Our Destiny

Chapter 5 "None of Them Is Lost" (From The God Who Weeps, by Terryl & Fiona Givens) (A very small part is included here).

God has the desire and the power to unite and exalt the entire human family in a kingdom of heaven, and except for the most stubbornly unwilling, that will be our destiny.

God is personally invested in shepherding His children through the process of mortality and beyond; His desires are set upon the whole human family, not upon a select few. He is not predisposed to just the fast learners, the naturally inclined, or the morally gifted. The project of human advancement that God designed offers a hope to the entire human race. It is universal in its appeal and reach alike. This, however, has not been the traditional view.

Some Christians believed hell to be a more populous destination than heaven. One popular friar of the early eighteenth century, St. Leonard of Port Maurice, sermonized on “The Little Number of Those Who are Saved,” reviewing the opinions of church authorities from St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas up to his own day. Most everyone he surveyed agreed that “the greater number of Christian adults are damned.” Non-Christians and unbaptized children weren’t even possible candidates for salvation. He relates one visionary account that put the proportions at two souls saved …for every thirty-three thousand damned to hell. Another source gave odds of three saved out of sixty thousand….

In the early Christian centuries, Origen had taught that God would somehow find a way to redeem all of His children from the effects of sin. He never worked out the details of how that would come about, and his belief in “universal salvation” was soon declared a heresy…

Charles Beecher thought such a… way was the only reasonable alternative to mass damnation on the one hand, and a superfluous atonement on the other. A more comprehensive program than the one executed by missionaries among the living must be envisioned. In 1863, he was convicted of heresy for such a belief.

Beecher’s position is the only reasonable one. If hearing and believing the message of Christ is essential to all mankind’s eternal happiness, then that opportunity must be available beyond the confines of mortal life. The eighteenth-century revolt against organized religion was in large measure a protest against the narrowness of its vision.

The belief that the work of ministry includes the departed, animates the Latter-day Saint practice of tracing the roots of their families into ages past and performing gospel ordinances on their behalf.

If we are serious about our prospects of life beyond the grave, then we should not shy away from making a considered effort to understand what kinds of continuity with this life make sense. If God’s dominion does not end with our death, why should the progress of the human soul?

The particular potency of the challenges we face—our bodily weakness, the instincts and passions that consume us, the press of evil all around us—make a life of virtuous aspiration very like a race through quicksand. However, it is just these conditions of mortality, … that are especially conducive to growth and progress.

Life may well give us, in a concentrated dose, the soul-stretching most necessary to our long-range spiritual development. But even for those who live and die in obliviousness to God’s eternal purposes, death does not freeze the soul in time.

We live on an uneven playing field, where to greater or lesser degree the weakness of the flesh, of intellect, or of judgment intrudes. Poor instruction, crushing environment, chemical imbalances, deafening white noise, all cloud and impair our judgment.

Hardly ever, then, is a choice made with perfect, uncompromised freedom of the will. That … is why repentance is possible in the first place. We repent when upon reflection, with a stronger will, clearer insight, or deeper desire, we wish to choose differently…

God would not have commanded us to forgive each other seventy times seven, if He were not prepared to extend to us the same mathematical generosity. Come, try again, He seems to be saying, like a patient tutor who knows his student’s mind is too frozen with fear to add the sums correctly.

Why else would the Lord’s strategies be so rife with interventions and second chances? Samuel was called three times in the night, before he recognized his Lord. It took a bright light and a voice from heaven to capture Saul’s attention. Who knows how many other potential disciples will find their road to Damascus only on the other side of life’s veil? Why should God not there as well as here persist in His efforts to gather His children, as a hen its chicks? Why not believe that “His hand is stretched out still?”

If we fall short of salvation, it will be because our cumulative choices, our freely made decision to reject His rescue, have put us beyond His reach, not because His patience has expired.