Rob Bell's Love Wins Chapter 4 Examined

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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All right, so many things

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I would like to do, and that would be one of them. I would like to spend the rest of the program, and might have to put lunch off for five or six minutes if I need to.

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Rich is protesting that. You do have a French background, don't you? Working hours are very, very important for the

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French. Anyway, it was only about a month ago,

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I forgot to go and look at the specific times, but it was only about a month ago that the brouhaha over Rob Bell began.

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And isn't it interesting that for many people, it's already a move along time.

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It's nothing left to see here. The thing with Cantor has struck me in that way.

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Now it's sort of like, oh, okay, we got Al Mohler to talk about it, and we got Piper to talk about it, and we've gotten some of the gatekeepers to speak on the subject, so we can move on.

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And don't get me wrong, I'm not overly excited about talking about Rob Bell. But, I am concerned that the issues that he raised can be addressed in a very surface level manner, and they just shouldn't be.

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And we do have a younger generation to think about that whether we accept what they find to be good communication or not, we can even look down on it.

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It doesn't change the fact that if that gets their ears, then we need to be concerned.

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And I just want to say to anyone who says, I don't even want to think about it anymore. Here's the people who can safely say that.

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If you feel that you can give a meaningful, biblical, clear, cogent defense of why

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God must punish sin, and why the wrath of God is important for us to understand, then you can move on.

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Because that's what this book really is all about. The God being presented by Rob Bell, who he claims to be absolutely orthodox.

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That God's holiness and wrath is gone. It's not expressed, or if it is expressed, it's so redefined that we can't understand it.

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I want you to listen. I'm going to read a whole section here. The most important part of this book is chapter 4.

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Right before it is where you get into some important stuff. This first part I just wanted to address because people had asked me about it, so I need to address it.

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Page 90. Actually, you know what? Let me double check that. I've actually got the paper version here, and I'm looking at my

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Kindle because it's easier to read. Page 90, getting there. Nope.

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Look at that. Well, that's wonderful. It tells me it's page 90 of 198, but it's not page 90 of 198.

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It's actually page 91. Somewhere around there. Kindle needs to work a little bit on that.

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We see the same impulse in the story Jesus tells in Matthew 25 about sheep and goats being judged and separated. The sheep are sent to one place while the goats go to another place because of their failure to see

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Jesus in the hungry and thirsty and naked. Let me stop right there. That's not why they are goats.

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That's not why they're goats. Rabel misses it all the time. He always misrepresents why people are sent to hell.

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It's never about the ruptured relationship and the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man.

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No, no, no. It's because of their failure to see Jesus in the hungry and thirsty and naked.

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No, you see, when a person's been changed, they see Jesus in those places, but that's not why they're sent.

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He misses it. The goats are sent, in the Greek language, to an aion of koladzo.

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Now, I'm not the first one to criticize. Rabel's Greek. Rabel went to Fuller Seminary.

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I had a great Greek education at Fuller Seminary, but that was because I had my own

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Greek professor from Grand Canyon University. That was one of the advantages of being in an extension seminary. Extensions are almost always more conservative than the main campus.

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Thanks, B. So I had a great Greek education. Four years at Fuller, three years before that in my undergrad.

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Seven years total. And the goats are sent, in the Greek language, to an aion of koladzo isn't even close.

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Not even close. Aion, we know, has several meanings. One is age or period of time.

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Another refers to intensity of experience. This is one of the things that drives me crazy about Rabel, is he makes these assertions and there's never a footnote.

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There's never a reference. You just have to believe him. I find that extremely disrespectful to your readers.

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I really do. And I'm an author, so I can say that. It is extremely disrespectful to your readers to do that.

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I think Rich can affirm. I don't know if you were watching the cameras last night, but my

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Arabic tutor was over last evening. I was here late and my Arabic tutor was here. And you know what we did? We spent almost the entire time looking at some commentaries that I have, some

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Tafsir literature, that's only available in Arabic. It hasn't been translated into English. Because I'm writing a book, the book is about the

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Quran, and I want to accurately represent what the early

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Tafsir literature said about the specific text that I'm addressing. And so I asked my

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Arabic tutor, I said, look, here's a list, but I want to start here. I want to start with Surah Al -Fatiha.

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And I listened to a debate recently. And I said, you know, I'd be really interested in what Atabri and this other source that I have says about the very end of Surah Al -Fatiha, which every

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Muslim repeats every time they pray, basically. And so we spent the whole time looking at Arabic sources in regards to the earliest interpretation of those texts.

