Colossians 1:15-20 Hebrews 4:3
Numbers 16:38 Psalm 36:6 Acts 15:18
I Corinthians 2:7 Luke 20:38 Ecclesiastes 12:14
God clearly demonstrated by His attitude and intentions regarding the
fall of Adam and Eve that He fully intended to provide some level of salvation
for the whole human race. God wrote the Bible to disclose to the finite mind of
man his past, present, and future. The Bible reveals to man where he has been,
who he is, and where he is going. But God is eternal, and from His point of
view, the Bible has been written in the eternal sense. Such scriptures as
Hebrews 4:3 assure us that God has finished all His works from the foundation
of the world. God cannot fail to finish every work that He has ever started.
This truth is confirmed by such scriptures as Acts 15:18; Ecclesiastes 3:14;
Psalm 36:6; and I Corinthians 2:7.
Colossians 1:15-20 reveals that God has created absolutely everything
that consciousness can objectify; that is, all material things and all abstract
ideas. Verse 15 reveals that Christ is God. Verse 16 reveals that Christ has
created absolutely everything. Verse 17 reveals that Christ existed before
creation, and He holds everything together. Verse 18 reveals that Christ is the
head of the Church. But the Church is only the beginning of salvation. The
phrase "the first born from the dead" implies that God will provide
additional births from the dead following the Church's birth from the dead. The
final phrase "that in all things He might have the preeminence" can
only mean that Christ will regain control over His entire fallen creation,
including mankind. Verse 19 assures us that the Father will restore to Christ
absolutely everything He has ever created. Verse 20 reveals that God's project
of reconciling all things He has ever created to Himself, whether on earth or
in heaven, has a direct connection to the cross of Christ.
Revelation 21:5 reveals the promise of God: "...Behold, I make
all things new." God always means exactly that which He states. Revelation
21:1-4 assures us that God will recreate "a new heaven and a new
earth." These two verses taken together can only mean that God will
recreate a new human race to live on His new earth, but the Church will be with
Him in heaven. Revelation 21:3; John 17:24. God's project consists of providing
the highest level of salvation for His Church and other saints saved by grace,
and a lower level of salvation for the rest of mankind. Many passages support
these conclusions. Psalm 36:6; Psalm 25:12-13; Luke 20:38; Ecclesiastes 3:14;
John 6:33; John 12:47; I Timothy 2:4-6; I Timothy 4:10 and many more.
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. All three must be
compatible or the story makes no sense. In order to obtain the correct answer
to any calculation, a mathematician knows that he must have the right formula
at the beginning, and do the right calculations in the middle in order to
arrive at the correct answer in the end. The same is true of the Bible story.
The beginning must agree with the middle in order to arrive at a compatible
finish. The Bible definitely accomplishes this result although it was written
by over 40 different writers over centuries.
The Bible begins with God's creations, especially His creation of
mankind. Like all of His creations of living systems, God created mankind to be
a good living system. In addition, God created man in His own image. God
created man to be loving, creative, and innocent; to a limited degree. Genesis
1:27. God loved man and put him into a paradise. Man fell into sin and became
corrupt to an extent. Man acquired a good side and a bad side, and a knowledge
of his condition.
God cursed the serpent and the ground, but He did not curse mankind.
God loved mankind and He could not curse the part of mankind that He had
created in His own image. The sin that had entered man was cursed since it came
from Satan's temptation, but God could never curse His own image that He had
put into man.
God fulfilled His Word that man's sin would cause him to die if he
disobeyed. God cursed the ground in two ways. First, God decreed that man would
have to labor to till the ground in order to sustain his life. In other words,
this punishment symbolized that no matter how hard man worked to live, he would
always fail; he would always die and be put into the cursed ground. God also
punished the woman with pain in childbirth which symbolized that man could only
obtain everlasting life through suffering and agony. In Genesis 3:15, God
promised mankind that the seed of the woman would be a Savior who would save
mankind forever from that cursed place in the ground called hell. The promise
of the Savior meant that in Adam and Eve's future, those who would come to
believe that they can only be saved from the curse by the labor of the Savior,
and never by their own labor, would receive salvation from God the moment they
believed. But those who refused to believe in the Savior could be banished to
the place of the curse called hell. However, this means that the good part of
man that God created would have to be subject to the curse just as the bad part
of man would also. If hell lasts forever, then God would forever lose a part of
His creation. Since God is almighty, He certainly can never lose any part of
His creations. Revelation 21:5.
Can God ever lose anything that He has ever created? According to
Ecclesiastes 3:14 and Romans 11:29, He cannot. The life that God created
belongs to Him forever. According to Romans 11:36; Romans 8:20-22; Colossians
1:16-20; and Revelation 21:5, God will eventually recover absolutely everything
that He has temporarily lost to the Devil, cleanse all of it from the curse,
and recreate every bit of it, including His recreation of man in His image.
This means the fires of hell must serve a purpose which is that those who
refused to believe in the Savior will be purged from their sins by the fires of
hell so that God can recreate them to live on the future recreated earth.
God decreed that man’s body must die and decay in the cursed ground.
But this curse can only be temporary because the destruction of the good system
that is man’s body will only serve to reduce it to its organic elements which
will feed the life of plants and the animals who eat those plants. This process
symbolizes the fact that God will recover and recreate everything He ever
created in the first place.
Destruction is not the same as annihilation. Annihilation pertains to
the abyss, the absolute void; that is, the nonexistent place from which all sin
emerges through the agency of negative consciousnesses. Destruction only means
the reduction of a system to its constituent elements. Science has discovered
this fact in the law of nature that determines that energy and matter can
neither be created nor destroyed, except by God. God often destroys systems,
but His purpose for doing this consists always in eliminating every taint of
the curse, and in recreating good systems from the tainted systems constituent
good elements.
God banished Adam and Eve from the garden because they no longer
belonged there. Genesis 3:20-21 relates that Eve became “the mother of all
living,” and that God killed an animal and clothed them with its skin. God’s
action symbolized the suffering and shed blood of the Savior to come. But
clearly, the complete intention of God was to save not only the Church but all
mankind through the sacrifice of the coming Savior. God clothed the mother and
father of all living men which symbolized the fact that He fully intends to
cleanse all living men from the curse and recreate every life which belongs
solely to Him.
The end of this story agrees perfectly with the beginning and the
middle. God has recorded the end of this story in Revelation chapters 19-21.
