Chapter 1

The Eclipse of Grace

McClymond’s Master Thesis and the Book’s Overarching Answer

The Argument on the Table

Nathan is a thoughtful young pastor in his early thirties. He has a growing church, a shelf of commentaries, and a question that will not let him go. He has spent four months working through Michael McClymond’s two-volume The Devil’s Redemption, all 1,272 pages. He sets the books on the table between us, leans back, and says quietly: “If the case against the hope is this learned, this careful, this wide, can I still hold it with a clear conscience?”

That question is this book.

Nathan is not an eccentric. He holds the creeds. He confesses the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, the real atonement of the cross, and the full authority of Scripture. He believes salvation comes through personal faith in Jesus Christ. But he has come to believe something else, too. He has come to believe that God will, in the end, bring every person He has ever made to that saving faith, so that all are reconciled and “God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). That hope is what McClymond’s book takes aim at. And McClymond’s aim is steady.¹

The charge at the heart of The Devil’s Redemption comes in chapter 12, titled “The Eclipse of Grace.” It is the capstone of 1,200 pages of history, theology, and careful argument. It is also the single most serious claim any critic has ever made against the hope of universal salvation. Here is McClymond in his own words:

Read that claim again. It is not a straw man. It is not a slogan. McClymond has spent eleven chapters tracing universalism from the second-century gnostics to the charismatic preachers of the 2010s. He has read everyone. And his verdict is this: the effort to give grace to all people, over and over, ends up destroying grace for any person. The grace gets so wide that it stops being grace at all.²

How does it happen? McClymond identifies three paths. Universalism, he argues, keeps replacing the free, costly, Christ-given grace of the gospel with something cheaper. It replaces grace with nature (the soul is divine and saves itself by what it is). It replaces grace with necessity (all must be saved as a matter of logic, so salvation is owed, not given). Or it replaces grace with self-expiation (the soul pays off its own sin in postmortem fire, so the cross is no longer doing the saving).³

Each of these paths leads to the same place. If the soul saves itself, Christ did not need to die for it. If salvation is a law of the universe, the cross was a display piece, not a rescue. If the sinner scrubs his own guilt clean in the fires of purgation, the blood of Christ was a down payment on a bill the sinner still pays himself. In every case, McClymond concludes, grace is eclipsed.⁴

Nathan has read all this. He felt the weight of it. So have I.

Why This Charge Has Force

I want to be honest from the start. McClymond’s charge is not a cheap shot. It is not a misreading. Against certain kinds of universalism, it lands hard, and it ought to.

There really is a gnostic universalism that teaches the soul is a spark of the divine, trapped in matter, destined to float home by the sheer weight of what it is. That is not grace. That is autopilot. McClymond traces this strand from the second-century Valentinians through the Kabbalistic tradition into the modern esoteric teachers. His work is careful and real.⁵

There really is a necessitarian universalism that insists all must be saved because the rational will cannot finally refuse God. David Bentley Hart makes this case with brilliance and force. I admire his work and use it often in this book. But I part company with him right here, because if salvation is a logical requirement, it is hard to call it a gift.⁶

And there really is a purgatorial universalism in which the sinner suffers his way clean after death, paying off his own debt in the fires. Sergius Bulgakov, as McClymond documents, rejected “simple forgiveness” as “sentimental.” Every sin, Bulgakov insisted, “must be lived through to the end.” McClymond rightly names the irony: Bulgakov placed the full burden of expiation on the sinner’s own back.⁷

Against all three of these, the eclipse charge lands. Grace is eclipsed in these systems. McClymond is right about that, and I will say so plainly throughout this book.

And the charge does not only touch the fringe cases. McClymond presses it against some of the best-known universalists of the modern era, too. He argues that even Thomas Talbott’s carefully argued case leaves the cross less central than it should be. He worries that Robin Parry’s evangelical universalism, for all its biblical grounding, slides toward a purgatorial model that makes suffering, not the atonement, the real agent of change. He charges that the charismatic universalists of the 2010s turned grace into license. Each of these claims needs its own careful answer, and each will get one later in this book.³⁶

The reason the eclipse charge cuts so deep is that it names a real pattern. It is not a slander. McClymond has done the homework. He has read the gnostic texts, the Kabbalistic sources, the Böhme tradition, the German idealists, and the modern charismatic preachers. He has traced a real history, and within that history, the pattern is real: the desire to save everyone can corrupt the gospel that does the saving.

I take that pattern seriously. I take it so seriously that every chapter of this book carries a teal-bordered box called the Boundary callout, whose only job is to ask: does this objection wound the biblical hope, or only one of the counterfeits?

