recognizes that his accuser is actually God himself (Job 9:15). Or the accuser can be the people of the world who hate God, Yeshua and his followers (John 15:18-27; 17:14). These are: “The great dragon [who] was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev. 12:9). He symbolizes the unrighteous who accuse Yeshua and his followers of evil. The dragon is a personification of all the accusers of the brethren. And he with his armed might has been thrown down, and those who have inherited the Kingdom “have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Rev. 12:10-11).
The believing community of Jewish Christians, represented by that holy Jewish woman, Mary, has given birth to Yeshua. And now this defeated but still alive dragon is making war on her other offspring, both Jewish and Gentile, who are identified by “those who keep the commandments of God” (see Rev. 12:13-17).
Yeshua tells the the Jews, who had at first believed in him but were now seeking to kill him, that the devil, the father of lies, is their father (see John 8:34-47). Obviously this statement is spiritually true and not literally true. The devil is a personification of man’s evil heart, a heart that is mankind’s adversary or satan, and it “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeing someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8). Look how emphatic Yeshua is when he declares this truth:
“Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but all things that come out of a person are what defile him… For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:14-16, 21-23).
How many times must Yeshua say that nothing, including Satan, devils, demons, all of which many Christians believe come from the outside of man, can defile a man. Satan, devils and demons defile a man because they come from inside a man, come from his own heart.
We would expect to see Satan and his rebellious angels taking some blame in Genesis for the wickedness of mankind, but he is not mentioned. On the contrary, God accuses mankind as the source of evil in his creation:
Yahweh saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart [his heart, not some fallen angel’s heart] was only evil continually. And Yahweh was sorry that he had made man [no sorrow is expressed over making a supposed wicked angle called Satan] on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. (Gen. 6:5-6).
Please remember, the serpent that God condemns in Genesis 3:14-15 is symbolic for mankind’s rebellious wisdom.
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Human beings are powerful spirit beings in addition to having an animal like bodily existence. The prince of this world is mankind’s worldly spirit. It is a very powerful spirit that rules the world with an iron hand. It is also the source of all evil powers in this world. This spirit is not a material substance. It is an immaterial reality, a reality that it shares with angels and God. The word “heart” is a symbol for this spirit or immaterial aspect of the human being. The Greeks called this non-material force the “psukhe” or “psyche” in English. In theology it is called the “soul”. In the past, the word “mind” was used, but the materialistic science of our modern culture made this word synonymous with the word “brain” which is a bodily organ needed by the human spirit to express itself in the physical world. Human thought, both good and evil thoughts, arise in the mind or soul of a person and not in his brain.
This spirit that exists in every individual is influenced by every other human being that exists in the world and by every human being that has ever existed. Our spirit existence does not possess the same inviolable boundaries that our bodies possess. This is why each human culture has its own particular spiritual weaknesses. No human being is born with a blank slate (tabula rasa) for a soul. We all are born with both the spiritual strengths and weaknesses of our ancestors. Adam and Eve were simply the first of our ancestors to set us on the road to sin. No fallen angel needed. Some cultures are especially prone to sexual sins and gluttony. Other societies have been susceptible to such sins as alcoholism and the lust for wealth and status.
The cultures of ancient Greece and Israel were especially tormented by the sins of violence, anger and revenge as can be seen in the history books including the Bible. This proneness to violence even among the early Christians can be seen in the words of Yeshua’s brother, James, as he admonishes his Christian Jewish and Greek audience. Their spiritual warfare is not with Satan, but with themselves:
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder… (James 4:2a).
It is their friendship with the world that is the source of their sin, not Satan: “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” (James 4:4). The devil is to be found in the soul of the believer, in his worldly passions: “… Resist the devil, and he will flee from you… Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double minded” (James 4:7b, 8b).
We Christians are not at war with a fallen angel called Satan. We are at war with an internal satan, a satan that is a part of who we are. We are our own worst enemy or adversary. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” When we Christians die and are resurrected with a spiritual body, this war that we have with ourselves will come to an end. In the meantime, however, we Christians must die to our sinful and selfish selves everyday.
The scribes and Pharisees were playing the role of the dragon when they accused Yeshua of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul (Matt. 12:24-32; Mark 3:22-30). That Yeshua was casting out Satan’s demons (adversaries of those possessed) by the power of the Holy Spirit was obvious to the scribes and Pharisees, and therefore they were blaspheming the Holy Spirit when they accused Yeshua of being possessed by Beelzebul.
This accusation amounted to accusing the Father’s Holy Spirit of being an evil spirit. It is a totally evil (eternal) sin that cannot be forgiven, that is, the blasphemer must be punished. That this sin cannot be forgiven does not at all mean that the sinner himself cannot be eventually reconciled to God. It simply means that the sinner must be punished, and with a punishment that will be a part of God’s plan to save him. I will return again and again to this subject of punishment and reconciliation.
The unbelieving, enslaved to sin, human beings, on the other hand, do not suffer from this war within themselves; they are more at peace with their sinful selves. But, in the end, they will experience a great deal of pain as God’s Judgment reveals their wickedness to them and then strips it away in the Lake of Fire. Suffering is the lot of both the saved and unsaved in this divine battle against evil, nevertheless, believers are blessed to be in this fight in their earthly life.
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2
Free Will
I am not writing about human free will involved in such choices as choosing a spouse, or deciding on where to live or what to buy and so forth. Also, everyone recognizes that a person’s choices are somewhat governed by one’s life experiences, past choices and by their character, a character that is governed by the presence of the Spirit of Christ, if he or she is a believer in Yeshua. No one has the ability to make totally free choices. If this were not so, no one could predict the behavior of any human being. Interpersonal relationships would be impossible if people’s choices were so free that they would be totally unpredictable. I speak of free will in the matter of belief and unbelief, of goodness and sin, of salvation and condemnation. In this area of spiritual life human beings are not in charge, they are not the captains of their lives. God rules.
Many Christians believe that God cannot save everyone because he is powerless against human free will. He does not want to force people to love him so he has decided that he must bow to what human free will has decreed as to the individual’s salvation, his eternal destiny. This belief that God can only offer salvation to human beings while it is up to the individual to freely choose to accept or reject this offer affects the interpretation of the entire Bible. While unintentional, freewill theologians make man into a god who rules over Yahweh God’s work of salvation. God becomes a spectator of a game whose outcome is determined by human free will.
C.S. Lewis wrote that “the doors of hell are locked on the inside” (the Problem of Pain pg. 127). Human beings freely choose to be in hell rather than in heaven, and God is powerless to break this door down. And yet Yeshua decreed that: “… The gates of hell [hades] shall not prevail against it [the church]” (Matt. 16:18). Yeshua is saying that his church will be on the offensive in its war against hades. and that hades will fail in its determination to prevent the church from rescuing the people imprisoned in hades. Gates or doors are a defensive weapon, not an offensive one. Yeshua is not saying that the church will successfully defend herself from an attack by the forces of evil symbolized by the gates of hades. It is the church that is on the attack. God, through his beloved son and his followers, will indeed break down the doors of hell. Man’s will will not have the last word as C.S. Lewis would have us believe. God will give sight to the blind sinner so that he can see the evil of his sins and then repent of them.
The most egregious accusation against God made by Christians who worship at the altar of human free will is that God does not actually save anyone. Of course they do not state their theology in such stark words, but this is what their idea of salvation amounts to. God simply offers salvation to the human being. It is up to the poor broken creature to actually accept God’s offer before this creature can hope to be saved from everlasting hellfire. If this poor broken sinner has been beaten and abused by “Christian” parents and therefore cannot bring himself to either understand or accept God’s offer of salvation, it is too bad for him. God is not in the business of saving sinners, he only makes offers to save them. Salvation depends on human beings freely choosing to be saved, to believe in Yeshua as their personal Savior.
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Christians have declared that human sin, sins such as refusing God’s offer of salvation, is a mark of human freedom, the freedom to choose to obey God or to rebel against Him. God has no choice but to honor this freedom, this supposed mark of man’s dignity. And, yet, the truly Free Being, Yahweh God, cannot, is not able,to choose to be evil because He is all Holy and Good. And, yet, when men and women choose to commit evil acts, theologians describe this “choice” as an act of freedom, a freedom that not even God has!
No! Yeshua declared that sin is slavery: “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone [this includes Adam and Eve] who commits sin is a slave of sin” (John 8:34). Yeshua also declares that a diseased tree cannot bear good fruit. He does not say that a diseased tree freely chooses to not bear good fruit (Matt. 7:18). Unsaved man cannot choose to do the good because he is enslaved by sin. Man does not freely chose sin. Sin enslaves the unsaved human being. The unsaved man is spiritually dead. And dead people cannot choose to believe in Yeshua. Paul also writes about the sinner being a slave of sin and concludes with these words:
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 6:22-23).
True human freedom is the result of God saving the human being from slavery to sin. True freedom is revealed when human beings are so holy that they cannot sin. The human being is either a slave to sin or is one with God and therefore cannot sin. The man or woman who is one with God has the perfect freedom of God. They are fully alive.
Adam and Eve’s sin revealed that they needed to be saved even before they sinned. They needed to be perfected by Yeshua Christ. If they had been made in God’s perfect image they could not have sinned. Perfect human beings do not sin! In the eternal age, billions of saved human beings will spend trillions of years in the presence of God without committing even one sin! Will they not be free?
On the other hand, Adam and Eve could not go even a short moment in time without sinning against God, and yet theologians say they were free to accept or reject God’s commandment. Their actions proved the opposite. Their actions proved that they were made from dust and were not yet made in God’s perfect image. In 1 Corinthians 15:42-56 Paul compares the man of dust, Adam, with the man of heaven (or of the Spirit), Yeshua. What is interesting about this passage is that the comparison is not between Adam, the man of sin, and Yeshua, the sinless man. The comparison is between Adam, as he was at the moment he was made by God, before he committed his sin and the resurrected human being, Yeshua. This means that, although Adam’s sin brought death to mankind, it was his very created nature that was imperfect, that needed to be resurrected into the life of the Spirit, before Adam would himself be made in the perfect image of God. Adam did not have the freedom or power to obey his Creator.
Adam and Eve were like the Israelites in their inability to obey the Torah. Just as the Law became a curse for the Israelites so the one law that God gave Adam and Eve became a curse for them. Adam could rightfully have said these words of Paul: “‘Yet if it had not been for the law [you shall not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil], I would not have known sin… I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died’” (Rom. 7:7b, 9). God had given the forbidden tree a most appropriate name. Without the commandment, Adam and Eve would not have know sin, would not have known evil––nor its opposite, the good. Just as the failure of God’s covenant with Moses and the Chosen People was a necessary preparation for the new covenant of the crucified Messiah so too was the failure of God’s covenant with Adam and Eve a necessary preparation for making human beings in the perfect image of God beginning with the first human being to be made so by his resurrection, Yeshua, the Messiah, the “firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18). Yeshua redeemed Adam and Eve from the curse of the law just as he did for the Jews (see Gal. 3:10-13).
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Although Adam and Eve were sinless prior to eating from the forbidden tree, they had to be born again of the Spirit even before they had sinned, for they were of the dust. This is true for us human beings alive today. Even those who die as sinless little babies must be born again of the Spirit, which they will be when they are resurrected. And their resurrection and rebirth in the Spirit will be through the work of Yahweh God in Yeshua, his beloved son. No one comes to the Father, including the sinless Adam and Eve and sinless babies, except through Yeshua, the Son of God. Human beings who die in infancy obviously cannot make a freewill decision to believe in Yeshua as their personal Savior, but they still need the saving work of Yeshua. This simply reinforces the point that adults are saved, are born again, through the work of Yahweh in Yeshua and not through any freewill choice to believe inasmuch as unsaved human adults are just as incapable of making such a freewill choice to believe as are infants. For they are spiritually dead.
Although human beings who die in infancy are personally sinless, they do not possess the perfection in holiness demanded of those who would have eternal life in oneness with God. God begins his work of saving these human beings by resurrecting them into imperishable spiritual bodies. God’s gift of the resurrection is much more than simply granting immortality to human beings. It is part of God’s plan to create human beings in his perfect image, to create human beings into Godlike creatures. After their resurrection, these who were only infants or young children in their earthly lives, are led to springs of living water (Rev. 7:17), that is, they are filled with the spirit of Yeshua. Yeshua alone is the way, the truth and the life: “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). No one can come to the Father simply because he dies in infancy. Nor can one simply come to the Father by some human freewill decision to do so. Basically, it is Yeshua’s love for and trust in the Father that ultimately perfects and saves human beings including Christians, not the imperfect faith or love of the Christian believer that is not yet created in the full image of Yeshua and thus in the full image of God.
The shocking truth is that Yeshua, as a member of the human race, needed the Father to save him just like any other human being. The Father did this by giving his beloved son the power to go to the cross in loving obedience to him. Yeshua’s obedience to and love for the Father, tested as they were throughout his life, especially during his public ministry, along with the Father resurrecting him from the tomb, were all gifts from the Father that made Yeshua one with the Father. This oneness with the Father is what it means to have eternal life. As we shall see, eternal life is much more than simple immortality.
The worshippers of human free will see salvation as a legal matter in which Yeshua pays the penalty for sin by suffering on behalf of mankind in order to assuage God’s wrath. On the contrary, salvation is a matter of God healing the sinner. Yeshua came as a physician to heal the broken hearts of men and women. He did not come as a lawyer, concerned with whether or not human beings freely chose to sin and therefore deserve to be eternally punished in hell. Salvation is not a legal solution to the problem of sin. It is work of a new creation in which the Adam in us is replaced by Yeshua (Col. 1:27) who was perfected on our behalf by his suffering (see Hebrews 2:10; 5:8-9) . In God’s work of salvation, man finally becomes the perfect image of God, something that was not done in the Genesis creation. Yeshua’s crucifixion was a creation event rivaling that of the Genesis creation. God was creating the New Man in having his beloved son suffer and die on that Roman cross. This New Man is truly free and thus incapable of sinning.
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There would be no point to God creating the New Man by the suffering of his beloved son, if human beings freely choose to sin. The only solution to the problem of sin in this theology is to take away man’s free will, at least in regard to the whole issue of salvation. But man’s problem is just the opposite of what the freewill theologians claim it to be. Man in his unsaved natural state is spiritually dead. A dead person cannot choose to believe in Yeshua or choose to avoid sin. He needs God to give him life. And this is what God does for the one he has chosen to give life to. He gives life to the person he has chosen so that he can hear the gospel and embrace it. This life makes it impossible for the individual to reject the gospel, to reject God’s gift of faith in Yeshua.
Forgiveness would have done nothing for mankind, if it had remained in a state of hateful rebellion against God, in the state of lovelessness. It was man’s state of enslavement to a rebellious unloving spirit that needed to be healed before forgiveness could have been beneficial to mankind. All human beings need to do before God can forgive them for their sinful ways is to repent of their sins and to believe in the one whom he has sent. But human beings can do neither without God’s healing touch, a touch that gives the sinner life and true freedom.
Christians wrongly believe that because human beings freely choose to rebel against God, God’s justice demands that human beings be punished for this sinful but free choice. This idea that crime follows an act of the free will of man was an integral part of Roman law. Roman law required that crime be the result of a freewill choice in order to justify the Roman government’s decision to punish the lawbreaker. It appears that Christianity, for the most part, has adopted Rome’s philosophy of law in its theology of sin. For the Catholic, this freewill understanding of sin is spelled out in the Catholic Church’s definition of mortal sin, a sin that can bring death to the sinner: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994, para. 1857).
Zoroastrianism, the faith of an Iranian prophet, undoubtedly had an influence on the Greek and Roman moral philosophy which in turn had a centuries long influence on the Christian understanding of sin and salvation. According to R. C. Zaehner, Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, in his book, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, pg. 41: “Zoroastrianism is the religion of free will par excellence.” On the contrary, biblical theology and anthropology discounts human free will in favor of God’s sovereign will. It is God who decides who and when to free from the slavery of sin. In the new covenant the individual and the group possess goodness and truth through the work of God in Yeshua, the Messiah, and not through human beings freely choosing the good or the truth. Yeshua said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). And it is the Father’s Spirit, the Spirit of truth, the Logos, that enlightens human beings (John 1:9) so that they can know and follow the truth. And it is Yeshua’s own God given Spirit whom Yeshua sent to the community of believers to guide them: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…” (John 16:13).
Finally, John writes that those who received the Logos, the Spirit, the Wisdom, and believed in his name, Yahweh, would be given the right to become children of God. These human beings are those who “were born, not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). And this Spirit of Wisdom became flesh, was incarnated in the person of the human being, Yeshua of Nazareth. Human beings do not become true children of God by being born of their mother, nor are they born by any supposed freewill choice to do the good. They become children of God by the free choice of God to make them his children, to give them the gift of believing in his name and in the name of his beloved son, the gift of being born again.
