We have the Holy Spirit of Truth in us and with us as our guide. We have Jesus, the way, truth and life, in us and with us to disciple us. We have our loving Father in us and with us to Father us into sonship. Agape love should be what we use to measure and test everything against.
The 4 streams of thought that are converging into one mighty river are: Mystic sonship, Realized eschatology, Universal reconciliation, Energy frequency healing. Realized eschatology leads to universal restoration. Apokatastasis is the early church Greek term for the restoration of all things. Christian Universalism (CU) is the belief in the restoration of all things; although there are many variations, which is why I will not be labelled. The essence, nature and character of God (who is Father, Son and Spirit) as love is the backdrop to all our discussion about creation’s beginning and end. Creation’s beginning and consummation is totally connected to Jesus being the Alpha and Omega.
Col 1:16 … all things have been created through Him (Jesus) and for Him. 20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself.
Eph 1:10 the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth-in Him.
1 Cor 15:28 When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.
Col 3:11 but Christ is all, and in all.
What does Christian Universalism believe? All those created by God will be brought to the destiny that God created them for. All those that God desires to save, and that Jesus came to save, will be saved: all things that He created Jesus, not sin, will determine the future of creation.
Everlasting ‘hell’ is not evangelical, in that it thwarts God’s purpose in creation and salvation and is incompatible with the God of the gospel story. Jesus is the beginning and end of time and the logos or plot of time. We were always included in Jesus.
Eph 1:4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we exist holy and blameless before Him in love. Jesus means ‘God is salvation’; that means that salvation is within the whole story. God is I am, transcendent: both outside of time and space in the eternal now and also immanent within every moment of every person. Everything exists within Him and He exists within everything. There are many other difficult and thorny questions in relation to restoration. What about the evidence of history? What about evil? What about the ‘Old Testament version’ of God? What about free will? How do we reconcile all these questions?
Where is Hades, Gehenna and the Consuming Fire on the timeline? The concept of forever is confusing from man’s standpoint. It is within eternity and has a beginning and an end ‘aionios.’ There is the paradox of how, in the Bible, people seemingly can be said to suffer for all time and yet still be restored. Destruction, annihilation language is used. The people in the Bible can seemingly be annihilated in time and then somehow be restored. Things seem to be always present in the eternal now and absent from time; that is because it is God’s perspective (things are described relative to the observer).
In Ezek 16 God promises the restoration of Jerusalem, Samaria and Sodom which were all destroyed in time by fire. But from an eternal now perspective all are transformed by fire, not destroyed.
For example: the New Jerusalem, now constructed of living stones, people, comes out of heaven. Jerusalem is destroyed on the timeline and then comes out of heaven into the earth.
Isa 66:22 “For just as the new heavens and the new earth which I make will endure before Me,” declares the Lord, 23 “And it shall be… All mankind will come to bow down before Me,” says the Lord. 24 “Then they will go forth and look on the corpses of the men who have transgressed against Me. For their worm will not die and their fire will not be quenched; and they will be an abhorrence to all mankind.”
New heavens and new earth.
All mankind will look on the corpses of all men being consumed in the fire. This pattern of destruction and restoration is one that is repeated throughout the Bible and is interpreted through our framework of thinking, be it evangelical, reformed etc.
Zeph 3:8 “Therefore wait for Me,” declares the Lord, “For the day when I rise up as a witness. Indeed, My decision is to gather nations, to assemble kingdoms, to pour out on them My indignation, all My burning anger; For all the earth will be devoured by the fire of My zeal. 9 For then I will give to the peoples purified lips, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord, to serve Him shoulder to shoulder.”
Gal 3:20 I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith of (not ‘in’) the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
Paul is dead and alive in the same sentence. Everything is destroyed in time but everything is restored from the eternal now perspective. The statement of the end of everything is also the new beginning of everything.
Re-creation, re-genesis, restoration, is always the inevitable consequence. Destruction is often linked to ‘evil’ so what is the context of evil and therefore the devil, Satan etc. in relation to the consuming fire?
God did not create evil, as it is actually an absence of good (just like a shadow has no substance as it is just the absence of light). Therefore, evil is the absence of good. Fallen angels were once light; and that light now is covered in darkness, which is in effect the absence of light. That darkness has a negative effect.
