You're listening to Tim Bulkeley's
5 minute Bible Universalism, or Not?
This is the first of 2 podcasts which will deal with this topic
his first one will do so from the perspective of the book of Jonah
and the second one will do so from the perspective of
Psalm 69, and as you'll see
those two perspectives are almost diametrically opposite
the more I think about this topic the more I'm reminded of
what used to be one of my favorite old hymns when I was a kid
in the days when we sang old hymns, it was written by W Y Fullerton
one of the great figures among British Baptists
though he died before I was born, the first verse goes like this:
I cannot tell why he whom angels worship should set his love upon the sons of men
or why a shepherd he should seek the wanderers to bring them back
they know not how or when, but this Iknow
that he was born of Mary when Bethlehem's manger was his only home
and that he lived at Nazareth and laboured, and so
the saviour, saviour of the world is come." And each of the verses
begins by recounting some things that the hymn writer doesn't know
but builds to a crescendo
with what he does know, and each verse
ends with a sort of echoing of that: "saviour, saviour of the world is come"
and that's how I feel about this topic of universalism
there is a load of stuff I do not know but there is some stuff I do know
in a blog post I dealt with some other stuff I don't know
hear I want to deal with the stuff I do know
what I do know really comes down to these two
Bible passages, neither of them
all on their own, but both of them typifying an attitude within the Bible
the first is the book of Jonah. I've dealt with Jonah in a number of podcasts
and if you want to get
the background what I'm saying today then do listen to some of those
8 or 9 podcasts I've already done on Jonah What I want to do here
is just really to notice that the book of Jonah
is decidedly odd, it's a story
among the prophets, it's a story about
what appears to be a true prophet who runs away from God
and in this story everything is larger than life
and in this story many things are hilariously funny
the other thing to notice before we start is that this story
ends with a punch line because it ends with a speech by God
and when a book of the Bible ends with God speaking that has to be the punchline
that has to tell us about the book was about, there is no more authoritative
speaker in the Bible than God
So, after all the fun and games in the book
in chapter 4 we have Jonah sitting grumpily outside the city of Nineveh
which has been spared by God because it repented
remembered it never is the wicked center
the heart of the evil empire (in Jonah's day)
and God and Jonah have some conversations
in the course of which God sends a nice big plant
to cover up poor Jonah who is hot and bothered and provide him with some
nice shade, and then overnight God sends a worm to
eat up the roots of the plant so that it withers and dies
and Johnah, in typical Jonah fashion
is pissed off enough to say: "I wish I could die"
at which point God says
"You're concerned about the bush for which he did not labour and which you did
not grow
it came to be in a night and perished in a night and
should I not be concerned about Nineveh that great city
in which there are more than a hundred twenty thousand persons
who do not know their right hand from their left
and also many animals." It's quite clear from this as well as from
other clues through the whole of the book, that the key message of the book of Jonah
is that God cares about all his creatures
even the animals, but especially about the human beings
and God wants to save all human beings
if any human being will repent of the wrong they've done
God is only too willing to spare them
to forgive them. That seems me
not just message of the book of Jonah but the message to the whole Bible
and so on this universalism question that is one of those
immovable fixed points that we have to stick as a stake in the ground
and so, among all the things that I don't know
on this question, one thing I do know
is that God is literally just dying
to save us, all of us
no matter how terrible we might be even the Ninevites.