Jeremiah 6:29-30 describes how God will use His consuming fire to separate gross metals from good metals which symbolizes His utter rejection of all reprobates. Just as God employs His sanctification process to improve the inner lives and morals of His believers by adding the perfect righteousness of Christ to their lives, so God uses a reprobation process to subtract His goodness from all reprobates who have totally rejected Him. Many times the reprobate may have heard the Word of God, been brought under the conviction by the Holy Spirit that he is a sinner in need of a Savior, but there comes a time when he finally and totally rejects the grace of God. He experiences a conversion to evil which is the opposite of the "born again" experience with God. His heart becomes filled with coldness and deadness toward God, just as the repentant believer becomes filled with love and peace from God.
Romans 1:21-32; II Timothy 3:1-8; and Titus 1:15-16 describes the declension of the reprobates toward depravity. This declension happens because God employs a reprobation process which is the opposite of His sanctification process. As their hatred for God grows, He subtracts His goodness from the reprobates by degrees so that they become ever worse in their depravity. Some of these reprobates may practice an outward morality to protect their reputations as religious leaders or professional persons, but their hearts will be filled with hatred for God. Even many of these hypocrites will secretly practice very immoral lives. But in the end, God will use His consuming fire to separate their total evil from what little goodness God has left in them. God will recover His goodness from them and use it in His recreation of a righteous people to inhabit His recreated earth. God will also cast their separated total evil and deadness into the lake of fire. Reprobates will lose their identities and personalities, but at least what little goodness they have left, God will save. Matthew 16:24-27; I Corinthians 3:12-15; Revelation 20:11-15; Revelation 21:1-5.
Most people never become either reprobates or believers saved by grace. Most people exist in a kind of neutral zone, never accepting or rejecting Christ. Following physical death, Christ will no doubt judge reprobates to be consigned to the fires of hell. But Christ will consign most neutral people to either a place called "the sea" or a place called "death." But in the end, God will use His consuming fire to separate His goodness from their evil in these neutral people as well. These people will retain some of their former identities and personalities in God's recreation to the degree that they led moral or immoral lives. As I Corinthians 15:35-49 indicates, those whom God recreates to live on the earth will differ from each other in glory, but God will give a spiritual body, like that of Christ Himself, to all who go to heaven. This means all who go to heaven will be equal in glory but not in rewards.
In the end, God will destroy both hell and death in the lake of fire, and He will abolish the sea. God has washed all of the inner sins of believers saved by grace with the blood of Christ into the sea of forgetfulness which He will abolish in the end. God will forgive the fleshly sins of believers as they daily confess and repent of them and wash those sins also into the sea of forgetfulness. But God will cast the fleshly sinful nature of unrepentant believers into the place called "death" until remorse and anguish cause them to repent of all their fleshly sins. Upon their repentance, God will wash them in the water of His Word, forgive them, and reconcile them to Himself. In these ways, God will recover all of the identities and personalities of all of His saints saved by grace and give them a home with Him in heaven. But in the end, God will also use His consuming fire to separate His original goodness that He put into all humans not saved by grace from their total evil when He resurrects them from their places in the sea, death, or hell. God will recover all His goodness and use it to recreate a righteous human race to inhabit His righteous, recreated earth, and He will cast all their collected total evil into the lake of fire forever. In these ways, God will purge all death and evil from His universe, and He will recreate a totally righteous universe. Revelation 1:5; Matthew 24:51; Ephesians 5:25-27; I Corinthians 3:12-15; II Peter 3:12-13; Revelation 20:5; Revelation 20:11-15; Revelation 21:1-8; Revelation 22:11-12.
No comments:
Post a Comment