As I assume happens to every believer at one time or another, I sometimes have occasions where I’ll begin to question whether what we believe is true — including whether or not the Bible really is the word of God — or whether those of us who believe what we do might just be fooling ourselves into believing lies. Well, when this happens these days, I simply have to remind myself of a certain factor that’s taken place repeatedly over the last few years.
You see, back in 2021, I wrote a book-length Bible study (which you can find here) going over all the relevant passages of Scripture that I believe prove the eventual salvation of all humanity (among many other related foundational doctrines we believe), as well as all of the passages that are used to try to defend the doctrine of never-ending punishment, in order to demonstrate that the latter batch of passages don’t actually mean what most people assume they do.
Since publishing the study, I’ve sent it to thousands of different Christians, with many of them promising to read it and send me a written refutation of the scriptural interpretations and arguments I made in it. Well, over the years, I’ve received exactly zero refutations of the study. To be fair, I received a few misguided attempts at refuting the first two or three points I made in the study before they gave up, but had they taken the time to read the whole thing before writing what they did (as I advised them to do in the study’s introduction), they’d have discovered that every argument they made was already answered thoroughly further on in the study (sometimes in the very paragraph which came after the one they stopped reading at, ironically enough).
What’s also interesting is that a fair number of the Christians I sent it to, many of them highly educated, wrote back saying that they couldn’t make heads nor tails of what I was trying to say in the study, with the term “word salad” tossed at me more than once. At least one of them, who claimed to have read many complicated university textbooks over the years, told me that the sentences in the document were pure gibberish, as though I’d just thrown random words on the page, and that he simply had no idea what I was trying to say in it.
Why this is interesting is because of the last group of people who got back to me. You see, quite literally every single person who told me they actually read the entire study through to the end without skipping over any parts of it also told me that they’re now believers in the doctrine of the salvation of all humanity, as well as believers in the rest of our core doctrines that I covered in that study (and that they weren’t before they began reading it), with many of them telling me that not only did the study make perfect sense and that it was actually quite easy to understand, but also that they believed anyone who read the whole study would definitely be convinced that the Bible indeed teaches the salvation of all. In addition, some of them also told me that they normally had a difficult time reading books, and that this was one of the few longer reads they were able to get through with no problem, contrary to the experience of some of the supposedly highly-educated Christians who claimed the study made no sense at all.
And this didn’t just happen once. Instead, it keeps happening over and over again, telling me that there’s a supernaturally-induced blindness being enforced on most people who try to read it, in order to prevent those who aren’t meant to see the truth right now from reading it and coming to believe Paul’s Gospel (of which the salvation of all is a foundational element), lining up perfectly with what 2 Corinthians 4:3-4 says: “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”
This, of course, also reassures me that the scriptural interpretations and arguments laid out in the study (which includes all of the “core doctrines” we believe are related to Paul’s Gospel) are indeed correct, and that God just won’t allow most Christians to read the whole thing because, if they did, they’d certainly come to believe the true Gospel as explained in the study, and they’d then get saved before the time that God intends for them to enjoy salvation.
So if you’re a member of the true body of Christ and are ever having doubts about the truths we believe, the fact that many otherwise intelligent Christians are incapable of even reading a Bible study discussing the reasons we believe what we do should be all the proof you’ll ever need that you’re on the right track.