Tag: covenants

404. Framing Hell in a New Light

Mike Parsons

 

That’s what happened with me. My eschatology got deconstructed, and then the same verses led me to a view where hell doesn’t exist in the form I thought it did. In fact, hell doesn’t exist at all, because it’s not even in the Bible. But it does talk about Gehenna, it does talk about Hades, it does talk about Sheol—the grave. So, it talks about those things, but it also talks about them in a restorative way, not in a punishment way.

I know it’s hard because I’ve been through it. But I’ve been through it, and I’ve continued the process of realising that a lot of what I was taught was referring to the period of transition—out of the old and into the new—until the end finally came. And that is the end. No prophecy came after that. It was all fulfilled.

Jesus actually said that. He said, “Unless this comes to an end,” and, “Unless every ‘i’ is dotted and every ‘t’ is crossed,” and all that, you know—then the end won’t come. Well, the end did come. So that is the end: all things were fulfilled. It says in Luke that all things were fulfilled; every prophetic statement was fulfilled. All the promises of God were fulfilled in Jesus. It says in Corinthians, all the covenants were therefore fulfilled, because covenants are promises. So, they all got fulfilled. And I think that draws a line under it.

So, let’s listen to God and Jesus and the Spirit every day, because they’re speaking to us—not through a book, but in an inner, small voice as they dwell in us. There are a lot of people who aren’t listening to that voice, and a lot of people, obviously, who don’t even know that voice exists in them yet. But God is not going to stop until they do, in revealing the truth of their inclusion in Christ, their reconciliation in Christ, and their forgiveness through what Jesus did on the cross—which is an amazing, good-news testimony that the world needs to hear. But, “They’re all going to be cast into hell if they don’t accept Jesus”—that’s not a good-news testimony. No, that’s bad news. Let’s give good news!

And I think the world will begin to find God—who is a God of love and who loves them too much to let them be lost eternally for punishment. He loves them too much for that. He loves them, and according to Ephesians 1:4 he’s already made sure—predestined them to become restored to face-to-face intimacy. It’s predestined, even before the foundation of the world, that everyone would eventually be restored. People can resist that restoration. But people cannot resist God’s love forever.

I don’t believe God’s love will ever fail. It will never stop until everyone is fully restored back into relationship with him. Because he loves us.

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48. A Thousand-fold Increase?

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

Kingdom and covenant

Our prophetic understanding must come in the context of God’s Kingdom and of covenant. Kingdom and covenant are two sides of the same coin. In order to get understanding of the purposes of God, we need understanding of both. Right from the very beginning it was God’s purpose to have a people who would demonstrate His Kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’; and covenants were the agreements He initiated with men to enable that to take place.

In 2011, when I first spoke about this subject, quite a bit was said and written about it being ‘year 11’. In particular, some people felt God was highlighting Deuteronomy 1:11 which says, “May the LORD, the God of your fathers, increase you a thousand-fold more than you are and bless you, just as He has promised you”. Some began to see ‘111’ everywhere as they began to focus on what God was saying. They got hold of that scripture and encouraged us to believe God not for a hundredfold increase, but actually for a thousandfold.

Does it mean that?

Firstly, of course, it is possible for the Holy Spirit to take that scripture and speak it to us personally and say ‘This is for you’. But if we don’t hear it that way, how do we approach the questions which will come up: ‘Is that right? Does it say that? And if it does, is it intended for us?’

Notice that it speaks of ‘the God of your fathers’. That is covenant language. ‘The God of your fathers’ refers back to Abraham, and how God made a covenant with him through which all families on the earth were to be blessed. Deuteronomy 8:18 tells us that it is to confirm that covenant that God gives us the power to make wealth. In light of that, I would say that yes, we can claim Deuteronomy 1:11 as a promise that God will increase us a thousandfold.

But is that exactly 1000, or does it just mean ‘a lot’? Let’s consider the scripture which says that God ‘owns the cattle on a thousand hills’ (Psalm 50:10). Does He not own the cattle on the 1001st? I think we know the answer to that. So a thousand is not necessarily exact, it is a large number – and in this case it really stands for ‘everything’.

Limiting God

My point is that if we are going to understand prophecy correctly, we cannot simply take everything literally and so limit God. People raised the objection that when Deuteronomy 1:11 was written, there weren’t actually any chapter or verse numbers: they were added later. That doesn’t stop God using them to illustrate something to us.

This is part of approaching scripture and prophecy with a Hebrew (eastern) rather than a Greek (western) mindset. Literal, deeper, personal, and hidden meanings – all can be true, and all found within the understanding of one verse of scripture.

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