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On the other hand, God does not feel the need to justify His punishment of sinners on the basis that they freely chose to sin against him. This does not seem just to our Western minds. But there it is. I will give one example of God’s disregard of this principle that requires that the lawbreaker freely choose to commit the particular sin, if he is to be justly punished. God killed Uzzah for a sin that he had no intention of committing. Touching the Ark of the Covenant of God was a sin so serious that to do so would bring death to the offender (Num. 4:15). The oxen that were pulling the cart upon which the Ark of the Covenant was being carried stumbled causing Uzzah to instinctively reach out to steady the ark to keep it from falling in the mud. “God struck him down there because of his error” (2 Sam. 6:7). King David was quite angry with God for his seemingly unjust reaction to this error on Uzzah’s part.
Furthermore, if an Israelite committed a sin that he was unaware of having committed, he was, nevertheless, commanded to offer a sacrifice in order to be forgiven for this unintentional sin should someone later bring this oversight to his attention (see Lev. 4:1-35). Once a year the high priest enters the Holy of Holies with blood, “which he offers for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people” (Heb. 9:7). In both these examples, God holds the sinner accountable even though there was no conscious choice to sin. And just because God says that a particular sin is evil, he is not thereby assigning blame. Sin is inherently evil even if the sinner himself is not to blame.
On the other hand, God was quite willing to forgive Cain for murdering his brother with very little punishment or even repentance required! He could no longer be a farmer; he was forced into the life of a nomad. God put a mark on Cain that warned others not to kill Cain for his crime of murder. God was hoping (humanly speaking) that by showing mercy and forgiveness toward Cain, the small family of human beings would respond with gratitude over such mercy. Instead, some of Cain’s neighbors responded with contempt for God’s mercy, and perceived God’s mercy as weakness. This contempt is brought out by the story of the evil Lamech (Gen. 4:19-24).
Later, God was forced to kill all human beings except for eight people, not for the purpose of punishing them for sin willfully committed, but because their lives had become unlivable due to their inability to love one another, due to their addiction to evil deeds. God even killed all the babies knowing that they could not freely choose to refrain from evil when they had become adults. God did not hope for any of these human beings to make a freewill decision to repent of their evil ways. Wicked human beings possess no such free will.
Thankfully, all these victims of God’s great flood will be resurrected by a merciful God who will deliver them from their slavery to evil by their baptism in the Lake of Fire (Rev. 7:14b; 20:15) and by their baptism in the Holy Spirit, that is, in springs of living water (Rev. 7:17) made possible by the Lamb of God.
According to Christians belonging to the freewill camp, sin freely chosen not only forces God to condemn these unrepentant sinners to an eternity of suffering, it somehow alters the physical universe so that these sinners become sick with all sorts of diseases. It is free will that does this, not God. In the movie, “God is Not Dead” the atheist professor asks the Christian student why his (the professor’s) mother had cancer and died of it. The Christian hero of the movie has a two word answer: “Free will.”
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What?! This cannot be because those who sin do not do so by an act of their free will. Sinners are enslaved by sin. No freedom here. We cannot escape the conclusion that God is the cause of cancer, both because he cursed the earth, which includes human bodies, when Adam and Eve sinned, and because God created the Second Law of Thermodynamics which means that the human body experiences entropy, genetic degradation. The human body, from one generation to the next, gradually loses its ability to defend itself against disease of all kinds. This is the Sovereign God’s doing and not the work of the invented god of human free will.
Now why God causes people to have cancer is a very difficult matter. Human suffering, including disease and death, is one of the great mysteries of the universe. Repeating what was said above about the Book of Job, God himself, through the instrumentality of one of his angels whom He had designated as mankind’s adversary, killed Job’s adult children along with his servants. God also inflicted Job with some terrible disease. Job’s friends tell Job that God is punishing him on account of his (freely chosen?) sins, an answer that somewhat conforms to that of the Christian student. God condemns Job’s friends for giving this false answer to the why of Job’s suffering. God does not give Job a reason for His decision to make Job suffer. God makes no mention of the angelic adversary’s (Satan’s) challenge. Instead, God gives a long description of His work of creation. Yes, human suffering is a creation mystery, not a legal mystery involving punishment for freely chosen crimes against God.
This is all a part of the mystery of God creating man in his image. God making man in his image means that God is making man into Godlike beings who will be one with God. Yeshua, is the first human being to be made in the perfect image of God. He is one with God, and he is so much like God that Christians have mistakenly come to believe that he is God. All human beings will someday be just like Yeshua (1 Cor. 15:49).
The path to this God-like existence had to begin with God making human beings morally and physically defective. How can anyone claim, in view of mankind’s moral failures and in view of so much ill health, that God does not make junk? Of course he does. Not one human being is born that is not in some way defective: physically, mentally and spiritually. Why this is so I can only guess. Perhaps, unless mankind has experienced this period of moral failure and suffering, they, in being made Godlike, would believe themselves to be God. In any event, the path to God indwelling each human being with his fullness (Col. 1:19) would be a path in which men and women encounter the mysteries of love and the experience of failure and suffering. Yeshua’s life and crucifixion is a monument to this truth about love and suffering.
In the TV series, “Touched By an Angel” sinners in trouble choose or fail to choose to follow the angels’ advice based on the power of their free will. If they choose correctly, they are saved. The TV series had no need of Yeshua. In none of the many episodes is Yeshua ever mentioned whereas human free will is featured in every episode. Neither God nor the angels are allowed to interfere with the divine power of human free will. But, according to this TV show, human free will can be coaxed into making the right choice.
This is all wrong. The wicked, which means all of us human beings, “are estranged from the womb” (Psalm 58:3) and have no power to do the good. Human beings are enslaved to their natural “fleshy” inclinations. God must break into their hearts and become the center of their very existence. God does this through placing the spirit of Yeshua Christ in the heart of man. Yeshua is the human expression of God the Father’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Unless a man or woman is born again of Yeshua’s spirit, he or she cannot be good and therefore cannot do good. God alone is good, but he can begin to work in the human being through the indwelling of the spirit of Yeshua whereby the individual walks according to the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God must have already begun working in the soul of a man when he finds himself miraculously believing in Yeshua. Again, Christians mistakenly look to the human being for the source of his faith rather than to God.
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It is God who chooses those who will receive his Spirit and when. And the individual’s death does not end God’s power to enter into the heart of a man. When the spirit of Yeshua enters the heart of a person, that person is given the power to conquer evil and is thus clothed in white. But those supposed Christians who soil their garments in this life or those who died in their wickedness, both must wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb before they can enter the throne room of God. And this washing is what is done in the Lake of Fire.
Paul reveals that his sins are not the result of freely choosing to do evil. He says nothing of his free will when explaining what his condition is that makes him sin:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is within my flesh. For I have the desire to what is right, but not the ability to carry it out… Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Yeshua Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin (Rom. 7:15-18; 24-25).
When Paul writes that with his flesh he serves the law of sin he is saying that he is its slave. I have difficulty understanding this passage, but I know that Paul is not linking sin with human free will, something that Christian pastors have made into a god.
About the Christian idolatry, in which human free will is worshipped as being the real power behind who is saved and who is not, rather than God, is the matter of love and free will. If it is God who chooses those who will love him and love their neighbor, how can this love be real? Doesn’t the choice to love someone have to begin in the heart of the individual? The main objection to the dethronement of human free will is that a human being must freely choose to love God and to love his neighbor or it is not love. A person must freely choose to love for that love to have any meaning. The truth is, human beings do not have the power to love God or others without God’s intervention. It would be nice, I guess, if we humans did have the natural ability to freely love God and others, but we don’t.
Even atheists need God’s intervention in their lives in order for them to love others. And it is God who initiates this assistance, not man with his supposed free will. Atheists believe that their denial of God’s existence does in fact cause God to not exist, at least in their lives. If atheists could only see behind the surface of their existence, they would be shocked to see the extent that their lives are under God’s control and have been guided and shaped by God. It is not surprising that atheists do not recognize that God is in control of their lives inasmuch as most Christians think that they are in control of their lives and that it was their freewill decision to believe that made them believers.
I repeat: The wicked do not have the freedom to make the choice to love God and neighbor. They are enslaved by their hatred of God and neighbor. It is God who chooses to free them from their slavery. He puts a new heart in them that cannot but love God and neighbor. To love is to be truly free. Only the person who is a slave of God rather than a slave of evil is truly free. Freedom does NOT consist of the power to choose to do evil or to do good. It is the power to do only the good.
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Most Christians do believe in what is called prevenient grace. Fallen man cannot choose to believe unless God gives him the enabling grace to do so. But this grace, according to the theologians who teach prevenient grace, does not actually save the person. It just gives him the opportunity to be saved by an act of his free will. And the man or woman with prevenient grace can just as easily lose his or her salvation by an act of the will by which he or she rejects the faith.
On the other hand, the Bible teaches that once the Spirit of Yeshua Christ comes to live in the individual, he is indeed saved because he cannot but believe. He is no longer the person he was born as. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit… (Matt. 7:18). He is a new creature in Christ. And this is why he will never apostatize; he already possesses eternal life by virtue of Christ living in him. If this eternal life can be lost through apostasy, how can Christians say that it is everlasting? In what way does the saved resurrected Christian, who is with God in his kingdom (or with God in his heaven), differ from who he was on this earth before the grave as a saved believer in Yeshua? Why can he become unsaved on this side of the grave but not on the other side, as some believe?
Yes, there is always the possibility that a saved person can stumble, can for a moment lose his faith as Peter did when he denied even knowing Yeshua. Did Peter suddenly become unsaved so that should he have died at that moment he would have been cast into hell or annihilated? No. Paul does encourage his converts to “continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard…” (Col. 1:23a). All saved people need encouragement from fellow Christians (Heb. 10:23-25). God, in saving human beings and keeping them in the state of being saved, does use secondary causes such as Paul’s preaching of the gospel and his constant encouragement of his children in the faith. Yeshua continually encouraged his close disciples even though he knew that only one would be lost. This encouragement is not proof that it is possible for true Christians to apostatize.
However, if an individual simply learns the truths of the Christian faith and gives his intellectual assent to them, this in itself does not prove that he was actually saved, that Yeshua’s spirit actually came to live in his heart making him a new creature. He can very well be unsaved and can go on sining deliberately (Heb. 11:26-31). He is now worse off than he was before when he knew nothing of the gospel or of Yeshua. He is as the person who has an unclean spirit who goes out of him, but then returns with seven other spirits more evil than itself. “And the last state of that person is worse than the first” (Luke 11:24-26).
In chapter six of Hebrews the author writes about the impossibility of restoring a Christian believer to repentance, if he has fallen away. On the other hand, the author does not claim that anyone that he is addressing has or will actually fall away. In fact, he writes that he is sure of their salvation:
Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things––things that belong to salvation (Heb. 6:9. See also Heb. 6:10-12,19-20; 9:13-14; 12:3-8).
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But, even if human beings did have the power and freedom to choose to do good or evil, Christian teachers actually make a mockery of this freedom. They invite the unbeliever to make a freewill decision to believe in Yeshua and to love the Father, but then they do something to negate this so called freedom. The Christian evangelist’s invitation to the unbeliever goes something like this: “Please, freely choose to believe in God and in his Son, Yeshua Christ. If you make this choice, you will find peace and joy in this life and you will enjoy an everlasting life with God in the next. But, I must inform you that should you freely choose to not love God, to not believe in Yeshua, you will be tortured forever in a place called hell or you will be annihilated, never to see your loved ones again. But let’s not dwell on this. I want your decision to love God to be a free decision. And, bye the way, God loves you, and he doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you; but he doesn’t always get what he wants. He must abide by your freewill decision to reject him, if that is your choice. He must obey this law of not going against your will because it was written by professional theologians, and, as we know, they are always right.”
As can be seen by anyone with an ounce of sense, the Christian insistence that a person’s decision to love God and neighbor must be a free one is totally compromised by the horrible threats that hang over the would be convert. God becomes a Mafia enforcer who tells the shopkeeper that his decision to buy protection insurance must be a free one. The enforcer doesn’t want to be accused of extortion. He wants the shopkeeper to freely choose to pay a monthly premium for protection of his shop. Nevertheless, he tells the shopkeeper that if he fails to freely pay his monthly premiums, his shop will be burned to the ground and he and his family will be killed. The enforcer also tells the shopkeeper that the Boss loves him and so prefers that there not be any unpleasantness.
Obviously, in view of freewill anthropology, the reason that the prospective convert chooses not to believe in Yeshua as his Savior is because he doesn’t believe in the evangelist’s threats or in his positive inducements to believe. In truth, the prospective convert does not believe because God has chosen not to put a new heart into the individual at this time. Freewill anthropology gives no explanation for why one person believes and another does not. One’s free choice is simply inexplicable. In divine sovereignty theology there is the mystery of God’s choice, but the mystery is found where it should be: in the Mind of God, not in the human mind.
The evangelist must be truthful. he must tell the would be convert that he cannot come to faith unless God moves him inexorably to do so, gives him the sight and the hearing to comprehend the gospel. The prospective convert should be informed that, if God does not choose to make him a new person born of the Spirit, he will remain a child of the first Adam. He will continue to have the nature of the natural man. And:
The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned… (1 Corinth. 2:14).
The prospective convert will protest this picture of God deciding who will believe and who will not. It appears to him to be unjust, besides taking away man’s dignity. Paul of Tarsus tackles this accusation that God is not just:
What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honored use and another for dishonorable use. What if God…. (Rom. 9:14-21 see also 22-24).
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Just as Yeshua is the revelation of God so is all of humanity, sinners and saints alike, Pharaoh’s and commoners alike. All of human history reveals truths about God that would otherwise remain hidden. Human history with its glories and follies, with its joys, happiness and pleasures along with its sorrow, suffering and pain, all of this is a revelation of God to his creatures. We human beings are a revelation of God to the angels, to all human beings and to any other race of beings God may choose to create. And all of this human history, corporate and individual, will lead to the creation of human beings who are in the perfect image of God.
Christians who believe in the Reformed theology of five point Calvinism admit that God hates those he casts into hell or annihilates. This admission, terrible as it is, is, nevertheless, logical given God’s choice to damn those he does not elect for salvation. But those, who believe that human free will determines the eternal destiny of human beings, and that God has no other choice but to send people to hell who have freely chosen to go on this path to perdition, claim that God loves these people whom he is forced to damn.
This makes no sense to me. It seems to me that God, in this scenario, loves the sinner’s free will, not them. It appears to me that if God truly loved these people, he would choose to overwhelm their free will with some sort of display of his love and goodness and of their happiness with him at the time that they appear before him at the judgment. How could any human being persist in his choice of hating God after such a display?
Also, I do not see any parent, including God, choosing to honor a child’s free will rather than forcing him to give up his drug addictive life style. God has his reasons for allowing sin and suffering in this world, but he has a higher purpose than simply honoring human free will. And in the end, all will be saved. One hears of parents calling the police to arrest their drug addictive son thus forcibly denying him the drugs he craves. They are taking away his supposed freedom to choose. And they do this because they love him. Unlike the God who is powerless in the face of human free will, they do what they can to save their son.
But without the doctrine of human free will, certain theological systems would collapse. How could the doctrines of hell or annihilationism stand up in a theology stripped of human free will? Well, they would have to become Calvinists who teach that God hates those whom he damns. And he has hated them from all eternity. And that is why he has refused to give them the grace to believe. As a matter of fact, Calvinism teaches that Yeshua went to the cross to save only those whom God elected from all eternity to save. This is known as the doctrine of limited atonement. The Calvinists misinterpret Paul’s extreme language and his theology as expressed in Romans 9:11-13:
…Though they [Jacob and Esau] were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad––in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of his call––she [Rebecca] was told, “The older will serve the younger.” As it is written [Mal. 1:1-2], “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I hated.
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What is the Calvinist’s defense for this seeming injustice? It is this: Salvation is a gift, not a right. It may be unfair, but it is not unjust. Nevertheless, the Calvinists cannot reasonably teach as John writes: “God is love.” Or that God is a merciful God. God becomes, in Calvinist theology, an eternally inexplicable, arbitrary and fearsome God. On the contrary, the One True God is a God who will reach his goal of saving everyone, is a God of reason and purposefulness. I say much more about this in the section on “Salvation”.
Another oddity that arrises out of freewill theology is the doctrine of the age of accountability. The one thing about Calvin’s teaching that really aroused the ire of Jacob Arminius, Calvinism’s noted opponent, is the unavoidable conclusion in strict Calvinist theology that even those who die in infancy, little babies, can end up in hell, if God has failed to elect them for salvation in some eternal past.
Anti-Calvinists of the freewill camp happily announce that, inasmuch as these unborn and born babies and young children are too young to make a freewill decision to either come to faith in Yeshua as their Savior or to deny him, they go straight to heaven should they die at their young age. Only when they reach the age of accountability do they become personally responsible for their salvation.
