Hm. Strange that I quoted it in more context than either you or Andrew Wommack did, then.
Your portions from Andrew Wommack certainly do not derive a position against universalism from 2 Cor 5:19. On the contrary, you (and Andrew) have to deny that in Christ God actually succeeds (or even really acts) to reconcile the world unto Himself. At most He reconciles Himself to the world (the opposite of what is stated in the scriptures). He may act to provide an mere opportunity to reconcile the world to Himself, in your theology, perhaps; but He doesn’t actually succeed in reconciling the whole world to Himself (and elsewhere you would deny that reconciling the whole world to Himself was even in His mind at all).
You also must have missed the place where Andrew wrote that God didn’t send His Son to give us some divine revelation of what we have to do to get right with God. He does, and did, for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. You have to offer instructions (like all the other founders of the world’s religions) about what we have to do to obtain salvation.
Andrew does too, eventually–indeed he has to go to the extent of saying that we must repent of our unbelief and not of our sins! Perhaps he doesn’t consider unbelief a sin, but either way he has to come up with some way for Jesus to save us from some hopelessness of God. Otherwise, Andrew would be a universalist! (And maybe an ultra-u.)
But Andrew’s article isn’t overly coherent anyway, so it’s probably just as well you don’t pay too much attention to it. (That may be your fault, however, for compositing multiple articles together without noting who said what.)
Anyway, 2 Cor 5:19 certainly establishes that all sins are paid for by Jesus and sins are no longer being imputed (or reckoned) unto anyone’s account. You can’t find anything in that verse or nearby to make this come out to a testimony against universalism, though–apparently even in Andrew’s article, which is why you had to port in a paragraph from someone else about the sin against the Holy Spirit–which in turn has nothing to say (so far as you reported) about the testimony of 2 Cor 5:19.
The end result is a mere contradictory nullity: even you have to admit that one verse establishes (and strongly so) that all sins are paid for and not being imputed into anyone’s account; and then simply contradict yourself a moment later with “But there is one sin that is not included.”
As I wrote elsewhere: we can interpret Mark 3:28 in light of Mark 2:29 or we can interpret 29 in light of 28. One of these is to interpret in the spirit of the ministry of reconciliation (and I had exactly the contexts of 2 Cor 5:19 in mind when I wrote that), and the other simply is not.
Or, we read the contexts and added them up and discussed them in depth. Or anyway I did. (Though I suspect Justin was seeing what I talked about in detail.)
At any rate, it makes no sense to say that God is no longer imputing sin to our account and is not mad at the world anymore; and then to justify hopeless condemnation on the ground that we are still condemned in our sins until we repent (not even of our sins, apparently, but of unbelief!!–and yet you accuse the real Aaron of walking the line of gnosticism, salvation by knowledge), while elsewhere talking about grieving the Holy Spirit until He withdraws forever (when you aren’t talking about God respecting free will so much that He allows free will to be permanently destroyed by sin or else destroys it permanently Himself). The whole thing is a theological mishmosh.
It gets even worse when you have Jesus being slain unfairly as the scapegoat for our sins–mixing your metaphors since the scapegoat wasn’t slain at all–which apparently must mean that God (the Father) unfairly slew God (the Son) for something the Son never did wrong, and moreover judged the Son without mercy. Really? Without mercy? Then there could have been no resurrection of the Son!
At any rate, I see that in trying to make the sin against the Holy Spirit a hopeless cause, you have now had to come up with the idea that the sin against the Holy Spirit isn’t even sin, but only unbelief. Otherwise, people would be guilty of the sin of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. Instead they are guilty of a blasphemy that is unbelief but not sin, or something like that.
You would have been better off not to follow your sources in trying to make out that the problem is not sin but unbelief: but even you can tell that 2 Cor 5:19 talks about all sins being paid for and forgiven and not held against people. So God has to be hopelessly condemning people for something that isn’t sin, right?!
Wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. As you yourself might have learned from not only reffing John 3:18 but going one step farther to verse 19. “Now this is the crisis: that the light has come into the world and people love the darkness rather than the light, for the acts were wicked. For every one who is committing evil deeds is hating the light and is not coming to the light, lest his acts may be exposed.” Call it the sin of unbelief, as you were doing before, but don’t try to make out that the problem isn’t a lack of repentance from something other than sin, just so that you can dodge what 2 Cor 5:19 says (along with Mark 3:28, even more absolutely emphatically) about all sins being utterly forgiven and not being held against persons.
