What Is Our Common Salvation?

In the house church I once attended, the lay minister claimed that Jude 1:3 referred to everybody becoming saved. This Universalist idea is wrong and many scriptures refute the belief that nobody is sent to hell forever.

So what did Jude mean about our common salvation? It's open to every person who surrenders control of their lives to Christ. Peter proclaimed in Acts 2:39 (Bible in Basic English) that, "For the word of God is for you and for your children and for all those who are far off, even all those who may be marked out by the Lord our God."

In one of Christ's parables, he described the end of the age as the end of a day when a farmer hired day labourers to reap his field. We see in Matthew 20:16 (King James Version) that not everybody will be chosen to follow him. "So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen."

Those Universalists should also read Matthew 8:29 (BBE). Even the demons knew better than to think hell didn't last forever. "And they gave a loud cry, saying, 'What have we to do with you, you Son of God? Have you come here to give us punishment before the time?'"

I've written before about Luke Chapter sixteen and how the rich man had a great gulf fixed between him and heaven so nobody could cross it. This one verse alone shows that going to hell is a one way trip.

But for us who are marked out for salvation, we won't ever depart out of Christ's glorious kingdom. As Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 4:16 and 17 (BBE), "Because the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a word of authority, with the voice of the chief angel, with the sound of a horn: and the dead in Christ will come to life first; Then we who are still living will be taken up together with them into the clouds to see the Lord in the air: and so will we be for ever with the Lord."

If that doesn't happen by Thursday, I plan on posting about the best sort of peace.