But here is the question that drives every chapter that follows: does the charge reach the biblical hope?

There is a universalism that holds the full creed. It confesses the Trinity, the real atonement of the cross, and the authority of Scripture. It insists that every person who is saved is saved through personal faith in Christ, by grace, through the work of the Holy Spirit. It rejects the gnostic spark, the necessitarian logic, and the self-paying sinner. And it still believes that God will, in the end, freely win every human heart.

McClymond’s eclipse-of-grace charge devastates the counterfeits. The question of this book is whether it touches the real thing.

The Response

1. The Map of the Book

McClymond’s charge has three prongs, and each will get its own chapter. The claim that universalism replaces grace with nature (the soul is divine and returns to God by its own kind) is answered in Chapter 4. The claim that it replaces grace with necessity (all must be saved by logical force) is answered in Chapter 5. The claim that it replaces grace with self-expiation (the sinner purges his own guilt in the fire) is answered in Chapter 6.⁸

This chapter does not attempt all three answers. It frames the whole case. It sets out the master thesis, grants what is true in it, and sketches the reply that the next thirty-nine chapters will fill in. Think of this chapter as the opening statement in a long trial. The evidence comes later.

But the sketch matters, because the reply has a shape. It is not a list of denials. It is a single insight pressed forty times: the universalism McClymond defeats is real, but it is not the one this book holds.

2. Which Grace?

The word “grace” does real work in McClymond’s argument, so it is worth asking what it means. McClymond draws on the biblical languages to make his case. The Hebrew word for grace (hen, “the kind turning of one person to another”) carries an element of freedom and spontaneity. The related Hebrew word (hesed, “loving-kindness”) “cannot be reduced to what is owed or to a duty.” The Greek word (charis, “gift, favor”) in the New Testament refers to God’s free, unearned gift in Christ.⁹

McClymond is right that grace is free, personal, and unowed. His point is that if salvation is automatic, it is not free. If it is owed by the nature of things, it is not a gift. If the sinner pays for it himself, it is not unearned. All three of those are true.

But here is where the argument turns. Biblical universalism does not make grace automatic. It makes grace effective. There is a vast difference between the two.

Automatic grace means no one ever needed saving in the first place. The soul is already divine and merely needs to remember it. That is the gnostic version, and McClymond is right to reject it.

Effective grace means something quite different. It means that the God who freely chose to save has the love, the wisdom, and the patience to finish what He started. Every person who is saved is saved by the cross, through faith, by the work of the Spirit. The “yes” is real. The faith is real. The cross is doing all the saving. What the universalist adds is not a different kind of grace but a wider reach for the same grace. We believe God’s pursuing love will, in the end, win every heart. Not by force, but by the sheer goodness of the truth, presented by a God who knows each soul and knows what it takes for that soul to freely say yes.¹⁰

Think of it this way. A doctor who heals one patient by medicine has not made medicine automatic. A doctor who heals every patient in the ward by the same medicine has not made it automatic either. He has just used more of it. The medicine is still real. The healing is still real. The only thing that has changed is the number of people who received it.

That is the shape of the claim. Grace is the medicine. The cross is the prescription. Faith is the patient swallowing it. The universalist says every patient will, in the end, take the medicine, because the Doctor is patient enough and wise enough to find a way to reach each one. That does not make the medicine unnecessary. It makes the Doctor that good.³⁷

George Sidney Hurd, in The Universal Solution, presses this insight into the center of the old Calvinist-Arminian debate. If God’s grace is truly irresistible, as the Calvinist holds, then extend that grace to all, as the Arminian’s texts demand. The result is not the end of grace. It is grace without limit and without partiality. Hurd’s point is sharp: a God who extends His personal, irrevocable call to every human soul has not cheapened the call. He has shown it to be as wide as His love.⁴¹

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people. (Titus 2:11, ESV)

Paul does not say grace appeared for some. He says it appeared “bringing salvation for all people.” The scope is as wide as the human race. The vehicle is still grace.¹¹

3. The Contingency McClymond Wants Is Still Here

McClymond insists, rightly, that grace must be “contingent rather than necessary.” By “contingent” he means that salvation depends on God’s free choice to act in history. It did not have to happen. God freely chose to send His Son. The cross was not a cosmic requirement but a gift.¹²

I agree with every word of that.

