UR isn’t obvious because it has never been the position of the church. Jesus never taught it nor did his apostles. Fortunately for us God doesn’t give us a multiple choice to vote on. There is only one truth from Genesis to Revelation. That truth is the reconciliation of creation back to a Gen 1 and 2 state of existence. God has made provision for everyone to be reconciled back to Him through His Son Jesus by their own free-will choice. God will not violate anyone’s will and therefore anyone who rejects God’s plan of reconciliation will experience the second death and be separated from Him for eternity in the lake of fire. Pretty simple stuff.
I edited your post to make it comprehensible. You use phrases like reconciliation of creation, but then add nonsense as if those left unreconciled are not part of creation.
Creation implies all things created.
I haven’t finished reading the entire thread, but there’s a lot of good stuff here. Let me just toss in my two cents . . .
There are so many things about God that I thought were obvious . . . and they weren’t obvious after all. Christians are obligated to tithe, for example. Even though I studied this in the Bible and found it distorted and inaccurate, and even though I was dirt poor and literally could not tithe, I still felt so very guilty about it all the time, and believed that God couldn’t bless me because I was eating my seed – well, my kids were eating it anyway. Still, somehow I couldn’t bring myself to take their food and give it to the building fund, ya’ know?
There have been so many things like this. God keeps showing me things I’ve had wrong about Him forever. I keep asking Him to, because I want to KNOW Him, not just think I know Him. The most recent thing He showed me I was wrong about was ECT, and though now that I look back, I can see it’s been in the works for decades, up until right before it “happened,” I would have sincerely called it wishful thinking and heresy.
I teach drawing (among other things) to children and occasionally to brave adults. (Children are much braver about things like drawing.) One of the hardest things for people to grasp is that they DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT THINGS LOOK LIKE. No matter how many trees you’ve seen, until you draw them correctly, you really have no idea what they look like. Think you know what a human looks like? Are you sure? Then draw me one. Unless you can do that, I’ll tell you that you don’t have a clue.
Drawing is easy. Seeing is what’s hard. Things that are right there before our eyes? We can’t see them. We think apples are red and canaries are yellow, but this isn’t always the case, and more than the local color of the bird, it depends on the quality of the light. Until we learn to SEE what’s right there in front of us, we can’t depict it.
The Bible is like that. We think we know what it says. When we read “as in Adam all died, even so in Christ all are made alive,” and we automatically flick down our ECT anti-heritical supra-ocular membrane. Obviously all cannot mean ALL. “In Christ” means all those who are in Christ – those are the ones who are made alive, because we know that the unsaved go to hell for eternity. Therefore this statement can’t mean what it seems to be saying.
It is not obvious simply because we CANNOT SEE. We have forgotten how to see what is right in front of our faces. We can’t draw a spiritual picture of Jesus, because we don’t know what He looks like, and we don’t know because we’ve got on our super-cool super-dark shades, through which all we can see is approved doctrine. When we see a scripture that seems to say that ALL will be saved, we either reinterpret it or, failing that, put it on the shelf until such a time as we can understand it more clearly, never suspecting that it means precisely and simply what it says.
My own short (at least it was gonna be 
)answer (from the viewpoint of human nature) is that we’re all so cynical and jaded by the world that we think that ECT is the only realistic conclusion based upon what we see. In other words, we’re looking to the world and to humans instead of to God for salvation. We think that if there’s any hope, then it must somehow lie with us. We just don’t see people magically getting better all the time - some people just get worse as time goes on. So, we figure, that must be the way it will always be. Our minds immediately extrapolate that out to infinity as if that’s the sum total of reality. I’ve often gotten the response that EU is “just not realistic.”
But, if we were TRULY thinking of infinity, or at least a really, really, really long time, instead of just this one earthly life, then it should be immediately obvious that it’s the other way around. Who could go on transgressing on and on without end, each moment of transgression becoming more and more exponentially painful than the last? You’d think that like a person constantly beating their head against a brick wall, they’d eventually just pass out.
At least, that may be descriptive of Arminians. What of Calvinists? Well, maybe they extrapolate the other way around and project a familial image of God onto the Father rather than one universally loving, the one who tells us to love our enemies, the one who causes the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. So to them, it may be far from obvious that God loves everyone - after all, there are plenty of dastardly, venomous, manipulative evil people out in the world which a father will not hold affection for over and against his own family.
But then I would go in the other direction down to a more micro-focused level thinking of specific scenarios - what of a caring father who found his son becoming a drug addict or a sex offender or even a murderer? Would he immediately write him off, or do his best to reconcile his son back to him until one of them leaves this world? Would he ever say that his son was “not his son” or deny their essential relationship? And if not, then is it not possible that our Father in heaven could not consider one of the least of these, one of the vile criminals of this world, or even - GASP all of them - to be his children?
So what may seem like the only “realistic” option to some may be only because they have not thought long and hard enough. God will have our faith at the level of initiated commitment, intellectually and emotionally as well as spiritually, or none at all. And those who do not put forth any of their own individual effort (as individuals, not as distinct from God) will eventually reveal themselves to be not of Him.
I think this is great, Cindy. It also made me laugh, because the example is so true on so many levels. My daughter (usually it’s the boys that are afflicted) has the WORST refrigerator blindness I’ve ever seen. She can be looking right at something and not see it! 
Thanks, Melchizedek. Yes, I know the feeling. Sometimes all you can do is shrug. How can they not see it? 
Having seen Carey playing in “The Grinch that stole Christmas”, when I read this title this morning was what the Grinch said,
“blind me with pepper spray”.
Seriously though, I think the biggest thing that blinds Christians to UR is Tradition! Revival reflects this in his statement that “it never has been the position of the church” which of course, is inaccurate to say the least, but reflects what most Christians assume in the ignorance of UR. “Tradition! Tradition!” (Fiddler on the Roof).
I believe that the pull of tradition is one of the major reasons that Jesus scolded the religious leaders; “You make the word of God of no effect for the sake of your tradition”. A very poignant warning today as well.
Yes. In the parable of the Sower, I believe that the Hard Ground speaks of Tradition. The hard ground is where people have walked and walked over and over again, packing the ground until it will not receive seed. Seed that falls on ground like this is like serving up the seed on a plate for the birds to eat. The Word, the seed is quickly rejected, dismissed with little, IF ANY, serious consideration. The only way to deal with such hard ground is for the gardener to break it up! And I’m not talking about some surface disking, it takes a plow to bust up the ground deep, to get below the hardened ground and break it up.
I’ve seen this many times in regard to other doctrines. For example, many people who use to hold a hard, uncompassionate, judgmental line concerning Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage, often find themselves to be facing divorce themselves, that or their children facing divorce and then desiring to marry again. Where before they would reject any contextual understanding of what Jesus said concerning divorce that allowed for healing, forgiveness, and remarriage, after having personally experienced the tragedy of divorce are broken hearted and open to understanding what Jesus said concerning divorce differently than what their Tradition affirms.
Hard-hearted judgment of others often, if not always, results in that person experiencing something similar, if not exactly the same thing, and it breaks their heart. And often they then experience the self-righteous judgment by others, reaping in great abundance what they have sown!
In sharing UR with Christians, Tradition is usually the biggest obsticle to overcome!
amen