Is Everybody going to heaven?

[Rajni]

There is nothing here to indicate these people bowing are saved at all. It's true, all will see Jesus as Lord and the Holy Spirit will reveal it to them, but will it be as their Saving Lord or their Conquering Lord?

That generally depends on the temperament of the individual doing the speculating.

Most people interpret this scenario to involve their enemies cringing and trembling in anticipation of impending doom, but that’s more a reflection of their own vindictive “those-I-hate-will-get-what’s–comin’-to-em” spirit, which goes beyond the scope of what Scripture actually says about it.

 

[Rajni]

Good to see others see the truth in the Word. Narrow is the way...

It sure is! Very few believe that God is capable of fulfilling what He has promised.


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[DeborahsSong]

Floatingaxe, nowhere in the Isaiah passage does it say that only spiritual Israel will be saved. Your dogma seems to be getting in the way of the Word, instead of the other way around.

Speaking of dogma, as I recall, you accused universalism of being Johnny come lately. Again, the other way around. Here are some points from Dr J.W. Hanson's work "Universalism the Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church" (1899):

"All ecclesiastical historians and the best Biblical critics and scholars agree to the prevalence of Universalism in the earlier centuries."

"Universal salvation was the prevailing doctrine in Christendom as long as Greek, the language of the New Testament, was the language of Christendom."

"The first comparatively complete systematic statement of Christian doctrine ever given to the world was by Clement of Alexandria, A.D. 180, and universal salvation was one of the tenets."

"Universalism was least known when Greek, the language of the New Testament was least known, and when Latin was the language of the Church in its darkest, most ignorant, and corrupt ages."

"...Augustinianism ripened into Popery, and the beautiful system of the Greek fathers was succeeded by the nightmare of the theology of the medieval centuries, and later of Calvinism and Puritanism."

 

[enoch son]

There is nothing here to indicate these people bowing are saved at all. It's true, all will see Jesus as Lord and the Holy Spirit will reveal it to them, but will it be as their Saving Lord or their Conquering Lord?

Don't matter! confress with your mouth and you will be saved.

 

[enoch son]

Prodigal Father???? Hardly wasteful.

Yes. let's really look at Isaiah 45:22-25...

22Look to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. 23I have sworn by Myself, the word is gone out of My mouth in righteousness and shall not return, that unto Me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear [allegiance].
24Only in the Lord shall one say, I have righteousness (salvation and victory) and strength [to achieve]. To Him shall all come who were incensed against Him, and they shall be ashamed.
25In the Lord shall all the offspring of Israel be justified (enjoy righteousness, salvation, and victory) and shall glory.





Please understand that God is speaking to Israel.


"Only in the Lord" does one have righteousness--which means one must be the Lord's! Those outside the Lord do not have righteousness! simple...


"To Him shall all come who were incensed against Him" --yes, and what shall they be? ASHAMED. Not saved.



Yes, the Lord God has already worked things out according to His will: He allowed His perfect and precious Son to be beaten bloody, and sustain broken bones and to be barbarously killed by being nailed like an animal hide to a wooden cross! He died and on the third day, He rose!

For who did He do that? The Lamb sacrificed Himself, and shed ALL His blood for you and me--for the entire world, out of boundless love! He did it--even though people couldn't care less. God sees and He will reward those people accordingly--those who do not receive that MOST precious, COSTLIEST gift EVER.

For the sin of rejecting Jesus, a forever punishment is waiting. For receiving Jesus, a forever glory is waiting. God is intolerant of sin. He doesn't play games. Watch His Word unfold before you at the end of time--be struck with horror at the folly of having believed lies, because God is a just God, and His Word is true. Choose Him or perish in sin. I love my God because He is just--that is a God worth knowing.

So what are you saying that God did not put us into the holy tree? I think romans say's your wrong.

 

[enoch son]

Acts 10;15 and 10;28 use the words common or unclean when I look them up to my surpize they mean strong's #2839 and #2840 unholy,profane,defile or pollute. Call no man this is what God said. Sometimes I wish God would line up with mans doctrine. LOL!

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

Like Him how, exactly?

As it already said in the post above, friend!

Will we not rather see Him as He bes in ALL His glory, for we shall be like Him? And what do we imagine ourselves to become then, in becoming like Him, if not the radiant living embodiment of perfect, 100%, no-holds-barred self-sacrificing LOVE, the kind of love that would go to the Cross for Hitler, for Bin Laden, for Bush, for Saddam, for tyrants and despots everywhere, for prostitutes and drug addicts, for devil worshipers and drama queens and social rejects and weirdoes and nutjobs and ordinary selfish hard-hearted humans like hello, all of us. Until we have this Love motivating our every thought, word and deed, we have not finished being transformed into His likeness.​

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

Don't matter! confress with your mouth and you will be saved.

How do we know? Because God doesn't change!!! And His mercy endures forever!!!

