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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Restoration 2026: If God is Love...

Aron Crews

01 If God is Love... Why Suffering?

02 If God is Love... Why Satan?

03 If God is Love... Why the Bible?

04 If God is Love... Why the Sabbath?

05 If God is Love... Why the Rules

06 If God is Love... Why the Church?

07 If God is Love... Why Death?

09 If God is Love... Why Delay?

10 If God is Love... Why Judgment?

11 If God is Love... Why the Cross?

K'dee Elsen Crews

Freedom Through Captivity

12 If God is Love... Why Me?

08 If God is Love... Why Hell?

This presentation is really going to, in a ultimate sense, answer, hopefully, the question, if God indeed is love or not.

All the presentations, we've been learning about different facets of reality and different things in the Bible.

Do they or do they not truly communicate and reveal a God of love?

But what we're going to see this morning is, again, by God's grace, hopefully, that the cross is the ultimate answer to if God is love or not.

So our presentation this morning, if God is love, I'm gonna spend just a, I think 1 minute review of last night, just to give myself maximum amount of time.

But last night we covered, if God is love, why judgment?

And we unpacked the 3 different phases of final judgment that occur, that are revealed in the scriptures.

There is the pre-advent judgment, the judgment that takes place before the second coming.

This is the judgment of the professed followers of Christ.

God, of course, knows who's saved and lost.

None of the judgments are for God's benefit, right?

Meaning he doesn't need to go down and sit through and evaluate all of the evidence.

He can make perfect decisions in a split second.

But the pre-advent judgment is for the sake of the onlooking, angelic, heavenly universe, so that they can see that God's decisions are just and merciful and that he is love.

Really this whole process of judgment is for the sake of transparency.

So that when everything is done and settled, no 1, whether human, angel, or any other intelligent being, will have any doubt in their mind that the decisions that God has made and how he has responded to the crisis of sin in the universe was done in any way less than the perfect way possible.

Then you have the millennial judgment, this thousand-year period after Jesus comes and before he comes a third time for the resurrection of the unrighteous.

So at the second coming, there would be the resurrection of the righteous, and then we spend 1000 years with Jesus in heaven.

This is why we call it the millennial judgment, the thousand year period.

And basically this is the judgment where we look over the decisions that God has made.

And we have all of our questions answered.

Believe it or not, even better than I've done this week.

God will answer for himself in all of the questions that we have about who's saved, who's lost, why this, why that will be fully answered and we will get to evaluate God's judgments and confirm that they indeed are just.

This is the final, the final, final judgment of the wicked when they are then resurrected and there is a need for final judgment.

Some people say, well, they already died.

What's the point of bringing them back just to judge them again?

Well, it's because there is a need for closure within this universe.

They need to fully face what they have done and be held accountable, and at the end of that, they will all confess that God is just in what their own punishment is.

So all of it will testify that God, in fact, is love.

In order to ultimately win the war against sin, Satan and evil, God must not only do what is just, but also be seen and understood as doing what is just from beginning to end.

And that is what the judgment is all about, showing God's full transparency.

With God, it is the means that justify the end, not the other way around.

I guess it was more like 2, maybe 3 minute review.

But now on to this morning's presentation, which by the way this is the only morning presentation, so it's good to be in the a.m.

The cross is a very fascinating belief when you compare it with all other world religions out there.

In fact, Christianity is the only religion whose central pillar, the very foundation, the core of what Christianity proclaims, is the ignominious torture and execution of its own God.

Like it's so radically different than any other world of religion where it's like the pinnacle that we sing praises to God is like, yes, He died.

That seems so contrary to every other, that seems contrary to human nature and contrary to any other world of religion out there.

And what we're gonna discover is, there it is again, uh-oh.

Wow, if you were here last night, I did a real, you know, my voice cracked.

What we're going to discover this morning is that the trauma at the tree in the Garden of Eden and the entering in of sin, suffering and the accusations of Satan are only fully dealt with at the trauma at the tree of Calvary.

