The Judge Is the Savior

Towards a Universalist Understanding of Salvation

Wyatt

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270670
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This is a book Jean Wyatt felt compelled to write, as she has for many years wrestled with questions surrounding the love and the justice of God, his salvation and judgment through Jesus Christ, and the effect of our response (or lack of response) to that salvation.The Bible gives glimpses of hope that in the end God will restore all things, and that finally all people will worship him. If it is God's will that all should be saved, is it possible to resist that will for all eternity?Or dare we hope that God will continue to seek and ultimately save those who now reject his offered salvation? Dare we hope that hell will be a place of restorative justice and cleansing, with redemption as its aim? Wyatt has come to the conclusion that we can answer "Yes" to both these questions.The fire of God consumes evil and cleanses people.Meanwhile, in the here and now in which we live as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to be witnesses to the kingdom of God and to work for his kingdom to come "on earth as it is in heaven."

1

Father, Hallowed Be Your Name

When did He begin to love you? When He began to be God, and that was never, for He ever was, without beginning and without end. Even so, He always loved you from eternity.

—Saint Francis de Sales, sixteenth century

What does the Lord require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

—Mic 6:8

When we pray, as Jesus taught us: “Father, hallowed be your name,”1 we hold together the intimacy and the otherness of God, his love and his holiness: two fundamental (and apparently opposite) faces of our God.

God loves us with the compassion of a parent, even from before the beginning of time, and like any earthly parent, he cares—enormously—how we treat each other, and how we treat him.

It matters to him because he loves us and is opposed to our sinfulness, injustice, and rebellion.

So he is our loving, holy and just judge, whose name is to be revered, honored, and hallowed.

But as we read our Bibles, there often seems to be an extraordinary tension between the love and the holy wrath of God. Passages of frightening wrath and judgment are juxtaposed with passages of poignant tenderness and wonderful promises of restoration. Vengeance and redemption seem to go hand in hand. There are passages that (if taken literally) might imply that God has punishments in reserve that make the death-camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz look merciful.2 However, other passages give inspiring vistas of the salvation of all peoples3 and the restoration of all things4 (which we will explore in chapter 7.) Paradoxes abound, especially in the areas of the justice and mercy of God and the eternal destiny of human beings.

There are plentiful accounts of God’s anger with men, and his severe judgment, even his curses on his sinful people.

Adam and Eve are rejected from the garden of Eden;5 there is the devastation of the flood, the scattering of proud mankind at Babel, and the wandering of the disobedient people of God in the wilderness. Deuteronomy 28 lists wonderful blessings in store for the Israelites if they obey God, followed by a much longer section of terrible curses if they disobey him. The “historical books” (which the Jews regard as prophetic books) seem to be based on the criteria laid out in Deut 28 and usually imply that when Israel prevailed, it was because the king did “that which was good in the eyes of the Lord,” while when things went wrong, it was a punishment against the king or the people for doing “that which was evil in the eyes of the Lord.”6

Long sections of the prophets deal with God’s threats not only to his disobedient “chosen people,” but even more catastrophically, to the surrounding nations, who are often seen as wicked and deserving of punishment. God is portrayed as a God of both wrath and salvation.

Recently, in a group studying Isaiah, we found the oscillation between prophesies of devastating judgment and wonderful promises of restoration to be mind-blowing and even confusing at times. For example, one realizes with an almost physical shock that the vengeance of God appears to be the very agent of salvation in this joyous hymn about return from exile and the ultimate restoration of both people and nature:

Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.7

God’s vengeance is sometimes directed against his chosen people, the Jews. The prophets saw their defeats and the exile into Babylon as a punishment for idolatry and apostasy, and perhaps even more for injustice and the oppression of the poor by the rich. The vengeance is later directed against the oppressors themselves, as Babylon falls to the Persians. God’s wrath is against sin (which he hates), not against his people (whom he loves). The book of Isaiah closes with a final devastating apposition of what looks like universal salvation with the destruction and apparently endless torture of those who rebelled against the Lord—which could be part of a classic picture of hell:

“From one New Moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me,” says the Lord. “And they will go out and look upon the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.”8

However, we need to remind ourselves that Isaiah is not thinking here of the fire of an everlasting hell, but the physical valley of Gehenna where dead bodies were thrown (see chapter 6, p. 150–151).

The Lord’s final coming is often visualized as a cleansing fire. So it is that Malachi prophecies, “Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.”9

Perhaps restoration and salvation are possible only through the destruction and elimination of evil—often portrayed as the destruction and elimination of evil people. We will look in more depth at concepts surrounding the f...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Father, Hallowed Be Your Name
• Chapter 2: Your Kingdom Come, Your Will Be Done, on Earth as It Is in Heaven
• Chapter 3: Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
• Chapter 4: Forgive Us Our Sins, For We Also Forgive Everyone Who Sins against Us
• Chapter 5: Deliver Us from Evil—through Judgment
• Chapter 6: Deliver Us from Evil—Perhaps through a Cleansing Hell
• Chapter 7: God Will Be All in All
• Appendix: A Brief Look at the Possible Relevance of “Near-death Experiences”
• Bibliography