6. Peace: God Restores All
Updated: Sep 7
Some readers will want to begin with the biblical arguments for universal restoration. Others may first want to know what believing it has actually done in my life. Scripture must decide whether the doctrine is true. My peace cannot make universal restoration biblical if Scripture does not teach it. But after studying the biblical case, the fruit of this belief has become impossible for me to ignore.
Christianity had already taught me many beautiful truths about God: that He loves us, seeks the lost, forgives sinners, defeated death through Christ, and calls us to reconciliation. But eternal conscious torment placed a terrible limit around those truths. When I came to believe that God’s judgments ultimately serve restoration and that He will not finally lose any of His creation, I did not feel that I had discovered a different God so much as that the goodness I had always been taught about God had become vastly larger and more consistent. God was better than I had dared to believe. My anxiety decreased. My peace increased enormously. I became more able to love people without carrying the almost unbearable fear that they might suffer forever.
The full article linked below explores that transformation much more deeply. It includes my personal experience, research on the psychological effects of hell belief, the historical consequences of attaching infinite stakes to theological error, and a comparison of eternal punishment and universal restoration according to biblical categories such as justice, hope, mercy, and love. It does not substitute fruit for exegesis. It asks what happens when the biblical case for restoration is actually lived.
And the fruit of the Spirit I most strongly associate with embracing universal restoration instead of eternal conscious torment is: PEACE.
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