The universalism this book defends keeps every bit of that contingency. Salvation is the work of the cross applied by the Spirit to each person. No one is saved by the metaphysics of the soul. No one is saved by a law of the universe. No one is saved by his own suffering. Everyone who comes to God comes through Christ, through faith, through the free and undeserved grace that Ephesians describes:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8–9, ESV)

The universalist does not change the vehicle. He expands the passenger list. God saves by grace, through faith, and He does this for everyone. The “how” stays the same. Only the “how many” changes.¹³

When does this happen for those who die without faith? The short answer is: after death, in the intermediate state, and at the final judgment. The dead are not unconscious. They remain aware, able to respond. And God, who knows every heart, meets each person in the way best suited to win a free and genuine “yes.” The saving encounter after death is not a second gospel. It is the same gospel, the same Christ, the same cross. What changes is the clarity: the soul can now see what it could not see before.¹⁴

This book takes up those questions in detail in Chapter 27 and Chapter 28. For now, the point is simpler: the saving work is still Christ’s work, the faith is still real faith, and the grace is still free and unearned. Nothing about universal scope makes the grace less gracious.

Consider what McClymond’s own definition of grace requires. Grace must be free, personal, and rooted in God’s contingent action. Check. Grace must not be owed by nature or necessity. Check. Grace must come through a particular Savior, not through a cosmic law. Check. The universalism this book holds meets every one of his conditions. It simply adds that the grace McClymond rightly describes is wide enough to reach everyone.

4. The Strand That Survives

If McClymond’s thesis is right in its broadest form, then every universalism eclipses grace. But his own evidence contains a problem.

Gregory of Nyssa.

Gregory was one of the great Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century. He helped shape the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. He affirmed the full deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, the real atonement of the cross, and the authority of Scripture. He is honored as a saint and a pillar of Christian orthodoxy in every major branch of the church.¹⁵

He was also a universalist.

Gregory taught the restoration of all things (Greek apokatastasis, “the restoration of all things”). He believed that God would, in the end, bring every soul to Himself, purging evil from the creation and filling all things with His goodness. And he held this hope while standing squarely inside the Nicene Creed.¹⁶

David Burnfield, in Patristic Universalism, points out something that matters here. Gregory did not treat his universalism as a side project, a guilty secret, or a departure from the faith. E. H. Plumptre surveyed the evidence and noted that Gregory showed “no apparent consciousness that he is deviating into the bye-paths of new and strange opinions.” He taught the hope of restoration with the same confidence he brought to the creed of Nicaea. He saw it as Scripture’s own teaching, not as a departure from it.⁴²

David Bentley Hart makes a related point. Gregory read the original Greek of the New Testament better than most modern Christians do. He lived in a world far nearer to the apostles, in language and in culture, than ours is. And he understood the universalist passages as the true testimony of Scripture, “the only theological position that could adequately account for every dimension of the New Testament’s principal theological claims.” Whatever else one says about Gregory’s universalism, one cannot call it ignorant of the texts.⁴³

McClymond knows this. He discusses Gregory at length and with care. He notes that Gregory “did much to deflect criticism” by giving up Origen’s speculative teaching on preexistent souls. He acknowledges that Gregory was “specially honored” for his role in developing Trinitarian doctrine. He grants that scholars disagree on how to read Gregory’s universalism.¹⁷

But here is what matters for the eclipse-of-grace thesis. Gregory’s universalism was not gnostic. He did not teach that the soul is a spark of the divine. He taught that souls and bodies come into being together, as creatures, not as fragments of God. His universalism was not necessitarian in the strict sense. He grounded it in God’s free purpose and in the nature of evil as something that will, in the end, be consumed. And his universalism did not replace the cross with self-payment. He placed the resurrection, not purgatorial suffering, at the center of his eschatology.¹⁸

Gregory of Nyssa is the strand that survives McClymond’s own thesis. He is a universalist who did not eclipse grace. He held the full creed and the full hope. And that is the strand this book defends.

5. The Boundary, First Sketch

Everything in this book turns on a single line. On one side stands a universalism that trades away the gospel to get its happy ending. On the other side stands a universalism that reaches its happy ending through the gospel, not around it.

The counterfeits trade away the cross, or the creeds, or the authority of Scripture, or the need for personal faith in Christ. They replace grace with nature, or necessity, or self-payment. McClymond is right about all of them. I will say so in every chapter.

