God is always the same, faithful and full of loving-kindness and He has never changed. When we engage God intimately, He will reveal Himself in continually new, surprising and sometimes even shocking ways.
As we experienced the true reality of who God is Father, Son and Spirit false doctrines and theologies will get exposed as lies, distortions and misrepresentations of God’s character and nature. Jesus is the exact representation of the Father, Seen Me seen the Father.
Eph 3:16-18 I desire for you to become intimately acquainted with the love of Christ on the deepest possible level; far beyond the reach of a mere academic, intellectual grasp. So that you may be filled with all the fullness of God! Awaken to the consciousness of his closeness! Separation is an illusion! Oneness was God’s idea all along!
2 Cor 10:5 … The dynamic of our strategy is revealed in God’s ability to disengage mindsets and perceptions that have held people captive in pseudo fortresses for centuries! 6 Every lofty idea and argument positioned against the knowledge of God is cast down and exposed to be a mere invention of our own imagination.
Some of the doctrines we are going to re-examine in the light of new experiential truth are: Hell, Wrath, Anger, Eternal Judgement, Punishment, Eternal Conscious Torment, Is death the end? Separation or Inclusion?
For next few weeks we are going to look at the thorny subject of “hell. A concept that is readily excepted in most if not all religions and in society generally. We will find that “hell” is but a product of the false concept of God being angry and vengeful.
One of the most famous and influential sermons ever is “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards says that God’s purity makes Him view sinners as loathsome serpents. Edwards describes humanity’s pitiful state in the hands of an angry and vengeful God dangled over the fiery pit of hell.
Edwards depicts God as an archer aiming an arrow at each human. Unfortunately, it is not cupid’s arrow. Edwards states that mankind is now the object of that very same anger & wrath of God that is expressed in the torments of Hell.
Mankind deserves to be cast into hell; divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God’s using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins.
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.
We will find that God is not like that even to His enemies let alone His children? I don’t believe anger is a characteristic that really depicts God who reveals Himself as love. Is God really just looking for any excuse to cast mankind into a fiery hell to be punished for all eternity?
Is there a difference between Hitler killing Jews in a torture chamber and God then immediately torturing them in hell-fire for eternity? We call one a criminal and the other Father? I am not trying to be offensive but I hope the challenge of this statement will offend your mindsets in the right way.
Before we look at “hell” in detail let’s look at some scriptures that give us a foundational understanding about who God really is to compare. Let’s look at God who is love and abounding in grace and mercy. This will give us truth that exposes “hell” as eternal punishment as lies.
Rom 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Who is the us that Christ died for a select few or everyone?
2 Cor 5:14 For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all …
Rom 5:10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. God is not angry even with those who may feel like His enemies?
2 Cor 5:19 namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, The whole cosmos has already been reconciled and no one’s sin is counted against them from God’s perspective so why a “hell”?
Col 2:13 When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, 14 having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.
1 Cor 15:22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. 1 Peter 3:18 For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.
Even if God was angry at something or someone does He stay angry forever? Psa 103:8-10: “Pitying and merciful is the Lord; lenient and full of mercy. Not unto the end shall He be provoked to anger, nor into the eon (age) will He cherish wrath. Not according to our lawless deeds did He deal with us; nor according to our sins did He recompense to us” (Septuagint).
Isaiah 57:16: “I shall not punish you into the eon, nor shall I be provoked to anger with you perpetually”. Hosea 14:4: “I will heal their apostasy (unbelief), I will love them freely, for My anger has turned away from them.”
The bible teaches that God does not stay angry or keep a record of our wrongdoings forever. James 2:13: “Mercy triumphs over judgment. My own experiences of God been characterized by love, grace and mercy, not anger and fear.
If God does not stay angry forever, then how can He punish people forever. God’s love is more powerful than all our sin put together. God’s love is stronger than the lies and deception designed to keep us separated from Him.
Song of Solomon 8:6 “Put me like a seal over your heart, Like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death, Jealousy is as severe as Sheol; Its flashes are flashes of fire, The very flame of the Lord. 7 “Many waters cannot quench love, Nor will rivers overflow it;
Rather than fire meaning torment and punishment it is depicted as passion and unrelenting love. God’s love as a flame that can never be quenched or extinguished that will never relent from pursuing us for relationship.
What is God really like? I know that I know that God is love and that His love is stronger than death – His love won’t relent. We can all find out for ourselves face to face and first-hand what God is really like heaven is open.
King David knew God’s love and forgiveness despite being an adulterer and a murderer and he wrote the Psalms expressing that relationship. Psa 139:7 Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there.
Psa 103:1 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name. 2 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of His benefits; 3 Who pardons all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases; 4 Who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion.
Psa 103:5 Who satisfies your years with good things, So that your youth is renewed like the eagle. 8 The Lord is compassionate and gracious, Slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness. 11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His lovingkindness toward those who respect Him.
