When I first began to glimpse what I now call the Larger Hope, I did not start in Genesis.
Like many of you, I started with Paul.
His language in Romans, 1 Corinthians, Colossians, and elsewhere is so sweeping, so stubbornly "all" in scope, that it begs the question: if God really intends to reconcile all things in Christ, do we see any hint of that purpose before we ever get to Paul?
In the last post we looked at Paul as the fountainhead of Christian universalism.
In this post and the next, I want to walk backwards into the Old Testament and simply ask: What kind of God-story are we already being told?
The promise that starts too wide to ignore
You do not have to get very far into your Bible before you run into one of the most audacious promises ever uttered.
God calls a wandering man named Abram and says:
"In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." — Genesis 12:3
That promise does not shrink as the story goes on; it expands.
God repeats it and intensifies it:
- "All the nations of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 18:18).
- "In your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed" (Genesis 22:18).
From the very beginning, the trajectory is outward.
God is not merely rescuing one family from the rest; He is choosing one family for the rest.
Israel's story is not a cul-de-sac.
It is a doorway.
When Paul later reads this promise through the lens of Jesus, he hears it as a gospel announcement that God's purpose has always been the blessing of all the families of the earth.
That is one reason the Larger Hope does not feel to me like an add-on.
It feels like the fulfillment of something that was baked into the dough of the story from the first kneading.
Chosen for the sake of the many
If you grew up hearing that "election" meant God picked a few for heaven and passed over the rest, the Old Testament will surprise you.
Israel is chosen, yes.
But she is chosen in the same way a priest is chosen: to stand between God and the world for the world's sake.
When the Lord calls Israel a "kingdom of priests" and a "holy nation" (Exodus 19:6), He is not announcing a private club.
He is announcing a vocation.
Priests exist for others.
They carry the people before God and the blessing of God back to the people.
If the Larger Hope has a root system in the Old Testament, it is here: God's election is not a fence to keep most people out; it is a bridge by which many may come in.
Isaiah's wide-angle lens
By the time you reach the prophets, the camera pulls back.
The horizon keeps getting wider.
Isaiah, in particular, cannot stop talking about a future that is bigger than Israel's narrow survival.
He sees a day when:
"The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." — Isaiah 11:9
That is not small language.
However you picture it, "as the waters cover the sea" is not a few puddles of knowledge in a mostly ignorant world.
It is saturation.
Later, Isaiah dares to say that God will "swallow up death forever" and "wipe away tears from all faces" (Isaiah 25:7–8).
Again, notice the breadth.
Not "some" faces.
Not "the faces we deem acceptable".
All faces.
You do not have to be a trained theologian to feel where this is leaning.
The direction of travel is toward a world where death itself is defeated and joy runs deep enough to dry every eye.
A chorus of voices, not just one
Isaiah is not singing solo.
The prophetic choir joins him.
Zephaniah hears God saying:
"I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord." — Zephaniah 3:9
Here again the language is stubbornly inclusive.
"All of them" calling on the Lord, "with one accord".
That does not settle every doctrinal question.
But it does tell us something about the heart of God and the direction of His purposes.
God is not content with a sliver.
He wants the choir fully staffed.
What the Old Testament is (and is not) doing
Now, let me say plainly what I am not saying.
I am not claiming that the Old Testament lays out a fully developed doctrine of universal salvation.
It does not.
It is a long, rough, beautiful story, not a tidy systematic theology.
What I am saying is this:
From the first promise to Abram through the prophets' wide-angle visions, we are being trained to expect that God's endgame is expansive blessing.
- All the families of the earth.
- All the nations.
- The earth filled with the knowledge of the Lord.
- Death swallowed up.
- Tears wiped from all faces.
- All peoples calling on the Lord with one voice.
If Paul later dares to speak of God reconciling "all things" in Christ, he is not changing the subject.
He is putting a name and a face on the hope that has been rumbling underneath the story all along.
In the next post, we need to face a harder question.
If the Old Testament sings this loudly about blessing, what do we do with all the passages about wrath, judgment, and fire?
Many of us were taught to read those texts as the Old Testament giving us the raw material for the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.
But what if the fire the prophets see is not the fire of a sadistic jailer, but the fire of a Refiner who will not quit until the metal shines?
That is where we will go next.
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