 

[Floatingaxe]

Floatingaxe, nowhere in the Isaiah passage does it say that only spiritual Israel will be saved. Your dogma seems to be getting in the way of the Word, instead of the other way around.

Proper interpretation of the Word comes from knowing the Author intimately.

Improper interpretation that takes things too literally, thinking that wicked people can bypass their call to repent in this life because they will be able to repent after death is the result of not knowing God rightly. In fact, it is calling God unjust and an imbecile. No righteous judge lets criminals go free while those who are indeed righteous get the same reward! That's inane theology.

Speaking of dogma, as I recall, you accused universalism of being Johnny come lately. Again, the other way around. Here are some points from Dr J.W. Hanson's work "Universalism the Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church" (1899):

"All ecclesiastical historians and the best Biblical critics and scholars agree to the prevalence of Universalism in the earlier centuries."

"Universal salvation was the prevailing doctrine in Christendom as long as Greek, the language of the New Testament, was the language of Christendom."

"The first comparatively complete systematic statement of Christian doctrine ever given to the world was by Clement of Alexandria, A.D. 180, and universal salvation was one of the tenets."

"Universalism was least known when Greek, the language of the New Testament was least known, and when Latin was the language of the Church in its darkest, most ignorant, and corrupt ages."

"...Augustinianism ripened into Popery, and the beautiful system of the Greek fathers was succeeded by the nightmare of the theology of the medieval centuries, and later of Calvinism and Puritanism."

Johnny-come-lately stands. The gospel of Jesus Christ came way before that!

 

[Floatingaxe]

Don't matter! confress with your mouth and you will be saved.

Oh, but it does matter to God. Repentance has to come before confessing Jesus as Lord to receive glory. Those who stand before God at the GWT will have already traded that glory for shame. Your offer to receive Jesus' payment for your sin is open only while you have life. There is no confession of faith before the just Judge. There will be nothing to say, then...

Sorry.

 

[Floatingaxe]

So what are you saying that God did not put us into the holy tree? I think romans say's your wrong.

Assuredly the Church is grafted into Israel, creating the spiritual Israel that God addresses. NOT the entire fallen world.

 

[DeborahsSong]

Floatingaxe, the Gospels and the Epistles were put down in Greek, not KJ English and not Latin. Again, from Hanson:

"Like our Lord and his Apostles, the primitive Christians avoided the words with which the Pagans and Jews defined endless punishment aidios or adialeipton timoria (endless torment), a doctrine the latter believed, and knew how to describe; but they, the early Christians, called punishment, as did our Lord, kolasis aionios, discipline, chastisement, of indefinite, limited duration"

"The first advocates of endless punishment, Minucius Felix, Tertullian and Augustine, were Latins, ignorant of Greek, and less competent to interpret the meaning of Greek Scriptures than were the Greek scholars."

"The first advocates of Universalism, after the Apostles, were Greeks, in whose mother-tongue the New Testament was written. They found their Universalism in the Greek Bible. Who should be correct, they or the Latins?"

The doctrine of endless punishment that is prevalent in modern Protestantism can be traced back to Augustine's distortion of God's word. He admits to not knowing Greek, yet his views on what the scriptures say have prevailed over the earliest understanding by those who spoke Greek!

In short, the traditional view of Protestantism as it relates to endless punishment is the Johnny come lately. You call what you preach "the Gospel", but if it doesn't line up with the scriptures in their original Greek, there are those who won't agree with you. We feel that the Holy Spirit is at work to restore what Jesus and the apostles actually taught and what the early church believed. And it is Good News!

 

[Floatingaxe]

Floatingaxe, the Gospels and the Epistles were put down in Greek, not KJ English and not Latin. Again, from Hanson:

"Like our Lord and his Apostles, the primitive Christians avoided the words with which the Pagans and Jews defined endless punishment aidios or adialeipton timoria (endless torment), a doctrine the latter believed, and knew how to describe; but they, the early Christians, called punishment, as did our Lord, kolasis aionios, discipline, chastisement, of indefinite, limited duration"

"The first advocates of endless punishment, Minucius Felix, Tertullian and Augustine, were Latins, ignorant of Greek, and less competent to interpret the meaning of Greek Scriptures than were the Greek scholars."

"The first advocates of Universalism, after the Apostles, were Greeks, in whose mother-tongue the New Testament was written. They found their Universalism in the Greek Bible. Who should be correct, they or the Latins?"

The doctrine of endless punishment that is prevalent in modern Protestantism can be traced back to Augustine's distortion of God's word. He admits to not knowing Greek, yet his views on what the scriptures say have prevailed over the earliest understanding by those who spoke Greek!

In short, the traditional view of Protestantism as it relates to endless punishment is the Johnny come lately. You call what you preach "the Gospel", but if it doesn't line up with the scriptures in their original Greek, there are those who won't agree with you. We feel that the Holy Spirit is at work to restore what Jesus and the apostles actually taught and what the early church believed. And it is Good News!

That's funny. Haha.