These are fundamental basic foundational truths: God is good, only good, always good. God did not create evil. God does not use evil. God will not allow evil. His only connection with evil is to disallow it through the power of the cross. God has already disarmed and disallowed every form of evil. Why evil still occurs is due to man’s individual and corporate neglect of Jesus’ salvation gift. Jesus is God’s perfect cure for evil, a cure which overcomes evil one way and one way only, with Jesus who is good, as God in the flesh, came to reveal the true nature of God as good, love, light, truth and Spirit. Only Jesus accurately reflected, and still reflects, the true nature of God. God brings good even out of what evil people do, by overcoming it and redeeming it; but He does not cause it.
Today, many people disagree on how guilty criminals should be treated. Is the purpose of punishment to rehabilitate the criminal by reforming his character? Or, rather, is the purpose of punishment to inflict eye-for-an-eye retaliation on the wrongdoer?
Put another way, is our motive for punishment revenge or rescue? This same analysis can be applied to God’s purpose for ‘hell’ or consuming fire. Is God’s motive in allowing sinners to go to ‘hell’ a form of ‘revenge’ upon the sinner, or is God’s motive rather to ultimately ‘rescue’ the sinner from his own fallen nature?
Which purpose better aligns with the nature of God revealed in Jesus? God is light and love and is good so that the substance of God is overwhelming.
1 John 1:5 This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.
Eph 5:9 (for the fruit of the Light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth),
Eph 5:13 But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light.
John 1:5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Luke 1:78 Because of the tender mercy of our God, with which the Sunrise from on high will visit us, 79 To shine upon those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Isa 60:1 “Arise, shine; for your light has come, And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”
Life destroys and overcomes death which is swallowed up in victory. Light destroys darkness. Truth destroys lies. The way destroys lostness or perishing. I am destroys, I am not, by revealing the truth of identity. The new man’s life destroys the old man- death. Love destroys fear. God in Jesus will fill all things that are an absence of anything.
Eph 1:23 the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
Eph 4:6 One God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.
1 Cor 15:22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
1 Cor 15:28 When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.
Col 1:17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
Col 1:20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross;
God is, by definition a restorative God. God is one, the union of three; therefore, God does not have separate parts for love and justice. God is love and God is a consuming fire, therefore love is a consuming fire. God is good and that goodness is a consuming fire. Love is justice and that justice or goodness, and forgiveness overcomes everything.
We are not one: we have what God created and we have also what we created through the do-it-yourself tree path-DIY-created as me, myself and I. The old man and the new man; but love, through death, crucifies the old man, overcoming it with the resurrected new man. The old man was created in independence and darkness. The original man created in light is restored through the crucifixion of the old man in Christ, the Son of Man and the last Adam, as the life-giving Spirit. God’s judgment- grace therefore destroys and recreates the Old Adam into the New Adam.
Our Lost identity now becomes our Restored identity. The old Adam is referred to by Jesus as the son of the devil who was the father of lies. This relates to God’s judgment of the old Adam through the crucifixion of the last Adam. Mankind is declared innocent through the judgment verdict that found mankind not guilty and justified. God’s judgment is God’s decision. God decides to make man in Their own image and Jesus has always been God’s judgment (God saves). God decides to save in Jesus, even before the foundation of the world and time. His grace to save was given before time- 2 Tim 1:9. God’s judgment, His good decision, destroys man’s bad decisions and restores His original thoughts and intentions for mankind. We died with Jesus in the judgment of death. We died once; therefore, we do not need to die again. A not yet believer still needs to realize they died with Christ after they die physically which is the second death in the consuming fire of love. Judgment is expressed in many figurative ways, but they are all fundamentally the same event: that is, the end of the old and beginning of the new. Old heavens and earth, Old Jerusalem, Old covenant, Wheat and tares, Sheep and goats Great white throne judgment, Judgment seat of Christ in fire. The judgment is Jesus, as His abundant life overcame sin and death.
2 Thes 1:9 These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, this destruction is to life not death, in the consuming fire of God, who is love.
John 3:19 This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.
John 12:31 “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. 32 And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all judgement to Myself.”
Justice in relation to restoration.
