NEGLECTED KERYGMA -- LECTURE 14

[Rebbe]

THE NEGLECTED KERYGMA OF CHRIST
a series of lecture essays on the biblical concept of a universal salvation in Christ

LECTURE FOURTEEN

Copyright © BRI/IMCF 2020 All Rights Reserved Worldwide by Les Aron Gosling, Messianic Lecturer (BRI/IMCF)

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Audio Lecture is now available for members: THE NEGLECTED KERYGMA OF CHRIST [14]: Lecture Fourteen

The late Dr Paul Tournier, brilliant Swiss psychiatrist and author of many outstanding volumes including the notable Guilt & Grace. A Psychological Study (1962, 1983) – and who held to a view of unrestricted universalism – explains that the abject fear of losing the love of God is the FOUNDATION of all human crises and of psychology (pp.189-197).

I tend to agree with him, at least in respect of a number of believers we have personally known within the Christian community. The Rebbetzin and I have been acquainted with MANY “converted” people who have literally gone crazy (or nearly so) over haunting thoughts related to the possibility that God did not really love them. This list of spiritually insecure individuals even includes pastors. They read the Bible but they do not KNOW that its contents are valid. They do not trust the written WORD of God. They are unbelieving believers. In any event, there is very little I disagree with in Tournier's thoughtful writings. Consider these summations about life from his professional perspective. I can most assuredly identify with his following thoughts. Hopefully, you can too.

He noted, “The really important thing in life is not the avoidance of mistakes, but the obedience of faith. By obedience, the man is led step by step to correct his errors, whereas nothing will ever happen to him if he doesn't get going.”

“God leads us step by step, from event to event. Only afterward, as we look back over the way we have come and reconsider certain important moments in our lives in the light of all that has followed them, or when we survey the whole progress of our lives, do we experience the feeling of having been led without knowing it, the feeling that God has mysteriously guided us” (Paul Tournier, Reflections: a Personal Guide for Life's Most Crucial Questions, 1982).

Again, “At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance.” (Emphasis mine).

And again, “Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.”

And yet again, “I am convinced that nine out of every ten persons seeing a psychiatrist do not need one. They need someone who will love them with God's love... and they will get well.”

“Everything that is worthwhile in life is scary.  Choosing a school, choosing a career, getting married, having kids – all those things are scary.  If it is not fearful, it is not worthwhile.”

“Christian faith does not involve repressing one's anxiety in order to appear strong. On the contrary, it means recognising one's weakness, accepting the inward truth about oneself, confessing one's anxiety, and still to believe, that is to say that the Christian puts his trust not in his own strength, but in the grace of God”  (Paul Tournier, Learn to Grow Old, 2012, 222).

“Life can become once more a grand adventure if we will surrender it to God. He brings one adventure to an end, only to open another to us. With him we must be ready for anything.”

“To be right is dangerous, it has ever been the source of all intolerance.”

Certainly, some have questioned whether or not Tournier was in fact a “universalist.” Did he actually believe that God would not only reconcile the universe to Himself, but act to save it as well?

In a response to a graduate student attempting to write a master's thesis on Tournier's work, Tournier replied, “That you say as a theologian that I am a universalist is evident, in the sense that I believe that Jesus was sent into the world to save the sinners that we all are. This is what I understand Saint Paul to say when he mentions that sin has entered the world through one man, Adam, and spread to all men, and that he calls Jesus the second Adam through Whom redemption entered the world for all men, and even as he says 'all of creation,' that the redemption of Christ is the victory of God over the Fall. I believe that this great plan of salvation is universal, concerns not only all men but the universality of the world and that Jesus on the Cross has accomplished this Salvation, this reconciliation of men with God, that the 'chastisement' as Isaiah says is fallen upon Him to free men from the malediction of the Fall. This plan of God therefore seems to be collective, global, universal”  (Daniel D. Musick. Paul Tournier's Universalism, abstract of Masters Thesis, 1973).

Dr Tournier was (as I have already mentioned) a believer in “unrestricted universalism.” Let me explain what I mean by this particular terminology.

[1] There are non-Christian religions which believe that Brahman (or some other Deity) originally designed to bring a salvation to all humankind – call that salvation “Nirvana” or whatever – and that this will occur through a predetermined course of multiple “transmigrations” (perfection attained through a series of reincarnational experiences). This is “universalism” largely without Christ.

