Who agrees with me that God loves us?
Who agrees with me that God has a great love for His children?
"I, Neil Baulch , do declare on this day:
1st August 2016, that GOD LOVES US!"
It can rightly be said, that everything God does, is by and through love.
Please remember while you are reading through to the end, that I clearly and definitely stated my firm belief that God loves us.
Now, this is my proposition:
We, the Western Church, have grossly exaggerated how much God focuses on us, by a great over emphasis on 'God's love for us' and it has done untold damage to the Western Church.
Or in other words:
The general impression most Christians now have of Jesus' ministry, was that he went around preaching the love of God to people, being nice and helping everyone he met.
This is just plain wrong. If you bare with me, I will explain what I mean with a lot of evidence from Scripture.
The Bible has been hijacked by politically correct Church leadership and it is presented as a completely different document than the story and spirit of Christ.
However, the true Church will never die, it will get stronger, but it will eventually be withdrawn from the institutional Church.
The first objection I get, is that such a statement cannot possibly be true, because we KNOW God really loves us.
Yet, when I prove from Scripture that we do indeed hold a great over emphasis on it, the next common objection I get is 'what's the big deal, why make such a big thing out of it?'
The problem that we cannot perceive by a superficial consideration, is that we have effectively lost our knowledge of who our God really is and now follow 'another' Jesus and a radically changed gospel.
A belief in a super-loving God, does indeed neutralise the usefulness of the gospel.
By a subtle subtraction of God's justice and the addition of a false, imbalanced love of God, we effectively substitute the God of the Bible for a manufactured 'nice' god, loosely based on the Bible.
That is going to sound extreme, but please bare with me.
And we see the effects of such a substitution, for instance, Universalism could only flourish as it is these days, in an environment that did not understand the holiness and justice of God.
It would sound very extreme if I were to say that 'This over emphasis on God's love for us has been one of the most destructive forces in the Church, through out history.'
But if you were to read this book, and hear about evidence that you have not heard before, I think you would agree that it is not an extreme statement at all.
To be continued........