Justice is not people getting what they deserve, as we deserve nothing. Justice is God getting what God deserves: that is, a face-to-face relationship with people made in His image and likeness. Justice is restored relationship. All righteousness other than the nature of who God is, is imputed righteousness. We have been made righteous through no self-works or effort. He has chosen to see us righteous through the judgment of the cross, which is not guilty; therefore, justice is in fact innocence for mankind. The cross creates our faith and destroys our doubt and our self-imposed guilt, shame and condemnation, and lost identity. Faith becomes the realization of the victory of the cross to overcome death and the sin of Adam. Faith is not self-generated; we live by the faith of (not ‘in’) the Son of God. The cross is the revelation in time of God’s eternal judgment. God’s eternal judgment is love based on His essence, character and nature. The living word of love creates all things including our faith. Free will really means we are predestined to love God in freedom. We are predestined to have a free will which we did not create ourselves. The free will we ‘created’ is in fact in bondage to the DIY tree path. Jesus came to destroy that bondage to set us free to choose life, not death. The DIY tree path has caused us to be fixated on what man can do All religion is based on the works man can do to be approved of by God. Mankind has created the religious God of judgment and justice in their own image. We need to focus on what God can do. God is restoring us to His image using His living word, Jesus, that will not return to Him without accomplishing the purpose for which He came. That is the good news! His love never fails, never gives up, never separates and is stronger than death and the grave. We are on a journey through this life to the good end that God always intended for us, which is to be ascended mature sons. We are living in the rest of the seventh day in the sixth day; until we all arrive at our predetermined destination, the seventh day of rest. The rest of seventh day restoration will lead us to the eighth day of new beginnings for the ages to come. God grants us our bad choices for a time in time, so that we can make a good choice where His good eternal choice becomes our choice in time for eternity. All illusions that we have created ourselves that contradict the true reality of God’s intention for us will be totally destroyed in His loving presence. He will even deny our denial until we choose to make the right choice and become free from fear, shame, separation and lost identity. God is at work in all His children according to His good pleasure creating that good free will so that we will make the right choice in the end. Phil 2:13 for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. What is His good pleasure?
Col 1:19 For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him.
Heb 10:8 After saying above, “Sacrifices and offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You have not desired, nor have You taken pleasure in them.”
Eph 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love 5 He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
Eph 1:3 Let’s celebrate God! He lavished every blessing heaven has upon us in Christ! 4 He associated us in Christ before the fall of the world! Jesus is God’s mind made up about us! He always knew in his love that he would present us again face-to-face before him in blameless innocence.
Eph 1:5 He is the architect of our design; his heart dream realized our coming of age in Christ. 6 His grace-plan is to be celebrated: he greatly endeared us and highly favored us in Christ. His love for his Son is his love for us. (The Gospel is not about telling people how lost they are but reminding them of how loved they are!).
We do not need to save people from what Jesus will do to them. We do not need a type of good news that will save you from God “Turn or burn” is not good news. The good news is that God is love and that He has already reconciled and forgiven us in Jesus.
We have told a totally wrong story which is actually totally bad news. We have twisted the story to make God out to be a cosmic child abuser. We have created an evangelical gospel that is totally different from the gospel of the kingdom that Jesus preached.
Jesus preached inclusion; and we have preached exclusion. We have preached separation; and Jesus and Paul preached union. We have preached we are saved by faith in Jesus; but Paul preached we are saved by the faith of Jesus. Jesus and Paul preached grace through unconditional love; and evangelicalism preaches a salvation by works and conditional love. Jesus said, “Follow Me”; but evangelicalism says, “Pray this prayer according to the 4 spiritual laws.”
God revealed to Paul that Jesus was already at work in him, even though he was persecuting Christians; but evangelicalism says that we have to invite Jesus into our heart.
Jesus preached that we are already born from above; but evangelicalism says we need to be born again by doing something. Jesus called people to follow Him; but Anglicanism preaches we need to be confirmed. Jesus called people to follow Him; but Baptists preach that we need to be baptized. Jesus called people to follow Him; but Catholicism preaches we need to take the sacraments. Paul preached that we are all alive in Christ; but evangelicalism preaches we are all dead in our trespasses and sins.
Gal 1:15 But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, was pleased 16 to reveal His Son in me, so that I might preach Him in the Gentiles. Paul preached that Jesus was already in the Gentiles. Jesus called people to follow Him; but Judaism preaches follow the law. Jesus called people to follow Him; but the AOG says we need to repent.
There are many questions that relate to the ‘Old Testament God’ and ‘New Testament God’ and why they can appear to be so different. Most of these questions, and in fact most questions about God, come from interpreting the Bible literally or evangelically from a sola scriptura position of inerrancy and infallibility. Many of the problematic questions are resolved from viewing the Bible differently, either more metaphorically or more figuratively. The evangelical view of the Bible as inherent and infallible can be a major sticking point in having open dialogue across streams. Many questions are also resolved by having face to face encounters with God Himself where His essence, nature and character are revealed through personal experience and deconstruction. The fact that God is love and inherently good is put into question through a very literal interpretation of the Old Testament. Using love as the lens of interpretation brings clarity to the distorted view of God created by man’s own understanding and theology. Nevertheless, the questions still exist and cause much confusion to believers and not yet believers alike.