This age of accountability is different for different people. It can be age 7 for some or later for others. This theology is all wrong because, as discussed above, even those who die in infancy need the saving work of Yeshua. Ultimately speaking, it is Yeshua’s faith in and love for the Father that saves all people whether they die in infancy or as adults. It is Christ in us that is our hope of glory (Col. 1:27). This truth is expressed every time that the Christian consumes the communion bread and wine which symbolize the flesh and blood of the crucified Savior which in turn are symbols for the Messiah’s spirit. Yeshua’s spirit is a human expression of the Father’s Holy Spirit. Each human being is destined to become a unique expression of the man from heaven, Yeshua, the Messiah, the Son of God.
Both the Calvinists and the freewill camp prefer to ignore this whole issue. It is obvious why the Calvinists wish to ignore it. They are often forced to deny that their theology does not ensure the salvation of human beings who die as infants and young children. But the freewill camp will ignore the problems with their theology and simply claim that only those who have reached the age of accountability can send themselves to hell, if they die without having freely chosen to believe in Yeshua as their personal Savior.
When this theology of the age of accountability is taken to its logical conclusion something terrible can happen as was cruelly demonstrated by a Mrs. Yates in Texas. She murdered her five children, all of whom had not yet reached the age of accountability, in her mind at least. She apparently sacrificed her own eternal salvation in order to ensure the salvation of her children. In her mind, she made the ultimate sacrifice.
She was suffering from depression, but her crime was a logical outcome of her freewill beliefs. Her children upon becoming adults, spiritually speaking, could very well have damned themselves by freely choosing to reject faith in Christ. Mrs. Yates eliminated this possibility. If only she had believed that God is more powerful than man’s free will and that he would save her children regardless of what they might have chosen in regard to faith in Yeshua at some future time. Her faith was in her pastor’s teaching on free will rather in the biblical teaching about a God who saves.
In the process of making the salvation of infants and young children a certainty while placing the ultimate destiny of young and old adults in the hands of man’s free will, freewill theologians have overlooked an absurd logical conclusion in their theology: Abortionists have saved 60,000,000 Americans from possible damnation. Wars, in which millions of babies and children have been killed, have also secured the salvation of millions.
On the other hand, God cannot assure the salvation of anyone, or at least the salvation of adults, according to freewill theologians, as he must depend on the fickle free will of human beings. The churches preach against such assurance, seeing it as the sin of presumption. They say nothing about trusting in the love that God has for unbelieving sinners (Rom. 5:6-10). I cannot see how anyone can maintain his love for a God whose is more interested in preserving the bizarre ideal of honoring human free will, than saving his human creatures.
No! God alone is Savior, not man’s free will. And God will overcome Satan and death to save everyone. Yahweh God alone is God.
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Yeshua tells people not to be anxious about tomorrow. Christian pastors tell their congregations to be extremely worried about the time after they die because they could lose their salvation in this life and end up being the object of his wrath in the next as he consigns them to the flames of hell or annihilation. These pastors also tell their congregations to fear for their children’s future because they may use their free will to prevent God from saving them. All this exhortation to fear coming from the pulpit in spite of Yeshua telling his listeners to not be anxious about tomorrow. No Christian can escape being very anxious about his future beyond the grave unless he believes that God will save everyone. Even the Calvinists. who believe in both God’s election of the saved and that this election guarantees the salvation of the elect, are never free from worry as they can never be quite sure that they are among the elect.
We saw that Christians, who believe that human beings determine their salvation or damnation by their freewill choice to accept or not accept the gift of faith, contradict their own doctrine of human freedom by hanging the threat of eternal damnation over the heads of those who are making this supposed free choice. But in addition to this contradictory understanding of human freedom in regard to salvation, these freewill Christians deny the scriptural proof that all human beings will be saved by claiming that the unsaved will in some way be forced to praise God in the hereafter. The scriptural proof that I am thinking of is found in Isaiah 45:23 (quoted at the beginning of this essay) and is quoted by Paul in two of his epistles.
Unfortunately, Paul in his use of Isaiah 45:23 in Romans 14:11 and Philippians 2:10 reveals why interpreters of the Bible find their work so difficult. In Romans 14:11 he uses it to augment his argument that believers should not be judging other believers. This is a misuse of Isaiah 45:23 because Isaiah 45 is about how God uses unbelievers, specifically the pagan Cyrus, to accomplish his will. In turn God promises to save these unbelievers for he alone is the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and is therefore the God of all people and not just the God of Israel: “‘And there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me’” (Isaiah 45:21b). In this context of Yahweh being the only God, the God of both the Israelites and the idolatrous pagans, Yahweh declares: “‘To me every knee shall bow; every tongue shall swear allegiance’” (Isaiah 45:23b). It’s not about believers in Yeshua giving an account of themselves to God. Believers may undergo a life review with God or with his angels, but they will not come into judgment according to Yeshua (see John 5:24b). Isaiah 45 is about God’s declaration that he is indeed the Savior of all mankind and not simply those who have supposedly used their free will to choose to believe in Yahweh or in Yeshua.
In Philippians 2:10, Paul uses Isaiah 45:23 to show that:
God has highly exalted him [Yeshua] and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Yeshua every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Yeshua Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Romans 2:9-10).
Again, Paul is reinterpreting Isaiah to buttress his exhortation to believers to humble themselves as Christ Yeshua humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death. And because of this humility God highly exalted Yeshua. But the conclusion is the same. All human beings will someday confess that Yeshua Christ is Lord and, therefore, all human being will be saved because: “… if you confess with your mouth that Yeshua is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).
Christians, who claim that only persons who confess that Yeshua is Lord are saved, erase the universal salvation implication of Isaiah 45 by further claiming that those who did not confess Yeshua is Lord during their earthly lives are now in their resurrected state forced to make this confession that Yeshua is Lord. This confession is not from the heart. It is not free. Don’t these freewill Christians recognize how bizarre this picture is of God respecting the free will of unbelievers to the point of allowing them to damn themselves, but then turning around and forcing these same unbelievers, once they are safely dead, resurrected and damned, to bend the knee to him (or to his beloved son)?
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Death
The majority of Christians believe that death, not God, has the final word on who is saved and who is not. This is how they interpret the words: “And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes the judgment” (Heb. 9:27). Actually, the author is here simply pointing out that just as human beings die physically only once so Christ was offered up for man’s sins just once. And just as after human beings die there is the judgment so Christ will come again to put the final touches on his saving work. This second work will consist of saving only those who have believed in him, those who are eagerly waiting for him (v. 28). This particular salvation is about Yeshua giving the living believers a new spiritual body, as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15:51-52: “Behold! I tell you a great mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” And it is about the first resurrection, which is for the deceased saints only.
Other theologians teach that the soul of man is fixed when he dies so that if a man dies in unbelief he will remain in that state for all eternity. Neither he nor God can change his unbelief to belief, his hatred of God to love of God. According to these theologians, the punishment that God imposes on this man is for the purpose of retribution only. It is not designed to heal him or to reform him. Some of these theologians teach the doctrine of annihilationism, meaning that the man who dies in unbelief and unrepentance is resurrected and judged after which God causes him to cease to exist. This is how they interpret the second death symbolized by the Lake of Fire as described in Revelation 20:14-15. Obviously a man who is sentenced to eternal non-existence cannot change his mind. And God will not change his mind either, according to this mistaken theology.
The Bible, on the other hand, contradicts these theologians who give death such power over both God and human beings. The final judgment of those whom God judged unworthy to be raised in the first resurrection is part of God’s work of saving these poor lost souls. A person’s physical death does not have the last word. This is the whole point of the final judgment. God has the last word and it is a work of saving the lost. If the physical death of a lost person ended any hope for his salvation, God would not bother to resurrect him and judge him. God would simply leave him in his grave (or Gehenna or hell, or hades or Sheol––all places where the dead go) “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). But God does overcome Death (1 Cor. 15:26, 28) and its everliving worm.
Although Hebrews 9:27 is about man’s physical death which happens only once, both the saved and the lost are appointed to die twice, although dying physically only once. Those who are saved on this side of the grave die to their old selves through repentance and water baptism. Those who die in unbelief and unrepentance face the judgment which reveals the evil that resides in the heart of the lost. With this revelation the cure follows. The cure: the Second Death, or baptism of fire, in which the evil self is burned away and the brokenness healed. All die twice. All are born three times, by their natural birth (or conception), by their birth in the Spirit and by their resurrection. The timing for the last two being reversed for those who die unsaved.
Why would God condemn to hell those who have the misfortune to die in unbelief? What is there about death that gives it this power to prevent God from saving these lost souls? Obviously death puts an end to the lives of these people thus possibly preventing them from repenting and believing in Yeshua. But why does their death put an end to God’s work on their behalf?
Some people are godless right up to the day they die, but then, just minutes before they die, they repent of their wickedness and make an act of faith. Death worshipping Christianity claims that these last minute believes are granted eternal life. How does one minute of belief negate a lifetime of wickedness? In a similar vein, Emperor Constantine chose not to be baptized until shortly before his death. He wanted to be free to sin right up to the end of his life knowing that his deathbed baptism would wash away all of his sins. And it was this unbaptized man who presided over the Council of Nicaea.
When a person’t death has the last word as to his eternal destiny, salvation for many becomes a matter of chance, of dumb luck. Many young people lose their Christian faith when attending college. So, if they are lucky, they will die of some disease or accident before they get to college. On the other hand, some people will seize the hope of an afterlife in their old age by becoming believers in Yeshua. For example, atheists are more likely to change their minds about their rejection of Yeshua as their savior if they grow old and have time to think about their eternal destiny. But an atheist who is also a bad driver has a good chance of suddenly dying young in a car accident having no opportunity to think about his eternal destiny. Heaven will be filled with mostly good drivers if one’s death has the final say as to who is saved.
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According to Christians who worship at the altar of Death, death precludes any chance of those who had never heard the gospel during their earthly lives from hearing it in the afterlife. The Calvinist doesn’t have problem with this because if the individual wasn’t exposed to the gospel during his earthly life, that simply means he wasn’t of the elect. He wouldn’t have believed even if he had heard the gospel. But those who teach that a human being’s salvation depends on him making a freewill choice to believe the gospel when he hears it, don’t have much to say about those who are never presented with the gospel, never presented with such a choice.
Some Christians say those who have never heard of the gospel get a second chance to be saved after their death. What a grotesque belief. Salvation is not a matter of chance. It is a work of God and God doesn’t need a second attempt at saving a person. He chooses to save some in this life and others in their resurrected lives. God accomplishes whatever he sets out to accomplish. No second chances needed.
Those who die unsaved were just as spiritually dead during their lives as they are after their physical death. They had no opportunity to believe in Yeshua because spiritually dead people cannot repent of their sins nor believe in Yeshua. But God does raise people from the dead when they are physically alive but spiritually dead, something that is true of all those who come to faith in Yeshua in their earthly lives. Those who believe in Yeshua during their earthly lives experience two resurrections, the first being when they are born again of the Spirit. Those who die in their wickedness also experience two resurrections, the first being their resurrection from the grave, and the second being baptized in the Spirit (Rev. 7:17). God is a conqueror of death no matter what kind of death.
God grants the gift of faith to those he chooses to raise up from their spiritual death. Salvation is a work of God. One would not know this from observing Christian evangelists. In watching evangelistic revivals one would think that faith is not a gift from God, but is a product to be sold by the preacher and purchased by the potential customers in his audience. Faith is not a product like a box of soap that can be sold to a buying public. Billy Graham type revivals seem to me to be attempts to get the audience emotionally worked up in order get them to buy faith in Yeshua like it was some sort of product. These revivals also use the fear of hell to sell their offerings. The customer is told that he cannot make a purchase after he has died. The time to buy is now. Sign here, please. These revivals are just one more bad fruit falling from the tree of the worship of human free will and death.
Sin does bring its own hell. The wages of sin is death such as the death of the young in two World Wars or the death from drug addiction, or the spiritual death of bitterness and envy. This is what people must be reminded of in preparation for God’s gift of a new heart. Such an understanding of sin and God’s gift of faith and the life in the Spirit that comes with this faith, imbues the new creature in Christ with an everlasting sense of gratitude. But the Christian should never give in to despair in regard to those whom God does not choose to give a new heart on this side of the grave. God is not finished with these unbelieving people even when they have been buried.
However, the lost soul who died in unrepentant unbelief will not enter the Kingdom of God inasmuch as the Kingdom of God begins in the here in now among believers and comes to fruition in the Millennium. The lost are not resurrected until after the Millennial Age when Yeshua turns over the Kingdom to the Father. This initiates the Age of the Father in which no one is ruling as a King. Kings are about law enforcement, about ruling the nations of unbelievers with a rod of iron (Rev. 19:15). In the Age of the Father, Yahweh will live among human beings as a loving Father lives with his beloved children. There will be no more sinners living outside the city as described in Revelation 22:15. And this godly people, who will be one with Yeshua, will have life within themselves as God has and will not be dependent for their immortality on an external source of life called the Tree of Life (see John 5:26).
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God is a Saving God and He will have complete victory over his enemy, Death. Yahweh God is more powerful than Death. Death does not have the final word as to the everlasting destiny of any human being.
The Christian belief that the work of evangelization, church planting, writing books on correct theology, missionary work in foreign lands is what is saving people from eternal damnation is a form of idolatry. It is the worship of self, of seeing oneself as the author of another’s salvation. Christians must stop giving themselves credit for saving millions of people from an eternal fate of death. The faithful Christian giving his or her life to ease the burdens that people labor under and to spread the gospel is a thing of beauty. But it is God who saves, not the faithful Christian. Nevertheless God asks the Christian to be faithful in the work that he has given him to do. God does use the Christian in his work of saving people. But, should he fail in this work, God himself will not fail to save everyone. All Christians should rejoice in this wonderful vision of the future of all of mankind rather than be bitter because it lessens the pride Christians have in their work of saving souls and lessens their feeling of being special because, as they believe, they are among the few who are saved.
A rather grotesque example of both the power of death to damn an individual sinner and of the power of Christian pastors to save this individual from eternal damnation is shown late in the movie, “God is Not Dead.” The atheist professor is hit by a car as he crosses a street in the rain. Luckily for him, two pastors are heading for the same arena where some gospel music entertainers are playing to a packed house. They see the atheist as he lay in the crosswalk dying, and they quickly jump out of their car to begin urging this atheist to hurry up and say the Sinner’s Prayer before he dies. Should he die without saying these magical words, he will be eternally damned.
This short prayer is part of a magical ritual in which the individual says just the right words to force a recalcitrant God to save him. If the pastors had not come along and urged this atheist to say this prayer, he would have been cast into hell or annihilated at the Last Judgment. God would have been powerless to save him had he taken his last breath without saying this prayer. The atheist saves himself by “freely” choosing to say the Sinner’s Prayer. And the pastors are also credited with saving this man from the all powerful God: Death. And God is happy too because someone came to his rescue. He would not have been happy about being forced to cast this man into hell against his wish to save him. It’s times like these that God feels so powerless.
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4
Salvation
The central doctrine of the true Christian faith is that Yeshua went to his baptism of suffering out of love for the Father, the Father who is Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is the God revealed to mankind in the Old Testament. And it was the Father’s love for his human creatures that motivated him to command his beloved son to surrender himself into the hands of evil men so that they could have him crucified. It is Yeshua’s love for Father Yahweh and the Father Yahweh’s love for his human son and for all of humanity that is at the very core of Yahweh God’s work of saving all of mankind. Yeshua is the revelation of the Father, of Yahweh God: “Whoever has seen me [Yeshua] has seen the Father…” (John 14:9b). He is an incarnation of the Father’s Spirit, his Wisdom, his Purpose: “And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). These words of Yeshua express the core of Yeshua’s revelation of Yahweh God which is that the Father is he who is worthy of our fullest love:
“I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father…” (John 14:31).
When I am tempted to hate the Creator God, Yahweh, because of all the evil and suffering in the world and in my own life, I turn to these words of Yeshua, and I pray to Yahweh that he would grant me the gift of loving him as Yeshua loved him. I pray this prayer in fear and trembling seeing what this love required of Yeshua.
And it is the presence of this love for Yahweh God in the human heart that the new covenant is all about. With the advent of this love in the human heart the Kingdom of God becomes a reality, the Kingdom of God being the rule of the Holy Spirit in the lives of human beings. Peter quotes the prophet Joel to illustrate the coming of the Kingdom of God through the infilling of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:16-21). By this love, believers in Yeshua become a source of God’s healing love for others. Yeshua and his followers give water to a thirsty world:
On the last day of the feast, the great day, Yeshua stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water [Isa. 12:3]’” Now this he said about the Spirit [see Isaiah 44:3], whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Yeshua was not yet glorified (John 7:37-39; see also John 4:13-14).
The presence of this Spirit in the heart of the saved is what separates the saved from the unsaved. And this Spirit finds its way into the hearts of the saved by means of a gift from God to the saved person, the gift of faith in Yeshua. Salvation is a gift from God and is not something that the saved person has earned.