So what we're gonna do, earlier on in the week I did have a presentation that connected the the deceptive why Satan.

Because we need to now show how that connects The original sin, how sin came into the human experience, is then answered by Jesus on the cross.

So we're looking at it though from the perspective of trauma because frankly, the cross experience is a, was a, is a, if someone still gets crucified nowadays, a very traumatic experience.

Trauma, we can understand to mean a deeply distressing or disturbing experience, whether physically experienced or emotionally.

And arguably, the most traumatic experience that we have in human history is War, right?

War is the place where the most trauma happens in human experience, right?

It's just trauma compounded to the extreme.

My wife works as a psychologist and she has her specialty in trauma and she has dealt a lot with veterans, retired military folk, and they carry a lot of trauma.

So we see in Revelation chapter 12 that war, traumatic event, broke out in heaven.

Michael's angels fought with the dragon, the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them any longer.

So the great dragon, the antagonist in this cosmic conflict story, the dragon was cast out, that serpent of old called the devil and Satan who deceives the whole world.

So then in order to understand this traumatic war that began in heaven we need to unpack the or rather we get direction from the 3 titles of the dragon.

He's called the Serpent of Old, the Devil, and Satan.

So we have an insight into the character of him.

Satan means enemy or also accuser, which is also a slanderous title.

And then we see the story of Genesis 3, the serpent of old is going to highlight the serpent, Satan, as a slanderer and as an accuser.

So let's now go back to revisit Genesis 3, taking a pit stop in the New Testament in 2 Corinthians 11, verse 3, where Paul says to his church, to his friends there in Corinth, he says, "'I fear, lest somehow as Eve, "'as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness.

"'For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, he says, you may well put up with it.

In other words, Paul is nervous that he presented the true Christ to them, that someone is gonna come along and then present a counterfeit, a false picture of who Jesus is, and that they're going to believe it.

The point here that we need to walk away with and understand is that Paul understood that the temptation, the deception, the craftiness of the serpent in Genesis 3 was in that he presented to Eve another Jesus.

In other words, he misrepresented who God was to Eve, which is what then led her to rebel against him.

So that's what we're gonna see as we unpack the story of Genesis 3.

There we read that the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

Notice, again, we are, what's being highlighted in the narrative is the intellect, the savvy, the cunningness of the serpent, not his brute strength, right?

So this is, again, a war, a battle of deception.

Then the serpent, Eve finds herself by the tree, and the serpent is there, and the serpent then engages in a dialogue with Eve, and he begins by asking her a question of which he basically misquotes God, right?

Sort of asking her to clarify, hey I sort of overheard earlier in the week and I heard God say the following.

Has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

It's like, I think God sort of said that, but let's take a look to just so we're clear on what God actually said.

In Genesis 2, we read, of every tree, God is speaking, of every tree of the garden, you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall surely die." So what we see in God's original command was he was telling them that They had access to every tree in the garden.

This is maximizing their freedom, maximizing their options.

And then he adds 1 small restriction, But of the 1 tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that tree I don't want you to eat of.

Series

Restoration 2026: If God is Love...

11 If God is Love... Why the Cross?

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Revelation Made Simple

2. The Angels of Revelation at War

47m

The Sanctuary, God's Answer to the Sin Problem

Why Jesus Waits

1h

The Divine Solution

1h 33m

Keys of Revelation

4. God on Trial

59m

Don’t Lose Heart

50m

Revelation Today Crusade

3. War Of the Stars

1h

Restoration 2026: If God is Love...

10 If God is Love... Why Judgment?

1h 10m

The Supremacy of Scripture

1h 11m

Antichrist: The One You've Never Known

Antichrist, Episode 6: Revealed

38m

Plenaries with Dwayne Lemon

Purify Our Motives

1h 43m

Power of the Everlasting Gospel

The Covenant’s Promised Blessings!

1h 18m

A Beginning With No End

Come On In

50m

Sound Doctrine