Did God destroy people including women and children in whole cities? Did God instruct others to destroy people through genocide? Did God use a Satan figure to destroy people on His behalf? That leads on to some specific questions:
Who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah? What about Job and His troubles? What about God’s treatment of Pharaoh and Egypt? Did God flood the earth destroying billions of people? Did God kill Ananias and Sapphira? Was Satan God’s servant, as Judaism teaches, or a cosmic rebel?
All these types of question throw into doubt God being love and good. A number of common truths are revealed when trying to answer these questions that can be used to frame the debate.
Where do you start? With the Bible or with God? What has the greatest influence on our decisions when answering these difficult questions? I believe both the Bible and my own personal experience are aligned over some very basic truths.
God is Love, Light, Spirit and a consuming fire. God has never changed; He is faithful and trustworthy. God is relational. God is both transcendent and outside of time and space and inherent within every moment of each of our lives. God is good; and He loves all that He has created unconditionally and equally. God’s judgment and justice are expressions of His nature as love. Everything that contradicts God being purely love and wholly good must inherently be false. Sowing and reaping is a fundamental principle in creation. Who really destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah (and by association Egypt, Babylon, Assyria etc.)? Did God flood the earth (and therefore is God actually behind the natural disasters we call ‘Acts of God’)? There are common themes running throughout each question. Sodom and the flood. Man following his own DIY path descends into more evil ways. Man is going to reap what he has sown. God seeks to rescue man. There is an enemy of mankind that seeks to rob, kill and destroy by ensuring mankind reaps the consequences of what it has sown. The flood account in Genesis 6 reveals a pollution of mankind and the state they were in.
Genesis 6:5 Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually… 11 Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth.
Gen 6:13 Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.
Sodom and Gomorrah.
Gen 18-19
Gen 19:13 for we are about to destroy this place, because their outcry has become so great before the Lord that the Lord has sent us to destroy it. However, as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed with brimstone and fire from the LORD, Lot’s wife looked back at the city, and she became a pillar of salt. (Genesis 19:23-26).
Are there explanations to these seemingly true Bible verses? God is always seeking to rescue. God was the hero of the story, rescuing Lot based on his righteousness (belief) from the consequences of what he had sown. God was the hero of the story, instructing Noah because of his righteousness (belief and genetic purity) to build a rescue ark. God was, like a heroic fireman, rescuing Lot from a soon-to-be burning building. Satan, on the other hand, was calling in the airstrike of his wrath to destroy those he had increasingly corrupted and those who had increasingly quenched and grieved away God’s protective presence. The Lord’s protective presence had constricted down to just Lot and his family. Satan filled in the vacuum of God’s quenched presence with his massive missiles of destruction. Remember, the Lord’s protective presence waxes and wanes depending on the various levels of individual and corporate faith present in those involved. This doesn’t happen overnight. Only repeated and rampant quenching of the Holy Spirit can so enable Satan to kill on such a wide scale as this. And how do we know it was Satan who killed here with fire from the sky?
Hebrews 2:14 is always the key in this type of question.
Hebrews 2:14-15 “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”
God does not kill. He quickens, heals, protects, purifies and purges, but He never kills – never! It is not in His nature, just like lying is not in His character, just like coercion is not in His character, just like cruelty is not in His character. We know from earlier writings that the Old Testament saints did not have a full or proper understanding of Satan.
They thought the devil was an obedient angel of God, lawfully executing God’s wrath. They thought Satan was the death angel, dutifully carrying out the Lord’s instructions, rather than rightly seeing Satan as a cosmic villain, the father of sin and lies, a rebel murderer opposed to God on every level.
Satan was indeed the death angel, not in service to God, but rather in open rebellion to him. Jesus repeatedly revealed Satan as an enemy of God, not His servant. The resultant problem was that the writer of Genesis wrongly attributed the works of Satan to God.
This was because the author had an undifferentiated view of God, not separating God and Satan. He thought Satan was God’s left hand. He was wrong. Judaism sees Satan as a friend to God, not an enemy. Satan was not inactive in the Old Testament while God did all his dirty work.
Jesus laid it out for us in no uncertain terms: stealing, killing and destroying is of the devil, not of God. John 10:10 and John 8:44 reveal that Satan was the liar and murderer from the beginning, not God.