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And so when I mention that in the book, there's going to be a footnote or an endnote. I'm not sure what

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Bethany's going to want to do at that point. I like footnotes, I know, but Bethany likes endnotes. It doesn't kill you to have your finger stuck in the back and look things up.

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But there's going to be a reference. I'm not just going to tell you, well, you know what, early Muslims taught that it was

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Christians and Jews that are being referred to at the end of Surah Al -Fatiha. It talks about those who have earned Allah's wrath as Jews, those who have gone astray.

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Those are the Christians. And I can prove that, and there's no question about that.

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But I'm not just going to tell you that. I'm going to give you a footnote because I respect my readers. Rod Bell doesn't seemingly respect his readers because he makes these claims, but he never footnotes anything.

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He doesn't have to back anything up. It bugs me, and I think it should bug you too. Anyways, the word qaladzo is a term from horticulture.

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It refers to the pruning and trimming of the branches of a plant so it can flourish. Well, once again, he could put a footnote here, and the footnote would be to D .A.

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Carson's book on common exegetical errors because this is one of them he lists! One of the best classes

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I had was right toward the... Was this part of my seminary or undergraduate? I don't know, somewhere along that line.

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My Greek professor assigned Moises Silva's book, Biblical Words and Their Meaning. The names changed, but that was what it was originally called.

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That was one of the most important books I ever read because it pointed out this kind of semantic lexical error that Rob Bell has made.

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Colossus did have that meaning, just like television once meant far -seeing.

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That's what television means. It's two words, tele and vision. Far -seeing. Seeing from afar.

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But nobody who uses the word television today has that as its meaning in their mind.

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So it would be absurd to make that type of argumentation. The same thing as, uh -uh, ecclesia.

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The called -out ones. Yeah, that's not what it meant when it was used in the New Testament, so that's irrelevant!

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I know, I'm ruining a lot of sermon illustrations, but those sermon illustrations are based upon not recognizing that words have meanings at a point in time when they're being used.

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And that's why, long, long ago, when I was working on my PhD at the unaccredited

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Columbia Evangelical Seminary, we spent the money, and we didn't have much money to spend back then, we spent the money on something called the

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TLG CD -ROM, the Thesaurus Lingua Graecae CD -ROM, which when it first came out was $60 ,000, and only universities had it, and it didn't cost us $60 ,000, it cost us $500 per year to lease it.

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But why did I do that? Because you have to look at the words as they were used at particular periods of time.

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That's how you do it! And here's an example. My goodness, I am never going to get this done, because this wasn't even the point

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I was going to be emphasizing. Okay, I am going to speed up, I am sorry. An Ion of Collazo.

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Depending on how you translate Ion and Collazo, then the phrase can mean a period of pruning, or a time of trimming, or an intense experience of correction.

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All completely bogus, wrong, untrue. You would not find any meaningful New Testament scholar that would substantiate that.

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In a good number of English translations, the Bible phrase Ion of Collazo gets translated as eternal punishment, which many read to mean punishment forever, as in never going to end, but forever is not really a category that Biblical writers use.

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He is completely wrong, and if you actually, if you would even give you the Biblical reference so you could look it up yourself, you might notice that that text in Matthew 25 -46, these will go into eternal punishment.

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Ais kolison Ionion, but the righteous into eternal life.

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Poidei dikaioi ais zoane Ionion. Whatever Ionion is doing there, it is modifying kolison, which means punishment, not trimming, and zoane, life.

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So if you want to try to change that, you want to try to say it is not eternal, then neither is eternal life, Mr. Bell, I mean that, talk about eisegesis, wow, that is, that was a real gross example of it.

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But let me get to chapter four. Please listen to the argument here.

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Listen to what he said. How would you respond to these arguments? On the websites of many churches, there is a page where you can read what the people in that particular church believe.

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Usually the list starts with statements about the Bible, then God, Jesus, and the Spirit, then salvation, the church, and so on.

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Most of these lists and statements include a section on what the people in the church believe about the people who don't believe what they believe.

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This is from an actual church website. The unsaved will be separated forever from God in hell. This is from another.

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Those who don't believe in Jesus will be sent to eternal punishment in hell. And this is from another. The unsaved dead will be committed to an eternal conscious punishment.

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So in the first statement, the unsaved won't be with God, and the second, not only will they not be with God, but they'll be sent somewhere else to be punished, and the third, we're told that not only will these unsaved be punished forever, but they will be fully aware of it in case we were concerned they might down an ambien or two when

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God wasn't looking. The people experiencing the separation and punishment will feel all of it, we are told, because they'll be fully conscious of it, fully awake and aware of it for every single second of it, as in never lets up for billions and billions of years.