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But there are three paths to salvation, to having this Spirit. The first path runs through a person’s earthly life. It begins with dying to the old self in repentance for sin and unbelief, and a rising from this death to a new life in the Spirit through faith in the resurrected Messiah, Yeshua of Nazareth. This death and spiritual resurrection are symbolized by water baptism. The saved person is born a second time by being born of the Spirit. The indwelling of the Spirit of God (as mediated by the Spirit of Yeshua) saves the individual, and the community of faith to which he belongs, from slavery to sin. And if there is a sufficient number of Spirit filled Christians in a particular society, the society is protected against much evil such as war. The good works that the Spirit filled Christian does is another aspect of this salvation. I repeat, good works cannot earn a person salvation because good works are a part of what it means to be saved. Good works are the fruit of salvation.
This first path is travelled by those few Jews and Gentiles whom God choose to have a saving faith in Yeshua in their lives on this earth. These are the 144,000 sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel (Rev. 7:4). This number is a symbolic number symbolizing the entire number of those saved during their earthly lives. Gentile Christians are sons of Israel, are Israel along with Jewish believers in Yeshua. This number also represents the New Creation in Christ. The old creation is also symbolized by the number 144: 24 hours times the 6 days of creation equal 144 hours. That these 144,000 are those who were saved during their earthly lives is revealed in Revelation 14:4b: “No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth.”
These 144,000 enjoy an everlasting life with God in heaven (Rev. 14:2-3). They do not enter into judgment even though they did sin during their earthly lives: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). But because of their faith and their walk in the Spirit by which they are being perfected in their earthly lives, God sees them as already perfected. Writing about the 144,000, John says this:
[They] have not defiled themselves with women for they are virgins [do not be misled by this symbolic language; these 144,000 saints include women]. It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless (Rev. 14:4-5).
These saints are only the first to be saved (the first path) in God and Yeshua’s work to save everyone.
The Bible has very little about salvation beyond the grave, that is, being saved from spiritual death in an eternal hell or being saved from total annihilation. This is so because this salvation beyond the grave whereby God continues his work of either perfecting the believers in Yeshua or beginning the work of perfecting the lost is about what God does and is not about what human beings do. Human beings, for example, do not resurrect themselves. Even Yeshua did not become the fully begotten son of God until the Father resurrected him giving him life within himself as God has. Obviously, the person who enjoys the saved life during his life on this earth will continue enjoying this eternal life in the hereafter. Paul warns believers not to forget about the promise of enjoying the full life with God in the hereafter, something that could happen with all the emphasis on walking in the Spirit in this life:
If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied (1 Corinth. 15:19).
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Unfortunately, like Martin Luther, many Christians believe that there is only this one earthly path to salvation. This is somewhat to be expected inasmuch as the Bible, mainly the OT, seems to support this view. The biblical authors, including Paul, write mostly about salvation in this life on this side of the grave. This earth side salvation is about being saved from “this crooked generation” (Acts 2:40) with its greed, envy, thievery, murder, lovelessness, drunkenness, warfare and so forth. Salvation is about obeying the Torah or walking in the Spirit, things that people are to do in their earthly lives. But the Bible goes a step further in this direction. The Bible, including even the NT, has almost nothing about salvation, about a paradise, in the eternal age.
To begin with, salvation defined as being delivered from an eternity of suffering in hell is not taught in the Bible. Even universal salvation defined as every human being enjoying an eternity with God, a salvation that I believe in, is rarely discussed in the Bible. In fact the more “orthodox” faith in which faith in Yeshua in this earthly life leads to an eternal life with God in the hereafter, the first path discussed above, is rarely discussed by the biblical authors. Salvation defined as being saved from sin and destruction in this life occupies some 95% of the Bible’s attention. Not only is salvation obtained through faith in this life, salvation is enjoyed mainly in this life before the grave, according to the authors of the Bible.
The OT has very little to say about life in the hereafter. And this-world-salvation is mostly about the salvation of the community, of corporate salvation rather than the salvation of the individual. If the Israelites obey God they will prosper during their earthly lives and Yahweh God will protect them from their enemies. If they disobey Yahweh God, he will send them famine and plagues and their enemies, such as the Assyrian Empire and Babylon, will destroy them (Deut. 8:19-20; Josh. 23:15-16; Judg. 2:11-15; Sam. 12:25; Isa. 1:19-20; Jer. 5:14-17; etc.). A future reward or punishment in the hereafter is not mentioned. God punished Adam and Eve with death in the here and now. God does not mention any punishment for them in the hereafter except that their death appears to be final with no resurrection and no judgment.
We find further evidence for the Bible’s emphasis on salvation in this life in the very words the biblical authors use in their description of God’s saving work. In Psalm 31:16 David is praying that Yahweh will save him on account of his, Yahweh’s, love for him: “May your face shine on your servant; save me in your steadfast love.” This salvation that David is praying for is all about asking Yahweh to “…rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors!” (Psalm 31:15). The Hebrew word for “save” in Psalm 31:16 is “yasha”, and it is paired with the Hebrew word for “rescue” or “deliver”: “natsal”. We find this same pair of words in Jeremiah 42:11:
“Do not fear the king of Babylon, of whom you are afraid. Do not fear him, declares Yahweh, for I am with you, to save youand to deliver you from his hand.”
No one in the OT prays to be delivered from an afterlife peril such as everlasting punishment in hell. It would never enter their mind to do so because they simply accepted death and considered any afterlife as unknowable. Nor do they pray for immortality. Salvation throughout most of OT history was all about this life and being saved from war, plague, famine and so forth, which are biblical expressions of God’s wrath against sinful Israel or against her enemies.
In regard to God saving us human beings, we see this emphasis on this earthly life even in the New Testament. Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, in his prophecy about the Savior whom his son would introduce to the world, declared that, by this Savior, God’s people would be “saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.” And that “being saved from the hand of our enemies, [we] might serve him without fear.” Zechariah’s son will “give knowledge of salvation to the people in the forgiveness of their sins.” (see Luke 1:67-79). There is no mention of God saving the people from some terrible future in the hereafter such as eternal suffering in a place called hell or from annihilation.
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The second path, rarely mentioned in the Bible, is the salvation enjoyed by those who in their earthly lives were righteous in spite of not knowing and not having faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob nor in Yeshua. These would be those unbelievers (The people of the nations are all unbelievers. Believers are of Israel) for example, in the judgment of Matthew 25 who gave assistance to hungry persecuted Christians, the least of Yeshua’s brethren. They are judged on their works by which they showed themselves to be righteous. These are the non-believers who are, nevertheless, found in the Book of Life. They will receive the gift of salvation, the Holy Spirit, when they are resurrected and judged. Their path to salvation straddles the great divide of physical death: their righteousness on the earthly side of the grave and, on the other side, the gift of the Holy Spirit made possible by the suffering, death and resurrection of Yeshua. Mark also writes about this saved group in his Gospel:
“For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will no means lose his reward” (Mark 9:41).
I assume, based on the parallel passage about nonbelievers in the Matthew 25 judgment, that this reward will include eternal life in the hereafter. This righteousness of unbelievers is still a gift as without God’s grace these unbelievers would never have fed the hungry believers in Yeshua, which Yeshua calls the least of his brothers, that is, his persecuted followers who have no status in society possessing neither power nor money.
Paul also writes about these people on the second path, but it is a struggle to understand him. He writes:
He [God] will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life (Rom. 2:7).
But, then, he quotes Psalm 14:1-3 as evidence that there have never been such people:
“None is righteous, not not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:10-12).
I believe that what we have here is just one more example of the Jewish use of hyperbole. There have been righteous people on this earth from time immemorial. Enoch comes to mind (Gen. 5:21-24). Yeshua himself told his disciples:
“Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Matt. 13:17).
On the other hand, it may be that Paul is here in Romans 3:10 writing about those who were under the Law, his fellow Jews, and not about the majority of the human race who were never under the Law or Torah: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin [as Adam and Eve discovered]” (Rom. 3:20).
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Nevertheless, one cannot deny Matthew 25:31-46 in which Matthew describes unbelievers being saved by their good works. The word “faith” does not appear in Matthew 25:31-46. None of those being judged in Matthew 25 are described as either having faith or not having faith in Yeshua. The same is true for John in his Revelation (or Apocalypse) 20:11-15. Again there is no mention of the people being judged having or not having faith. They are judged solely “according to what they had done” (Rev. 20:12, 13). I would find it very odd if none of these unbelievers were found in the Book of Life, that the Book of Life did not have the name of anyone appearing before the Great White Throne. What would be the point of looking in the Book of Life for their names, if none of them will escape being thrown into the Lake of Fire? Remember, no one who believed in Yeshua during his earthly life will be found among these who are being judged (John 5:24).
I guess now is a good time to look into the salvation of those who die in the womb or as young children or as severely mentally challenged adults. Inasmuch as they were too young or mentally damaged to have a saving faith in Yeshua, but yet were nevertheless in need of God’s saving work in their lives they need to have their inner character judged. And every human being is born with a somewhat developed character, inherited spiritually, not genetically, from their parents. Born or unborn children of spiritually dead parents are themselves spiritually dead as is revealed in Genesis 8:21b in light of Psalm 58:3:
The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth, speaking lies…
These innocent but obviously not perfect individuals will be resurrected, thereby obtaining an imperishable body that is no longer entangled in sin. Nevertheless, they may need to be judged, for their own sakes, and purified in the Lake of Fire. They are not judged on the basis of their works because they have none. They are judged on the basis of who they are, their identity, an identity that they have inherited from all of their ancestors going back to Adam and Eve. They will then join the multitude that cannot be numbered in Revelation 7:9-17. But those conceived of parents who have walked in the Spirit may very likely not be estranged from God from the womb. They may only need to be resurrected and be led to springs of living water by which they become one with Yeshua and thereby one with God. After their resurrection they are born again of the Spirit and have no need of the judgment or Lake of Fire.
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The third path of salvation starts with God’s miracle of resurrecting the unsaved. This path was made possible by the work of God in Yeshua, the Messiah. It is Yeshua’s faith and love that is the basis for the salvation of all human beings, not the faith or love that human beings demonstrate. The physical death of human beings is simply the boundary between God’s saving work in the earthly lives of those he has chosen to be believers in Christ culminating in their resurrection, and his work of saving those who have died in the state of lostness beginning with their resurrection. This third path begins with the story of Adam and Eve who will be saved when God resurrects them from the dead at the time of the Second Resurrection. (I am not really sure if God will wait for the Second Resurrection to resurrect such people as Adam and Eve and other OT era “saints”.) God had to wait to resurrect them until he had resurrected the firstborn from the dead.
The Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse is the go-to Scripture for the teaching of universal reconciliation or salvation of all human beings. All three paths are included in its revelation of God’s work of salvation. What the Book of Revelation says about the 144,000 (Rev. 7:2-8; 14:1-5; 20:4-6) was discussed in the section on the first path. The people on the second and third path to salvation are those who come before the throne of God in the Last Judgment (Rev. 20:11-15), and are either found in the Book of Life (the second path) or not (the third path). I repeat: Those of the first path do not come into judgment. They are not among those who are judged before the Great White Throne:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John 5:24).
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Those who are judged and not found in the Book of Life are cast into the Lake of Fire, which is the Great Tribulation, out of which come the great multitude that cannot be numbered (Rev. 7:13). They are from every nation, and peoples and languages (Rev. 7:9). These words such as “nation” are code words designating those who are not Israel, that is, those who were not saved during their earthly lives, were not members of the people of God. The Lake of Fire is symbolic for a burning away of that which is unholy and unhealthy in the lost sinner. It is a healing fire (sulfur is a healing medicine) and it is also symbolic for the blood of the Lamb. That this great multitude were unsaved during their earthly lives is evident from the future tense of the verbs describing the path of their salvation (Rev 7:15-17). They will not hunger or thirst anymore. The sun will not scorch them anymore (in regard to the sun compare Rev. 7:16 with Rev. 16:8-9). The Lamb will be their shepherd and he will guide them to springs of living water (that is, the Holy Spirit). “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Anyone who is thirsty can take the water of life without price. Who is thirsty but those who had been cast into the Lake of Fire? God’s wrath against evil does come to an end. The seven angels with the seven plagues are the last, “for with them the wrath of God is finished” (Rev. 15:1). The doctrines of eternal hell fire or eternal death (annihilation) proclaim that God’s wrath never ends. (The word “annihilation” is a fancy word that theologians use to avoid the biblical truth that death, the last enemy of Yeshua and mankind, will be destroyed (1 Corinth. 15:26)
Christians such as those who believe in Reformed theology and thereby acknowledge God’s sovereignty, his power to accomplish that which he wills to accomplish, simply deny that God wills to save all human beings. These Christians confuse God’s decision (election) to choose only the few to be believers on this side of the grave (the first path of salvation) with his grand overall purpose, which is to save all of mankind (the second and third paths of salvation). They assume that God’s plan is to save only the elect from an eternal death, to save in the hereafter only those who believe in Yeshua on this side of the grave. They overlook the truth that the remnant, the few, are not chosen because of any merit on their part such as sinlessness; they are chosen by grace and serve God’s overarching plan to save the entire human race: “For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Rom. 11:32). Each human being receives this mercy in the order and time that God has predetermined. God’s choice to harden the hearts of most human beings in this life before the grave is only temporary. Their hearts will not remain hardened forever. God can not only change the human heart at any time in the person’s earthly life, he can change the human heart after his or her death. This is the whole point of God resurrecting the unsaved unbeliever as well as the saved believer. The physical death of the unsaved does not end God’s work of saving them.
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The opponents of the teaching that God will in the end save all human beings make this objection: If everyone is saved, what will motivate people to believe in God and in his work of salvation through Yeshua Christ? What will keep people from sinning to their hearts’ content?
Well, to begin with, sin is way overrated. It’s not as fun as many Christians think it is. Even atheists are aware that the wages of sin is misery often leading to death. Atheists who are parents weep over their children’s drug addictions seeing such sin as destroying their children’s lives. Unrestrained sexual activity does not make anyone happy. It’s looking for love in all the wrong places. War, with all its destruction, sorrow and death, is the result of sin. If sin brings so much misery to unbelievers just think how miserable it makes believers. Believers are not going to suddenly go berserk should they be told that they can be assured that they will live forever with God.
The threat of hell or annihilation has not been all that effective in curtailing sin or unbelief. It has had a 1600 year run and it has failed. I believe that when people learn that God will reconcile all people to himself they will respond with love and gratitude (provided, of course, that God opens their ears to hear this good news). Mercy and kindness elicits love from people whereas threats of unheard of punishments will only bring out the worst in people. Just examine the history of the Christian Church–– and of Islam, a religion that adopted the Church’s use of the threat of hell–– to see the violence that these threats engendered in people. Love and fear cannot coexist. John has these words about fear and love:
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:18-19).
Yeshua was always telling his Apostles not to be afraid (Luke 5:10b). Yeshua told his audience:
“Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink… Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matt. 6:25, 32, 34).
If Yeshua is so against believers being anxious about their earthly needs, he certainly cannot be happy about his Church threatening his followers with hell or annihilation in the afterlife should they step out of line in this life. A loving relationship with Yahweh God cannot survive in an atmosphere of fearful anxiety over what he might do in some future situation. Everyone will experience suffering in this life. But the Father is asking the believer to put his human wisdom aside and trust that he, the Father, in bringing suffering into the believer’s life, is doing so out of love for him, and is using this trust to make him into the perfect image of himself.
For many Christians if God will eventually save everyone, then finding oneself among the saved no longer makes one feel special. And it was the fear of losing their special place in God’s creation, their chosenness, that was partly responsible for the Jewish authorities’ decision to have Yeshua and his mission totally discredited by his crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. The Father sent Yeshua to the Jewish people to prepare them for a new covenant in which life in the Spirit, brought about by Yeshua’s obedience in suffering, would be granted to those who believed in him for their salvation. Focusing one’s attention on obeying the Torah or being circumcised would no longer be the path of salvation. The focus would be on loving God and neighbor through the influence of the Spirit living within the person who has put his faith in Yeshua for his salvation. And this salvation would be extended to the Gentiles who believed in the Jewish Messiah.
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That the Jews were going to lose their special status in God’s eyes was made evident by Yeshua in his conversation with the Samaritan woman:
“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain [where the Samaritans worshipped] nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:21-24).
Christian pastors and teachers, in rejecting the biblical truth of the eventual reconciliation of the entire human race with God, are rejecting their Savior, Yeshua of Nazareth, just like the Jewish authorities did in the first century of this age. This prideful attitude of being somehow superior to the hellbent unbeliever must be rejected; instead Yahweh God’s plan to save everyone is to be joyfully embraced. Yes, the believer is becoming more and more perfectly made in the image of God, in the form of God. And because of this exalted status through no merit of the believer, the believer should heed these words of Paul who was writing about a particular human believer and lover of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, he bumbled himself and became obedient to the point of death–even death on a cross (Phil. 2:5-8).
