SPEs (9) Our Choice

The powers of evil will ask, “Can we leave our evil life behind and return to following God.”

Jesus will say, “You can, but my followers will make the final decision. The Father said that those who follow me will judge the angels”.

Do you not know that we shall judge angels (1 Cor 6:3)?

Christians who know that verse and are looking forward to condemning evil angels to hell have not understood it. What God was saying is that we will decide their fate. We will decide whether they are allowed to come back onto his side. We will have to decide if we will trust them to work with us again, after all they have done to us.

We have authority to decide the fate of the spiritual powers of evil because they operated on earth and authority on earth has been given to humans. Once that authority has been restored by the advance of the gospel, we will have authority over all spiritual power operating on earth.

God’s plan to reconcile everything in heaven to him will fail if we refuse, because we do not trust those who have done evil. For his purposes to be fulfilled, we will have to forgive follower spirits and welcome them back to serving God.

The scriptures say that we will judge the angels. This is not a moral judgement, like the one we will face. Rather, when the spirits hear Jesus voice and decide to return to his Kingdom, humans will have to decide if they should be allowed back, given that they have done so much evil. Our natural inclination will be to say “no”, because we do not trust them.

If we are going to welcome them back, we will need to love them as God loves them. I suspect that we have prevented many spirits from returning to the fold because we are ungracious towards them. If we love them, we would have reconciled many of them already.

Love
If we are going to welcome follower spirits back, we will need to love them as God loves them. I suspect that we have prevented many of them from returning to the fold because we hate them. If we loved them, we would have reconciled many of them already.

God loves all the angels and spirits that he created, even though many opposed his plans. He understands that they have been tricked into hearing and obeying the wrong voice. He has a plan to rescue them and bring them back into his kingdom (Col 1:20).

We hate bad spirits because they do evil; We find it hard to imagine that they could be reconciled with God. We just assume that they will be evil forever. However, God has never stopped loving them. He created them and is sad to see them hearing and obeying a different voice. He wants to rescue them.

If we were as gracious as God, we would love them and want to see them reconciled with the Father. If we loved them instead of hating them, we would have more authority over them, because our voice would be clearer with more authority (hate obscures authority).
We should be praying for the time when the spirits in the spiritual realms will be reconciled with the Father. We have been forgiven much, so we must be willing to forgive those that have done great evil.