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All this on a website. Welcome to our church. Yet on these very same websites are extensive affirmations of the goodness and greatness of God, proclamations and statements of belief about a

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God who is mighty, powerful, loving, unchanging, sovereign, full of grace and mercy and all -knowing.

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This God is the one who created the world and everything in it. This is the God for whom all things are possible. I point out these parallel claims that God is mighty, powerful, and in control, and that billions of people will spend forever apart from this

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God, who is their creator, even though it's written in the Bible that God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of truth.

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1 Timothy 2 doesn't give you the verse, just at least once he throws in a reference. It's nice, 1 Timothy 2, which we all recognize as one of the big three.

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And if you're expecting any exegesis on Rob Bell's part or any response to the counter -exegesis that's been offered, please, you've got to realize we're talking about Rob Bell here.

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And that's not what emergent folks do. They don't debate issues. For all their talk about dialogue, they don't want a dialogue.

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They want a monologue. You've got to understand that. So then you ask the question, so does

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God get what God wants? So does

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God get what God wants? How great is God? Great enough to achieve what God sets out to do or kind of great, medium great, great most of the time.

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But in this, the fate of billions of people, not totally great, sort of great, a little great. According to the writer of the letters to the

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Hebrews, God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear. Chapter 6. Another incredibly isogenical use, but we pass over it for now.

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God has a purpose, something God is doing in the world, something that has never changed, something that involves everybody, and God's intention all along has been to communicate this intention clearly.

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Will all people be saved, or will God not get what God wants?

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Does this magnificent, mighty, marvelous God fail in the end? Now, hear the objections.

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If you don't hear them, in the language they're being expressed, you will not be of much aid to someone in responding to them.

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He goes on and quotes a number of texts about God accomplishing his purposes.

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That's good. And he says, and Paul writes in Philippians 2, every knee should bow, every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is

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Lord, the glory of God the Father. All people, the nations, every person, every knee, every tongue. Psalm 22 echoes these promises.

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All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families and nations will bow down before him. And he's right.

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This insistence that God will be united, but notice, but notice, without exegesis, with just by citing, and this is how false theology does false theology, listen to this importation, without foundation, of an entire interpretation of everything he has now quoted, without ever having done any exegesis of any of the texts.

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This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets return to again and again.

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Now not a single text he cited ever said that. Oh, but every knee will bow.

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Okay. But what are you, what are you assuming that means? Every tongue will confess.

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That means everybody gets the same thing, right? See, this is, this is the slippery slope. Notice it again.

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This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets turn to again and again.

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They are very specific in their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in the world, constantly affirming the simple fact that God does not fail.

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In the book of Job, the question arises, who can oppose God? He does whatever he pleases. Chapter 23.

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And then later it's affirmed when Job says to God, I know that you can do all things. No purpose of yours can be thwarted. Chapter 42.

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Though through Isaiah, God says, I will do all that I please. Isaiah asks, surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor is his ear too dull to hear.

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While Jeremiah declares to God, nothing is too hard for you. In the

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Bible, God is not helpless. God is not powerless and God is not impotent. Paul writes in Philippians that it is

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God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. Of course, that text is about a specific people.

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You see, Rob Bell likes to take texts that are specifically about those who are in Christ, those who have repented, those who are united with Christ, those who have been regenerated.

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He applies it to everybody. Once again, God has a purpose, a desire, a goal, and God never stops pursuing it.

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Jesus tells a series of parables in Luke 15 about a woman who loses a coin, a shepherd who loses a sheep, and a father who loses a son.

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The stories aren't ultimately about things and people being lost. The stories are about things and people being found. The God that Jesus teaches us about doesn't give up until everything that was lost is found.

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This God simply doesn't give up ever. Now back to those church websites, the ones that declare that ultimately billions of people will spend eternity apart from God while others will be with God in heaven forever.

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It's history, tragic. Have billions of people been created only to spend eternity in conscious punishment and torment, suffering infinitely for the finite sins they committed in the few years they spent on earth?

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I stop for a moment. I stop for a moment. How do you respond to that?

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Oh, friends, I hope if you get anything out of this, I'm trying to make this a learning moment, if you get anything out of this,

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I hope you know how to respond to that. Obviously, my deepest desire is that if you've listened to this program for any period of time at all, one of the first things running through your mind right now is this man is so man -centered.

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His gospel is so man -centered. There's nothing about God here. There's nothing about his holiness.

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There's nothing about his self -glorification, the glorification of the Trinity. It's all about man, man, man, man, man.

