Being "saved" does not mean we have been given a ticket to a paradise in the sky. Being "saved" means God has given us the opportunity to escape the image and works of Satan and to lay hold on the image and works of Christ. The faith and diligence with which we respond to our opportunity will determine our eternal destiny. This is the thesis of many of our writings. A thorough reformation of Christian thinking is necessary if our thesis is to be established as a guiding principle of Christian doctrine and practice.

It is our understanding that both the physical and spirit realms are places of instruction for us. We believe also that God's purpose in creating the physical realm is that through it He may reveal His will to all His creatures.

While the revelation of God's Person takes place in us to a certain extent during our sojourn in the present era, it may require many millennia before the unique revelation of the Lord God that each of us is has begun to approach maturity.

Before we can participate in the program of revealing the invisible God we must be willing to die to all we are, to come forth as a naked spirit before the Judgment Seat of Christ, and through His judgment of us be brought into newness of life.

No eternal witness of God can come through the human personality but only through the new man who is the unique union of Christ and the individual. All of the first personality must be so burned by the Divine fire and infused with Christ as to constitute a new creation.

As it is true that the judgment of the saint can take place in either the physical realm or the spirit realm, so it is true that the wicked can be judged in either realm. The wheat and the tares are growing together, not only in the physical realm but also in the spiritual, as we understand it. Certainly Satan and his followers are maturing in evil.

Physical death does not change anything of significance, because human beings are eternal spirits, not fleshly animals that perish in the dust. We are alive somewhere, and the process of redemption through judgment continues, or else will continue in the Day of the Lord.

The Divine judgment will not have been concluded until the saints descend from Heaven as the gloriously perfected Wife of the Lamb, the nations of saved peoples of the earth are walking in the Light of God's Presence shining in the saints, and the wicked have been thrown into the Lake of Fire. The Divine judgment, which began with the atoning death and triumphant resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, will continue until that time.

For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit. (I Peter 4:6)

Christ entered the spiritual prison and brought the Gospel of the Kingdom to the spirits confined there. Those spirits then were required, as we are, to choose to receive Christ as both Lord and Savior. They were judged as we are, although they were not at that time alive on the earth.

To be continued.