Rom 8:35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
1 John 4:7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
1 John 4:19 We love, because He first loved us. 20 If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. If God commands us to love and forgive each other He would be a hypocrite if He did not love and forgive everyone also.
1 John 4:18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. How can God punish people if He is love? He can’t and He doesn’t.
Phil 1:9 It is my desire for each one of you, that the realization of love’s completeness in you will increasingly burst through all boundaries, and that every sphere of your relationship with others will be greatly impacted by your intimate acquaintance with love. Let God’s love destroy those false images of the angry distant deity.
God’s love leads us into His rest, into the full realization of His finished work! Psa 23:2-3 “In the green pasture by the waters of reflection my soul remembers who I am.” Psalm 23 demonstrates the agape kind of love and the rest we experience when we lay down with the good Shepherd, who gave His life for the sheep, and hear His voice.
Last week I had two encounters with God’s love that I believe were God’s way of preparing me to share this difficult topic. I went to the throne of grace just because I felt led, whilst there the Father told me to stand under the waterfall in His garden where deep calls to deep. On Wednesday at the eagle face group we did an activation where we engaged that waterfall.
I stand under the waterfall in the Father’s garden overwhelmed by the full representation of the inexhaustible supply of the Father’s heart of love. Love unlimited and limitless, a never ending flow of life, lavish and extravagant in its abundance and effulgence. Such amazing love that you my God would die to reveal this truth to me.
Overwhelmed, undone and totally inspired by love’s boundless degree. Father Your love for me in all its glorious, resplendent, height, depth, length and breadth; multidimensional beyond time and space; unbounded, unlimited is Your love for Your Son and for all your sons.
Love that is stronger than death and the grave burning with passion and desire that will not relent until it is known by all. The power of love that I see in Your eyes hanging there on that cross for all mankind. Your eyes the window into the depths of Your heart of love fully expressed, fully manifested and fully realised in You dying my death.
Hanging there unlimited by the constraints of time or space, unveiling and fully revealing Your divine nature for all to see and for all to embrace in the heavens, on earth and under the earth. Your love prevails victorious removing every veil overcoming every distortion, obstacle, argument, lie and deception.
I stood under the waterfall with the colors of the rainbow cascading down with all variations, hues, tones, shades of color and frequency. Each variation representing a manifold facet of God’s multi-colored grace and love one color for every person, tongue, tribe, nation, color, family, the lost, the lonely, the hurting, the sick, the addicted
His love for everyone: the rejected and the rejecters, the abused and the abusers, the victims and the perpetrators of every sin ever done by following the path of the DIY tree. The immense power of God’s love and grace flowing down from His heart and throne released in its fullness
The love of God as demonstrated by the cross encompasses everyone’s past, present and future. I felt the exhilarating dimensions of this love feeling the extremes that God will go to reach everyone seen in the individual uniqueness of each color designed for each person.
The empowerment to share the good news with each person that God is passionately in love with them and has done everything necessary to restore them relationship with Him. There is nothing and no one who is outside of the reach, scope and power of God’s love, grace and mercy.
Amazing love can it be? Yes, Jesus died was buried, resurrected and ascended for me and for the whole of the cosmos that He created and sustains by His love. God who is Father, Son and Spirit who lives in a circle or dance of love has always desired to include us with Him not exclude us
Ephesians 1:4 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. God found us in Christ before he lost us in Adam!
Ephesians 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 favoured us in Christ. His love for his Son is his love for us. Does this sound like a God who plans to separate us and punish us forever in “hell?
As I began to meditate on the concepts of old and new God started to accelerate the renewing of my mind. As I looked at evangelism, I discovered a fear-based system originating from a wrong perception of the nature of God the angry vengeful and retributive God. God personally started to walk me through encounters that challenged my thinking.
God showed me that on my journey that the foundations of my relationship with Him as expressed in Hebrews 6 have all changed by my experiences with Him in love. The foundations of what I believed were being challenged by God Himself why? Because I and the church and the world have been deceived by DIY religion.
As I looked at evangelism and its methodologies, I discovered a number of topics kept coming up. The subject of hell and infernalism. The subject of universal reconciliation, and inclusion. I have discovered that many people are on this same journey of discovering the true nature of God as love.
I resisted going into the issue of hell for a while, but God would not let me be. The issue kept coming up both in my encounters and as I was looking at new verses old concepts. I knew deep down something was not consistent with God the Father’s love.
The more I began to meditate on these concepts the more I found the bible’s reliability in our English translations was questionable for some words. Some English words that don’t even exist in Greek or Hebrew have shaped our reality and understanding of many important fundamental truths.
I found that some key English words have been misinterpreted or mistranslated and have therefore misrepresented God’s nature and character. Church, repentance, eternal, eternity, everlasting, forever, punishment, torment and hell itself.
