Part 3: The Protagonists
We have established that God creates long-term plans for the world, and then intervenes in human lives to make these plans reality. He even meddles in the hearts and wills of man, changing their personality. We established that the Bible never says God loves every human, or that He considers them equal. Now we will discuss the “elect.”
The climax
If Creation is a play scripted by God, we could think of it as having a five act structure:
Act 1: Creation falls into chaos and judgment, culminating in the Flood;
Act 2: Abraham receives a promise, culminating in the Jewish Messiah;
Act 3: Satan conspires against the elect, culminating in the Day of the Lord;
Act 4: The Millennial Kingdom, culminating in Satan’s release and final defeat;
Act 5: Judgment Day and New Creation.
In the near future, possibly within our generation, humanity will look up and witness the Day of the Lord, which will be the climax of world history before the dawn of the promised triumph of Christ. By that point, the world will be a very different place. The tribulation of the church will have been completed, global cataclysms will have wiped at least one third of mankind (Rev. 9:18), and all the cities on every continent will lay in ruins due to unprecedented earthquakes (Rev. 16:18-19). Civilization as we know it will cease to exist.
On this day, Jesus will come down from heaven with the spirits of the martyrs who were killed by the satanic conspiracy and be joined by the persecuted remnant of Israelite believers in the clouds. They will each receive new bodies, descending to Jerusalem to set up a kingdom that will reign for 1,000 years. During this millennium, Satan will be locked in the bottomless pit, which means humanity will have its first true golden age, without spiritual deception from dark forces. It’s not a fairy tale or a poetic metaphor, but the real coming triumph of the Messiah who was nailed to a cross for the sins of man, and promised to come back for his people. We ask God for the arrival of that kingdom in the Lord’s prayer, every day.
The wicked will be destroyed, Satan will be suppressed, and the world will begin to heal from the devastation of the apocalyptic events. Nobody can quite picture how this will look, but we can be sure that there will be no greater honor than to participate in the First Resurrection:
(Revelation 20:4-6) Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the Beast or its Image, and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.)
This is the First Resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the First Resurrection! Over such the Second Death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s focus on immunity from the Second Death.
Second Death is the total annihilation of the soul,1 nullifying the consciousness forever. Therefore, Judgment Day is not just about punishing people for sins or rewarding people for accepting Jesus, but a matter of deciding who the protagonists of history really were all along. After all, those who are annihilated may as well have never existed; their hopes, fears, and suffering in this world add up to nothing. At best, they will be side characters in the backstory of those who receive eternal life and move on to the New Creation. Just as God blots out the names of these rejected souls from the Book of Life, their memory and significance will invalidated too.
The protagonists of history. Yes, it’s a concept that may offend some Christians who prefer to think of everyone as inherently valuable, but the more we study Scripture, the more we see that God has a chosen few who will inherit everything, and everything else is manipulated to benefit them.
From the foundation
(Matthew 25:31-34) “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
“Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
First, let’s appreciate that Jesus says the Kingdom has been prepared for the elect since the foundation of the world, showing us that whole design of the world was a preparation for this people and their role in God’s plan. This aligns with several other passages, such as Ephesians 1, Romans 8, and Revelation 17.
(Ephesians 1:4-6, 11) For He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in His presence. In love He predestined us for adoption as His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, by which he has bestowed favor upon us in the Beloved One. … In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will,
God chooses the elect before the world starts, and He does it according to the good pleasure of His will (not ours) and according to His own counsel, not according to our choice to accept His Son; in fact, we will see in the next part of this series that it’s actually impossible for anyone to freely choose Jesus.
(Romans 8:29-30) For those whom God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those He predestined, He also called; those He called, He also justified; those He justified, He also glorified.
There are those who only focus on the “foreknowing” in the above passage, saying that God simply knew in advance who would choose to heed the Gospel due to natural circumstances and free will, and therefore God blessed them in advance. But this makes little sense logically. If these people were naturally going to believe the Gospel anyway, why give them a destiny on top of that? Plus, we know from the testimony of those who are saved by God’s grace that they were not naturally compatible, but enemies of God in their rebellion and pride, and would not have chosen it without God’s intervention in their hearts.
(Revelation 17:8) … And those who live on the earth, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world, will wonder when they see the beast that was, and is not, and will come.
Here we see that their names are already written in the Book of Life before the foundation of the world. This repeated motif of the New Testament is meant to eliminate all conjecture about human responsibility.
Let’s put it another way: before the stage was even built, the Author foreknew the characters of His story, and who among them would become the protagonists. It’s no exaggeration to say that the world is a stage for this grand narrative to unfold on. In fact, using this analogy, we could say that the stage was only built so that the play could be produced, and the play was only produced so that the Author could enjoy the transformative arc of the protagonists whom He wished to spend eternity with! God does not “foreknow” us in the sense that He viewed our wonderful personality long ago and respected it so much that He arranged for our salvation, but quite the opposite: as the Author, He devised a special story for how He alone would convert a worthless pile of dirt into an immortal priestly king in His service!
Greater than anyone
And how exactly can we know that God sees these predestined elect as being infinitely more valuable than all other humans? Jesus himself teaches:
(Luke 7:28) “I tell you, that among any born of a woman, no one is greater than John the Baptist; yet even the least in the kingdom of God is greater than him.”
Can you do the math on this, dear reader? If God considers John to be greater than every human ever born from a woman, and yet he is inferior to even the lowest member of the Kingdom of God, what does that say about the value of the elect compared to all humans in history?
