Would it surprise our reader if we insisted that the goal of salvation is not limited to escaping Hell and going to Heaven? There is a Hell and there is a Heaven. But there is more to the salvation that is in the Lord Jesus than escaping Hell, as important as such an escape is.

Our Lord Jesus spoke a few times of the tormenting fires into which the wicked will be cast. The Lord never spoke of going to Heaven as the object of the Gospel of the Kingdom, the goal of His teaching.

How does God profit if untransformed people escape Hell? How has this solved the problem of sin and rebellion in the creation?

If we place our trust in the Lord Jesus and are baptized in water, and then live as a Christian should, we will escape the wrath of God (I Thessalonians 1:10). But the Christian salvation is not a plan for man's escaping Hell and going to Heaven when he dies. Rather, the Christian redemption is a change in man so he can have fellowship with God. Fellowship with God brings immortality to man and eventually leads him into Paradise.

The problem of current teaching is that it presents a means whereby unchanged mankind can regain Paradise. It makes the return of rebels to Paradise, rather than a restoration of the fallen man, the goal of the Divine redemption.

The current concept of salvation is largely mythological. It proceeds from man's love for himself. It accounts for the present ungodliness among the members of the Christian churches. The believers have been taught that they have been unconditionally saved from wrath. When they die they will go to Paradise (they think), whether or not there is a change in what they are and how they behave. The apostolic doctrine of Divine grace has been perverted in our day.

The true scriptural salvation is a change in the individual. It is the transformation of the person into the image of Jesus so he can have fellowship with God. All we desire comes through fellowship with God. Fellowship with God is not produced by our partaking vicariously of the perfection of Jesus but by the working in us of a new creation.

If we would have fellowship with God we must be transformed in personality and in behavior. We must partake of the Life and Virtue of the living Lord Jesus.

The goal of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God is to bring about the performing of God's will in the earth as it is in Heaven. The goal of the Gospel is the return of God to the earth and the resulting abundance of love, joy, peace, immortality, and paradisiac surroundings.

Adam and Eve lost the opportunity to attain immortality because of their disobedience to God. Then they were driven from Paradise.

The Lord Jesus is our Redeemer. He came to restore to us the opportunity to attain immortality and to enter once more into Paradise on the earth.

The Gospel of the Kingdom of God has to do with the restoration of what has been lost by disobedience to God. In the Hebrew Prophets the emphasis is on the coming of the Glory of God to the earth. Christ will return in His Kingdom to the earth.

To be continued.