Jesus came to expose Satan’s methods, not adopt them. He came to destroy the works of Satan altogether (1 John 3:8). So, did God intentionally drown millions of children, women and men in Noah’s day? No! Not then, not now, not ever. Then why does the Old Testament appear to say that He did?
Simply put, the Old Testament was written from a perspective which saw Satan as an obedient angel of God with a tough job, but who ultimately was just following the Lord’s orders.
Jesus, in contrast, revealed in His teachings that Satan was violently opposed to His Father’s will rather than humbly submitted to it. Read most any Jewish religious reference material on Satan, and you will see they believe that Satan was the death angel who smote all the Egyptian firstborn, supposedly at the Lord’s command. Jews still believe that Satan is the grim reaper who ultimately kills all men at God’s sole command.
The book of Job shows Satan kills with sickness (‘boils’), with nature (‘a great wind’), with other violent men (‘Sabeans with swords’), and with supernatural power (‘fire from heaven’). Satan is a master assassin who kills a million different ways, but always, the Jews believe, at the express command of God. So, the culprit in the worldwide flood is, according to Jewish thought, Satan – and they are right.
But what the Jews, both ancient and modern, are wrong about is their belief that Satan is an obedient angel, merely doing what God expressly tells him to do. In the New Testament, we get a significantly different picture. While Hebrews 2:14-15 confirms that Satan, as ‘the devil,’ does indeed have ‘the power of death,’ Jesus’ purpose in bearing the cross was to ‘deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.’ Jesus ascended the cross in order to ‘destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil’. Jesus came to destroy the works of the destroyer (1 John 3:8). But Jesus destroyed them not with His ‘alleged” counter-wrath, but with His sacrificial love. Jesus came to reveal that all forms of ‘death’ and ‘violence’ were enemies of God and never a part of His divine nature. 1 Corinthians 15:25-28 defines the dynamic of “death” as an “enemy” of God to be “put under His feet” until it’s “destroyed.” The truth of the types and shadows of the old is revealed in the New Covenant relationship Jesus enabled us to have with our Father. The Old Testament saints were confused and not able to differentiate the purposes of Satan and God, or to distinguish between the voices of God and the devil? It indicates mistaken identities and confusing the voices of God and Satan or mistakenly combining their two voices into one bipolar voice. Without the indwelling Holy Spirit, they could not distinguish between both voices. The Old Testament saints assumed both voices were from God, that both were God. Jesus came with “You have heard it said but I say unto you” Jesus came to correct all the misunderstandings about His Father. In Matthew 5:38-48 it reveals that Jesus came to unveil His Father’s light and Satan’s darkness, something the Old Testament saints were clueless about. John 1:18 No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. God kills no one; in fact He has abolished death and brought life and immortality into the light. A revelatory truth that explains the types and shadows of the Old Testament that cause much of the confusion. Jesus states emphatically “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father” and “The Father and I are one”.
I believe the flood event was as follows: Men continually sowed wickedness in the earth until their thoughts and imaginations were purely evil (Gen. 6:5). God foreknew their expanding unbelief, and that Satan would have greater and greater access to pollute the seed of all mankind during the coming 120 years. This was because they were continually quenching and ‘pressuring away’ the Lord’s protective Spirit by increasingly giving their hearts over to the devil (Gen 6:3) There were less and less genetically human beings and more and more Nephilim, with no human spirit. God warned His righteous (genetically pure) Noah to build a protective Ark for Noah and his family to avoid the Satanic wrath to come. (Gen 6:8-22). Satan continued to “accuse” God that He should repent of ever making mankind and that they had to be wiped out (Gen 6:6-7). God responded that His righteous Noah would not fail and that his righteous seed would be preserved (Gen 6:8). Satan released his killer flood and so the last righteous and all the wicked perished (Gen 7:10-24). So that demon souls would roam the earth. God’s protective spirit contracted down to the size of Noah’s ark and brought them through the flood and blessed Noah and his sons and said unto them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” (Gen 9:1). The seed was preserved, rescued by God in spite of Satan’s destruction. This view enables the OT to be seen through the NT lens of ‘God is love’ that Jesus came to unveil.
Some say that 2 Peter 2:4-10 suggests that the New Testament confirms that God brought the flood of Noah on the world of the ungodly. However, literally it says, ‘the flood the world of irreverent ones having brought on.’ In other words, this passage says that the flood was brought on by the sowing of wicked men. Men continually sowed the sin, and became polluted, thereby progressively quenching away and constricting down God’s protective Spirit over the next one hundred and twenty years. Satan ultimately brought the full harvest of destruction, but God continued to protect righteous Noah.