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I hope you're hearing that. I hope you're hearing that. But when you hear this,

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I hope you go, wait a minute. Rob Bell, why do you think people, why are you assuming people stop sinning when they die?

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Because, see, that's, that's, he doesn't have a biblical anthropology. He does not have a view of man as the enemy of God.

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No, no, no, no. Have billions of people been created only to spend eternity in conscious punishment and torment, suffering infinitely for the finite sins they committed and the few years they spent on earth.

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I can understand why Rob Bell, as an Arminian, doesn't like his Arminian upbringing.

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But that doesn't mean it's an even semi -meaningful objection to what the Bible actually teaches.

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Good reason for not being an Arminian. Suffering infinitely for the finite sins.

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Now, those are finite sins against an infinite God, first of all. But why do you think they stop?

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What is your basis for believing that at death, God sanctifies every sinner?

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Is our future uncertain? Or will God take care of us? Are we safe?

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Are we secure? Or are we on our own? See, it's all about us, us, us. Man, man, man.

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Is God our friend, our provider, our protector, our father? Or is

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God the kind of judge who may in the end declare that we deserve to spend forever separated from our father? See the distinction?

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You've got to get rid of the holiness of God. You've got to get rid of the justice of God. You can't, you can't, wait, nobody can hold them together.

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No one, no one can do that! He even says that. No one can believe in that type of God because he doesn't.

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And that's why I was so thankful. That initial, that initial review, somebody on the channel remind me of the author, it's a

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Dutch name, that A .C .E. did. That initial review that was published before the book came out had the temerity to say

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Rob Bell has a different God. Because he does. He says we can't, we can't hold together that very holy

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God of Isaiah with the God of the cross. And that's why the cross ends up being emptied of its true significance in this kind of liberalism.

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Is God like the characters in a story Jesus would tell? Kevin DeYoung, thank you, D .H. Is God like the,

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I love the folks on the channel. It only takes about 30 seconds. Is God like the characters in a story

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Jesus would tell? Old ladies who keep searching for the lost coins until they find it? Shepherds who don't rest until that one sheep is back in the fold?

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Fathers who rush out to greet and embrace their returning son or in the end, will God give up? Will God give up?

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Because see, all God's doing is trying to get those people back. Of course, the fact that those parables were talking about God's elect and that to read it otherwise destroys everything in the history of Israel.

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Ah, we can't go there. We can't go there. Will all the ends of the earth come as God has decided or only some?

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Of course, all the ends of the earth means God's elect or spread to all the ends. Anyway, will all feast as it's promised in Psalm 22 or only a few?

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Again, it's all the nations. See, he's read all these as universalists. That's why he ends up as a universalist even though we'll see he tries to hedge his bets there.

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Will everybody be given a new heart or only a limited number of people? What did Jeremiah 31 say? Will God in the end settle saying, well,

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I tried, I gave it my best shot and sometimes you just have to be okay with failure? Will God shrug

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God -sized shoulders and say, you can't always get what you want? Now, on to some specific responses.

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Did you want to throw something in here real quick because I still got a lot to read. I'm listening to this and I keep thinking, okay, he keeps saying will

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God in the end and I keep thinking, well, we've got a book for that. It's called The Book of Revelation. Oh, he does talk about Revelation.

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The goats. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but you see, the gates are not closed which means there's always an opportunity to come in.

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The invitation goes on. Postmortem evangelization. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

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You see, he's there. Now, on to some specific responses. There are those like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter who put it quite, quite clearly.

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We get one life to choose heaven or hell and once we die, that's it. One or the other forever. God in the end doesn't get what

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God wants. It's declared because some will turn repentant and believe and others won't. To explain this perspective, it's rightly pointed out that love by its, now listen to this, folks.

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This is, this is why I don't want to, we're going to go long. I'm sorry. I have to. We took the calls but I need,

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I can't stop in the middle of this. God in the end doesn't get what he wants.

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It's declared because some will turn repentant and believe and others won't. To explain this perspective, it's rightly pointed out that love by its very nature is freedom.

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For there to be love, there has to be the option both now and then to not love, to turn the other way, to reject the love extended, to say no.

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Although God is powerful and mighty when it comes to the human heart, God has to play by the same rules we do.

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God has to respect our freedom to choose to the very end, even at the risk of the relationship itself.

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If at any point God overrides, co -ops, or hijacks the human heart, robbing us of our freedom to choose, then

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God has violated the fundamental essence of what love even is. There you go, folks.

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What's at the very root of Rob Bell's universalism?

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Arminianism. A view of God's love that is subhuman.

