Three Revelations
It is commonly believed that God created the world to have children able to freely choose between good and evil, and God did this to have children who freely made the choice to be His children. This means that creation is basically a test and it suggests that our choices determine our eternal destiny.
But God foreknew all our choices and God has all the control over our nature and our environment that He chooses to exercise. God intervenes in human affairs to rescue some people, but not others. God reveals Himself to some people, but not others. Creation does not seem to be a test.
This is not to say that it is unfair, unjust or in any way wrong for God to put His thumb on the scales—God can do anything He wants—but God intervenes in creation in ways that indicate He is not concerned with conducting a fair and unbiased test. The true reason for creation must be something else.
First Revelation
The first revelation is that God created the world for the emotions we experience. These emotions include a lot of pain and heartache, but in the end, God heals us and gives us eternal life, and the painful emotions we experience are central to the purpose of creation. Creation is about love in all its complex attributes. Sorrow, heartache, sacrifice, compassion, forgiveness, loneliness–could these emotions be so useless and so insignificant to a truly loving God that they should never even exist?
God understands what we are going through, and He understands it better than we do because He has experienced this journey through many generations of His children. It is impossible to grasp the astounding level of grief that God has experienced through His children, and the infinite understanding that the human experience has provided God. The wisdom that God receives through creation was always part of God since God transcends time so that creation–as it must be–is an essential experience by which an infinitely Righteous God is completed. Emotions must be experienced. Creation must exist for the wisdom that is gained by creation to be eternally part of God.
Creation is not a test. Our choices do not determine our eternal fate. A Loving God can and will devise a way to redeem all His children to eternal life regardless of their choices, however our choices can impact the difficulty of our journey. There does appear to be a lot of contradictions in the New Testament causing Christians, especially Protestants, to endlessly argue over the details of eternal judgment without understanding that the Bible is often talking about temporal salvation. This understanding causes a lot of contradictions to disappear. Temporal salvation has to do with our journey, Heaven is our destination. Our eternal life in Heaven is a gift of God through Christ and Christ will redeem all of His children to eternal life.
Second Revelation
The second revelation is that God transcends time, but Christ is a part of God that separated from God and came into time. As stated in the Nicene Creed, Christ was not made but was “begotten” of God. Christ came from the essence or substance of God. Transcending time and space there is only one God, but Christ came from oneness with God into time and Christ must therefore return to oneness with God at the end of time. There was never a time that Jesus did not exist, yet outside of time there is only God the Father. This is how Christ is God, and yet there is only one God. This is why Christ is called “Son” of God and not brother of God.
The return of Christ to oneness with God means that Christ discards His physical body at or before the end of time. This makes it completely fair and reasonable for our bodies to be discarded. We are each one person, body, soul and spirit; but thanks to Christ we each become two people. Our spirit is judged separately from our body and is found worthy of eternal life and is given a new body. This separation of our body from our spirit is justified by Christ because He is one of us. Christ redeems us and by His stripes we are healed, but He redeems us without a transfer of responsibility for sin. The idea that Christ becomes responsible for our sins is one reason the Jews still reject Jesus since this idea violates the Scriptures.
Christians believe in substitution atonement because they feel they must believe in it. They have found no way to reconcile the words of Jesus with those passages in the Scriptures that reject a transfer of responsibility for sin, so they simply ignore those passages. God prevented people from seeing this simple solution which actually does reconcile the words of Jesus with the Scriptures. This means it reconciles Christianity and Judaism on a very fundamental issue. Jesus must be reconciled to every single verse in the Old Testament, and now He is.
Jesus does not become responsible for our sins, but He does justify the transformation of us into people worthy of eternal life, a necessary perfection we can never achieve by ourselves. As He said, Jesus is the only way to the Father. A person does not have to be a Christian for this redemption by separation, they only have to possess within themselves a spirit of unselfish love which is the true child of God created in the image of God. Jesus redeems all His children.
Third Revelation
The purpose of creation required that God create a world with creatures capable of both good and evil. God did not give Satan the ability to love others knowing that Satan would become evil. God gave humans the ability to love others knowing that Satan would influence the humans causing them to struggle between good and evil. This is how the purpose of creation is achieved, but Satan stays within the letter of the Law while humans violate the Law. Satan believes he has demonstrated that power trumps love, but this is exactly what God knew would happen. We children of God are condemned by the Law while Satan is not, but Christ redeems us from our sins and Christ also destroys evil.
The third revelation is that when Jesus was on the cross the devil’s hatred of God was exposed. This is why Christ was so repulsed by the cross that He was sweating blood. This is the unimaginable sacrifice that God made for us since God is repulsed by evil and the evil that was poured out on Christ when He was on the cross was immeasurable.
God had forsaken Christ by looking away from the crucifixion and the devil thought Jesus was a mere human who couldn’t witness his loathing. To this day the devil doesn’t know that Jesus is a witness against him because the devil doesn’t know that Jesus is the Lord. Jesus is at the “right hand” of God, a place that transcends Heaven; and the Christians have preached of a “Trinity” which the devil knows to be false. Jesus came from oneness with God and Jesus will return to oneness with God.
Jesus is the “faithful witness” to the sin of the devil, and as Jesus returns to oneness with God there are two witnesses against the devil as required by the Law. Humanity is redeemed, and Satan is condemned by the Law. It is this revelation (these three revelations) that exposes the truth, that causes the debate between Michael and the devil that end in Satan being cast out of Heaven into the Earth. It is this revelation of the truth in the end that causes the end. This is why Jesus spoke in riddles since some secrets had to be kept until the time of the end. This is why the book of the end is called the book of Revelation.