Inquiry on the Lake of Fire

[Gary Amirault]

Dear Sir or Madam:

 

I have come across your website and I find something that I do not understand, perhaps you could help me. My mother has just died, she is a Christian..not a perfect person..but one who would tell you "I feel Him on all sides of me" and one of which so many people, old and young love and respect her, one who tells a man who says he doesn't know God, "But Robert, He knows you" ...am I to understand that although there is no eternal 'hell' but that my poor mother is being punished burning in a lake of fire to 'purify' her? Is this what you are indicating or not?

 

Here is an email I received today. I've directed him here. GA:

Honestly, I am severely anguished over this terrible loss and all of my faith is called into question right, maybe I do not understand...am I to rejoice because God is not punishing my mother 'eternally' in a lake of fire...but merely burning her for anywhere from a  few days to a few thousand years?? Am I supposed to be happy about this? I don't find this any comfort at all, I wouldn't do this to my own enemy or to a rat and be able to watch it, no matter what this enemy or even a rat has done to me. Or do I misunderstand what you are putting forth?

 

Please answer if you would, thank you, Rob

[studier]

Am I supposed to be happy about this? I don't find this any comfort at all, I wouldn't do this to my own enemy or to a rat and be able to watch it, no matter what this enemy or even a rat has done to me.Or do I misunderstand what you are putting forth?

I am sorry for your loss, Rob. I am only happy to announce it is a misunderstanding of what is being put forth. You hit the nail on the head, you wouldn't do this to your worse enemy, no matter what they have done to you. That, my brother, demonstrates a selfless love for your enemy. Yes, God get's the vengence, but God is love, so what kind of vengence awaits a person in the seat of Love? One of loving direction! You know the Scriptures, "Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you." God is not above His own commands, especially spoken by His Son. If even one person was an enemy to God, God loves them. Nothing can seperate us from the Love.

Jesus died for all mankind, reconciling all mankind to God. This is without consultation of mankind, but on the authority of Jesus Christ, whom God had given all mankind to. So in reconciling all mankind, He destroyed what made us enemies to God, and united us all under His Son proclaiming us also His Children. Your mother, is one of those Children, whether she knew it or not.

So is your mother being tormented by perpetual flames, or limited flames? No. The fire is already out, and the flames only represent a judgment. That judgment comes out of the God, God who is Love and knows all things including the most tender things of your mother that you love. He will not forget these things, but in fact He treats her without regard to any sin she has committed. In fact, the sins of the world are not taken into account when it comes to this judgment.

2 Corinthians 5:17-19
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

It is this message that we are sharing with you.

Colossians 1:19-23
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.

Now, I hope you are at peace because I can assure you, your mother is.

[Peacetroll]

"But Robert, He knows you" ...am I to understand that although there is no eternal 'hell' but that my poor mother is being punished burning in a lake of fire to 'purify' her? Is this what you are indicating or not?

HOG WASH.

God does not purify by placing souls in a temporal fire.

THIS IS A CATHOLIC DOCTRINE THAT HAS BEEN PROMIGATED TO THE LAYMEN CHRISTIANS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.

DOn't believe the Catholic doctrines, don't believe God is some kinda evil torturer.

The transition occurs (for those whom God chooses),...in a 'twinkling of an eye'.

PEACE IN THE TRUE GOD-------- JESUS CHRIST!

1 Corinthians 15:52
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

[martincisneros]

That was one of the last remaining difficulties of my understanding of the Universal Restoration.  Like any insight without perspective it initially "answered all things" until the flies in the ointment became gruesomely apparent.  I suppose my limited duration of future barbecue with A1 Steak Sauce came from Elhanan Winchester's Dialogues on the Universal Restoration.  John Murray, a contemporary of Winchester, considered Universalists who understood things in the way that Elhanan did to be Pharisaical Universalists, and he said that he knew of no one else further from the true spirit of Christianity than such Universalists.  To what degree that was about the fact that Elhanan was having more converts than the Church in Jerusalem with John Murray's ministry in Boston, or a genuine theological and fruit concern, I'm thinking the jury's still out on that one.

Love burns.  Anyone who has never experienced the burning side of love has never been struck by cupid's arrow, or they've never had a very deep, very rich, very silencing relationship with the Lord Jesus.  The closer you get to your love, whether human or divine, the more the heart seems to burn, the more the emotions and thoughts seem overpowered, and the more you'd give up your soul and rob every bank if it would be enough to guarantee that the moment would never end.  The stronger the love of God, the more nonsense from your personality, your habits, and what you'd previously considered pleasures mysteriously "burn away."  I don't want to get all metaphysical on people for the time being, but this is what the Scriptures mean and assert when they say that God is a consuming fire.  It's the goodness of God that leads us to repentance.  How good is goodness?  Before you'd embraced the Lordship of Jesus, what form did the wrath of God take in bringing you into His loving embrace?