I Thessalonians 1:10, 2:16, 5:7-9. Wrath is coming. God is very angry. Evil has proliferated on the planet He created to be a haven of His love and joy. All of these verses tell us that Jesus has delivered us from this wrath. But if the "us" means everyone, with whom is God still angry? Is there to be no judgment after all? Universalism turns everything upside down.

II Thessalonians 1:7-10. False teachers, especially those who deny eternal judgment, should take note of these vehement ideas from the apostle, words that are ultimately from the Spirit of God:

1. One day Jesus, an angry Jesus, will be revealed from Heaven. He is coming to judge the earth!

2. Those who do not know God and those who do not obey the Gospel will face a reward of flaming fire.

3. The punishment will be far from merely corrective. It will be everlasting destruction. It is awful when those two words are placed together. The Universalists have challenged the meaning of "everlasting" in the Greek. Of course they must, for it is key to their argument. The New Testament is clear that punishment is forever. We'll look at that word study just after the book-by-book commentary.

4. Forever these evil ones will be separated from the presence of the Lord.

5. From that day on He will be surrounded by and adored by all those who have believed in Him. And no one else.

II Thessalonians 2:9-12. More seriously bad news for the Universalist. These verses are what would be called in the world of baseball "no-doubters". Over the wall. Out of the park.

First, the lawless one. The antichrist. Now, he is, after all, a man. He will be a man full of the un-holy spirit, but still a man. Would the Universalist be so brash as to conclude that even this man will one day be reconciled to God? If so, let me, or rather Paul, dash that hope to the ground right here:

When the Lord comes the very brightness of His coming will destroy the antichrist. Consumed by the breath of Jesus' mouth. Zap. Gone. And remember that, in the context of II Thessalonians, and I believe, all of the New Testament, this destruction is an everlasting destruction. Being destroyed once is a horrible thing. Being destroyed forever...

Not only the man of sin, but all men of all time who did not receive the love of the truth, they too will perish eternally. They did not want to be saved on Christ's terms. Now they find that these were the only terms available. Lost forever, says Paul.

Not only so, but also (and those who cringe at anything sounding Calvinistic must here close their ears) God will be involved in allowing their deception, as with Pharaoh, because of their hard-hearted response to God's truth. They wanted their own pleasure more than the righteousness of God. So God will give them the desires of their evil hearts, then condemn them to the devil's hell.

Universalism is wrong. It is leading souls to the very hell they say cannot exist for them. Beware of this poison!

II Thessalonians 3:2. How it could be possible for Paul's readers not to get what he was saying in chapters 1 and 2, I do not know. But one little post script here in chapter 3 seals it up for us: