Hope for All, Even for Those Without Hope!

Greetings Everyone!

Today what has been on my mind is the word “hope.”  Specifically, what has been going over in my mind are verses like 1 Thessalonians 4:13, where Paul writes:  “…we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” (New Revised Standard Version/NRSV)

Verses like this can be incredibly misleading.  The difference is between objective hope and subjective hope.  Let’s imagine people who do not believe something wonderful is going to come to pass (e.g. they don’t believe God will have mercy on all people, as he has promised in Romans 11:32; their loved ones, they believe, who have passed away are just ‘no more’) or let’s imagine people who believe something terrible is looming (e.g. eternal torment) – in both these cases these people do not have subjective hope (at least for others…they may have it for themselves).  In light of this example, Paul wanted the believers to not grieve about those who died (surely not all of their relatives were believers)…he wanted them to have subjective hope in objective reality:  that is, Jesus is going to take care of those folks, being the Savior of the world.  That’s why he came!    

As for those “others,” (the unbelievers) let’s go on to see that the very wonderful thing that they never had even hoped for (“they had no hope”), did, in fact happen.  God did (and he will) have mercy on all, as he has promised.  In this case, all along they had objective hope, but grieved because they didn’t have subjective hope.  So to sum it up, Paul is saying that for those that do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world--those that do not believe that he will, in fact, take care of a person’s loved one, how can they possibly have that hope within themselves?  And yet, when God does treat the loved one fairly and with mercy, this shows that there was hope for that person all along and for the loved one, but the one who did not believe simply did not have that hope.  So to say “they had no hope” is NOT the same as saying “there is no hope for them” or “there is no hope for their loved ones who have passed.”    

As an example, before Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus, he was Saul, and did not have subjective hope.  But destiny would have it that all along, even when he had no subjective hope, he did, in fact, have objective hope!  And so it is for all of God’s creatures.  This may be one valid explanation for the conclusion of 1 Timothy 4:10:  “…we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.”  I cannot even express how supporters of the doctrine of a God who eternally torments his own creatures either dodge this verse entirely or desperately wish it wasn’t in their Bibles.  But it is!  And it ruins their theology of eternal torment when it says so clearly that God is the Savior of all people.  What makes sense is that the word “hope” is right in the verse, and so those who have this subjective (and objective!) hope are spared from subjective despair (NOT objective if God is the Savior of all people!) at the loss of loved ones.  God saves the believer in his amazing grace from despair and other anxieties, due to the believer’s possession of this hope NOW.  This would warrant the word “especially,” I believe.  The word “exclusively” is not an option in any translation.  The King James goes with “specially.”  Ask eternal torment folks about 1 Timothy 4:10, not in a mocking way, but really ask them to explain what it means to them.      

In passages like 1 Thessalonians 4:13, you may have someone point to this and try to rob you of you hope for the salvation of all mankind.  They may say something like:  “oh, you see there!  There’s no hope for those people,” and sincerely mourn this fact.  We’ve already shown that not having hope is not the same as there not being hope.  I know very few Christians (they are out there though!) who actually say this with a sort of glee.  This is a terrible sickness of the spirit, that one day will be purged by a metaphorical fire.  As Mark 9:49 tells us, we ALL get some fire!  I can’t stress that enough.  I mentioned this to an eternal hell believer and he just shrugged and said basically “I don’t know what that fire is, but I know it’s not hellfire.”  This is right after those verses in Mark 9 about immortal worms and unquenchable fire!  That, said the man I was debating, definitely was hellfire.   I don’t believe this man was cruel or gleeful, but brainwashed.  The good news just couldn’t possibly be THAT good, could it?    Yes, my friends, it can, because our God is THAT awesome!  He is, indeed, the Savior of the entire world.

  When people realize that God will exact perfect justice but ultimately reconcile all his creatures to himself (Colossians 1:20 reads: “and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”), including “lost” loved ones, then we really and truly are filled with an unspeakable joy.  It’s a little ironic then, that believers in eternal torment today (which was not anywhere close to being the majority doctrine of the early church), have been robbed of this hope that Paul says that they are supposed to have in 1 Thessalonians 4:13…that is, unless ALL of their loved ones believed or “got saved” in their short life. 

What a destructive doctrine – eternal torment in hell.  No hope, no mercy.  Is that justice?  I had a wonderful man at my former church who told me with tears in his eyes how his family was not saved, but he still accepted the doctrine of eternal torment and said that we would not care after death because we would be so close to God after death!  Now, if I believed God was going to eternally torture any of my relatives, he wouldn’t be a being worthy of worship.  I don’t think I’d want to get very close to him at all!  Rather, he would be a malevolent being, a sadistic rejected loser taking out his wrath, forever and ever, on his own creatures, his own children – many of our loved ones. (Acts 17:28-29 clearly tells us who God’s children are: ALL of humankind…this is Paul giving a sermon to the Greeks in Athens).  He is trying to convince them that there IS hope.  That’s the message for everyone:  even if we have no hope, there is still hope for us!  Why?  Because God is not a monster, God is love, and God is the Savior of all people.  We all have a lot to look forward to.  There is hope for all because His mercy endures forever!

God bless,

David