God Loves His Enemies |
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God’s Love And His Rendering To People According To Their Works, Even The Dead In this writing, I am setting out to prove, among other things, that God loves His enemies and that He loves them in such a way that if they choose rightly, those who have been His enemies by being wicked can become His friends. His friends are those who obey His commands, which are good. I am also setting out to show that God loves all of His creatures, even the damned who have died already and that He commands them to repent from out of their sins into righteous living empowered by Him. I will use scripture and reason for my proofs. I know that scriptures can be interpreted both correctly and incorrectly. Proper interpretation is only done well with God’s aid. We can ask God in faith for wisdom and He will give us wisdom.[i] God gives His wisdom in certain ways.[ii] God is opposed to the proud and gives His grace to the humble.[iii] It has taken me some time to study the concepts I will write about in this writing and reach the conclusions that I have. In this study, I ask you to consider the Savior Jesus Christ. I will present to you why I believe He and Bible writers, in their teachings, taught about what God renders to who for reward and punishment. I will also show that they did teach in such a way as to support that those who have been damned are commanded to repent and become righteous and enter God’s Kingdom. Jesus and John the Baptist both preached, “repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”[iv] That message in essence is still preached today. Jesus taught, “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 5:3) The Gospel of John has on record that those who believe in Jesus will not perish, but have eternal life and those who do not obey Jesus will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on them.[v] John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16-17 say that all things in heaven and on earth were created by Jesus. Jesus Himself taught, “before Abraham was, I am.”[vi] I write these things to emphasize the importance of Jesus Christ in God’s plan of salvation. The Kingdom of God as a whole is also important in God’s plan of salvation. Each person in the Kingdom of God is like God and His son Jesus Christ to the extent that they live God’s way. I believe that Jesus Christ is, in a way, present throughout creation. He is “in” people who believe in Him.[vii] He examines minds and hearts.[viii] He and our Father in Heaven and the Holy Spirit are at work loving all of their creatures.[ix] God will render to each person according to his works.[x] God renders eternal life to those who by perseverance in doing good, seek for glory and honor and immortality.[xi] He renders “wrath and indignation” to people “who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness.”[xii] Ezekiel 33:13-16[xiii] is an interesting passage which I will quote below to further explore these themes: “When I say to the righteous he will surely live, and he so trusts in his righteousness that he commits iniquity, none of his righteous deeds will be remembered; but in that same iniquity of his which he has committed he will die. But when I say to the wicked, ‘You will surely die,’ and he turns from his sin and practices justice and righteousness, if a wicked man restores a pledge, pays back what he has taken by robbery, walks by the statutes which ensure life without committing iniquity, he shall surely live; he shall not die. None of his sins that he has committed will be remembered against him. He has practiced justice and righteousness; he shall surely live.” This principle that God treats a person according to their present commitment is important. If a person repents for evil or for good, that affects the outcomes. Warnings and pronouncements of judgments can be very conditional. Jeremiah 18:1-10 has the same principle shown in it. James 2:13 has a good saying, “For judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.” God is merciful in good ways. People who are forgiven by Him are shown mercy by Him. God is quick to forgive those who confess their sins and to cleanse them from all unrighteousness.[xiv] He loves even sinners. He demonstrates this by the sacrificial death of His son Jesus Christ.[xv] Anyone who trusts Jesus Christ to be their Savior has eternal life. A person who trusts Jesus Christ is humble and engaged in doing the good work that God commands them to do. There are many expressions of doing good work as a follower of Jesus Christ. God’s word is preached throughout all creation.[xvi] His law is adequately commanded everywhere. No one in all creation has a good excuse to sin.[xvii] God’s law is good, just, and fair. The greatest command is, “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” The second is like it, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus even showed that in this law, his command is “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”[xviii] These commands give a good overview of the theme of the good works God commands us to do. I will endeavor to show that God’s pronouncement of eternal life for the righteous and punishment for the wicked is conditional. The righteous are on course to live pleasing to God, and if they remain committed to living righteously, which is called enduring, they will be rewarded accordingly. The wicked are on course to live wickedly and if they remain wicked, they will be punished accordingly. As I showed above, God renders to people according to their works. If a person turns from doing good to doing evil, God will render to them according to their works. If a person turns from doing evil to doing good, God will render to them according to their works. God loves His enemies like Jesus commanded people to do. God had Jesus Christ make a proclamation to those who had died in Noah’s flood.