Most believers are not asked to be crucified on behalf of the human race, but all believers should be at least happy that God will indeed save everyone, even the most unworthy.
Unlike what many Christians believe, Yahweh God reveals his holiness by saving wicked people. Yahweh God does not reveal his holiness by punishing them with an everlasting punishment such as by casting them into an eternal hell or annihilating them. Yahweh punished his beloved Moses for failing to uphold his holiness before the eyes of his people when he, Moses, showed his anger with Yahweh’s act of mercy in the symbolic saving of the rebellious people of Israel (see Numbers 20:2-13). The Israelites, instead of being thankful to God and Moses for their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, expressed their anger at Moses for bringing them out into the wilderness where there was no water to drink. God, instead of punishing the people for this rebellion, commanded Moses to:
“Take the staff, and assemble the congregation, you and Aaron your brother, and tell the rock before their eyes to yield its water. So you shall bring water out of the rock for them and give drink to the congregation and their cattle” (Num. 20:8).
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The rock is Yeshua and his obedience in suffering. The water that pours out of the rock is the symbol for the gift of salvation that Yeshua won for sinners in going to the cross. This gift that the water represents is the life giving Spirit that Yeshua spoke of to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:14) and to the people on the last day of the Feast of Booths (John 7:37-39). But Moses, in a fit of anger toward these rebellious sinners, struck the rock twice, an action that somehow gave the message to the people that God was reluctant to show them mercy, to save them from their thirst. Christians too believe that God should not save those who die in unbelief. They seem to think that the rock, Yeshua, should die a second time if God is do the unthinkable and save those who are in a state of rebellion against him when they die. Yahweh does not allow Moses or Aaron to take the people into the Promised Land because of their failure to believe in Yahweh’s merciful decision to grant the congregation’s request thereby show his holiness.
The prophet Ezekiel sums up this lesson regarding the water of life in his description of the New Covenant that God will make with his people and eventually with all people. Yahweh God will vindicate his holiness before the nations in showing mercy to his wicked chosen people. Please read Ezekiel 36:23-27. And Yeshua, voicing the desire of all sinners as he hung on that Roman cross, cried out: “I thirst.” But the Roman soldiers gave him only sour wine just as many Christians do when they preach hellfire and damnation or annihilation as the proper end of those who die in unbelief.
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God’s work of granting human beings salvation, which is the fulness of life, the fulness of a perfect life of love, was begun but not completed with his creation of Adam and Eve. Most theologians wrongly claim that God, at this point, had already succeeded in creating perfect human beings in creating Adam and Eve, their rebellion simply ruining his perfect work. His work of salvation then became a matter of restoring human beings to their original glory, their original perfection prior to their sin. This original perfection, according to these theologians, included their immortality. (Catholics called their sin the “felix culpa” the “happy fault” as they understood that the coming of the Messiah was a beautiful response to their sin, a beautiful Plan B.)
My reading of Genesis tells me something very different. Their sin was a fall, a fall from their previous innocence, but was not the radical Fall taught by theologians. To begin with, Adam and Eve’s immortality was greatly inferior to the eternal life of the resurrected human being. Adam and Eve’s immortality came from an external source: The Tree of Life. God had created them as mortal beings; their immortality was not intrinsic, and it was obviously temporary. (Can there be such a thing as temporary immortality? One must conclude that Adam and Eve were never immortal). It wasn’t a part of their very being. This was made evident when, after they had sinned, God simply guaranteed their eventual death by preventing their access to The Tree of Life. God did not have to make one change to their bodily existence to cause their eventual death. They could have been immortal even after they had sinned had God allowed them continued access to The Tree of Life (see Genesis 3:22). Adam and Eve were made of dust and they would return to this state. They never had the imperishable bodies of the resurrection (see 1 Corinth 15:42-56).
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Secondly, their sin revealed their imperfect nature, it didn’t cause it. Adam and Eve needed the saving work of God in Yeshua even before they had sinned. That they sinned revealed this truth. Perfect human beings do not commit sin!!! God is good and his creation was good, but this does not mean that Adam and Eve were spiritually perfect or even good: “‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone’” (Luke 18:19). If God’s creation had been perfect, God would not have had to promise to create a very different heaven and earth in the future and give us human beings a completely different body than that which Adam and Eve had before they sinned (see 1 Corinth 15:42-56 and Rev. 21:1, 4-5). In the eternal age, human beings will be so perfect that billions of them will live forever without committing even one sin, whereas Adam and Eve couldn’t even go a month without sinning. God cursed his creation after their sin (Gen. 3:16-18). And, because of human violence and wickedness, he had to destroy much of his creation including almost all of humanity in the Great Cataclysm of Noah’s day, which occurred only a few millennia after the creation week. The Curse and the Cataclysm caused the slow but sure deterioration of God’s creation including a gradual shortening of human life spans.
God did not make Adam and Eve in his perfect image. They were only a very imperfect image of God. Yes, like God they had language, they had the use of reason, and like God they were to have “‘dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth’” (Gen. 1:26). Adam and Eve knew almost nothing of love so they could not have been the image of God who is love. God had not yet taught Adam and Eve how to love. God would take all of human history to teach human beings about love. And at the very center of this history, of this teaching, is Yeshua of Nazareth. Yeshua taught human beings how to love through his loving obedience to the Father in going to the cross of suffering. Human suffering would be intrinsically connected with learning how to love. Yeshua was the first human being to be made in the perfect image of God. It would be through God’s creation of this perfect Second Adam, Yeshua of Nazareth, that God would accomplish the task of creating all human beings in his perfect image (1 Corinth. 15:49).
God explains in the Book of Job that Job’s suffering is a part of the mystery of creation itself. This creation mystery began with God’s creation of the man of dust, Adam, but only reached its climax on that day in April 33 AD when the man Yeshua hung in pain on that Roman cross in loving obedience to the Father. Yeshua is the New Adam, the man of the Spirit, and not of dust. The creation of the man, the man in the image of Yeshua and therefore in God’s image, was not accomplished in the creation week of Genesis. The creation of mankind has taken thousands of years of human suffering and failure along with many instances of Divine intervention in man’s history. And this work of creation of man will not be complete until all are resurrected into a new existence with God.
We human beings simply do not understand what obstacles God faces in this long endeavor. We human beings think that because God is omnipotent that he can do anything without any struggle on his part or without any negative side effects. But making human beings into Godlike creatures, creatures made in his perfect image, seems to be one of those tasks that God has taken on that demands more than just snapping his fingers. This long divine struggle calls us believers in God to put our trust in him and to praise and thank him for this work of making us human beings one with him.
Our human wisdom demands that we condemn God for all the suffering and evil in the world. We must set this human wisdom aside while trusting in God’s wisdom and in his governance of his creation. Yeshua had to put his wisdom aside as he hung in pain on that Roman cross. He felt forsaken by his Father, a feeling that we all have at times. He knew that he had to suffer and die to fulfill Scripture. And he knew that this suffering was for the purpose of saving sinful human beings from their miserable sin filled lives. But I don’t think he knew how his suffering could save other human beings from their sins. Did he know that his suffering was meant to make his love for and his trust in the Father a perfect love and a perfect trust? Did he know that in going to the cross he was defeating the Serpent of wisdom in himself, the Serpent that was telling him all through his life up until his arrest that he should avoid offending the Jewish authorities, that he should stay out of Judea? Yeshua, through his suffering, was defeating the Serpent that had led Eve into her rebellion against her Creator.
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When Yeshua was teaching about love, especially about loving one’s enemies, he gave this commandment: “‘You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’” (Matt. 5:48). Adam and Eve were far from perfect in either loving their Creator, as was shown by their sin, or in loving one another. Eve must have known that in offering the forbidden fruit to Adam she was putting him in some danger. Where was her concern for his welfare? And where was Adam’s concern and love for his wife, Eve, when he realized that their sin put her in some peril? Instead of defending Eve and offering some excuse for his and her disobedience, he blamed Eve for his transgression: “‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate’” (Gen. 3:12).
Eve was correct in putting the blame on the Serpent. The Serpent was actually her faulty wisdom, a wisdom that was not under the rule of God. Who but the human being, represented by Eve, is the Serpent who is described as “more crafty than any other beast of the field that Yahweh God had made”? (Gen. 3:1). That her wisdom was not under the rule of God was not her fault as she did not have the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Father’s Spirit. This Spirit “was in the world and the world was made through him [or it], yet the world [including Adam and Eve] did not know him [or it]” (John 1:10).
In one sense Eve was also correct when she told herself that in eating the forbidden fruit she would be like God, knowing good and evil. She would gain wisdom (Gen. 3:5-6). This knowledge did not come from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil nor from its fruit. It came from Adam and Eve’s disobedience in going to this tree for wisdom. But she had no idea that such knowledge would bring great suffering to her and Adam and to all their descendants inasmuch as this knowledge of good and evil would not be simply intellectual knowledge. It would be experienced as moral failure, sin, hatred of God and other people, pain, loss, suffering and death along with the good of being loved both by God and by others. And it would be knowing the good of loving the Father and others such as spouse and children and neighbors. Eve and her descendants would begin to learn how to love. Adam and Eve by eating from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil put mankind on the long beautiful and terrible road of God’s work of saving mankind from their lives as the natural man, the man of dust.
God has known all about Adam and Eve’s sin and their suffering, and the sins and suffering of their descendants from all eternity. Yahweh God revealed this truth when he told the angels, whom he had given the ability to help him in his work of creating the universe, including man:
“Behold, the man has become like one [not all or some] of us in knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22a).
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Only one of these creators, not all or some, knew of this good and evil and this was Yahweh God himself. In truth, Yeshua, by his life, revealed the Father as nothing or no one in his creation could. And there is one aspect of Yeshua’s life that reveals a truth about the Father that should come as a great surprise to the Christian philosophers who have written about God’s inner being based on their philosophical training, declaring him to be impassible. And this aspect of Yeshua’s life is his suffering. Yahweh God, the eternal, omnipotent and omniscient God is a God who suffers. When God was making his decision to create human beings, he, in seeing all the suffering that human beings would experience, agonized over this decision. This agony experienced by Yahweh God was revealed to us human beings through Yeshua’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. In this Garden he contemplated the suffering that he was about to experience by his crucifixion and death which would inaugurate the New Creation. But, like Yeshua, Yahweh God was also thinking of the suffering that he himself would be subject to in creating human beings and saving them. He himself would experience every physical, emotional, mental and spiritual pain experienced by every human being that would ever exist. Nothing, not one proton or one second of human pain can exist without God’s full and continuing consciousness of that proton or that twinge of human pain.
To deny Yahweh God’s suffering is to deny that Yeshua is a revelation of the Father. Just as Adam and Eve’s knowledge of good and evil would not simply be an intellectual knowledge but would be an experiential knowledge so to when God said that Adam and Eve had become like him in knowing good and evil, he was saying that he too had an experiential knowledge of good and evil through his human creatures. What a terrible trial God brought down on himself. God did not have to become a human being to fully experience human weakness, brokenness, fear, suffering, shame, guilt, loss and death. He experienced all of this through the lives of all of his human creatures including through his beloved human creature born of Mary in Bethlehem in about 1 AD.
And speaking of this beloved human creature, Yeshua was never Plan B for humanity. God knew that in withholding his Spirit from Adam and Eve at the time of their creation that they would invariably disobey his one commandment. From all eternity, Yeshua was always the Father’s Plan A for his creation and salvation of a human family. Why all this human suffering was necessary in Yahweh God’s creation of human beings in his perfect image is the great Mystery of Creation and of Yahweh God the Creator. I am so grateful that the humble suffering servant of Yahweh God, the Father, our Savior, Yeshua, taught me that this God is owed my fullest love (see John 14:31).
When Adam and Eve sinned their eyes were opened to the reality of their existence. For the first time they recognized the infinite gap between their existence and God. This recognition of their true smallness vis a vis their Creator caused them to feel both fear and shame (Gen. 3:5, 7-11). It was this fear that urged them to begin sacrificing their animals to Yahweh God, a practice that Yahweh God had never demanded of them. Yahweh wanted them to sacrifice their prideful desires out of love for him, not their animals. And in seeing their nakedness they became aware of their animal nature in contrast to the Spirit of God. When Yahweh God walked in the garden in the cool of the day he was clothed in garments that were white as light and his face shown like the sun. The material world including the human body is good, but human beings are meant to be in the image of God and not in the image of the beast of the field. Yeshua revealed the glory that God intended for Adam and Eve and their descendants on the mountain when he was transfigured before Peter, James and John (Matt. 17:1-8). Adam and Eve knew in their shame that they were not yet the image of Yahweh God. Ironically, they would be made in the image of God through the obedience of the suffering man, Yeshua, as he hung naked on that Roman cross, crowned with the thorns of God’s curse of the ground (for the story of the curse see Gen. 3:17-18).
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Human immortality with the fulness of life, that is, eternal life, would not be granted until Yeshua was resurrected from the dead. Yeshua would be “the firstborn from the dead” (Rom. 8:29; Col. 1:18). In view of this revelation of Yeshua being the firstborn from the dead, I have to assume that Enoch, Elijah and Moses were taken up into heaven in their earthly bodies and given an immortality inferior to that of the resurrected Yeshua (such as Lazarus had when Yeshua brought him back to life), and that they have now received a fully glorified resurrected body. Peter, James and John were granted a glimpse of the future glory of the resurrected life of Moses, Elijah and Yeshua, a future that was perhaps only months away. This new immortality is much more that simply not dying. It will be life to its fulness. This intrinsic immortality will be the same as Yeshua has. Yeshua explained this new life that he would have through his resurrection to his disciples, using the present tense instead of the expected future tense:
“For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26).
No more depending on The Tree of Life for an inferior immortality; it will be a Godlike life.
As we have seen, God drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden so that they would not have access to the Tree of Life and thereby live forever (Gen. 3:22-24). In doing this God was NOT punishing Adam and Eve for their sin. Just the opposite is true. As beings created from dust without the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit, Adam and Eve would have been absolutely miserable living forever. Immortality would have been a curse. From my limited experience, I have discovered that a majority of those people who do not believe in an afterlife do not want to live forever. Even when they have everything that this life has to offer, in fact, especially when they have everything this life has to offer they are bored to death and want out. Direct suicide is at epidemic proportions as is indirect suicide by drug and alcohol addiction and by other forms of risky behavior such as war. Citizens of a country will often create conditions that will lead to war with another country simply because they are bored. Boredom itself is often a symptom of wanting to end the anxiety over one’s mortality by confronting death, a confrontation that is expected to be exciting thereby making life worth living. Ironic indeed. And we are speaking of people who are healthy and well off.
And of course as people separate themselves from God through sin, their lives become more and more unbearable so that they seek death. The wages of sin is indeed death. It was to end their misery, a misery that people don’t always recognize in themselves, that God destroyed human life on this earth with a Great Cataclysm in the days of Noah. The last thing these people would have wanted is immortality.
In view of this understanding of what human beings think of immortality, Christians must explain to unbelievers that eternal life is much more than simple immortality. They must trust that our Creator knows what we human beings need to make us happy and full of life. Human beings cannot even begin to imagine the wonders of eternal life in an intimate union with God.
The belief or doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not found in the Bible. It is a Greek philosophical idea that found its way into the Christian faith much like the Trinity and the belief that Jesus is God. I am not saying that this belief is necessarily wrong just because it is not found in the Bible, but it does pose a problem for the significance of the biblical doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which becomes the resurrection of the body, if the soul is immortal. Why desire the resurrection of one’s body, if one can be happy as an immortal bodiless spirit? And what is death or human mortality if human consciousness survives death? Did Adam and Eve and Yeshua really die if they continued in conscious existence after the death of their bodies?
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When a man dies, the whole man dies, not just his body. Man is body and soul. The material and the immaterial make up the human person. The human person does not have life if both aspects of his existence are not present to him. It is very likely that the soul does not decompose after death, but is preserved in the hands of God and becomes part of God’s miracle in resurrecting the whole man or woman. Yeshua did commend his spirit into the hands of his Father (Luke 23:46). And Yeshua’s dying promise to the dying criminal: “‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’” is meant to be a phenomenological truth such as saying that the sun moves across the sky. Their coming together in Paradise would appear to them to have occurred immediately after their death.
I do not understand what beliefs about human life lie behind Yeshua’s disciples’ thinking that they were seeing a ghost when they saw Yeshua walking on water (Matt. 14:26). Did they believe that Yeshua had died and they were seeing his “soul”? And what did King Saul and the medium of En-dor see when they had a vision of Samuel some years after he had died and gone to Sheol (1 Sam. 28:3-19)? Had the medium awakened his soul, his ghost, and brought it up from Sheol?
These questions beg us to take a detour on the road of discussing the difficulties one faces in commenting on and interpreting the content of the Bible. Even the Bible, Yahweh God’s special creation, does not have the absolute perfection that we believers wish it had because it is also a work of man, and God’s truth is mediated through imperfect human language. This is why we human beings must depend on the Holy Spirit, the Father’s Spirit for guidance when reading the Bible or for receiving any wisdom from God. Yeshua said this to his disciples:
“And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49).
