Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
Consider this string of IF's:
• If God is a personal Being who can be described as a loving heavenly Father;
• If Jesus of Nazareth is the divine Son of God, the world's Savior;
• If His sacrifice on His cross is the world's moment of truth;
• If the Bible is the inspired word of God, given for the instruction and the uplift of mankind;
• If God has a plan of salvation that is effective;
• If there is hope for the world, a light at the end of our cosmic tunnel;
Then sin must somehow be eradicated from the vast universe of God.
The idea of an eternal conscious hell as the domicile of lost people (yes, lost angels, too), must mean the plague of sin with its agony, hatred, and suffering must continue forever in God's vast universe.
If the above has any significant content of truth, then the biblical doctrine of the Sanctuary (Leviticus, Old Testament; Hebrews, New Testament) must be the answer to the universal problem of sin (which is the source of all the agony that afflicts the world).
The idea that "God is love" (agape) is totally inconsistent with the idea that sin must be ineradicable from human hearts. The Hebrew Day of Atonement was the one day in the year that prefigured in type the final cleansing of God's great economy and "to bring in everlasting righteousness" (Dan. 9:24).
If Jesus Christ ministering as the world's great High Priest is incapable of developing a people as a corporate body who have "overcome" sin even as He "also overcame" (Rev. 3:20), then Christianity has nothing to offer a distraught world.
It's time to do some serious thinking about what the gospel means.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: August 21, 2004.
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