new church life: march/april 2016
and those who had been held captive
in them were set free to learn the truth
(if they wished to) and to find their
way to their eternal spiritual homes.
The power of hell was broken, and the
evil spirits no longer had the power to
reach out and “possess” the mind of a
man in the world or a new spirit in the
spiritual world as they had once had.
The power of hell was broken. It was
now subject to the government of the
Lord once again.
Perhaps it would be useful to
mention that hell only got out of
control in the first place because of the
Lord’s intense desire that everything
we do be of our own free choice.
Therefore, as long as it was still possible
for those who wished to go to heaven
to do so, the Lord allowed evil to grow
and grow in the world because that
was what the human race wanted for
itself. It was only when the human race
had brought itself to the point of total
destruction that the Lord stepped in to
restore spiritual order.
We can think of it in terms of an adult supervising a large group of children
in a playground. Quarrelling is a normal part of the way children interact with
each other, and a wise adult allows a certain amount of disorder to go on so
that the children can learn to deal with their own problems in their own ways.
But if the quarrelling becomes so extensive that the children cannot possibly
control it, then it is necessary for the adult to step in, make some judgments,
and restore order.
The essential point of this illustration is that we understand that
both letting the quarrelling go on at first, and later stepping in, are actions
representing the adults’ great love for the children, but that love is showing
itself in different ways under different circumstances. And so the Lord’s great
love for the human race shows itself to us in different ways under different
circumstances.
The fourth doctrinal point is that “the Lord came into the world to
glorify His Human.” This is very important because unless we remember this
The final point is that all
of this means nothing
if we don’t use it in our
daily lives, in our dayto-day dealings with
others, for "the universal
of the Christian faith
on man’s part is that he
should believe in the
Lord. In the simplest
possible terms, if we say
we believe something,
but we do not live
according to it, then we
don’t really believe it."
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