[2] There are some thinking Christians who also agree that God has purposed to save humanity by the atonement of Christ and that as a consequence of the cross all human beings will be saved. But how all men will actually be “saved” is blissfully unexplained. Such a salvation could occur in this life or in the immediate “after-life.” They usually ignore that an experiential process of salvation is essential to this outcome. This appears to have been Tournier's view.

[3] Then there is the opinion held by a large proportion of Christian believers specified as “qualified universalism.” This is stated to be a view that “God planned to save all men by the atonement of Christ but the majority will be lost ultimately due to a failure to believe in Christ and failing to freely exercise their will in choosing the Saviour.” Methodists and other Arminianists hold to this idea which hinges on our ability to positively accept a salvation that is being freely offered by Christ. Clearly, it differs from a harsh Calvinist opinion that Christ died only for the elect and therefore only a very small group will ultimately be saved by God. Both are damnable lies.

[4] Our biblical stand is that God has willed for all to be saved and therefore we believe in “an ultimate universal salvation IN Christ” by and through the imposing GRACE of a loving Almighty God.

In today's lecture I wish to reflect a little on the enormous FLAW that exists in the largely promulgated FALSE doctrine of imposed “endless misery” which, when given serious thought by its nescient, unenlightened, embarrassingly illiterate religious adherents, ought to create within themselves an attitude of humble prostration on their knees toward the God of All GRACE who has a vitally DIFFERENT view of that which He has brought into an existence for all of His creations – than the OUTRIGHT LIE offered by theologians who wilfully distort both God's NATURE and His CHARACTER.

Those who unthinkingly propound the doctrines of everlasting abandonment by God should allow themselves to be filled with wonder as they open the Bible and read its consoling contents as the Spirit moves them. They really need to be more like Arthur Stanley Eddington, the great physicist, when he says quite simply, “Something unknown is doing we don't know what.” They need to stop thinking that they “know it all” that is contained in the biblical revelation – and break with dead and lifeless tradition – and come to realise that the biblical revelation is filled to the brim with eastern Jewish thoughtform. A radical transformation would begin to take place in their thinking and the consequences would be rather startling.

Yes, the FLAW that exists involves an understanding (or, lack thereof) concerning the nature and character of the ALWAYS ALIVE Creative God.

DOES GOD SAVE UNREPENTANT SINNERS?
We have recently covered the true account of the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. Luke, who became Paul's physician, recorded a series of Christ's parables in his Gospel emphasising the astonishing LOVE of the Creator toward His creaturely “images.” Luke narrates a story of a lost sheep, an account of a lost coin, along with the narrative of the lost and unrepentant prodigal child who blew his fortune on “cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women.” Cigarettes? Maybe not, but I doubt that he would have failed to imbibe of the popular and plentiful local psychoactive plants that were widely available in such pagan temple environments and which were imported into the Holy Land by the ancient Philistines.

In any event, in each of these accounts it is always God who takes the initiative to save. Please note that God fails to wait for the sinner to repent at His Throne of Grace in order to be forgiven and to discover there an elusive salvation. So, let me ask now a simple but seriously pondered question. It is this:

How can we – any of us, and in the light of Our Lord Yeshua's parables – even consider that THIS SAME GOD who PROVES His love for us in “that while we were yet sinners” (and UNREPENTANT SINNERS at that) and who sent His uniquely conceived Son to die for each of us as penned by an inspired Paul in Romans 5.7,8 is to be identical to the ONE who will subject ANY of His “images” to an eternity filled with unbearable suffering and untold endless misery?

If we desire to really know the MIND, nature and character of the Father of Our Lord Yeshua the Messiah all we have to do is ponder over the description of God given by Yeshua in Mt 5.  I have discussed this approach by Yeshua with “unbelieving believers” in times past and usually they react by attempting to qualify all that he has stated most clearly in this very important passage of sacred text. Here is what he plainly articulated to his disciples.

“Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Do good to them that hate you. Pray for them who despitefully use you and who persecute you – IN ORDER THAT you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven.  For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust... become spiritually mature even as your Father in heaven is spiritually mature” (Mt 5.44,45,48).

