And how does the answer you claim to arrive at from that verse work with all the verses which says God is Good. IOW Please explain how you can see Good doing evil.
It does not depend, it is either yes or no unless the obvious choice creates the dilema you obviously see for your belief about what God eventually does to evil creatures, which ironically should include any BEING that creates evil. And so you essentially gave it a maybe yes, maybe no answer. Some Buddhist have answered no, non existence is best. But if non-existence is ever best, even if we say only conditionally as in Judas, we should wonder that God would create at all because we would be saying it would be better that He did not create. Yet, we know He created, even Judas. I find it difficult to imagine a God that is Good and hold that He does not always do His Best, which can only be viewed as Him doing less Good than it could be. Less Good means a little evil - which brings us back to OP and you claim to support that Good creates evil.
And why did Satan enter the apostle Judas and not Peter (that he might be sifted like wheat), well it was because Jesus prayed for Peter and He didn't pray for Judas. Poor ole Judas was 'predestined to do evil' and to be a son of perdition.
Right, so you said. And it apparently somehow makes sense to you to have the Bible say Good does evil or it says to you that God does not do His Very Best all the time if at all or it even proclaims ancient Buddhist thought that ceasing to exist is better (even if only sometimes) than existing.
That comes from wrapping your mind around translations written by those indoctrinated with a belief in eternal torture. They are therefore written to support the dictates of men and not the grammar of the Greek. Here are three bible translations which are translated and interpreted more correctly.
No, you should not let your emotions lead you. I didn't let them control me, and fear of being rejected by 'the church' is a big emotion to overcome. So you should study more scholarly translations of scripture which are more difficult to read because they ARE more literal....but 'clearly disagree' with translations written to defend the eternal torture doctrine.
In reality we have two qualities within a given ages time frame. One quality is God's life and one quality is God's judgment to those living in that particular age.
We are to correctly understand that, in verses like this, we are talking about a 'quality' of something taking place 'in time' and not a 'quantity of time'...beyond 'an age'.
Then realize that "punishment" is a noun pertaining to 'an age' and not eternal punishing.....which is a never ending verb, and not correct translating.
To help out your further expression of this teaching of men, you forgot to add that we read and accept the parable of the dead as being just what is rather than the symbolism/fantasy those same men claim it represents. Or should I say teachings of apostles?
If that was the 'consistent' use of the words scripturally that might be true. But it isn't. Translators change the definition to fit their theological doctrine and not the 'gospel truth'.
If you are saying that consistency with 'eternal living' must be countered with 'eternal dying' then "the last enemy to be destroyed is death" would never be fulfilled would it? And that is not 'the gospel'.
how can the eternal "continuation" of a process means as a qualifier that a process may end in one particular case, but a different process having the same qualifier never ends?
I don't think he would agree. In his mind God is incapable of having someone in a "place" eternally where the torment experience is directly proportional to unaccounted evil committed in this life. As long as any evil is unaccounted for, those wicked deeds represent an injustice in the universe. Hell makes that imbalance right. Whatever else we may think Hell to be, it represents how that imbalance of Just is restored. The idea that Heaven has "degree" as a reward is similar. It is not a communal thought of everyone Heaven bound gets the same piece of a pie. Yet "living" in Heaven is the only type of "life" that represents what it means to be fully living as a human (which means body and spirit). Living in Hell necessarily means the opposite of that.
Don't we ALL make the same claim though? And don't ALL churches 'claim' to believe the bible, and yet we have 666 different denominations who don't agree with each other based upon 'the bible'. There is a religious spirit promoting 'the false' in all '-isms', whether they be Hindu-ism, Budda-ism or denominational-ism.
Let me leave you with a quote from Martin Luther in a letter to Hansen Von Rechenberg in 1522: "God forbid that I should limit the time of acquiring faith to the present life. In the depth of the Divine mercy there may be opportunity to win it in the future."
