UNIVERSAL REDEMPTION

UNIVERSAL REDEMPTION 
I asked last week what went wrong with the gospel, quoting Paul who wrote concerning a wrong gospel saying there are some who trouble you (tarasso - to strike one's spirit with fear and dread - Galatians 1:7). He says they want to reverse (metastepho) the gospel. Since the time of Christ, a World population of almost 70 billion people has existed, and how many people have heard the true gospel? I believe certain English words have been prejudicially translated from the original language that have altered the nature of the gospel and reversed our perception of a loving saving God. And we will look at some of those words today. And how has that affected our current global Western culture relationally and morally 2Peter 3:9 The Lord…is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance (metanoia – a change of mindset). I am proposing that the trajectory of Scripture presents God’s judgment as ultimately restorative rather than purely retributive, and that words and concepts traditionally interpreted as eternal punishment may instead work through age-to-age judgment, truth, and revelation until human creation is brought into alignment with God. I am arguing that God’s redemptive power and purpose is not ultimately defeated by human resistance. 
Philippians 3:21 He will transform our lowly body (tapein??sis – lowly estate) that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself.

I would like to personally query three aspects of the nature of the gospel today. This will take more than one session.
Is God’s nature one of loving restoration or retributive punishment?
What is hell and judgement and the consequence of sin?
What is eternity?

I perceive God as a divine architect who has designed a relational home where he might enjoy loving relationship with his human family, for them to find utter fulfillment in his company. The home was built on a foundation of love and peace and order. Then the foundation became destructively cracked and flawed by the pride and disorder of Satan. Immediately following that the damaged foundation was built upon with inadequate flawed human material and it has crumpled and subsided time after time. Then a new divine/human foundation was laid which was Christ and a new creation was invited to build upon this new foundation of love and peace and order. The home was made to be filled and not emptied, so the flawed foundation had to be fully restored, and the flawed human material had to be fully redeemed so that it could be filled. 
In Matthew 22 a King prepared a feast for his son, and most of the invited guests were too busy or distracted to turn up, but he wanted his house filled with guests for his son so sent his servants out and they ended up having to invite people from the highways and byways, both bad and good. And the house was filled. God wants a full house. The highways and byways people can be seen as ‘fringe people’ The edge or fringe becomes the meeting place of exclusion and inclusion in Scripture, and examples include Ruth as an outsider being included in Israel through marrying Boaz, and the gentile woman who touched the fringe of Jesus’ garment and was healed. It is also typified in the priestly garments and the boundary materials of the tabernacle. And even one of the wedding guest fringe people resisted and was cast into outer darkness for not wearing a wedding garment and I’ll cover that redemption theme at another time. I believe the plan for God’s house being filled was designed before time began, and what follows in real time is restoration and the events of purifying and restoration in the history of human life. 
2a. The nature of sin and its consequences – The common established belief is that
Sin separates us from God and that sin can finally result in going to hell. The following Scripture is commonly taken to mean that if you believe in Jesus, you will not perish (go to hell) but you will receive eternal life (go to Heaven).
John 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

2b. The names implying what hell is are Hades, Gehenna, Lake of fire, Tartarus, Sheol and even Outer darkness. Hades (O.T. Sheol), does not really describe the place of eternal torment. It described the realm that is not visible to the living (ha – not and ideis – seen) the unseen, the hidden, what lies beyond the horizon of the living. It occurs in the Epistles once in Revelation, where it is done away with to no longer exist. 

Jesus spoke of Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem where the fire of spontaneous combustion destroys the rubbish which symbolizes the judgment and destruction of sinful corruption (also James 3 re the tongue and corrupt speech). I’ve seen Smokey Mountain on a missionary trip to the Philippines with 2 young people. Thousands lived ther and made a living there scavenging what was not consumed by the fire. The epistles interpret the concept of fire as a process of transformation where God’s fire removes what is of the flesh so that life in Christ remains. I’m proposing that the nature of fire called hell is purifying and corrective discipline rather than retributive punishment. 
We will get to the others later…Lake of fire …Tartarus…Outer darkness…

I have already compared Jonathan Edward’s sermon of ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God with the writings of Athanasius in 350 AD. Edwards said ‘Why should God love you because you have never loved him’. The apostle John answers that - ‘We love him because he first loved us’ (1John 4.18). 
Athanasius wrote that Jesus died out of sheer love for us so that… he might turn men again to incorruption who had turned back to corruption and make them alive through death… and by the grace of his resurrection thus he would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.

The refining fire of God’s love is the divine method for transformation because it looks forward to what is possible and applies the purifying trials of faith to get there.
Punishment and retribution look backward at what was done and demand payment to what seems to be to no good end.
The fire of judgment in this truth is not the satisfaction of divine wrath; it is the
completion of divine purpose - and redemption is the restoration of what was always meant to be.
God’s divine wrath is the intense indignation at what sin has done to cripple the souls of his children and it is aimed at the source of evil itself and not the victims of it. That indignation shakes whatever can be shaken to rid it from his children so that what remains cannot be shaken – the Kingdom life within. And whatever evil or darkness we harbour in our own lives will get shaken from our ignorant or resistant grasp for our own sake and those around us. 
Hebrews 12:1… let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith… do not despise the chastening of the LORD…He does that for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness. Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful;

Paul says that as a wise master builder (architekt??n) he has laid the foundation.
1Cor 3:11 For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.
This purifying fiery judgement and Hades, and Gehenna all overlap but some are used more as warnings than encouragement.

