I sure wish people would not resurrect a thread I started over 3 years ago because I cannot even stand to read what I wrote.
Since then I have sustained more losses and the major loss was my husband of 37 years.
Maybe they wanted to check in and see how ya doing?
Sorry for your loss.
We do not grieve as others do who have no hope. For we know that God, through Christ Jesus, will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep.
Why does the choice have to be between the two?
Do you believe that those who are cast into a lake of fire are destroyed permanently?
That's just my read on it. It's not a happy story, even for the people saved. The lost are described as ashes under the feet of the saved. God will need to wipe away the tears from the saved. It's a more logical, or humane conclusion. Hell can't last forever. Forever means infinity. The Christians who say hell lasts forever, can't imagine infinity into the future. The human mind can't wrap itself around it. God is not going to punish anyone for infinity into the future. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. They just die. God is a just God. The punishment just fits the crime. Some will be beaten with few stripes, some with many stripes. But it concludes with their destruction. Revelation 20 calls this the Second Death.
What makes you think that God loves His creation? Oh I know, because the Bible says so. Sorry, that is not good enough for me, not whan I see all the suffering in this world.
I was borrowing that from 2 Esdras 8, it's extra Biblical:
"For you come far short of being able to love my creation more than I love it. But you have often compared yourself to the unrighteous. Never do so!
I believe that the spirits of animals will continue to exist after their bodies die, but I don't know if we will ever see them again.
I believe we will based on my read. Animals were made from the same dust as we were and have the same breath of life in them as we do. Nephesh, living souls, living creatures. But they were never a part of God's plan of man's salvation because they never sinned. Genesis says that God is going to demand an account from every animal that kills a man.
That's a nice thought, but I don't know what good it does for us or them even if God does remember them.
God's got them on record. His record is better than a DVD or streaming digital media cloud storage. If God will demand an account from every animal, it means He has the ability to bring them back. Their data, their existence, is retrievable by God. Who, besides God, wants them back more than we do? It would be elementary for Him to reach back through time itself and get your cat back. He made the cat, He can make the cat again. Behold, He makes all things NEW again.
But what about those who do not love God, are they going to be cast into hell?
It says that sin is transgression of the law. And that the penalty for sin is death. And God is love.
But God also has love for the oncoming generation. Would He continue to let children be born into a defiled world?
This morning I was looking at this post from the Gaza news.
Interesting book by CS Lewis.
The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis
Snip from the chapter on animal pain:
"Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in”. I do not take all the senses of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that man is in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the Church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be senses that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I am now going to suggest—though with great readiness to be set right by real theologians—that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. That is to say, you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood—namely “The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead”.
That whole context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary not only for the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality [128] of their masters. And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal disappears when the creature is thus kept in its proper context. If you ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer “Where its identity always did reside even in the earthly life—in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body”. In other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know its master and, in knowing him, will be itself. To ask that it should, in any other way, know itself, is probably to ask for what has no meaning. Animals aren’t like that, and don’t want to be.
"Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” And He said to me, “Write, for these words are true and faithful.” - Revelation 21:5
Behold I make all things new again.
Therefore comfort one another with these words.
Peaceful Sabbath.
