Tag: the hell delusion

488. Do You Only See What You Expect To See?

Mike Parsons

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All those people who say they have been in hell for ten minutes, or whatever, are framing their experience through their theological understanding of hell rather than the truth. They see what they expect to see. That is the problem. We can be confirmation-biased and create our own scenario around what God is really trying to show us.

This is why we need to let God renew our minds and trust him in that process, rather than resisting him. At the same time, we should not be naive enough to think that everything we are thinking is already correct, because we are all still in the process. Even so, I would rather err on the side of love in everything I think than lean towards anything else. If I interpret everything through love, I will not go far wrong.

243. Not Counting Their Trespasses

434. God’s Fiery Love

253. Framing Your Reality

 

487. My First Hand Experiences Of Hell

Mike Parsons

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So between 2005 and 2010, I had a number of experiences which I described at the time as hell-like, simply because I had no other reference point in my life. I thought I had encountered hell, and so my framework for understanding was the usual concept of hell. That’s what I believed the experience meant, because I couldn’t see it any other way; I had no other frame of reference.

Once I actually encountered God and encountered love, I was able to revisit those experiences and see what he had really been showing me through them. I came to realise that I had completely misunderstood and misinterpreted what had happened, just as many others do when they claim to have been in hell for a few minutes. They are framing their experience through their theological understanding of hell.

404. Framing Hell in a New Light

244. The Hell Delusion

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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285. God is Love… BUT

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

God is Love

God is love and that love is unconditional. The ministry entrusted to us is to share the good news of the unconditional love, inclusion and reconciliation that God has already brought about in Jesus! That message will enable people to come into a reality in which they experience that love and grasp the fact that they are already reconciled to God; that God loves them and He holds nothing against them.

Yet much of our preaching of the ‘gospel’, particularly in an evangelical setting, has been the opposite of that. It has been a message of exclusion and very much works-based, in fear of avoiding punishment rather than entering into love.  And what I have understood and experienced is that love can only be unconditional. That means that for God to love you, there are no conditions that you have to fulfil. None.

For a moment, stop and embrace that. If you can just grasp that one truth in an experiential way, it will transform your life as it has transformed mine.

God is unconditional love and therefore He loves all his children equally. No matter what you have done, where you have come from, or what has happened to you, God loves you. He is not angry with you, or disappointed with you. He loves you.

But…

Many people obviously accept that God is love because the Bible says so, but there is always a ‘but’. Why is that ‘but’ there? Because it is too good to be true for an independent, alienated mind to accept – and many of us have been alienated or separated from God within our own minds because of our religious programming.

“Yes, God is love, but He is also holy.” How many times have I heard that? As if His holiness contradicts His love!
“Yes, God is love, but He is also righteous.” As if His righteousness contradicts His love!
“Yes, God is love, but He is also just.” As if His justice contradicts His love!

All these are all religiously-programmed statements that I used to believe, because I had never experienced the contrary. I had never experienced the truth, so that made it easy to believe the lies.

“Yes, God is love, but He is also a judge.” As if that makes Him what? A bad judge? A judge who is going to find us guilty? Love never finds us guilty because love keeps no record of wrongs (I Corinthians 13:5), so how can He find us guilty?

“Yes, God is love, but He cannot look upon sin.” By ‘sin’ they normally mean certain behaviours, but in reality, sin is lost identity. Well, if God cannot look upon sin, if God cannot look at a lost world, how could Jesus ever have come? And God is not just looking at this world, He is engaged within each and every person to bring us all into the reality of our relationship and inclusion in Christ. So the fact is that we have already been reconciled in Christ, we have already been made righteous in Christ, we have already been made holy in Christ. We didn’t need to do anything, He did it all!

Religion always adds a ‘but’, but none of those ‘buts’ contradicts the fact that God is love, other than in the false religious doctrines that create a god who seems to be two-faced, a god who in the Old Testament seems to be angry and needs to be appeased in some way but in the New Testament seems to be loving – though even in the New Testament there seems to be wrath and anger.

In reality, the word translated ‘wrath’ can equally well be rendered as ‘passion.’ God is passionate about anything that hinders our coming into relationship with Him. He is passionate about making available that relationship for us and therefore His wrath is going to be poured out on anything that hinders our coming into relationship; not the kind of ‘wrath’ that we have tended to believe, but rather God passionately outworking His love to bring about change and transformation for our good.

Religion twists

So that religious deception alters and denigrates God’s character and makes love able and willing to punish us – not to discipline or correct us, but to bring retribution upon us. What loving Father would ever eternally punish His children like that! These religious concepts have created a god that people find it difficult to trust, a god who says he loves us and yet threatens to torment us forever if we don’t do things the way he wants us to do them.

None of that is the reality of who God is. Religion twists God’s holiness and righteousness through a wrong understanding of the concepts of judgment and justice. This deception is what creates this false ‘hell’ narrative in which such a god would torture his children eternally. No, God will love His children eternally, and will never stop and never give up until they experience that love. Yes, His love is a purifying, refining fire, a consuming fire: it will consume every hindrance and objection and anything that comes in the way of us entering into the depth of unconditional love.

So holiness, righteousness, judgment and justice do not contradict unconditional love:

Holiness expresses it
Righteousness reveals it
Judgment is its result
And justice enforces it.

Justice brings about the judgment – and the judgment that has been made by God on behalf of the whole of humanity, the whole of mankind, the whole of creation, is…

“Not guilty!”

Each of this series of blog posts is adapted from Mike’s latest FREE video series on ‘Unconditional Love’.
Click the image or link above for the whole series, or scroll down to watch the video of the talk this post comes from.
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