1 Corinthians 3:13–15 distinguishes between the work and the worker. The work may be tested and found wanting, may be burned away as wood, hay, or straw. But "he himself will be saved, though as through fire." The person passes through and the fire does not consume them - it consumes what was not them.
With Peter the illustration is that as that seed grows through faith, the outer husk of the seed, our outer soul-self life, is burned away by the fiery trials of faith.
1 Peter 4:12 Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you;

1Timothy 5:24 some mens’ sins go on beforehand to judgement and some they follow after.
This means we can have the wood and straw burned off in this life or in the next age.

The Greek word translated judgment – krisis, throughout the New Testament primarily means decision and judgment. The word carries the act of separating, sifting, distinguishing. A crisis is the decisive moment, the point at which the true nature of something becomes apparent and that can clearly involve adverse outcomes. 
The Bible uses the following words;
krisis  judgment, decision, evaluation and accountability.
kolasis Matthew 25:46 - corrective pruning (like trimming a tree)
paideia Hebrews 12 - discipline, training of a child 
dike – Justice and being weighed in the balance.
Judgment is not retaliatory destruction, but a process that exposes, purifies, and restores. Even the judgment in the apocalyptic vision of Revelation which we will look at in later sessions is about sifting, not retribution, so the pattern holds even at the level of judgment itself.

But is the redemption payment enough for all mankind? Did the work of Jesus do enough to satisfy his Father that he paid for the lives of all of God’s created children?
Supposing a child was kidnaped and the parent had to pay a $100,000 ransom. Does a parent say ‘look I can manage $50,000 but 100 is too much – and then walk away?

In the Jewish Seder ceremony of Passover, the father takes three matzahs or flat pieces of bread and breaks the middle one in half. He hides half of the middle matzah, called the afikomen, somewhere in the house and the children go through the house searching for the hidden half. When it is found and returned the father gives the winning child a ‘ransom’ – possibly a radical prophetic picture blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in (Romans 11:25) Jesus being half taken out of sight for Israel but fully seen by those who have eyes of faith to see him. The broken middle matzah can be seen as a picture of hiddenness, brokenness, and the later revealing and restoration of Christ as our redeemer. What is broken and hidden is not lost—but sought, redeemed, revealed, and finally received as indwelling life.

3. The nature of eternity and age to age. 
The Scriptures use the word eternity, but biblical eternity also means age-to-age unfolding with purposeful beginnings and meaningful completions of participation in the life of God and ongoing revelation. The Wycliffe Bible (1382) translated from the Latin Vulgate inherited the Latin aeternus, not the Greek ai?n and age to age ai?nios. The King James Version (1611) Standardised “eternal and everlasting” and cemented this meaning in English-speaking Christianity. Old Testament eternity = olam = Horizon.
The theological impact was that Judgment or age-to age correction and purification was replaced by eternal punishment. And the meaning of living in the life of the age to come vaguely became eternal life in heaven instead of God’s purposes across the ages.

Jesus reveals the Jubilee Year as a striking model for full redemption. 
Luke 4:17 Jesus went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 61:1). And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written: "The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, Because He has anointed Me To preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD." 
Then He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He said to them Today you have heard this Scripture fulfilled." You will notice that after Jesus proclaimed the The Jubilee Year - he closed the Book, and there was a special reason for that. The next sentence in Isaiah 61 that he would have read said ‘and to proclaim the day of vengeance of our God’. But that was not what Jesus came to do. ‘For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:17)
The Jubilee year spoke of the greatest fulfillment of what might have been. This was the year of being given God’s rest and blessing and provision for their lives both individually and as a people of God. It was the year when all work of any kind had to cease, debts were forgiven, Leviticus 25 says and each of you shall return to his possession, and each of you shall return to his family and the slaves were given their freedom, and the families were to celebrate the blessings of being God’s children. He also included Gentiles like the widow of Zarephath, Naaman the Syrian, but they could not absorb the implication of his supernatural promise to fulfill the Jubilee for all time for all the world.

For them this was the sacred architecture of the meaning of full restorative redemption.
It was the too good to be true promise of a too loving to be true God. That was Jesus.
That was a little over 2000 years ago – 40 jubilees since Jesus (40x50 = 2000). The number 40 speaks of the time of trials for Israel in the wilderness, and the forty days of temptation in the wilderness for Jesus, and his forty days of resurrected life on earth before his ascension. His vision was corporate, complete, and eschatological with redeemed humans having universal restoration held out to them by the Prince of Peace. But this annoyed them, so they tried to throw him off a cliff. Good news sometimes gets resisted. Amen.

Paul OSullivan   pauloss@me.com