The AMPLIFIED Version of Matthew 5.48 better captures the Greek intention and reads as follows: “You, therefore, must be perfect growing into complete maturity of godliness in mind and character, having reached the proper height of virtue and integrity, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

THEN if this is the case why is it that we think of that same God as being so diametrically opposite to this signifier as to cast the unrepentant into an eternal hell of endless misery and suffering?

Is there is hell? Yes.

Is it eternal? No.

Does it serve a DIVINE PURPOSE in the ultimate intention, design, plan and goal of the living, loving God FOR THE ENTIRETY OF THE UNIVERSE who has no better personal descriptor than that given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13? You'd better believe it.

WHY is this so? Obviously, if we are His children we shall show (or reveal by nature) God's very unique DNA characteristics in ourselves. Deep inside every Spirit-begotten child of God there exists the propensity to reflect all that God IS in HisHer nature and character. We will seek to display openly His outgoing, out-flowing love, understanding, comprehension along with a formidable grasp of the problematic issues that hold our enemies in the grip of satanic impulsive forces – and we fight against those spiritual powers, and not against human images of the living God – even if they are unrighteously dead-set against us.

Look. I have read (and further studied seriously) the texts included in the biblical revelation that seem to appear to have grave and negative warnings for those who have the “wrath of God” abiding on them in one form or another. I have attended to one of these texts in Lecture 11 in this series. It is located in Luke's Gospel, and I will repeat now what I penned then.

“In Luke's account we read of Christ's prediction that in the future judgment there will be degrees of “correction,” “chastisement,” and “punishment” for failure to live up to the standards of the Creator. He is obviously speaking of the “Last Great Day” (see Luke 12.41-48 with particular reference to vss. 47,48). Here we locate mention of slaves of a Master receiving “many stripes” and some copping “fewer stripes.” But not a mention of the fires of an eternal hell. Indeed we discover... an intensive period of re-education marked by severe, and not so severe, chastisement.”

What the unconverted world will receive THEN at that future time period, God's “Firstfruits” are already at this time undergoing in present negative experiences and (with the help of God's Spirit) overcoming NOW our yetzer ha'ra (the evil inclination). Yeshua told us plainly, “Every man will be salted” (Mk 9.49).

I do not in any way backtrack any of the statements I have written in regard to people being subjected to receiving the correction of “severe stripes” at [1] the direct hand of God or [2] indirectly through the agency of angels or [3] even by the blind law of karma. I could add a 4th point – correction/punishment/chastisement via “accidents” (so-called) which can be realised as deep subconscious negative self-judgments as imperative measures for the “level-headed” conscious mind. (See Karl Menninger's Man Against Himself, 1938.) “Many stripes and fewer stripes” happen even during this life when God “chastens [disciplines] every child he loves” (Prov 3.12; Heb 12.6).

The non-thinking hallowed halls of spiritual ignorance in the mediaeval church read the same texts about “stripes” that Luke penned but perverted the sacred writings to infer afterlife eternal punishments at the hands of ferocious, demented demons and a maleficent Satan. Listen! If God suffers in OUR afflictions (See Isa 63.9) then God would by nature suffer eternally even if any one single individual was sent to a never-ending hellfire of torment and endless misery. The very idea is ludicrous.

Writes German theologian Jürgen Moltmann in The Crucified God (1974) “...a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is also a loveless being” (22).

And as Apostle Paul reminds us: “Spiritually prosperous is the God and Father of our Lord Yeshua the Messiah, the Father of mercies and GOD OF ALL COMFORT, who comforts us in all our affliction, IN ORDER THAT we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor 1.3,4).

None of us ought to ever forget that our Saviour Yeshua was the IMAGE of His Father, and what do we find Isaiah prophesying about him? “He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa 53.3).

Over the decades I have written repeatedly about the real reason Abraham became known as “the friend of God” (Isa 41.8; 2 Chron 20.7; James 2.23). Abraham discovered a secret knowledge about the God he worshipped and served. Abraham looked straight into the heart of God and realised God need “comforting” (Gen 18.1-5). He did what he could to bring encouragement and consolation to the heart of the Creator, and his accommodation to God worked wonders. Abraham was blessed exceedingly for his loving heart and cognisance.

