Saviour of All Fellowship
March 2002 second installment

Dear Friends in Faith,
    From a web site on the internet I found an article entitled: “What's Wrong with Universalism?” I quote here their one of the many questions and answers.
    Q: In Rom 5:19, if all are made sinners in Adam, and all are made righteous in Christ, does this mean everyone gets saved, as the heresy of universalism teaches?
    A: The Children of God cult taught this. All Christians agree Universalism is wrong, but Non-Calvinists and Calvinists have two very different reasons why. Non-Calvinists include “4-point Calvinists”, Lutherans, “Calminians”, Arminians, and others. They say that Christ offered the payment for everyone. A common illustration is this: Say a man owed a million-dollar debt he could not pay. A generous, wealthy friend opened a bank account, in the man's name with a million dollars in it, and told the man to withdraw a million dollars and pay the debt. Suppose the man either, did not believe the wealthy friend, or else withdrew the money and squandered it. Then the man would still be liable for His debt, despite the generosity of the wealthy friend.
    I (Tony) would like to draw your attention to several problems with the Answer above. In the first sentence the writer uses a “poisoning of the well” and/or “guilt by association” type argument. In other words, since the Children of God cult taught this, it must be wrong. This is irrational. The second sentence is an overstatement. Obviously not all Christians agree that Universalism is wrong. I don't believe it's wrong and neither does the readership of SAF, let alone the many thousands the world over. Now let's look at the idea that they give concerning the wealthy friend. First of all, this is not what the evangel is about. Neither God nor Christ deposited anything into your account so that you could pay some sort of debt if you so choose. The true point of the evangel is that Christ “is giving Himself a correspondent Ransom for all.” “Christ . . . died concerning sins, the just for the sake of the unjust” (1 Pet.3:18), and “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor.15:3), therefore our sins have been died for. We don't go into some sort of spiritual bank account and draw out so much of what Christ did and apply it to some sort of sin debt we owe God. How can a person draw on what Christ did for them, squander it and so not have it apply to his debt to God? Is this person saying that you can draw out a tenth of what Christ did and apply that to a tenth of your sins and you have to come up with the nine-tenths yourself should you squander what Christ did? What is the cut-off for what saves? Can you draw 99.9 % of what Christ deposited and go to hell for eternity because there might be one sin you didn't apply the payment to? This idea is foreign to the evangel. Jesus never opened an account. He never asked us to go to that account to draw on it to pay a sin debt we owe God. Therefore the argument the person sets forth is not applicable to the evangel.
F Actually, I think a better illustration to use would be thus: You owe a debt you can never pay off. God finds all the routing numbers to your accounts and makes a direct deposit to pay off all your creditors. You can keep paying your accounts if you really want (working for your salvation) but they will just keep sending your checks back to you (if they are the least bit honest). You can disbelieve the accounts are paid in full even if they send you notices that they are.

Yours in His Grace,
Tony Nungesser

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