Gen 3:15 The promised seed that would eventually crush the head or authority of the serpent, devil, Satan would come; and the period of the restoration of all things would begin.
Whenever the Old Testament, literally ‘the dead letter’, contradicts the New Testament image of God revealed by Jesus, we are compelled and authorized to elevate its meaning to align with New Covenant truth. Jesus repeatedly did this exact thing by deconstructing their beliefs. For example, Matthew 5, during the Sermon on the Mount. Luke 4:18-20, where Jesus ‘edits out’ the phrase “to declare the vengeance of our God” from the Isaiah 61:1-2 passage. He was quoting to declare the purpose of His ministry. He purged the wrath out of the passage, in other words. We need to stop reading the Bible just by letter context but instead, read it by Holy Spirit’s light. 2 Corinthians 3:4-6 And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us able ministers of the New Covenant, not ‘of’ the letter but ‘of’ the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
Who did kill Ananias and Sapphira? Acts 5:1-11 Well, the passage doesn’t even ‘literally’ say that God killed them. Peter asked Sapphira in the literal Greek of verse 9, “Why did the two of you agree to pressure the Spirit?” In other words, why did you two push away the protective presence of God? The implication is clear then that Satan, not God, is the culprit. Satan “filled their hearts” to lie; then Ananias and Sapphira quenched away God’s protective presence with their sin; then Satan filled the vacuum in their hearts with his oppressive condemnation; then they both died. How do we know God didn’t kill them? It is against His very being as love Hebrews 2:14-15 says Satan has the power of death, not God. John 10:10 says Satan kills men, not God. 1 Corinthians 5:5 says Satan destroys the flesh of men, not God. Actually, the passage doesn’t say anybody actually killed them, but they themselves “gave up the ghost” (spirit) after hearing Peter’s words of condemnation. It may well be that they feared Peter’s words so much that they just surrendered their will to live. Did Peter extend God’s grace to them to not hold this sin to their account, as Jesus did, as the martyr Stephen did? Or did he even try to minister to them, to counsel them, to pray for them, to intercede for them, to lay hands on them to be forgiven and healed, or any of the other things the Bible and later Church practice advised? Peter was not perfect, and neither are we. He had a well-known quick trigger when it came to anger or frustration. He was quick to use the physical sword to cut an ear off an approaching soldier. He was also quick to use the verbal sword, such as when he told Simon the sorcerer to perish on the spot along with his money. Perhaps Peter was also quick here to likewise thrust a murderous impulse here to Ananias and Sapphira. Let’s not create a doctrine using Peter’s example; there are better examples to follow.
Gal 6:1 Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted. 2 Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfil the law of Christ.
We have to be very careful that we do not use the Bible to construct theological doctrines such as ‘hell’, PSA, and ECT that totally contradict the very essence of who God is as love. It is Christianity that has created a God in its own religious image that the world has mostly rejected. God has placed another spiritual dynamic within creation that always gives those who are victimized the most powerful force in the universe to wield at their disposal, the power of love through forgiveness. Love, grace and mercy in action through the choice to forgive and release. True ‘forgiveness’ is not just ‘mercy to graciously overlook the wrong. ‘Forgiveness’ in the original Greek language means complete ‘deliverance’ for the sinner from the bondage to the sin itself. Jesus is our perfect example of a victim. He was completely sinless, yet carried every sin, all our misguided evildoing in thought, deed or word, ever committed in His own body. Yet Jesus, on the Cross, said “Father forgive them.”
Rest is the key to restoration and revelation Start to focus on your breathing, slowing it down; and start thinking of the name of God, YHVH Breathe in deeply and exhale slowly: Yod- Breathe in: Hei-breathe out: Vav-breathe in. Hei-breathe out. Repeat.
Be still and know that I am God I am love, I am joy, I am peace. Invite love, joy and peace to flow in you and through you to create an atmosphere of rest around you. You are in a safe place. Start to think of an open heaven and set your desire upon it. Steps like Jacob’s ladder leading up to heaven. Hear the invitation to come up here. Shift focus of our mind. Walk up those steps to the door. Now step through the veil into the kingdom realm. Jesus is standing in the doorway. Present yourself to Jesus, your High Priest, as a living sacrifice. Let Him take you by the hand. Ask Him to reveal restoration and the oracles of the Father’s heart. Ask Him to reveal the truth about the difficult apparent contradictions. Jesus, please take each person and show them what they need to receive the revelation about restoration. Go wherever He takes you.