I trust God to have cause His Word to have been translated perfectly into English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Croatian, Italian, and all other wonderful languages that people speak without any error such as you suggest.

The argument presented here is merely an opportunistic attempt at accusing people of being unknowledgeable. Too bad it doesn't work. God is more than capable of overcoming "rewriters" like Universalists and their agenda of the enemy.

We've got his number...

 

[DeborahsSong]

Floatingaxe, if you so trust, then you underestimate the work of Satan, who has actively been involved in creating distortions over the centuries . There are errors in the KJV. In my work on cherubim, I was just dealing with one of them. The KJV has "cherubims", but this is not accurate. Cherubim is the plural of cherub, a very minor point, but capable of refuting your charge of no errors in any bible translation.

Universalists have no interest in rewriting scripture. We prefer the original! The rewrites are in translations, such as KJV, NIV, etc. So, we are forced to use literal translations of the NT, Greek interlinears, Greek word studies, and so forth, not out of some love for erudition, but to learn what Jesus and the apostles actually said and wrote, because we, like you, love God's word.

 

[Floatingaxe]

Floatingaxe, if you so trust, then you underestimate the work of Satan, who has actively been involved in creating distortions over the centuries . There are errors in the KJV. In my work on cherubim, I was just dealing with one of them. The KJV has "cherubims", but this is not accurate. Cherubim is the plural of cherub, a very minor point, but capable of refuting your charge of no errors in any bible translation.

I trust God as preserver of His own word...but I do not trust people that come along, point out so-called errors and claim that now we must believe that God is now a cartoony love-god who never gets angry, and no matter how evil we are, we don't ever have to accept His terms for salvation because this wimpy pushover of a god will bring us all in one day!

Uhh...NO. Universalism is a Satanic construct.

Universalists have no interest in rewriting scripture. We prefer the original! The rewrites are in translations, such as KJV, NIV, etc. So, we are forced to use literal translations of the NT, Greek interlinears, Greek word studies, and so forth, not out of some love for erudition, but to learn what Jesus and the apostles actually said and wrote, because we, like you, love God's word.

No--Universalists are revisionists.

 

[icedtea]

If someone had a concordance (I don't) they can look up all the verses where God is angry, brings punishment and destruction and laughs at the wicked.
Not all will be saved. This gospel makes people tell others about the way to everlasting life. If I thought all were saved in the end, I would not need to tell anyone about salvation.
Nor would the disciples have risked their lives to do so.

 

[DeborahsSong]

God is preserving His word: Again, Dr Hanson:

"The submergence of Christian Universalism in the dark waters of Augustinian Christo-paganism, after having been the prevailing theology of Christendom for centuries, is one of the strange phenomena in the history of religious thought."

"The wonderful progress made during the first three centuries by the simple, pure and cheerful faith of early Christianity shows us what its growth might have been made had not the morose spirit of Tertullian, reinforced by the "dark shadow of Augustine," transformed it."

"Christianity was everywhere at first, a religion of 'sweetness and light.' The Greek fathers exemplified all these qualities, and Clement and Origen were ideals of its perfect spirit. But from Augustine downward the Latin reaction, prompted by the tendency of men in all ages to escape the exactions laid upon the soul by thought, and who flee to external authority to avoid the demands of reason, was away from the genius of Christianity, until Augustinianism ripened into Popery, and the beautiful system of the Greek fathers was succeeded by the nightmare of the theology of the medieval centuries, and later of Calvinism and Puritanism

" The resurrection of Universalism after an eclipse of a millennium of years is as remarkable as was its strange disappearance."

God gave the law, not with the expectation that man would be able to keep it, but as a testimony to man that he was incapable of obtaining salvation by works. Now we have a man-centered Christianity that distorts His word. Man calls the shots, not God. Man decides his eternal destiny. It is as if God exists for man, and not the other way around. Why did God allow such a thing to manifest itself? Now that it has, He can restore His word and get to be God again.

 

[Tavita]

If someone had a concordance (I don't) they can look up all the verses where God is angry, brings punishment and destruction and laughs at the wicked.
Not all will be saved. This gospel makes people tell others about the way to everlasting life. If I thought all were saved in the end, I would not need to tell anyone about salvation.
Nor would the disciples have risked their lives to do so.

Wouldn't you? I would. I want other's to know the wonderful love and forgiveness of our Savior. HE is the treasure of Life... to know Him and the power of His resurrection.. in this life.

We should not be 'using' Christ as a ticket to eternal life!

 

[Faulty]

That generally depends on the temperament of the individual doing the speculating.

Most people interpret this scenario to involve their enemies cringing and trembling in anticipation of impending doom, but that’s more a reflection of their own vindictive “those-I-hate-will-get-what’s–comin’-to-em” spirit, which goes beyond the scope of what Scripture actually says about it.

You're off an that assumption as well.

 

[Floatingaxe]

We should not be 'using' Christ as a ticket to eternal life!

But He is.