The biblical hope trades away none of these. It affirms the Trinity. It confesses the full deity of Christ and His bodily resurrection. It holds the cross as a real, objective atonement for sin. It insists that every person who is saved is saved through faith in Christ. It reads Scripture as the final authority. And it reaches the hope of universal salvation by means of these commitments, not by setting them aside.¹⁹

That line is not a dodge. It is a discipline. And it is, in a sense, McClymond’s own line, used to a different end. He has given the church the most thorough catalog in print of where universalism has gone wrong. This book uses his catalog gratefully, and against his own conclusion: the creedal hope of Gregory of Nyssa is the strand his thesis cannot absorb.²⁰

Chapter 2 will draw this line in full, and Appendix B will serve as the reference. Every chapter that follows will carry a teal-bordered box called the Boundary callout, asking one question of the argument at hand: does this objection wound the biblical hope, or only one of the counterfeits?

The Scholars in the Room

McClymond presses his eclipse-of-grace thesis hardest against Thomas Talbott, perhaps the most influential contemporary philosopher of Christian universalism. Talbott’s case, built around the inescapable love of God, is one McClymond takes with real seriousness. He gives Talbott a lengthy section in chapter 11, engaging the philosophical argument, the problem of evil, and the trilemma that challenges the traditional view of hell.²¹

Talbott argues that three claims cannot all be true at once: (1) God wills to reconcile all sinners to Himself; (2) God has the power to achieve this purpose; (3) some sinners will never be reconciled. Calvinists, Talbott notes, tend to qualify the first claim. Arminians tend to qualify the second. The universalist accepts both and rejects the third.²²

McClymond’s response is that Talbott builds his case on philosophical reasoning rather than on the testimony of the historic church. But Talbott’s argument is not pure philosophy. It rests on biblical texts: God’s revealed desire that all be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), the universality of Christ’s work (Romans 5:18; 1 Corinthians 15:22), and Paul’s doxology in Romans 11:32. In that verse, God shuts up all people in disobedience “that he may have mercy on all.”²³

McClymond records that Talbott came to universalism not through liberal theology but through an encounter with the character of God, spurred by reading George MacDonald. Talbott found in MacDonald a thinker who “managed to see everything, even divine judgment and wrath, as an expression of God’s perfecting love.” This is not the language of someone abandoning the faith. It is the language of someone pressing deeper into it.³⁸

George Sidney Hurd, in A Defense of Biblical Universalism, takes a different but related approach. He meets the anti-universalist case text by text. His central claim is that the biblical arguments against universal salvation rest on contested translations and inherited assumptions, not on the clear weight of the evidence. His reply to James De Young’s Exposing Universalism is the most direct answer in print, and it runs on exegesis, not philosophy.²⁴

Hurd’s central move is what he calls the “universal reversal.” In Romans 5:18, Paul draws a parallel: just as one man’s offense brought condemnation to all, so one Man’s righteous act brought justification to the same all. Hurd presses this hard. Paul does not say “some.” He says “all.” And to make the point unmistakable, Paul reaches for a word that means “super-abound” (Greek huperperisseuο) to describe the extent to which grace outpaces sin. If the fall reached all, Hurd argues, then the reversal must reach at least as far, or grace has not super-abounded at all. The reading is not philosophical. It is Paul.⁴⁴

David Burnfield, in Patristic Universalism, adds the witness of the early church. He argues that the patristic tradition was far more open to the hope of universal salvation than modern critics allow. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and others held forms of the larger hope while standing inside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. McClymond’s narrative, Burnfield contends, overstates the esoteric connection and understates the mainstream patristic one.³⁹

Robin Parry, in the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist, takes McClymond’s eclipse-of-grace argument head on. His Appendix 5 is the most sustained published reply to the eclipse thesis in print. Parry identifies what he calls McClymond’s “grammar of grace”: the four components McClymond says are essential for any genuine account of grace. Grace must be a gift. It must be undeserved. It must be freely given, not forced by necessity. And it must carry a relational character between God and the person. Parry then asks a question so plain it nearly answers itself: if salvation for one person can be a grace-gift, what would make it less of a grace-gift if God gave it to more people? Or to all people?⁴⁵

Parry concedes that the charge has real force against certain forms of universalism. A purgatorial universalism that makes Christ unnecessary for salvation does risk the eclipse McClymond names. But he presses the point that McClymond’s critique lands only on some versions. A universalism that keeps all four marks of grace intact has not eclipsed grace. It has extended it. To insist otherwise, Parry observes, would commit the strange position that God is obligated to damn some people forever in order to preserve grace’s gracious character.⁴⁶

Between Talbott’s philosophical case from divine love, Hurd’s exegetical case from the biblical texts, Burnfield’s patristic case from the church fathers, and Parry’s direct reply to McClymond’s eclipse thesis, the answer takes shape. These are not thinkers who have traded away the cross or the creeds. They are thinkers who believe the cross does more than even its defenders have dared to claim. The grace they defend is not the cheap, automatic grace McClymond describes. It is the costliest grace in the world: a grace that paid the full price at Calvary and then refused to stop until it had reached every soul it died for.²⁵

Counter-Objections

“You are just redefining grace to dodge the charge.”

