The Results of the Fall
Many atheists contend that if God is Almighty then why did He not simply ban all evil from His creations with a summary command. These critics forget that every intelligent system that God ever created can think and feel on its own. They would wonder if God had not been dishonorable and afraid in refusing to do battle with evil. They would wonder if God doubted the power of His own Love by avoiding war with evil. This doubt within God's creations would simply leave a constant opening for negative consciousnesses to misuse free will to invade God's creations again and again, as they had done in the case of Lucifer. God had to do battle with evil to prove to His intelligent creations that His Love would cause Him to lay down His own Life to save a fallen race from eternal spiritual death. John 3:16; John 15:13.
God had to directly confront the Devil's challenge that His gift of free will to Lucifer and humanity had been a mistake that the
Devil could exploit to cause human souls and spirits to choose to practice total evil which would annihilate them and prove that God's Love for His creations is not Almighty. God had to create a human history to give humans time to exercise their free will. God had to allow the Devil to do his worst to humanity to prove that no matter how much they had to suffer, the Devil would never be able to cause them to choose to become totally evil and lost from God's Love forever. God would sustain the faith and love for Him that He had put into the souls and spirits of every human and cause every human, sooner or later, to return to that faith in Him and love for Him of their own free will when He would cause every one of them to observe the Lamb of God who would suffer their spiritual deaths Himself in order to liberate them from it and reclaim them for His own. John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14. God had to intervene in human history to prove that His Almighty Love will never allow Satan to annul the living souls and spirits of every human whom He loves. The fact that God's Love constrained Him to take this action actually verifies His Almighty Love. Had God summarily dismissed evil from His creations, then the eternal extent of His Almighty Love would have forever remained in question within His creations. I Corinthians 13:8.
Since God suffered the eternal deaths of all humans in their place on the cross, then what part of God eternally died? Jesus dismissed His Living Spirit into His Father's hands when He died. Both were still alive. Luke 23:46. Jesus' sinless body suffered a temporary death, but He rose from the dead victorious over evil and eternal death. Eternal death could not hold His innocent Spirit. During those three days of Jesus' bodily death, He gained the victory over eternal death by extracting the living souls and spirits of all humans from eternal death by replacing it with a temporary death. Revelation 1:18. Humans live because Jesus lives. Humans saved by grace obtain the eternal life of Christ Himself, and humans saved from the regions of death obtain a recreated life on God's recreated earth. Colossians 3:1-4; Revelation 21:1-5. For these reasons, God created the two regions of death called the Sea and Hell and changed the bottomless pit into a place of temporary death to hold the temporary deaths of all humans not saved by grace. This is the first death which God will destroy by casting Death and Hell into the lake of fire and destroying the Sea by another means. Revelation 20:11-14; Revelation 21:1; I Corinthians 15:26.
In the general resurrection in the end of the world, God will use His consuming fire, which is the same as His eternal wrath against evil, to dissolve the individual systems of every human within the regions of the dead to extract their living souls and spirits from their eternal deaths which are totally evil. Luke 3:16-17. God will be able to do this because all of these living humans will have previously repented and returned to faith in Christ of their own free will as recorded in Revelation 5:11-14. John 11:25.
The consuming fire of God will become the lake of fire which will forever consume the separated, totally evil, and spiritually dead part of every human's being. In this way, the consuming fire of God, equivalent to His eternal wrath against evil, becomes the eternal deaths of all humans. However, God's eternal death does not detract from God's eternal Life in the least. In a sense, God's eternal wrath against evil is an attribute of His eternal Life. God remains always eternal and infinite. The infinite transcends mathematics which is always finite. Any subtraction from the infinite still leaves the infinite. God lives forever. Psalm 147:5; Revelation 1:8; Revelation 1:18.
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