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Evidently, God was not loving Lazarus when he raised him from the dead. He wasn't loving

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Paul when he knocked him off of his horse. And he wasn't loving you and me when he raised us from spiritual death.

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So you see, folks, you've got to understand something. What Rob Bell is rebelling against, well, he hates Reformed theology, there's no question about that, but what he's actually rebelling against is

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Arminianism. It's Arminianism that drove him off into liberalism. And most people don't understand that.

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The question that flows out of this understanding of love, then, is quite simple. Lots of people in our world right now choose to be violent and abusive and mean and evil.

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So why won't they continue to choose this path after they die? Good question, Rob. That question leads to another idea.

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One, ruin the dynamic nature of life. We aren't fixed, static beings. We change and morph as life unfolds. As we choose evil, it often leads to more evil.

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Tell a lie, moments later, you find yourself telling another lie to cover up the first lie, and so on. When we choose to reject our

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God -given humanity, we can easily find ourselves in a rut, wearing grooves in a familiar path that is easier and easier to take.

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One lie leads to another, one act of violence demands another, and so on and on it goes, gaining momentum all the while.

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This is how addiction works. Sometimes something gets its claws into us, and as it becomes more and more dominant in our life, it becomes harder and harder to imagine living without it.

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What makes us think that after our lifetime, let alone hundreds or even thousands of years, somebody who has consciously chosen a particular path away from God suddenly wakes up one day and decides to head in the completely opposite direction?

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Well, where do they wake up and what's going on while they're there? I wonder after death. And so a universal hug fest where everybody eventually ends up around the heavenly campfire scene, kumbaya, with Jesus playing guitar, sounds a lot like fantasy to some people.

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Although we're only scratching the surface of this perspective, the one that says we get this life and only this life to believe in Jesus, it is safe to say that this perspective is widely held and passionately defended by many in our world today.

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Well, I'm glad he admits that. Others hold this perspective that there is this lifetime and only this lifetime in which we all choose one of two possible futures, but they suggest a possibility involving the image of God in each of us.

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We can nurture and cultivate this divine image, or we can ignore, deny, and stifle it. If we can do this now, becoming less and less humane in our treatment of ourselves and others, what would happen if this went on unchecked for years and years?

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Would a person's humanity just ebb away eventually? Could a person reach the point of no longer burying the image of God?

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Could the divine image be extinguished in a person, given enough time and neglect? Is there a possibility that given enough time, some people could eventually move into a new state, one in which they were in essence formerly human or post -human or even ex -human?

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An interesting question. And then there are those who can live with two distinctions, two realities after death, but insist there must be some kind of second chance for those who don't believe in Jesus in this life.

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In a letter, Martin Luther, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, wrote to Hans von Reckenberg in 1522 about the possibility that people would turn to God after death, asking who would doubt

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God's ability to do that. Now hopefully we all have already read the fact that that is a gross abuse of Martin Luther and an out -of -context use.

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But again, it doesn't give you any reference. You could look it up. And so space is creating this who would doubt

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God's ability to do that perspective for all kinds of people, 15 -year -old atheists, people from other religions, and people who rejected

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Jesus because the only Jesus they ever saw was an oppressive figure who did anything but show God's love.

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And then there are others who ask if you get another chance after you die, why limit that chance to a one -off immediately after death?

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And so they expand the possibilities, trusting that there will be endless opportunities and an endless amount of time for people to say yes to God, as long as it takes, in other words.

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At the heart of this perspective is the belief that given enough time, everybody will turn to God and find themselves in the joy and peace of God's presence.

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The love of God will melt every hard heart and even the most depraved sinners will eventually give up their resistance and turn to God.

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And so beginning with the early church, there is a long tradition of Christians who believe that God will ultimately restore everything and everybody because Jesus says in Matthew 19 that there will be a renewal of all things.

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Peter says in Acts 3 that Jesus will restore everything and Paul says in Colossians 1 that through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

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In the third century, the church fathers Clement of Alexandria and Origen affirmed God's reconciliation of all people. There's a reason why

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Clement and Origen are viewed so lowly by Orthodox folks. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa and Eusebius believe this as well.

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No reference is given, of course. In their day, Jerome claimed that most people, Basel said the mass of men and Augustine acknowledged that very many believe in the ultimate reconciliation of all people to God.

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Well, yeah, universalism has been around for a while. To be clear again, an untold number of serious disciples of Jesus across hundreds of years have assumed, affirmed, and trusted that no one can resist

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God's pursuit forever because God's love will eventually melt even the hardest of hearts. If that isn't