The World and the Word

                                   The Israelites

The Word of God is Infinite. Isaiah 40:28; Psalm 147:5. The Word of God consists of the Infinite Contents of the Mind of God. John 1:1. God reveals His Word to mankind in every good system that He has created including His written Word, His law, His science, His arts, His universe, and in His created life and in all His good systems. Psalm 19:1-4; Romans 1:19-20; Hebrews 11:3. All of God's good systems in His universe possess a limited perfection because God can create or dissolve them as He wills, and He has created them to be outside of His Inner Consciousness but inside His Omnipresent Consciousness. But God Himself and His heaven where He lives possess Absolute Perfection which can never be changed.

God chose the Israelite people to write His Word and to bring the Savior of mankind into the world. God had to limit His written Word to the limited mind of man and keep the rest of it secret. Deuteronomy 29:29. As it is, humans find much of God's Word difficult to understand. Romans 11:33. Nevertheless, God's written Word connects directly to His Infinite Word. This means God must keep His promises. For this reason, God will provide all Israelites who have believed in and have practiced His Word given to them, the land that God gave to Abraham and the religion that God gave to Moses forever. Numbers 18:8; Deuteronomy 4:40; II Samuel 7:10; I Chronicles 16:15-19; Genesis 17:6-8. God concealed the doctrine of a future, suffering Savior somewhat in the Old Testament, but those Israelites who came to some faith that their Messiah would suffer for their higher salvation gained that salvation by God's grace. Psalm 22:1-31; Isaiah 53:1-12.

When the Old Testament saints saved by grace physically died, their souls and spirits could not go directly to heaven because Christ had not yet come to cleanse them from their sins with His shed blood. But God allowed their souls and spirits to descend into Paradise, which is the same as the garden of Eden, which was located next to Hell deep in the lower earth. Ezekiel 31:14-18; Luke 16:23; Luke 23:42-43. But after Jesus had shed His blood and died on the cross, He descended into Hell and preached the gospel to all the Old Testament saints in Paradise. They all believed and were all cleansed by His blood. He gave them all His absolutely perfect righteousness by means of which they could all live in heaven, and Christ translated them all, with Paradise itself, to heaven when He ascended. Ephesians 4:7-10. Christ also provided them with spiritual bodies like His in Paradise. Matthew 27:51-52. Thus Christ completed the Rapture of the Old Testament saints.

But God had also promised that He would give the land that He had promised to Abraham to all Israelites who remained faithful to the religion that God gave to them through Moses. Genesis 17:6-8; Numbers 18:8; Deuteronomy 4:40. This fact can only mean that in order for God to fulfill His promise, He must raise all faithful Israelites from the regions of the dead in the end of the world. All humans not saved by grace, God must consign to one of the regions of the dead when they physically die because their souls and spirits are still stained by sin, and they still retain their evil natures. Hebrews 9:27; Revelation 20:13. But precisely because of His grace toward them, God allowed the Old Testament saints to reside in Paradise until Christ could come to them to complete their salvation by grace.