If, indeed, all die because Adam sinned, since he and all successive generations were banned from the Tree of Life, then the stated penalty for sin is accordingly executed on every sinner by their individual deaths, and God’s decree is thereby sufficiently satisfied or fulfilled. God is therefore under no necessity to “punish every sin” in some additional manner in order to meet the requirement of that primal threat or warning. Nothing more is required. Yet He certainly does bring further punishments to chastise the vicious in order, if possible, to lead them to repentance, and where that is not forthcoming, to terminate their lives to prevent further needless injury to others or to His creation in general. He also brings discipline upon His own believing children in order to cleanse or “prune” them so as to render them more fruitful in divine character and activity.
Nor does God use the Lake of Fire to exact the “just due” for every discrete act of wrongdoing ever committed by the unsaved; rather, it serves as simply the more decisive and final termination (as promised) to sinners who never turned to Him and endured in faithfulness. It exterminates them. [12/19/07]
God’s foreknowledge of all that will happen, including contingent events initiated by human self-authorization (autexouciotes) rather than by God’s own willing of them (although He created and intended such human natures and their powers o self-determination, all of which are duly limited in power to actualize as well as by their mortality, until He resurrects some to agelong life) does not compromise His delight of anticipation, since even though He knows what will occur, He knows that we do not know the magnitude of “the transcendent riches of His graciousness” with which He is about to bless us in the oncoming ages (Ephesians 2:7). This is the “fun” He has ordained for Himself. I can live with that. I live from that!
God’s joy comes, at least in part, from giving joy to others! He has taught us this through His Son, Jesus. Even sinful human parents experience this dynamic with their own children. Our joy is in theirs!
All this means that a key objection to divine foreknowledge (and the prophetic spirit) is taken away when we understand that God’s personal joy (which, indeed, should be of concern to us, so we are not indulging in vain speculation to expound our concern theologically) is not compromised by His perfect knowledge even of the future. Hallelujah! [12/19/07]
Calvinists want to make a distinction between the “elect,” who are exempt from “eternal punishment” because Christ presumably “bore the penalty of their sins,” and the “reprobate,” who will be “punished for their own sins.” But in fact all suffer the penalty of their own sins: death. The real and proper difference to be noted is between believers, who will be raised from the dead to inherit agelong life in spite of their dying (for their own sins!), and unbelievers, who will die in their sins and therefore be raised to face the condemnation of the second death in the Lake of Fire. [12/19/07]
The Premial Atonement 