"If the Gospel is not good news for everybody, then it is not good news." (user search)
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  "If the Gospel is not good news for everybody, then it is not good news." (search mode)
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Author Topic: "If the Gospel is not good news for everybody, then it is not good news."  (Read 770 times)
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realisticidealist
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« on: September 28, 2020, 03:44:39 PM »

It's a plainly true statement that is only remotely controversial if you use it to imply universalism. The Gospel is good news for everyone in the sense that everyone was damned under the law but now has the chance to be saved. It's not good news for everyone in the sense that everyone will be saved, and the Bible is pretty clear about that.
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RI
realisticidealist
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 14,778


Political Matrix
E: 0.39, S: 2.61

« Reply #1 on: September 28, 2020, 11:47:17 PM »

It's a plainly true statement that is only remotely controversial if you use it to imply universalism. The Gospel is good news for everyone in the sense that everyone was damned under the law but now has the chance to be saved. It's not good news for everyone in the sense that everyone will be saved, and the Bible is pretty clear about that.

"Love God so that He will save you from what He will do to you if you don't love Him"

This reductive statement is as valid as saying the message of marriage is "Love your wife so she'll spare you what she'll do if you don't lover her." It is technically valid, in a bare minimum sort of way, but also precisely backward.

The Christian message is to love God for what He has already done for you. Love God because He made you by hand, because he knew you in your mother's womb, because He filled your lungs with His own breath. Love God because He is with you every moment of every day, guiding you with His Spirit, and nudging you toward your heart's greatest joy. Love God because He sees your every flaw, your every fear, your every sin, yet loves you regardless.

Love God for the perfect and beautiful world He created for us, a world designed so that, vastly inferior as our minds may be, we may too know intimately the nature and heart of our creator. Love God because He let us be free. Love God because the sin we choose in that freedom shows us His mercy and justice, lets us understand what the love which is inherent to triune God's nature really means, and through its overcoming and reworking to our good testifies to God's glory.

Love God because He became one of us, lived as one of us, suffered as one of us, and died as one of us. Love God because He redeemed the human nature by His participation in it, healed the mortal sickness that kept us from communion with Himself, paid the price we could not pay, pardoned our crime for which we'd rightly been convicted, and gave us an invitation to rejoin Him forever when we should rightfully wilt in His sight.

And if, after all that, we choose not to love Him in return? If we instead despise Him for what He may do or for what He didn't do or even perhaps for what He did? If we put our love and faith and trust and worship in ourselves or our idols instead of Him? What happens then?

God respects us enough to honor our decision. He'll let us walk away. As CS Lewis writes, "there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, `Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, `Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell."

Separated from God, we collapse in on ourselves. Only without God do we fully realize how much His vast love meant, but in its place we only find our own infinitesimal smallness. Ergo, the pain and agony of Hell are self-inflicted, the door locked from the inside.

It is the husband's love for the wife which makes divorce meaningful and painful. So too it is with God.
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