The genius who came up such a moronic phrase must have been St. Luke. Or St. Peter. Or St. John. Or St. Mark. Or John the Baptist. Or St. Paul. Or, who knows, maybe Jesus…
Mark 1:4, Luke 3:3; John the Baptist comes preaching a baptism of repentance unto the sending away or pardon of sin. (He then challenges Pharisees and Sadducees coming down to be baptized to be producing fruit worthy of repentance, Matt 3:7-8, Luke 3:7-8.)
Acts 13:24; Paul agrees that John came preaching baptism of repentance, and later (38) talks about how through Jesus Christ is being announced to them the pardon of sins.
Acts 2:38: “Now Peter is declaring strongly toward them, ‘Repent and be baptized each of you, on the name of Jesus Christ, into the pardon of your sins, and you shall be obtaining the gratuity of the Holy Spirit.’”
Acts 3:19: [Peter preaching] “Repent, then, and turn about toward the erasure of your sins, so that season of refreshing should be coming from the face of the Lord.”
Acts 5:31: [Peter preaching again] “This Inauguator and Savior * God exalts to His right, to give repentance to Israel and the pardon of sins.”
Acts 8:22: [Peter to Simon Magus] “Repent, then, from this evil of yours, and beseech the Lord if, consequently, the notion of your heart will be forgiven you.”
Rom 2:3-4; “Yet are you reckoning on this, O man who are judging those committing such acts [the sins listed in the previous chapter] and are doing the same, that you will be escaping the judgment of God? Or are you despising the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, being ignorant that the kindness of God is leading you into repentance?” (Hardness of heart in regard to sin is mentioned as leading to indignation and fury from God shortly afterward.)
2 Cor 12:21 “Not again at my coming will my God be humbling me toward you; and I shall be mourning for many who have sinned before and are not repenting on the uncleanness and prostitution and wantonness which they commit.”
Luke 5:32; Jesus comes to call sinners to repentance.
Luke 13:2-5; Jesus affirms that those who have recently suffered calamities are not worse sinners than other people dwelling in Galilee and Jerusalem, yet if the ones who hear Him do not repent they shall likewise be perishing.
Luke 15:7: “I am saying to you that thus will be joy in heaven on one sinner repenting, than on ninety-nine just persons who have no need of repentance.” (In reply to Pharisees and scribes grumbling that Jesus receives and eats with sinners.)
Luke 17:3: “Yet if your brother should be sinning, rebuke him, and if should ever indeed repent, forgive him. And if he should ever be sinning against you seven times a day, and if he should ever be turning about seven times a day toward you, saying ‘I am repenting’, you shall be forgiving him.”
Luke 24:47: Jesus says that repentance for the pardon of sins is preached in His name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem.
Rev 2:2-7: Jesus (by John’s report) sure isn’t exhorting the church of Ephesus to repent of unbelief! (If anything, He praises them on their superior levels of belief and even faithfulness under heavy blows.) The problem with the congregations of Pergamum and Thyatira and Laodicia aren’t that they need to repent of unbelief per se either. (Christ would actually prefer for the Laodicians to be cold toward Him than what they currently are!)
Rev 9:20: the acts of their hands of which the rest of mankind not killed in the calamities refuse to repent, are not only unbelief, but an obvious (and stereotypical) list of sins.
These texts are all rock-solid stable in the surviving copies, by the way. I could add several other examples where the term ‘repentance’ is not specifically in view but some other equivalent or related notion is being discussed. But that would quickly grow (even more!) tiresome.
In short, I recommend getting away from the notion that what God (supposedly hopelessly) judges a person for is not sin but rather “unbelief”. On the contrary, He judges for the sin of unbelief, too, but because it’s a sin, not because it’s unbelief. (On the contrary, God is disposed to “wink” at ignorant unbelief!–as Paul colorfully puts it during the Mars Hill forum.) Trying to get away from the total forgiveness of sin proclaimed in 2 Cor 5:19 by making out that God judges us for something other than sin, including the sin of unbelief, is not an accurate (much less a winning) strategy. It would be better to take that statement and its contexts as an already/not-yet predictive declaration: all the world shall be forgiven of their sins, and indeed from God’s perspective this has even already been completely accomplished. The only question is how God shall enact this total victory over sin and the reconciliation of all sinners to Himself historically, i.e. how long it will take and by what methods all sinners shall in themselves be reconciled to God as God reconciles and has reconciled us to Himself in Himself.
But as you (and your sources) are well aware: that would be some kind of universalism. (Thus the attempt at trying to make the judgment of God come out to be for something other than sin.)*