Active Users:1195 Time:23/11/2024 03:50:23 AM
Point of emphasis. - Edit 1

Before modification by Joel at 28/01/2011 10:41:44 PM

I understand your concerns, actually. I think they're valid ones. I just think that Hell is a more valid concern.

My universalism is more a very firm faith that God will work it all out, somehow. Or rather, God will let us work it out somehow; I very much believe in grace as God enabling us to do things ourselves. There's an important distinction there.

Well, yes, God HAS worked it out, somehow; I just went over that. But Grace isn't entirely about what we accomplish, using Gods gifts are otherwise, and it's vitally important to realize that while that's no license to sin, it's still first and foremost a God centered thing. We're offered salvation by Grace through faith, and that not of ourselves, "it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them".

God lets us accept His Grace, but He also lets us refuse it; to do otherwise would be tyrannical, which God is not. Confronting us with our need for Him in this world or another very much forces the issue; at that point whether Hell exists in any sense is largely irrelevant, because we face the undeniable fact that we depend upon God for our very existence, both its inception and its continuance. It's possible, automatic, I think, to then choose God, but for our own sake, not His, which is the wrong motive, because that's once again human oriented rather than God oriented.

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