Tuesday, December 11, 2018

God's Two Methods of Salvation part one

God created Adam and Eve to be completely righteous but also innocent. God has said that whatever He creates will last forever, and His Word cannot be diminished. Ecclesiastes 3:14; Numbers 23:19. God also gave Adam and Eve free will which He attached to their innocence. They could obey God and keep their innocence pure, or they could disobey God and cause their innocence and righteousness to become besmirched with filthy sin. They did not know about filthy sin, but they did know they should obey God. This means their innocence caused their fall to be only partly their fault. For this reason, God cursed Satan and the ground but He did not curse living humans whom He created.

But God allowed Adam and Eve to fall into sin as a part of His plan to completely purge His world of all sin and evil and recreate it, along with all humanity not saved by grace, to be a righteous world. II Peter 3:12-13; Revelation 21:1-5. God had a special plan of salvation by grace for all who will believe that Jesus shed His blood and water on the cross to thoroughly cleanse them from all their sin and that in His resurrection, Christ would give them His own life and righteousness by which they would become joint-heirs with Christ and thus allowed to live with Christ in heaven forever. I Peter 1:18-25; I Timothy 4:10; John 6:32-35; Romans 8:14-17. In John 6:33, Jesus explicitly states that He "giveth life unto the world." The word "world" means all mankind. Christ can never mean anything less than exactly that which He states. I Timothy 4:10 explicitly states that the living God exists as the Savior of all men. This statement can only be true if God actually saves all men. The phrase "especially of those who believe" can only mean that God has a special salvation for those who believe in Christ while still alive in the flesh.

God has two different plans of salvation. In His first plan, God saves by His grace all who, while still alive in the flesh, put their faith in the power of Christ to save them through His death, burial, and resurrection. John 3:16; I Corinthians 15:1-4. God prophesied about salvation by His grace when He clothed Adam and Eve in the skin of an animal whose blood He had shed. Genesis 3:21.

God has a second plan of salvation for the rest of humanity not saved by grace. God prophesied in Isaiah 45:21-24 and in Philippians 2:9-11 that a day will come when all of humanity will worship Him as God and Savior. This prophecy will be fulfilled as recorded in Revelation 5:11-13. Philippians 2:10 records that those saved by grace in heaven will worship God in the same way as those on earth and under the earth. In Revelation 5:13, those in heaven and on the earth and under the earth will all worship Christ as "the Lamb" which means they will all recognize Christ as the Savior of all mankind. Revelation 20:5 prophesies that God will resurrect these living humans who worshipped Him from the regions of the dead in the ground for Him to recreate to live on His recreated and righteous earth. Revelation 21:1-5. For this reason, God cursed the ground in Genesis 3:17 because He would have to consign unbelievers in His Son to one of the regions of the dead because He could not accept their sin and unbelief. Revelation 20:13. This means all those within the regions of the dead are partly alive and partly dead. God will cause the living parts of these humans to have faith in Him, but their dead parts which will never believe, God will consign to the lake of fire forever. Revelation 20:11-15; Revelation 21:8.

In Genesis 3:20, God prophesied that He will save and preserve all living humans. God can never lose anything He has ever created. Romans 11:29; Romans 11:36. Jesus affirmed these same truths in Luke 20:37-38. God will certainly answer the prayer of His Son in Luke 23:34 and forgive and save all of His living humans. But God will never forgive that part of humanity which remains evil and dead and, just like the demons, totally reject and hate Christ. Matthew 12:31-32; Revelation 21:8; Revelation 22:11-12; Ecclesiastes 12:13-14.

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