Yeshua was telling his disciples that the Father will be placing his Sprit, the Holy Spirit, in their hearts and minds. He did not tell his disciples that the Father would be sending them the King James Version of the Bible. The Holy Spirit would be guiding these and other disciples in their composition of the documents that would become the New Testament. That the Bible is inerrant does not mean that it is perfect. It it were a perfect book, according to my limited understanding, it would have a glossary in which such words as “demon” would be defined according to what the biblical author meant by the word and not according to what the Greek speaking Gentile meant by the word. It would have a list of the different definitions of the word “salvation”. And it would explain what the Apostles believed about the afterlife and the existence of ghosts. The Bible would be more consistent, not having very different stories surrounding Yeshua’s birth such as are found in Matthew and Luke. It would be more friendly to us moderns who are not used to the hyperbole that Yeshua and the biblical authors use such as “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away…” There would be less use of symbolic language and less use of personifying abstract ideas and human attributes such as using the symbol of the Serpent for human wisdom or Satan for temptation or human evil. And the verb tenses would agree with how we moderns use them such as not using the present tense to describe a future act of God.
I earnestly pray that, in writing this paper, I am not promoting erroneous beliefs about God or Yeshua. I am very much aware of James’s warning: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all stumble in many ways…” (James 3:1-2a). I have endeavored to follow Peter’s command to: “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pt. 3:18). My intent in writing about the truths found in the Bible is not to divide the faith community, but to unify the believers in the correct understanding of the gospel. May God have mercy on me if I fail to do this.
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This Spirit of the Father would not become flesh, would not become incarnate until the Spirit came upon Mary, and the New Man, Yeshua (the beginning of the New Creation) was conceived in her womb. Both the incarnation and the crucifixion were creation events in which the New Man was created. When Yeshua went to the cross, he was crucifying man’s rebellious wisdom in himself. He was the crucified Serpent (John 3:14) foretold in Numbers 21:9. Like the image of the crucified Serpent that Moses made for the healing of the people so Yeshua was crucified in order to be a source of healing for a broken humanity. In his suffering he was being made perfect in love (see Heb. 2:9-12; 5:7-9; 10:14) and therefore is able to perfect us human beings. Yeshua was perfected on behalf of mankind (which includes himself); he was not punished on behalf of mankind:
For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified (Heb. 10:14).
This was to fulfill the new covenant in which forgiveness follows being filled with the Spirit of God and having the law written on the heart (Heb. 8:10, 12; 10:15-17. See Jer. 31:31-34 and Ezek. 11:19-20; 36:25-27). The laws and statutes that those sanctified by Yeshua’s suffering and death will be the laws and statutes of love of God and neighbor. The new covenant is about making people perfect in loving others, for God is love.
With Yeshua’s suffering and subsequent resurrection, the Father had completed his work of making Yeshua into his fully begotten son (Acts 13:26-41). God is also making us human beings into his fully begotten sons as we, like Yeshua, experience suffering and physical death. But it is Yeshua living in the human heart that makes it possible for human beings to love God and to die to self during this painful process. (God is making women into his sons too; this is not about sexual identity.)
God, Yeshua and the authors of the Bible continually mock the Serpent, which is human wisdom untethered from Yahweh God’s wisdom:
At that time Yeshua declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will” (Matt. 11:25-26).
The wise men shall be put to shame; they shall be dismayed and taken; behold, they have rejected the word of Yahweh, so what wisdom is in them (Jer. 8:9)?
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe (1 Cor. 1:20-21).
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Many of the Jews in NT times, while believing in a resurrection of the dead, assumed that only the righteous would be resurrected, and this is why Yeshua said the following to correct this misunderstanding:
“‘Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all [not only the righteous] who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment’” (John 5:28-29).
The evils that people prayed to be saved from wasn’t only the harm that enemies might do to them but included being saved from perils such as storms, disease and accident. For example, when the disciples thought that they were about the perish in the storm that threatened to sink their boat they cried out to Yeshua to save them. When the storm miraculously abated upon Yeshua’s command, the disciples experienced true salvation. Multitudes of people came to Yeshua expecting him to heal them of their illnesses, disabilities and demon possession. When Yeshua did heal them and forgave their sins these acts were part of Yeshua’s mission to save people. These people were experiencing salvation. When Yeshua described his work to John the Baptist’s disciples (see Luke 7:20-23) he was describing a work of salvation.
Yeshua’s teaching the good news of the Kingdom of God was also a saving work. Yeshua said, “I came that they [his sheep] may have life and have it abundantly’” (John 10:10b). When Yeshua promised eternal life to those who believed in him, he was promising more than simple immortality. He was promising them a whole new abundant life which began with the knowledge of God the Father which Yeshua provided through people knowing him: “‘And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Yeshua Christ whom you have sent’” (John 17:3). Yeshua’s sermon on the mount in Matthew 5, 6 and 7 reveals what kind of life will save a believer in Yeshua from destruction in their earthly lives.
Yes, their earthly lives. Yeshua after stating the golden rule of love of others says this:
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matt. 7:13-14).
The narrow gate is the gate to a full life of the Spirit in one’s earthly life. Yeshua is not here teaching about life in the hereafter, about hell versus heaven. If the people of Europe had a true faith in Yeshua and lived their lives according to Yeshua’s sermon on the mount they would not have entered on the wide way that led to their destruction in WWI and WWII and in the Bolshevik Revolution with its rule over much of Europe. They would have experienced salvation from all these evils. Yeshua gives a similar example of what it means to perish on account of sin and therefore what it means to be saved from perishing:
There were some present at that very time who told him [Yeshua] about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:1-3).
Entering the narrow gate of repentance and walking according to the Spirit can, in this life, save the believer from premature death and from the destruction caused by such sins as drug addiction, alcoholism, sexual addictions, being unable to love or forgive others and so forth. The Apostle Peter gave the positive description of being saved when he told his audience that if they would repent and be baptized in the name of Yeshua Christ they would have their sins forgiven, AND they would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that would enable them to walk according to the Spirit. Peter exhorted the people to “Save yourselves from this crooked generation” (Acts 2:38-40). Peter did not say, “Save yourselves from an eternity in hell or from annihilation.” Paul also defines salvation as being saved from “the present evil age…” (Gal. 1:4). Paul gives a description of what salvation is in his words about the fruit of the Spirit:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…; And those who belong to Christ Yeshua have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires (Gal. 5:22-24).
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I am still not ready to tackle the contradictions in the salvation theology that is preached from every pulpit, the focus of which is on being saved from everlasting suffering in hell. But I will say this. The theology of damnation by annihilation is becoming more popular among Christian preachers. Instead of teaching about an eternity of conscious pain, preachers are embracing the teaching that the wicked will be resurrected, judged and then annihilated, having no conscious existence whatsoever. Now, however, I must continue to lay the ground work for that discussion by showing more examples of the Bible’s emphasis on being saved from various catastrophes in this earthly life.
Most of the authors of the Old Testament say nothing about the afterlife or any reward or punishment in such a life. The Sadducees, who did not believe in a resurrection from the dead and believed that only the Torah came from the hand of God, challenged Yeshua with a trick question regarding his belief in a resurrection (Matt. 22:23-33). Because the Sadducees accepted only the first five books of the Bible as being inspired by God, Yeshua was limited to these books in providing scriptural support for his and the Pharisees’ belief in the resurrection from the dead. He presented Exodus 3:6 in which God describes himself to Moses as being the “God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” This verse only implies a resurrection from the dead in that, as Yeshua said, “‘He is not God of the dead, but of the living’” (Matt. 22:32). And Yeshua simply explained, in his answer to the trick question, without any Scripture reference, that human beings will be like the angels in the resurrection neither marrying nor being given in marriage (Matt. 22:29-30). All of this simply points to the fact that the Torah has nothing about an afterlife.
I can find only three verses in the OT that unequivocally support a resurrection from the dead. They are Isaiah 25:8 and 26:19; and Daniel 12:2. The Ezekiel 37:12 passage about God putting flesh on Israel’s dry bones appears to be about Israel’s resurrection as a prosperous people of God. The Book of Job has this somewhat enigmatic verse in which Job claims that he will see God “after my skin has been thus destroyed” (Job 19:26). On the other hand, Job’s reward for his faithfulness in suffering is a very much this-life-before-the-grave reward: Job 42:10-17. There is nothing about enjoying Paradise in the hereafter as a reward for his faithfulness.
Even Yeshua’s disciples had a very difficult time believing that Yeshua had been resurrected after three days in the tomb in spite of witnessing Yeshua’s miracle of raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. They probably believed in the resurrection in the same way that people today believe in nuclear physics. They knew nothing about it and were not much interested in discovering what it involved. They expected Yeshua to rule on this earth in their lifetimes. Peter told Yeshua that his prophecy of his death at the hands of his enemies and his subsequent resurrection could not possibly come to pass: “‘Far be it from you, lord! This shall never happen to you’” (Matt. 16:22). Yeshua gave his disciples the basic facts about what was going to happen to him: he would be arrested, mocked, spit upon, flogged then killed, “and on the third day he will rise” (Luke 18:32-33). Luke continues: “But they understood none of these things.” How could they not understand Yeshua’s clear, simple statement? They simply had very different beliefs about Yeshua’s mission and about life after the grave than what we Christians have today.
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Luke writes that when the women told the disciples that the tomb was empty and that angels told them that he had risen “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Luke 24:11). The Apostle Thomas did not believe even his fellow disciples when they told him that Yeshua had appeared in their midst. “‘Unless I see in his hands the mark of nails, and place my finger into the mark of his nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe’” (John 20:25). It is hard to know just what Thomas believed. Did he believe that Yeshua now had no physical existence but was simply wandering about as some sort of ghost? Did he want to touch Yeshua’s wounds to verify that he was not a ghost? We moderns would never expect to see the wounds on the resurrected body of a loved one who had been tortured to death for the faith. Tomas’s demand is bizarre to say the least. Luke reports that the disciples likewise thought, when the resurrected Yeshua came among them, that he was a spirit of some sort and not really him. Yeshua said to them, “‘Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have’” (Luke 24:39).
Some years after Yeshua had ascended into heaven, Paul had to warn some Christian believers in Corinth about the spiritual damage that they incur in not believing in the resurrection of the dead:
For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins (1 Corinth. 15:16-17).
(Note that Paul does not believe that Yeshua’s saving work consisted of paying a debt for human sin, for if it did so consist then Yeshua need not have been resurrected in order to have delivered these believers from their sins. The dead Yeshua would still have paid the debt. But it is the resurrected Yeshua that saves us from our addiction to sin by living in us.)
Obviously, the disciples believed that if Yeshua was really resurrected it was his dead body that was resurrected. The tomb had to be empty, if people were to believe that Yeshua had risen. God always considers man’s weaknesses and understanding of reality when revealing some truth like the truth of Yeshua’s resurrection. God resurrected Yeshua’s dead body with its wounds and all rather than resurrecting him in a brand new body and leaving the dead corpse in the tomb. Nowadays many believers make arrangements to have their dead bodies cremated. They no longer subscribe to the ancient belief that God has to use the person’s dead body to resurrect him or her.
I have discussed the disciples lack of understanding the resurrection in order to bring out the reality that when Yeshua spoke of sinners being cast into the Jerusalem dump, Gehenna, his audience most likely did not think of some afterlife punishment as they barely had any understanding of a resurrection of the dead.
And Yeshua did not use the English word, “hell”, as he did not speak English. This truth seems to be too obvious to speak of, but I constantly hear people say that Yeshua taught the doctrine of hellfire. On the contrary, the world “hell” has many connotations for us moderns that Yeshua would not have intended. When I start seeing Christians with their right eye torn out, I will then begin to honor their literal understanding of the translators use of the word “hell” in such verses as Matthew 5:29: “‘If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better to that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell [actually, Gehenna].’” Yeshua was a Jew and as such he chose to use figurative and hyperbolic language to make an impression on his listeners. This language causes some pain for us modern people who attempt to interpret his words.
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The central Christian reality is that Yeshua literally rose from the dead and is now at the right hand of God the Father. This reality and Yeshua’s teachings constitute the promise of our own resurrection. But this must not distract the Bible reader from the fact that the Bible’s discussion of salvation is focused on the earthly life of human beings. And I think that this is so because we human beings must be an active part of our salvation in this life whereas in the afterlife, God is the only actor in the work of saving human beings. It is he who resurrects both the good and the bad, the believer and the unbeliever. It is he who judges the unbeliever and casts him into the Lake of Fire. When Paul writes that we believers in Yeshua must work out our salvation in fear and trembling, he is not writing about our salvation in the afterlife. He is writing about our everyday struggles to walk according to the Spirit. To bear up under our sufferings with patience. To accept persecution because of our faith.
If we had to work for our future beyond-the-grave salvation from eternal death then, yes, we should be trembling over the thought of spending an eternity in hell or in non-existence. But we do not have to work for our everlasting life in the hereafter. That is a pure gift made possible by Yeshua’s own love, faith and obedience and not our own. In the crucifixion, Yeshua was being made perfect in love and faith so that he is the source of our own future perfection in the hereafter, a perfection that for believers has its beginning in the here and now.
Supposedly, Catholics believe that they have to earn their salvation through doing good works whereas Protestants believe that they are saved by their faith in Yeshua, a faith that is a gift from God. Both views are incorrect. One cannot earn his way to heaven. Doing good works is a sign that the Christian is already saved for it means that Christ is living in that Christian. He could not be doing good works in the name of Christ without possessing the Spirit of God. Walking in the Spirit is a gift from God.
Believing in Yeshua and in the Father who sent him is also a gift from God, a gift that enables the Christian to walk in the Spirit. Believing in Yeshua as one’s personal Savior is a sign that God had already saved the Christian. He could not have come to faith without God giving him the Spirit whereby he came alive. Spiritually dead people, which includes all unbelievers, cannot believe in Yeshua.
But believing in Yeshua as one’s Savior does not by itself save a person. Yes, it is true that God counts, or reckons, or deems the faith of “the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly” as righteousness (Rom. 4:5). When the sinner is reckoned as righteous by his faith alone without works, this means that all of his sins have been forgiven and he is now reconciled with God. But this righteousness through faith is only the first step on the road to salvation. Paul adds these words to his argument for justification through faith:
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more (now that we are reconciled) shall we be saved by his life (Rom. 5:10).
This life that saves reconciled sinners is the presence of the life of Yeshua in the heart of the believer. It is the One who is believed in that saves the believer. The sinner does not save himself by means of his faith. With this gift of faith comes another gift which is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27b). With the gift of faith, the sinner is made holy, is sanctified. Thus, the sinner is not only deemed to be holy through his faith. He is made holy. Yeshua told Paul that he was sending Paul to the Gentiles so “‘that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me [Jesus]’” (Acts 26:18).
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A good summation of what it means to put on the New Self and thereby give evidence for one’s salvation in Christ, and also of what it means to be living the unsaved life, is found in Colossians 3:1-17. Yeshua brings the Holy Spirit with him when he takes up residence in the soul of the believer. It is Yeshua himself who saves us human beings, not his teachings nor his example. He himself with his faith in and love for the Father is what saves us. Our own faith is simply one of the symptoms of this indwelling Spirit. And it is this truth that is symbolized by the sacrament of the Eucharist. Yeshua did say this:
…“Truly, truly”, I say to you, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).
“As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me” (John 6:57).
Yeshua’s followers were upset with these remarkable and rather grotesque statements about eating his flesh, and they had difficulty with his claim of being sent by the Father and having life in the Father. Yeshua departed from his figurative language and spoke plainly:
“Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no avail. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:61b-63).
Jesus is saying that it is through he himself and not his preaching and not his example that the Father’s life is transferred to the heart of human beings. It is the indwelling of the Spirit mediated by Yeshua’s spirit, not Yeshua’s literal body and blood, that is the source of the believer’s salvation. This is what the New Covenant promised by the prophets is all about:
“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel [all believers in the Messiah, Yeshua, belong to the house of Israel] after those days, declares Yahweh: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33).
“And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezek. 36:26-27).
Paul makes all of this very clear in Romans 8, of which this is a small part:
For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through the Spirit who dwells in you (Rom. 7-11).
So, these words of Paul reveal that Paul’s belief about faith and works is in agreement with the Epistle of James. With the indwelling of the Spirit comes the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-24). Salvation does not come through the Law or works but through the Spirit by which the Law is fulfilled. The believer no longer sees himself or his failed attempts at obedience to the Law as the source of his salvation. He looks to the presence of the Father’s Spirit as mediated by Yeshua’s Spirit living in his heart for salvation.
