SO MUCH SUFFERING
My testimony contains information that, according to the many entries in my guest book, and the many positive emails in my email file folders, is helping many people. My guest book can be accessed towards the bottom of my front page at
http://greater-emmanuel.org/Hope4You/
Also see the testimonies at http://www.tentmaker.org/visitorcomments.htm
My guest book only holds 150 messages. Then the oldest ones are automatically deleted to make room for the newest ones.
SO MUCH SUFFERING is caused by the horrific false doctrine of endless suffering in hell, that it gives me great pleasure to guide people to the evidence that a correctly (literally, not interpretively) translated Bible teaches universal salvation, not endless suffering in hell, or even annihilation.
We agree with fundamentalist Christians that we should not believe things that go against Biblical teaching. We don’t.
I'm 69, and I am acquainted with many people who are, or were in various stages of nervous breakdown over their inability to love a god who would let anyone suffer forever. Even though they have embraced Christ and His gospel, they are afraid of what God might do to them after they are raised from the dead for not being able to love Him. The information in my testimony has helped many of these people.
If any member or surfer on this forum is suffering because they are unable to successfully emotionally cope with the idea that God is going to let any creature suffer forever, they can Google up the more than 600 page search engine at the top of the TENTMAKER front page. Just type in a key word or phrase from each argument or scripture passages and ten articles will appear that refute the eternal hell and annihilationist doctrines.
Then click to the next page and ten more articles will appear, and so on and so on for many pages.
Most fundamentalist Christians are not even aware that there are two sides to the argument about what the Bible teaches.
I have exhaustively studied both sides myself. This debate always ends with the words, "My Greek scholars are more reliable than your Greek scholars," and the result is a stalemate.
If your readers think it glorifies God more to believe that He is going to let some of His creatures suffer forever, then they should keep believing that.
But if they think it glorifies God more to eventually meet everyone on the level of their greatest and deepest need, which is a change in their stubborn will, then I would like them to know that that is exactly what the Bible teaches that God is like.
I am a Concordant Christian. I have read and recorded gleanings into my more than four thousand page personal journal from most of the back issues of UNSEARCHABLE RICHES that has been published back to 1909. Every argument that I have ever heard against the Bible teaching universal salvation have been repeatedly dealt with in these magazines.

Largely, but not exclusively, because of the contents in these magazines, I am convinced that the evidence in support of the Bible teaching universal salvation is irrefutable. That is why the argument that we should teach endless suffering in hell just in case it might be true is unacceptable to me. IMHO the greatest of all manifestations of God's grace in action on this earth is that anyone can believe in "eternal suffering" for anyone and not have a nervous breakdown thinking about it.

Here are several Concordant websites.
http://www.concordant.org/
http://www.saviourofall.org/
http://gtft.org/
http://www.tentmaker.org/
Regarding arguments against the Bible teaching universal salvation, see
http://www.tentmaker.org/books/BibleThreateningsExplained.html
Any hell that anyone will experience the Bible calls "kolasis aionian," which means age-during corrective chastisement.
http://www.tentmaker.org/books/asw/Chapter11.html
It is limited in duration, and corrective in purpose.
http://www.tentmaker.org/books/Aion_lim.html
Regarding the most common argument that the same word for "punishment" is also used for "life" see the following:
All three of these articles should be studied with care, especially the third one.

http://concordant.org/expohtml/TheEons/eon1.html
http://concordant.org/expohtml/TheEons/eon2.html
http://concordant.org/expohtml/TheEons/eon3.html

also see:

http://concordant.org/expohtml/TheEons/aion.html
http://concordant.org/version/tranprin.html

I also would like to leave you with one more link. I am going to guide you to the testimony of a man whose experience was almost identical to mine. Even the thought processes that took him into, through, and out of his breakdown are the same as mine. Only he is more eloquent in telling his story than I am in telling mine. His name is Charles Slagle.
http://www.tentmaker.org/books/Absolute-Assurance-in-Jesus-Christ.html
It may begin to change your thinking.
The url of my own site is
http://greater-emmanuel.org/Hope4You/

OK after reading a lot of your things I have a serious problem with something you said in this one.

"I'm 69, and I am acquainted with many people who are, or were in various stages of nervous breakdown over their inability to love a god who would let anyone suffer forever. Even though they have embraced Christ and His gospel, they are afraid of what God might do to them after they are raised from the dead for not being able to love Him. The information in my testimony has helped many of these people."

OK basically you have said that you are acquainted with many people who have judged God as unrighteous and are afriad God is going to punish them for saying he's wrong and unjust. Your testimony makes people feel BETTER about thinking this way of God?

ROMANS 9: 13-16 As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.

ROMANS 3:3-4 For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged.

People need to quit taking their ideas of whats right and wrong and defining who God is with them. What you and I think is wrong doesn't mean squat. What GOD says is wrong is what really matters. If he says he casts the wicked in the lake of fire forever then HE IS RIGHT IN DOING IT. It's a very serious thing to look at something God does and then say "I can't love a god who would do something like that." I would HATE to be one of the people who said that!

Men must not attempt to remove the guilt that only God can remove.

Hebrews 10:22
Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.

God has provided a means through which man may become clean, not just feel clean. What lasting benefit would I be doing my brethren if I made them feel accepted by God, but in reality they were not?

All men will stand before the God who said "vengeance is mine"

Jeremiah 46:10
For this is the day of the Lord GOD of hosts, a day of vengeance, that he may avenge him of his adversaries:...

The message of the Gospel would loose it's relevance if this day of judgment was not real. What possible purpose would God be serving in taking away sin if in the end it didn't really matter anyway?

Besides all this, God has spoken through the Prophets concerning this day, Jesus has spoken and pronounced some "woes" concerning it and the Apostles also preached concerning escaping this impending day of wrath. It seems to me that anyone who would attempt to disprove something that God has so clearly demonstrated as being true, is not operating with an honest and good heart. I want to be charitable but when faced with the day of wrath this is serious business. This is no time to be "walking" on egg shells. The truth concerning the lake of fire is real and it needs to be preached as God presents it, not as "some" men perceive it.

In Christ,
Robert Cobb