For most Christians, hell is an unquestioned doctrine. Hell fits their doctrinal system… God is just, He must punish sin, therefore “hell” is the punishment for sin. Simple or is it? We all probably have an image of what we think “hell” is…
Devils or demons with pitchforks afflicting dead people in a furnace. God burning people in torment forever and ever… A place separated from God’s love where people are suffering eternally. In fact, most of those pictures come from Dante’s Inferno, not the Bible.
Some Christians can’t reconcile the idea of hell and the goodness of God. There are many ideas to explain this: There is no hell. There is just annihilation or ceasing to exist. Hell is a place but of purification not punishment. But what does the bible actually say?
The bible does not say that a person must believe in hell in order to be saved or go to heaven. A person’s belief in hell has absolutely nothing to do with salvation. Religion has made hell a focus of salvation by using it to create fear and scare people.
How then did the concept of “hell” become part of our belief systems both religious and cultural? Persians, Zoroastrians, Babylonians Vikings, Buddhists, Hindus, Mongolians, Aztecs, Greeks, Romans, Islamists. In all those religions going to “hell” is based on our deeds or in some just fate
As the concept of hell or an afterlife of torment or punishment is universally accepted in most religions it must be true right! Or is that just a commonsense argument? What is the truth?
Perhaps the fact that all cultures have those concepts is just an indication that they all came from the same root source of lies. Perhaps from the same source that inspired idolatry and sacrificial appeasement in the first place. The DIY tree path of knowledge that seems true to man but are only lies
The argument goes, if God needs to be appeased then those people who don’t appease God must go somewhere after they die and must be separated from Him. This is a logical argument that when joined with an angry vengeful image of God makes eternal punishment the obvious solution
These common doctrines and beliefs are rooted in the same source of lies that deceived Adam into following His own path. The same fallen mindsets that we have all inherited from Adam. Rooted in a lost identity and a lost relationship
The idea of Hell being a place of punishment and torment came from the same source – the accuser, the liar and deceiver that is often called satan or the devil . The fact that everyone believes it just makes the deception all the more successful
The idea of perpetual torment is so prevalent in the world’s religions and cultures that if you mention “hell,” a certain concept immediately comes into people’s minds. This has been propagated by literature through the ages and more recently by films and TV shows but was not the view of the early church
Many religions had this view but what about Judaism in the bible? The writings of the OT and Jewish literature throw up various different views of the afterlife including annihilation or sleep until judgment. Eternal torment after death was not an OT or Hebrew concept.
The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible comments, “Nowhere in the Old Testament is the abode of the dead regarded as a place of punishment or torment. The concept of an infernal ‘hell’ developed in Israel only during the Hellenistic (Greek) period” (beginning in the fourth century B.C.).
Greek religious and philosophical ideas, including those of Aristotle and Plato, became influential throughout the region during that time. Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of World Religions points out that “many formal aspects of Hellenistic religion persist in the Jewish and Christian traditions today.”
If God is love, if God is good, if God is not angry, if God does not require appeasement or sacrifice, if God does not punish us then what is the purpose of Hell? Does “hell” even exist? If some version of “hell” does exist what would be its purpose?
I found the word Hell does not actually exist in the Greek or Hebrew language nor is it a biblical concept at all. In English hell from olde English hel or helle from Proto-Germanic haljo. Root halija concealed or covered place. Norse god Hel is Loki’s daughter who rules over the evil dead.
There are 4 words that have been translated by the western church religious system as “hell”. None of 3 Greek and 1 Hebrew word actually means “hell”. In literal translations of the bible there is no hell mentioned at all
The Message=56, King James=54. New King James=32, NLT=19. New Century=15, English Standard=14 . New International=14, Amplified=13. New American Standard=13 . LXX (Septuagint)=0, Young’s Literal=0. Concordant Literal=0, Complete Jewish Bible=0 . World English Bible=0
Most of the confusion around hell starts with translation error of 4 separate words into the single English word “hell”. Each word has different meanings. Sheol (Hebrew) grave or place of dead. Hades (Greek) unseen grave underworld. Tartarus (Greek) prison for angels. Gehenna (Greek) Fiery rubbish dump.
With new access to Church history and Greek language, it’s time to rethink the myth of orthodoxy regarding “hell” which says it has always been this way. Many insist that if you question hell, you are rejecting what has always been agreed upon by the Church, it is time to experience the Truth for ourselves and discover His love.
Too many think God so hated the world he killed his own Son, but God so loved the world, he gave his own Son. “- NT Wright. Let’s engage with God and experience His love. If you want to see where people go after they die, ask God to show you.
Close your eyes and begin to think of Jesus being in front of you ask Him to reveal the truth of His love to you. Ask Jesus to reveal the Father’s true nature to you and embrace Him.
Ask Jesus to take you to stand under the waterfall of His love. Feel the manifold facets of God’s multi-colored grace and love wash over you and flow through you.
Feel the power and unrelenting passion that God who is Father, Son and Spirit has for you individually and for all mankind.