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Yeshua did not go to the cross to pay the penalty for sin. God can forgive without any penalty being paid. This is shown by the prayer that Yeshua taught his followers to pray: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” God doesn’t expect us to look for someone to satisfy our wrath or satisfy our sense of justice when someone sins against us so why would God look for someone such as his beloved son to satisfy his justice, to satisfy his wrath? God wants us to freely forgive those who have unjustly harmed us in the same way that he freely forgives those who sin against him. Substitutionary atonement theology completely negates the notion of a merciful freely forgiving God. This theology claims that God could not forgive human beings for their crimes against him unless someone paid the price for such forgiveness, the someone being his beloved son. If the debt has been paid, there is no mercy, no forgiveness. But forgiveness would be worthless if the sinner were left in his state of brokenness, in his state of spiritual death. Yeshua went to the cross to become the source of sinner’s healing and life, and with this wholeness, the forgiveness of his sins becomes a truly worthwhile gift as it is an integral part of God’s program of making the sinner one with himself. (I discuss the “unforgivable sin” below.) Yeshua went to the cross to perfect himself in holiness so as to be the source of our holiness.
The theology of substitutionary atonement claims that by his crucifixion and death Yeshua has paid the price for human sin and thus has satisfied God’s justice, and has thereby reconciled God to his sinful human creatures. This theology has turned the truth on its head. Yeshua’s crucifixion and death proved to the world that long before Yeshua was even born, “God so loved the world [i.e. sinful humanity] that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). It is sinful man that needs to be reconciled to God; God does not have to be reconciled to sinful man. Yeshua’s crucifixion shows that it is man who hated God and not God who hated human beings. The Jewish authorities were revealing their hatred of God when they turned the human being, Yeshua, over to the Roman authority:
“Whoever hates me [Yeshua] hates my Father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father” (John 15:23-24).
Human beings need to be healed of this hatred, need to have their hearts remade in the image of a loving God. And that is what Yeshua was doing in going to the cross. He was perfecting his own heart in love for God and thereby perfecting the heart of everyone who would receive his spirit within themselves.
Human beings have been offering animal and human sacrifices to their gods from time immemorial in order to keep their gods from destroying them by famine, plague, war, infertility and so forth. Fear, not love, was the overriding emotion behind their rituals of sacrifice. When people were not paralyzed with fear of their gods, the opposite emotion ruled: they held their gods in utter contempt. On the other hand, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob gave two commandments to the people of Israel that summed up the whole Law of Moses:
“Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5).
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am Yahweh” (Lev. 19:18b).
Yes, God did command his people to fear him, meaning that they were to hold him in the highest respect while endeavoring with all their might to do his will. This fear was not to be like the craven, unloving fear that the pagans had for their gods.
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Yahweh God, in consideration for the emotional fears that the Israelites had for the supernatural, allowed the Israelites to continue to offer him animal sacrifice, albeit with many rules governing this practice. But when they, like the pagans, turned from fearing God to holding him in contempt, he revealed his true attitude toward animal sacrifice:
“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says Yahweh; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats” (Isa. 1:11).
Furthermore, Yahweh God never expressed any approval of human sacrifice, a common practice among ancient peoples. God tested Abraham in asking him to offer up his beloved son, Isaac, as a burnt offering. But God did not allow Abraham to actually go through with it. And while at least some Israelites were quite willing to offer their young or adult children as a sacrifice, such a sacrifice was offered to foreign gods such as the god Molech and never to Yahweh God. This practice indicates that the Israelites were quite aware of Yahweh God’s abhorrence of human sacrifice.
My point is, in view of God’s abhorrence of human sacrifice, is it not somewhat absurd to believe that he sacrificed his own beloved child to satisfy his wrath against sinners? Yahweh’s and Yeshua’s sacrifice on that Roman cross was similar to a mother’s sacrifice of her life in service to her children. And, yet, Christians turn Yeshua’s sacrifice into a pagan one the purpose of which was to placate God’s wrath toward sinners. Their sin is taken away, according to this pagan theology, in the sense that they will not be sent to suffer in an eternal hell because of their sins.
On the contrary, Yeshua’s sacrifice was for the purpose of giving the sinner a new heart of love, the love that motivated Yeshua to go to the cross and the love that motivated the Father to put his beloved through that suffering. Yeshua’s sacrifice was a creation event in which the New Adam was being created. It is the new human capability to love that takes away the sins of human beings. Sin is a failure to love.
Yeshua is called “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”, the sin (singular) being that of lovelessness. The Passover Lamb is a symbol of Yeshua in the sense that the blood of the Passover Lamb and Yeshua’s shed blood both saved from slavery and death those who would become God’s people. Sin is a form of slavery that leads to the death of the sinner, and freeing God’s people from slavery and death is what the Passover Lamb and Yeshua accomplished by their respective shed blood. God delivering his people from slavery in Egypt, the Exodus, is a picture of what salvation is. Passing through the Red Sea (the Gulf of Aqaba) on the way to Mt. Sinai in Arabia is a symbol for passing from death to life both for the Israelite in receiving the Torah from Moses and for the Christian Israelite in his baptism in the New Covenant of faith inaugurated by the Messiah due to the failure of the Torah to save the people of Israel. Passing through the River Jordan to the Promised Land is a symbol for the resurrection. Yeshua, as symbolized by the Ark of the Covenant, being the firstborn from the dead. This resurrection of God’s people was something new: …”You have not passed this way before” (Jos. 3:4b).
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No one can earn God’s love or earn a place in heaven by doing good works because God freely gives us his love and salvation. Nonetheless, good works, under the influence of the Spirit living within the believers, are actually what salvation in this earthly life is all about. Good works cannot earn salvation for anyone because salvation is good works. The more abundant life, which salvation is, is a life in which the believer obeys God’s laws of love. God’s law that he writes on our hearts is the law of love, of loving God with our whole heart and mind and loving our neighbor as ourselves and loving our brother believer even more than we love ourselves. When God gives us this power to love this is the very definition of what it means to be saved. If the Israelites could have kept the Torah, that is, could have obeyed the law of love, God would have protected them from their enemies, would have given them prosperity for these things are the wages of love as opposed to death which are the wages of sin.
Each of a believer’s good works is a gift, a good gift, and “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights…” (James 1:17). Therefore, not only is the faith of the Christian a gift from God, so are the believer’s good works. These gifts come by way of “the implanted word, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:21b). Paul says the same thing about the good works of the Christian:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Yeshua for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph. 2:8-10).
And:
He [God] is the source of your life [in the here and now] in Christ Yeshua, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Corinth. 1:30-31).
So, if good works, which are evidence that the believer is walking according to the Spirit, are not present, this is a sign that the faith is not there either: “Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless?” “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:20,26).
Yeshua was baptized with water, a baptism of repentance which he did not need. But he did need his other baptism that made him into a new man perfected in love. Yes, Yeshua spoke of his suffering and death on a Roman cross as his baptism, a baptism of suffering and death in obedience to God the Father. “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished” (Luke 12:50). Yeshua told his close disciples that they too would be baptized with the baptism he was baptized with (Mark 10:39). Yeshua suffered and died on our behalf, but he did not suffer and die in our stead, as the theologians claim. No, as Paul wrote:
For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God… The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God… provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him (Rom. 8:14, 16, 17b).
Christians must take up their cross daily, which means that they must be prepared to suffer and die daily which includes dying spiritually to their old selves and dying socially or physically rather than deny Yeshua (Luke 9:23-26). Also, persecution, in one form or another, is the lot of the servant of Yeshua. Yeshua said as much: “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20a).
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God reveals His wrath against human sin by causing sinners to suffer and die because they need to know that sin, which is a failure to love others, is an evil that he cannot tolerate. His wrath has very little to do with meeting the demands of His justice by punishing people for their supposed freely chosen sins.
There is an important point about salvation in this life before the grave that must not be overlooked. And that is that the Christian is not to compare his faith, his holiness, his progress in walking in the Spirit, his good works with any other Christian. All believers are servants of God and each one must answer to God concerning how he has used God’s gifts. He is not to be judged by God’s other servants nor is he to judge God’s other servants. God does not give everyone the same amount of faith. We all have different levels of faith and we all have different gifts:
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us… (Rom. 12:3-6).
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I should now discuss the meaning of these three English words found in English translations of the Bible. These words are: eternal, damnation and forgiveness.
The reason the Epistle of James and some verses in Paul were and are so troubling to Christians like Martin Luther is that James and Paul are writing about what salvation means in this earthly life. If the believer is not a loving person, loving both God and his fellow man, he or she is not experiencing the full life of a saved person in their life before the grave. Eternal life begins in the here and now. The word “eternal” is actually denoting the full quality of this life and not simply its duration, and it is not restricting this life to the hereafter, to some timeless life.
However, if the supposed Christian fails to express his faith by doing good works, but builds on the foundation of Yeshua Christ nothing but selfishness and works of the flesh, his “work will be burned up [and] he will suffer loss [a word denoting damnation in his earthly life], though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Corinth. 3:15). God will save this barren “Christian” in the same way that he saves the unbeliever.
For the wicked who die in unrepentance, eternal life is about their life in the hereafter. They will have suffered damnation in their earthly lives such as lovelessness and sinful addictions that made their lives a living hell. And it was God who made the decision not to give them the gift of faith, the gift of salvation in their earthly existence. “Many are called but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14). But their lives beyond the grave will be a pure gift from God not requiring good deeds in this life. The first gift that God gives these lost souls is the gift of their resurrection. They are resurrected into an imperishable spiritual body just like believers are. The doctrine of the annihilation of the lost makes a mockery of God’s gift of their resurrection.
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I must here point out that when Yeshua told Martha, “‘I am the resurrection and the life’” (John 11:25a) he was speaking of the resurrection and life of those who believed in him, but he was not limiting this promise to only believers. After all, the wicked are also resurrected––and judged. But, in regard to the resurrection of unbelievers, Christians focus on the judgment part. The amazing truth is that all human beings are resurrected into the life of Yeshua. Without Yeshua there would be no resurrection for anyone, because the whole purpose of the resurrection is to make the resurrected individual one with Yeshua, the human being, and thereby one with God the Father. Human beings are not absorbed into the Divine Being thus losing their human individuality, but they do take on the human nature of Yeshua just as when human beings were born they were born with the nature of Adam (which includes Eve). We all will become new persons keeping something of our earthy personality while sharing something of Yeshua’s personality. Yeshua will be a part of every human being who has ever lived. Without Yeshua we human beings would not, could not have eternal life. Human beings are not only the branches, and Yeshua the vine, in this life. This will be true forever. Each and every human being will be a unique expression of Yeshua while at the same time possessing their own unique individuality having some continuity with their earthly selves. Yahweh will give each human being a new name that will express his or her unique identity in union with Yeshua who brings the whole human race into oneness with Yahweh God:
“To the one who conquers…I [Yeshua] will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Rev. 2:17b).
And, although Yeshua was a man, his humanity came from a woman only, a woman who, of course, had her masculine side. He had no male father (God the Father is pure Spirit and therefore cannot be either male nor female). Therefore women do not become mainly masculine creatures by having Yeshua become part of who they are. Eve did not lose her femininity just because she was created out of Adam’s body. Yeshua and Eve are unique in that way. Both were made from one living human being of the opposite sex. And both were changed by embracing a tree, the tree of human wisdom in the case of Eve, and the tree of obedient love, in the case of Yeshua.
But the earthly person must die for there are evil entities living in all of us. All Christians are aware of the monster, that ancient Dragon, the Serpent, the Satan and the Devil, that lives in each of us, a monster that is always clamoring for our attention, always tempting us to follow it into sin. This monster is part of who we are and therefore we must die so that Yeshua can replace this monster with himself thereby making us a new creature in himself. For the believer this becoming a new person is completed by his or her resurrection. For those resurrected unbelievers, they must die a second time in the Lake of Fire where who they are is destroyed. They, like Yeshua, become a new person through their baptism of fire. Their dead monster is replaced by Yeshua when they are led to springs of living water by which they are baptized in the Spirit (Rev. 7:17).
Resurrected unbelievers face a time of judgment, a time that could be quite lengthy as God or Yeshua or the saints review their whole life with them, passing condemnation on those parts of their lives that have need of being condemned. The evil of their lives are fully revealed to them, an experience that has to be very painful. This painful experience of being judged and condemned could be what John calls the Lake of Fire, the second death, or it could be some separate experience of their dying evil selves.
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Regardless, all that God has done, is doing and will do is for the purpose of saving all of mankind. Israel, the people whom God has saved during their earthly lives, serve as a divine promise to save all of mankind. God is a Savior God. He is not a God who will allow death to win any soul.
“I will give you as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon [sinners are imprisoned by their sins; they do not freely choose to commit them], from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am Yahweh; that is my name; my glory I give to no other [not to Satan, not to human free will and not to Death], nor my praise to carved idols. Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them” (Isa. 42:6b-9).
The Mosaic Law is completely silent in regard to God threatening sinners with punishment or damnation in an afterlife. Even the prophets are rather quiet about an afterlife. God will cast the wicked king of Babylon down into Sheol, that is, the grave. His body will not rest in a kingly tomb but will be trampled underfoot. And his sons will be slaughtered (see Isa. 14:4-23).
The punishments that the Law of the covenant with Moses demanded were all to be meted out in this life and not in the afterlife. Except for the everlasting contempt or abhorrence mentioned in Daniel 12:2 (due to the sin that cannot be forgiven), all punishments listed in the OT are carried out during this life before the grave. Under the Mosaic Law, the lawbreaker incurred a debt that had to be paid by his punishment. The creation of these debts was for the purpose of motivating the people of Israel to obey the Law. However, they failed to fulfill this purpose.
An example of the legal demands of the Law that caused the sinner to incur a debt is found in Exodus 20:10:
If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”
But people did not stop committing adultery. The Law succeeded only in bringing spiritual and physical death to the people of Israel. God struck his child, Israel, with the rod of Assyria and Babylon and with laws requiring the death of adulterers and mediums, but to no avail. The rod of discipline did not drive away the child’s folly (Proverbs 22:15; 23:13-14).
Only the new covenant, sealed by the blood of Yeshua, would change the heart of the sinner, thus making the people a holy people who would not commit adultery. God, through his work in Yeshua, the Messiah, besides sanctifying once sinful people, is also credited as
“…having forgiven our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands [such as the law to put adulterers to death]. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13b-14).
This debt is not about an eternity in hell or annihilation because no such debt was ever promulgated by God.
Modern English translations of the Bible avoid using the English word “damnation” most likely due to the modern connotations of the word that do not fit the meaning of the Greek original. Of the 14 English translations of the Bible featured on the Blue Letter Bible website, only 4 use the word “damnation” and they are the King James Version (ll times), the Websters Bible (10 times), the New Living Translation (3 times) and the Darby Translation (1 time). Most translations use the word “condemnation” to translate the three Greek words that the KJV translated as “damnation”. The three Greek nouns (transliterated) are: 1. krisis, 2. krima and 3. katakrima. Per The Blue Letter Bible webpage, they have the meaning of (1). Separation, trial, contest, selection judgment, opinion, decision, sentence of condemnation, right justice, accusation. (2). Decree, judgment(s), final judgment, penal judgment, sentence condemnation of wrong, decision on faults of others, the sentence of a judge, matter to be judicially decided, a lawsuit, a case in court. And, (3). An adverse sentence (the verdict): ––condemnation.
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What all of this points to for me is that the English word “eternal” as in “eternal damnation” is somewhat meaningless. A man convicted of manslaughter is not condemned to twenty years of condemnation, or twenty years of judgment, or twenty years of a decision. He is sentenced to twenty years in prison. So the word eternal cannot be about the time of a sinner’s krisis or krima. It has to be about the quality of God’s condemnation of the sinner’s evil life. This condemnation has the quality of completely fulfilling God’s purpose for such condemnation, which is to make the lost soul aware of the evil of his actions. This condemnation (this damnation, to use the KJV translation) is for the purpose of saving the individual.
The result of God’s condemnation of the lost sinner, according to John in Revelation, will be that the sinner is cast into the Lake of Fire where “the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever” (Rev. 14:11a), or, according to Yeshua, being cast into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Or cast into Gehenna “where their worm dies not and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48).
When the Bible uses such phrases as “forever and ever” and “the flames will not be quenched” they are not to be taken literally as far as the concept of duration is concerned. They are idioms denoting the quality of the flames or the dire event. The Bible uses these phrases in many places where it is obvious that the flames or smoke or whatever do not go on for hundreds of years let alone forever. Worms do eventually die. The fires burning in dumps such as Gehenna do go out. In Deuteronomy 15:17 the Mosaic law states that if a slave elects to stay with you, his master, and you put an awl through his ear “he shall be your slave forever.” Well, not quite forever. Hannah promises to bring her son, Samuel, to the Tent of Meeting or Tabernacle when she has weaned him “so that he may appear in the presence of Yahweh and dwell there forever” (1 Sam. 1:22). Obviously, Samuel did not be serve in the Tabernacle forever. The Lord Yahweh tells the prophet Ezekiel that he will set the forest of the Negeb on fire and that “‘the blazing flame shall not be quenched’” (Ezek. 20:47). Those fires went out long ago. So the Greek word “aionios” and the Hebrew words “olam” and “netsach” translated into the English “eternal” and “forever” are not so much about duration as they ares about the thoroughness of the destruction or punishment or, in the case of eternal life, the fulness of life.