You see, the protagonists of history are in a totally different league. That is why God actively manipulates all of Reality to support and foster these elect for their ultimate role in His plan:
(Romans 8:19-22, 28) For the earnest expectation of Creation waited for the sons of God to be revealed. For Creation was subjected to vanity, not by its own will, but by reason of Him who subjected it, as Creation itself hoped to be delivered from the bondage of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole Creation groaned and travailed in pain together until now. … And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
With no exaggeration, literally the entire Creation had been waiting for the elect to show up and be blessed by God with the Holy Spirit, signifying that they were destined to transcend the inevitable corruption of nature and become immortal. How much clearer could the Bible be that the elect are the protagonists of history! They are the ones who matter, while everything else is disposable. When this universe is destroyed and New Creation is formed, we will transcend from one Creation into the next, and everything that came before will only be our backstory, to the glory of the Savior who chose us, redeemed us, and preserved us.
John the Baptist
Since we’re on the subject of John the Baptist and him being greater than anyone who had been born, I’d like to remind the reader of the strange circumstance of his own birth and destiny, which was decided while he was still in the womb:
(Luke 1:13-15) But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son; you will name him John. Joy and gladness will come to you, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even before his birth.
This is amazing. Isn’t the Holy Spirit the gift given to those who repent from sin and accept Jesus as believers? And yet John was given him while he was a fetus, along with an amazing destiny that he had no control over! Talk about being scripted as one of the protagonists of history! Abram at least had to accept God’s call to leave his family and travel to a distant land, but God considered John greater than anyone who had been born… before he was born! Try explaining that by free will and rationality.
Added Thought: Day of the Lord
Earlier in this post, I quoted Jesus talking about sorting humanity into those who would have eternal life and those who would receive eternal punishment. I know the event probably sounds a lot like the final Judgment Day, and it could be, but the description fits better with the Day of the Lord, when the Son of Man comes in glory with angels, sits on a throne, and judges the nations who survived the apocalypse.
According to my analysis of both OT and NT prophecies, millions of people will likely survive the cataclysms of the end times and be brought to Jerusalem to experience the beginning of the Millennial Kingdom on earth. This fulfills many of the important prophecies Jews were hoping Jesus would fulfill the first time he came. Namely, they knew Jerusalem was supposed to become a place where the Lord personally dwelt and gave the law to the Gentile nations, including with threats of eternal fire for those who are ungodly. And sure enough, Jesus proclaims exactly that:
(Matthew 25:41, 46) “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. … And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Compare that to these verses:
Zechariah 8:3 says, Thus says the Lord, “I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. And Jerusalem shall be called City of Truth; and the mountain of the LORD of hosts will be called the holy mountain.”
Micah 4:2 says, and many nations shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
Isaiah 60:14 says, The sons of those who afflicted you shall come bending low to you,
and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.Isaiah 33:14 says, The sinners in Zion are afraid; trembling has seized the godless: “Who among us can dwell with the consuming fire? Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?”
Even in the Old Testament, there was a promise of everlasting burning for the sinners who came to Zion and had transgressed its people. The Lord was always supposed to dwell there and give the law. Jesus was supposed to rule with a rod of iron, as depicted in Revelation 2:27, 12:5, and 19:15. This is not the harmless Lamb of his earthly ministry, but the ruler of the world back for vengeance and righteousness. Obviously, this event has not happened yet, and it hardly makes sense as happening in New Creation either.
Hell for the specially cursed
Also, notice that hell was prepared for the devil and his angels, not humans. It takes a special kind of sinner to be condemned to eternal suffering, and not everyone who is unsaved will be tortured forever. In this case, those who are going to be cursed by Jesus are probably those who abandoned the Christians who were being killed in their midst during the tribulation. We’re talking about a 5-20 year span from when the churches are being destroyed to the time when Jesus will be judging the world for what they’ve done. And as for eternal life, this is also an immediate fulfillment, because the First Resurrection will grant eternal bodies to the martyrs—the very people who were killed during the tribulation by those cursed to hell!
In my book Maybe Everyone is Wrong, I examine other instances of warnings about eternal torment, and how they are consistently reserved for special audiences who rebel against God. The doctrine that everyone goes to hell if they’re not saved is a sad doctrine of the church which offends people unnecessarily. Christian apologists rush in to defend the doctrine by what means, dear reader? By emphasizing FREE WILL, of course. It wouldn’t be fair if it was fate, so they have to make believe that humans are capable of turning to Christ by rational acceptance of ideas. They claim that a human’s failure to obey God is enough to justify an eternity of torture, because they weren’t willing to take the tiny step of saying a prayer. This trivializes the miracle of adoption by God, and ignores the overwhelming evidence that salvation is not chosen by our own will, but given to us despite our will. But for a deeper study of that subject, we will require another entry in this series.
Let me know what you think of this message, or if any of your concerns were addressed:
Use this link if you want to share this post with others who need to hear the message:
Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. (Matthew 10:28) There will be eternal torture and punishment for a select group of humans who fight against Jesus and reject the warnings given by the angels during the time of God’s wrath on earth, but most humans who are unsaved will simply be destroyed and consumed, becoming nothing.
These articles always strengthen my faith and make me appreciate our God more and more.
To be candid about reality and the elect's place in it is sure to cause some hatred from the nonbelievers. I can see how we could and will become public enemy number 1
Puts into context the old saying "There but for the grace of God go I."