GOD WORKS WITH HUMAN FREE WILL
Notes author Samuel Cox, a largely unknown English nonconformist Bible expositor and preacher:

“God made men as He was obliged to do, if they were not to be mere automata moved by a Divine spring, free to choose between good and evil. And, though good be in itself so winsome and attractive, men chose evil rather than good. In proving and asserting the freedom of their will, they deflected it from the will of God. It was, and is, the Divine purpose to redeem them, through their experience of the miseries of self-will backed by the ministries of his Grace, to a firm and constant love of goodness, to draw back their wills into a complete and abiding harmony with his perfect Will. This is the one, divine, far-off event to which the whole Creation moves, and the whole course of Providence, and the entire series of Revelations, and all the gifts and operations of the Spirit.

“To secure this result, God permits those who have made an evil choice to do the evil they have chosen, and to suffer by and for it, to be corrected by it. But God is love, and cannot see his creatures suffer without pain. God is good, and cannot come into contact with (the evil of sin) even though it be a victorious contact, without entering into a divine agony. In all our sufferings He is afflicted; He suffers in all our sufferings. That is to say, from the very beginning God has borne part, and the greater part, in the countless and dreadful miseries and conflicts which men have provoked by their sins, and will continue to bear that part in them till sin and time shall be no more.

“Now it is this perpetual conflict with the innumerable forms of evil, this endurance of the miseries which his creatures endure, this sorrow as of a gracious Father who sees his children sold into the bitter captivity of sin and pain, and can only suffer with them till, through suffering, they have grown wiser and stronger – it is this which constitutes the eternal agony and passion of God; this is the cross which He forever bears, this is the sacrifice which He is always making for the sin of the world.

“But if this divine eternal Passion is to become a redeeming energy, it must be revealed to those for whom it is endured. Till we know that God is sorry for us, we shall not be sorry for ourselves with that godly sorrow which worketh life. Till we feel that He is afflicted in all our afflictions, and will therefore use all the resources of his power to deliver us from the evils which afflict us, we can make no hopeful stand against them. Hence, once in the ages, in the person of Jesus Christ, God became man to shew his sympathy with men, his kinship with them, his care for them. To prove that He is verily afflicted in our afflictions, and that He is able to redeem us out of them all, He visibly lived our life, bare our afflictions, carried our sorrows, confronted our temptations, and overcame even the sharpness of death by laying down his life for us and by taking it again... the historical Cross of Christ is simply a disclosure within the bounds of time and space of the eternal Passion of the unchangeable God; it is simply the supreme manifestation of that redeeming Love which always suffers in our sufferings, and is forever at work for our salvation from them” (Samuel Cox, Salvator Mundi: or, Is Christ the Saviour of All Men?, 1899, 167-169).

Have YOU ever heard such a message preached in any church YOU have recently (or ever) attended?

Brethren, something STINKS to high heaven in traditional evangelical church theology. After all, I am still awaiting an intelligent answer to my question of youth (when I first began to use my mind) AFTER leaving school. It is a question, I might add, that has not failed to cross the minds of all authentic theologians over the past two millennia. And that question is this:

Why should an infinitely good God desire to perpetuate ENMITY in a purposeless hell of His own making – sharing His LORDSHIP and eternal RULE with an ETERNAL DEATH STATE?

This very notion reflects a rank detestable DUALISM that has nothing in the ONENESS and UNITY of perfect Deity! God has made it entirely clear. Death one day will be swallowed up in the victory of resurrection LIFE and God has purposed to annul the death state (1 Cor 15.54; Isa 25.8).

It should give us ALL cause for rejoicing that weak, arrogant, hapless human beings are not required now to repent first and then be saved by God's GRACE, but rather God saves lost men and women and then reveals who it was who saved them. Repentance does come, but it is ushered in as a consequence of the revelation of our salvation entirely by God's loving nature and character of GRACE through the shed blood of Christ.

In closing this lecture allow me to quote from a modern theologian with a heart of love toward lost humanity. He comments (as encapsulated by scholar Linn in his little volume Good Goats), “God does not go from being displeased with us to being once more friendly; God is infinitely above being offended and does not ask to be appeased. God's forgiveness is not a response to our admission of guilt and our conversion; it is their cause” (Bernard Cooke, Power and Spirit of God Toward and Experience-Based Pneumatology. 2004, 170 in Good Goats, 1994, 84).

THIS CONCLUDES THE CURRENT LECTURE