[xix] Beyond the preaching to just those of Noah’s generation, it is written in 1st Peter 4:5-6 that the gospel (good news) has also “been preached even to those who are dead”. The gospel is preached even to the dead! This shows the character of God. He loves all creatures and commands all creatures in all of His creation to obey the law of Christ. The damned are not an exception. The damned are damned because of their present time bad commitments. God renders to them according to their works. The gospel is preached to them, and if they repent into being righteous, they will no longer be damned. They will be rewarded by God for their faithfulness. If they remain on their evil course, the general sentence of punishment will be upheld. Conversely, if those who have been conditionally promised eternal life turn from doing good into doing only evil, they will be treated accordingly and be damned. The idea that God is the Savior of all, especially of believers[xx], is important. God is loving toward all of His creation. He hates evil. He loves righteousness. He forgives when it is appropriate to. He is merciful and kind as well as stern and severe. God searches and tries peoples’ hearts and minds.[xxi] He loves to reward the faithful and punish the wicked. He does as He pleases.[xxii] An idea I now want to cover is that of double-mindedness. A person is double-minded if they have both good and evil intent in their hearts. “Double-minded” can mean “two-spirited”. In James 4:8, the double-minded are commanded to “purify their hearts”. This is an important concept, because not everyone is either only righteous or only wicked. Many people are both righteous in part and wicked in part. God commends righteous living and condemns sin in sinful people. This is a useful concept in considering what is what in reality for considerations about what has been talked about in this writing. The reality is that there are people that are not totally righteous or totally unrighteous, but are double-minded.[xxiii] The word “eternal” and the concepts of “eternal life” and “eternal punishment” as described in Matthew 25:46 as well as other places are important. The Greek word for “eternal” has a range of meanings. It can mean “age”, “perpetuity”, and “eternal”. It has the idea of a lifespan. In the case of “eternal life” and “eternal punishment”, it carries the idea of a perpetual state of existence in those ways. Eternal life is for those who persevere in doing good works. Good works can only be done in God’s grace. Eternal punishment is for those who are wicked unbelievers. The status of a person can change if they begin to choose differently. God does not command people to be wicked. He does command them to be righteous according to His commands. As stated before, He is opposed to the proud and gives grace to the humble. Eternal life and eternal punishment can each come to an end with new beginnings for a person if that person begins to live differently in such a way that God renders to them differently. One final concept I will refer to that people may have wonderings about is the story Jesus told in Luke 16:19-31 about men in the spirit world after death. In it, Abraham told the rich man, who was in fiery torment, “between us and you there is a great chasm fixed, so that those who wish to come over from here to you will not be able, and that none may cross over from there to us.” How then can those who have been damned be saved? I prayed about this for a while and kept on receiving the answer that I was right that there was a way. There is a good explanation. The answer I finally arrived at was this: the rich man had no way in his then time ways of living to go to Abraham’s side. Abraham would not be commanded by God to go to the rich man’s place of torment. Abraham was living righteously at the time. The rich man was living arrogantly at the time. The rich man would have to humble himself to obtain power from God to live in less agony and more in the way of the righteous. So, while there was no way for Abraham to come to the rich man or the rich man to come to Abraham in a certain paradigm, there was actually a way for the rich man to repent and be received into paradise. It is called the way of righteous repentance, which he was not taking part in at that time. Thank you for reading. These are some things I have prayed about and studied and arrived at these conclusions. I encourage you to pray and ask God for wisdom concerning what you have read and are thinking about. Please remember God’s greatest commandment for you is for you to love Him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. His second greatest commandment for you is for you to love your neighbor as yourself. He also, in His law, specifies that we are to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us as well as bless those who curse us and pray for those who mistreat us. At the time of this writing, I plan to allow for comments and questions on the website as well as having a Frequently Asked Questions section. If you would like to find those resources and use them, you may. God’s grace and peace to all who believe in Him and His love toward all of His creation, John [i] James 1:5 [ii] James 3:17 [iii] James 4:6 and 1st Peter 5:5 [iv] Matthew 3:2 and 4:17 [v] John 3:16 & 36 [vi] John 8:58 [vii] Ephesians 3:16-17 and John 17:26 [viii] Revelation 2:23 [ix] Psalm 145:9, Matthew 5:43-48 [x] Romans 2:6 [xi] Romans 2:7 [xii] Romans 2:8 [xiii] New American Standard Bible, The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, CA, 1995 [xiv] 1 John 1:9 [xv] Romans 5:8 [xvi] Romans 1:19-20 and Colossians 1:23 [xvii] Romans 1:18-20 [xviii] Luke 6:27-28 [xix] 1st Peter 3:18-20 [xx] 1st Timothy 4:10, John 4:42, 1st John 4:14, John 1:29, 1st John 2:2 [xxi] 1st Chronicles 28:9, Psalms 7:9 and 26:2, Jeremiah 17:10 and 20:12, Romans 8:27, Revelation 2:23 and Hebrews 1:3 [xxii] Psalm 115:3 [xxiii] As support for this notion, I reference the 7 letters in Revelation 2 and 3 in which Jesus commended people and also told of things that he had against them.
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