I now will take a look at the word “forgiveness”. If Yeshua had been punished on account of men’s sins, it could not then be said of God that he had forgiven the sins of men. Forgiveness means that the victim forgoes any punishment of the person who harmed him or means that the creditor does not require the payment of a debt. The problem with the word, forgiveness, is that it is conflated with loving someone. To forgive someone is simply to decide to not punish him, to not hold his mistreatment of you against him by punishing him. Of course, one way of punishing someone is to withhold one’s love for that person. But one can love someone and still not forgive him such as when a mother decides to punish her beloved child for his misbehavior.
If a debt is paid, it cannot then be said that the creditor has forgiven the debt. The doctrine that God has forgiven our sins and the doctrine that Yeshua paid the debt owed to God for our sins are totally incompatible for they contradict one another. A forgiven debt is one that has NOT been paid to the creditor, God being the creditor. A forgiven sin is a sin that neither the sinner nor Yeshua nor anyone else is punished for.
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And speaking of forgiveness, the unforgivable sin (Matt: 12:22-32) is simply a sin that God must punish by causing some suffering or loss to the sinner. Once this punishment is meted out, the forgiveness issue no longer exists. The sinner is not forgiven but instead is punished. The sinner and God can now relate to one another as if the sin had never been committed. Although punishment can be that of withholding one’s love from the offender, this is not how God punishes sinners, punishes the unforgivable sin.
The unforgivable sin causes so much anguish because it is wrongly assumed that the punishment for this sin must be God withholding his love from the sinner forever and ever. There is no such punishment for the unforgivable sin. All unforgivable sins are punished in the Lake of Fire. And this temporary punishment is for the purification and healing of the sinner. It is not retribution. God is not looking to avenge himself on sinners. What shocks me about the passage on the sin that cannot be forgiven are these words of Yeshua: “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven…” (Matt. 12:32a). No one will be punished for this sin!? As was pointed out above, sometimes a loving mother must punish her child for disrespecting her. But this refusal to forgive her child in no way breaks her loving relationship with her child.
Strictly speaking, if a sinned against person cannot in anyway punish the offender, she thereby cannot forgive him either. This is so because forgiveness has to do with not exacting a punishment that the victim can indeed inflict on the offender. If a woman’s husband has been murdered, she cannot forgive the murderer, using the word “forgiveness” in its strict sense, because the state has jurisdiction over the murderer’s punishment, not the widow. Of course the widow can correctly decide that hating the murderer of her husband harms her and not the murderer. She can decide to love him as a fallen creature of God whom God will save one day. This love is a decision and does not require any positive emotional feelings for this man. Having feelings of anger toward the murderer is not incompatible with loving him, with wanting God to eventually save him from his wickedness and to bring him into a relationship of love with him and with all humanity.
I will now take a further look at the English word “eternal” in the context of the unforgivable sin. The Gospel of Mark has Yeshua calling the sin that cannot be forgiven, “the eternal sin” (Mark 3:29). This English phrase, “eternal sin” makes no sense if the word “eternal” is interpreted as a reference to “everlastingness” or as “having no beginning and no end” or “timeless”.
The difficulty here in understanding what Yeshua meant by this phrase is that four languages are involved. To begin with, Yeshua spoke Aramaic. Mark then translated the Aramaic word Yeshua used, most likely similar to the Hebrew, olam, into the Greek, aionios. Then in 405 AD, St. Jerome translated this word into the Latin, aeternum.
Bible translators not only have to know the foreign language they are translating from, they also have to find a suitable word or phrase in the language they are translating the Bible into. The English translators, in their struggle to find the correct English words, used the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, as an aid. Most languages, including English, have no word for the philosophical concept of the “eternal” or “eternity” meaning something or someone having no beginning and no end or being timeless. The English translators of the Bible simply anglicized the Vulgate Bible’s Latin word, aeternum, into “eternal”. That the English translators could find no English word for “eternal” reveals just how difficult it is for us English speakers to interpret its meaning.
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The use of the philosophical word “eternal” by English translators of the Bible has caused monumental theological problems including making Yeshua’s phrase, “the eternal sin”, incomprehensible. The “eternal sin” is supposedly freely chosen by the sinner and therefore deserving of “eternal punishment”. The word that Yeshua actually used was meant to describe the heinousness or other similar quality of the evil of the sin rather than its timelessness. And this is so in connection with punishment. The punishment will be such that it will completely fulfill the purpose for which God is imposing it on the sinner, which is to heal the sinner of the disposition that led him to commit such a sin. And eternal life is life in its fulness, which, of course, includes the quality of never ending.
Yes, this all has to do with the unforgivable sin, which is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that tells us human beings that all that is good is from Yahweh God. The modern unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit is the sin of believing that the universe, especially human life, came about as the result of certain natural laws and physical forces driven by evolution. This sin includes the belief that science, not God, is the source of all true wisdom. The rejection of the Bible as the source of truth (however limited the Bible is by itself) is also part of this sin.
I will now give two examples of how this sin prevented Yeshua from healing people of both their physical and moral illnesses:
Example number one: When Yeshua preached to the people of his home town, Nazareth, they were offended by his obvious unimportance, his human nothingness (see Mark 6:1-6). Just as the sister of a king is all to familiar with her brother’s weaknesses and failings, and therefore cannot hold him in awe as his subjects do, so the people of Nazareth, knowing Yeshua and his family, refused to believe that God had sent him to them and to all Israel as his special ambassador. They refused to believe that God was the source of Yeshua’s power to heal. Perhaps he was using magic. They wanted to see something special, something grand in him that could account for his power to heal. So too today in the matter of Yahweh God’s creation: the Darwinists search Nature for her creative powers rather than looking to Yahweh God as the source of nature’s wonders.
Christians have behaved like the people of Nazareth. Yeshua’s littleness in his humanity offended believers 1700 years ago so they made him a God, the Second Person of a Triune God. This false doctrine was and is a sin against the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father, points to the One True God, Yahweh God, as the source of all that Yeshua was and is. The passage in Mark ends with these words:
And he could do no mighty work there except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled at their unbelief (Mark 6:5-6).
It was not any power of the people’s freewill determination to reject Yeshua’s miracles that prevented Yeshua from doing a mighty work there. It was Yahweh God, Yeshua’s Father, who prevented Yeshua from doing a mighty work there. God gave Yeshua, a human being and only a human being, the power to heal every human illness so that people would believe that he, Yahweh God, had sent Yeshua into the world. Yeshua’s mission was to make Yahweh God known to the world as the only God, and that the world would know that Yeshua loved him (see the whole of John 17 but especially of 17:3 and 7; and 14:31).
Yeshua’s miracles, miracles that Yahweh God had given him the power to perform, were for the purpose of giving divine public support, before the people of Israel, to the truthfulness of Yeshua’s teachings, including his claim that God, his Father, had sent him into the world to do the Father’s work. And because the people in Nazareth refused to believe that Yeshua’s miracles came from God thus providing divine assurance to everything that Yeshua was teaching them, Yeshua’s miracles in Nazareth would not have served the purpose for which Yahweh God intended. Therefore God would not allow Yeshua to do a mighty work in Nazareth.
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Example number two: It is in this passage (Matt. 12:22-32) that we find Yeshua talking about the sin that cannot be forgiven. Yeshua has just healed a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute. But when the Pharisees heard about it, they said, “‘It is only by [the power of] Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.’” Again we see these religious people denying the Divine goodness of the One True God that Yeshua was revealing by healing this man. This miracle was of no use to the Pharisees.
The Pharisees continued to claim that if Yeshua would only give them a sign they would believe in him. This is similar to what the atheists demand of God: If only God would give us evidence for his existence we would believe in him. They ignore the fact that all of creation is evidence for God’s existence and creative powers! All of Yahweh God’s creation is a miracle, a true miracle that science will never, ever be able to explain. This truth can be seen by those who have the eyes to see it. This “seeing” is what is partly meant by believing in God, by believing in Yeshua. The Pharisees did not want to believe in Yeshua so they refused to believe in his miracles or that they came from Yahweh God. Atheists do not want to believe in Yahweh God so they refuse to believe in any of his grand miracles even as they view them through their powerful telescopes and microscopes.
When a human being appears before Yahweh God in his throne room, he can deny that everything he sees is real. He can convince himself that all that is before him is an hallucination. This is why the gift of faith is so important and why the unforgivable sin is so destructive. Faith is not about believing in something that is unreal or outside of reason. Yeshua’s miracles were real healing events. The physical universe is a true miracle of God. Faith is about believing that everything that is is real and has God as its source. The person who lacks this faith becomes more and more detached from reality. To cure this person Yahweh God must cast him into the Lake of Fire where his blindness, his refusal to see, is healed. Yahweh God cannot simply overlook this terrible condition. He loves this person too much to do this.
Of course the wicked shall awake from death to face eternal contempt and abhorrence for their wickedness (the source of which is the unforgivable sin). Again, the adjective, eternal, is about the totality or thoroughness of this abhorrence felt by the Judge who will be presiding at the Final Judgment. It is because of this abhorrence that the Judge sentences these people to be cast into the Lake of Fire, the purpose of which is to remove this abhorrent wickedness from their very being so as to save them from death.
The last enemy to be defeated is not human beings, but death itself, mankind’s fundamental enemy. It was life that Yeshua won for humanity through his suffering and not the appeasement of the Father’s wrath. The Father did not need to be appeased. Yeshua was his weapon against death, against the death called hell, against the death called annihilation.
To sum up then, the eternal sin that cannot be forgiven is the sin against faith in Yahweh God as the Creator of everything that is good, against the faith that Yahweh God is the source of all the goodness in man, and that it was he who sent Yeshua into the world (John 17:7-8).
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The particular judgment depicted in Matthew 25:31-46, Romans 2:5-11 and in Revelation 20:12-13 is judgment of those who died in a state of lostness. It is a judgment of unbelievers who either consciously rejected faith in Yeshua, or who were never called to believe, or who wrongly believed that they had the gift of faith in Yeshua but failed to walk according to the Spirit. Faith without works is dead. Believers do not come under this judgment (see John 5:24). Matthew 25:32 shows that this judgment is a judgment of the nations. The “nations” is a code word for unbelievers. Jew and Gentile Christian believers are not of the nations. They are both Israel.
Some of these unbelievers will be found in the Book of Life because of the love they showed to Yeshua’s little ones, his brothers and sisters, those who believed in him and suffered thirst or hunger or nakedness, or were sick, or were strangers in the land, or were imprisoned during their earthly lives. Because some unbelievers will be found in the Book of Life at the Last Judgment, theologians have rejected the correct interpretation of this Last Judgment as being a judgment of unbelievers only. God cannot be allowed the freedom to save righteous non-believers based on Yeshua’s faith and love and on the non-believer’s good works on behalf of suffering Christians. Salvation must be based on the believer’s faith in Yeshua. No exceptions allowed. On the contrary, Yeshua is the Savior of even those who did not believe in him in their earthly lives.
This judgment will result in most of these people being condemned to the Lake of Fire. However, this Second Death will not have the last word. Who will be thirsty, if not those in the Lake of Fire?: “And let the one who is thirsty come, and let the one who desires to take the water of life without price” (Rev. 22:17b). God also loudly proclaims that there will come a time when there is no more weeping (Rev. 7:17c; 21:4). And who is weeping if not those cast in the Lake of Fire?: “ ‘In that place [the fiery furnace] there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt 13:42).
Christians have shied away from claiming that God is ultimately responsible for the imperfections in his creation, imperfections that cause disease and death in humans and animal and plant life. Christians have also shied away from recognizing that God is ultimately responsible for human sin, for the human inability to love God and neighbor. And lastly, Christians have refused to see that God is ultimately responsible for human suffering. This attitude separates God from his creation which then results in human beings embracing atheism. And this is exactly what the devotees of Darwinism do. Darwinism teaches that human beings came into existence by pure chance, the pure chance of natural selection working with random genetic mutations. In the Theory of Evolution, sin, evil, suffering, death are not attributed to an all good God. They are not attributed to anyone. There is no Creator.
This is what happens when Christians remove God from his creation because of a fear of making God appear as an evil God. It follows from a lack of trust in God’s goodness and love in view of the mystery of evil. Instead of including God in the discussion of these terrible realities of sin, evil, death, sickness, earthquakes and so forth, Christians talk about human free will and and Satan, giving them godlike powers in hopes that they will take the blame for these things. Atheists have done the same thing by granting godlike powers to Nature and Death.The goddess Nature provides the raw materials for evolution, but the god Death, guides it. Without Death, Nature could not select the superior life brought into existence by random changes in the genome of living creatures. The god Death clears out the inferior life forms making way for evolution to create all the diversity one finds in Nature.
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Christian theology put men on the path to this atheism by inventing human free will with its random or inexplicable choices. Salvation, like evolution, became a matter of chance rather than being a God directed and implemented plan. And, according to the theologians, one has only one chance at salvation and that is to make a choice to believe in this life before one dies. Death, in much of Christian theology, is the determinator of who is saved just like death is the god who decides what creatures will survive in the world of Darwinian evolution.
With salvation being the result of inexplicable human free will choices, choices that mimic the “choice” of a coin landing on heads or tails and with death limiting the time and circumstances of this choice, Christian theology begins to resemble the “theology” of Darwinian evolution. Christian believers have put their fellowman on the path to atheism, with Deism serving as the the bridge between this false Christianity, that I have been describing, and atheism. The Deists were waiting for Charles Darwin. I hope that this writing of mine will at least encourage others to engage in a serious discussion of God and his work of saving human beings that doesn’t involve the three gods of Satan, human free will and death.
The Christian faith is an apocalyptic faith, meaning it awaits the fuller revelation of God’s outworking of his plan to save mankind. This new inbreaking of God in human history may take the form of a catastrophic altering of the creation itself. This revelation of God’s continuing work to save mankind is usually thought of as a new revelation of Yeshua, of Yeshua in his glory at his Second Coming. In this Second Coming, Yeshua will overcome many of the evils, including death, that afflict mankind. In this interim age, Yeshua will rule the earth in a more direct way than he has since he left the earth some 2000 years ago. The Bible doesn’t give much detail about this new work of God. But it will bring about a new civilization that human beings have been yearning for.
A world power, as of now unidentified, that has worshipped a god of its own making rather than the One God, and that has set the moral tone for the whole world by its spiritual prostitution, will be destroyed. Is this world power a national power such as the supposed Christian nation, the United States? Or is it some ecclesiastical power such as the Christian Church in its Roman, Russian and Protestant manifestations? All of these entities have prostituted themselves in their search for wealth and power.
This divine apocalyptic intervention in human history is in opposition to the world’s hope for a human created utopia. This religion of utopianism looks to and depends on human beings for salvation rather than God. It also places the source of moral evil in the world outside of the human heart. The Christianity that we have been discussing also depends on human beings and their free will to save the world, and it blames a fallen angel, Satan, rather than the human heart for much of the evil in the world.
The three gods of humanistic utopianism are: education, science and the making of a new world order under a socialist or some other human manufactured society. Rather than a full life of oneness with God and the human family, an earthly paradise or utopia is the goal of the humanists. This utopia will be made possible by science, in which scientists, humanism’s priesthood, will conquer illness and death. Education will direct the human will, whether free or determined, to choosing the good for one’s neighbor rather than oppressing him. The world’s satans, such as racism, classism, sexism, militarism, homophobia, capitalism, income inequality, power seeking, greed and so forth will be defeated by good people as they overcome bad institutions.
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In the humanism of utopian hopes for the future, people are seen to be basically good and in no need of salvation from their slavery to sin, from their need for being re-created in the image of God. What human beings need, according to the utopian dream, is to be delivered from society’s evil institutions.
Except for Yeshua serving as an example for right behavior, he himself is not needed, in the humanist worldview. Even many Christians see no need for his Second Coming, a coming that would be initiated by some sort of a divine remaking of the earth. These utopian humanistic Christians despise the apocalyptic character of the Christian faith for it robs them of their chance to make difference, of their chance of playing the role of the Christ in saving the earth and its people along with the earth itself with its flora and fauna. This humanist motivation for his hatred of apocalyptic Christianity is similar to that of what motivates Christians to abhor the doctrine of universal salvation. The anti-universalist Christian preacher does not want to be robbed of the glory of saving his fellow human beings from an eternity in hell.
I have attempted to explain certain things that in many ways are inexplicable. I hope I have at least been a channel of some of the truth that is to be found the words of Yeshua inasmuch as “the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32), free from fear and the lovelessness of sin.
Rowland F. Stenrud
May 12, 2019
The Spirit Disagrees 