That is a fair worry. But I am not redefining grace. I am using the same definition McClymond uses: free, personal, unowed, rooted in a particular act of God in history. I accept all of that. What I am claiming is that the universalism McClymond targets and the universalism I hold are different things. He is right that the gnostic version empties grace. I do not hold the gnostic version. He is right that the necessitarian version makes grace owed. I do not hold that version either. The question is not whether I can redefine my way out; the question is whether my version of universalism actually keeps grace free. I believe it does, and the next six chapters will build the case.²⁶

“If all are certainly saved, grace is still automatic in the end.”

This is the deepest version of the objection, and it deserves a careful answer. The claim is that certainty of outcome equals automaticity of process, and therefore even a grace-based universalism is really salvation by nature in disguise.

But consider. In orthodox theology, God’s elect are certainly saved. The Calvinist says that God’s sovereign choice guarantees the outcome. The Arminian says that God foreknows who will freely believe. In neither case does the certainty of the outcome make the grace automatic. The grace is still free. The faith is still real. The cross still does the saving. Certainty of outcome and automaticity of process are not the same thing.²⁷

The universalist simply extends this logic. If God can certainly save one person by grace without making that grace automatic, He can certainly save all by grace without making it automatic. The mechanism is the same. Only the number is different. Thomas Talbott makes this case with force in The Inescapable Love of God. God’s grace, Talbott argues, is “utterly irresistible over the long run,” not because God forces the will, but because no illusion about the goodness of rebellion can survive forever in the presence of perfect love. The person remains free at every moment. But over time, in the hands of a God who knows each heart, resistance runs out of reasons.⁴⁷²⁸

Parry, in his reply to McClymond, presses the same nerve from a different angle. Even if we grant McClymond’s own premise that grace is contingent and not required by God’s essence, universalism survives. God could, on that view, freely choose not to save all. But the question is whether He did choose to save all, and whether the cross and resurrection are evidence that He did. A free choice by God to extend grace to every person is still a free choice, and still grace.⁴⁸

“Even if Nyssa survived, the vast majority of the church’s history went the other way.”

That is true, and I do not dodge it. The majority of the church’s history has favored either eternal conscious torment or some form of final separation. Universalism has been a minority view in every era. But truth is not settled by a head count. The same church that held to eternal torment also held to the divine right of kings, the persecution of heretics, and the morality of the slave trade. Majority opinion is worth hearing. It is not the final court. Scripture is.²⁹

And the minority that held to the larger hope was not a fringe of misfits. It included Gregory of Nyssa, Clement of Alexandria, and a strand of the early church that Ilaria Ramelli has documented with enormous care.³⁰ The question is not whether the hope was popular. The question is whether it is true.

The Promise of This Book

Here is what this book will do. Over the next thirty-nine chapters, it will take McClymond’s case at its strongest. It will state each argument in his own words, fairly and at full strength. It will not duck the hard ones. It will not caricature the critics. And it will answer each argument with exegesis, history, theology, and the careful defense of a hope held within the bounds of the historic Christian creeds.

The method is simple. Each chapter states a real argument an able critic actually makes, names where it lives in McClymond’s or De Young’s book, and then answers it. Where the critic is right, I will say so. Where his premise does not reach the biblical hope, I will show why.³¹

A word about posture before we go on. McClymond and De Young are serious Christians and able scholars. McClymond in particular has given the church a genuine service. He has cataloged, with enormous care, exactly where the universalist impulse has gone wrong. I use his catalog throughout this book, and I use it gratefully. The difference between us is not that I think his work is careless. It is that I think his conclusion is too broad. The counterfeit universalisms he documents are real. But there is a strand he does not quite account for, and it is the strand I hold.

The case against universal salvation has three layers. The deepest is the eclipse-of-grace charge (answered here and in Chapters 4–6 and 10). The widest is the exegetical case: the texts that seem to teach an everlasting hell, from Matthew 25 to Revelation 20 (answered in Chapters 22–33). And the sharpest is the historical case: that universalism descends from a gnostic and esoteric tradition that the church rightly rejected (answered in Chapters 3, 15–21). Each layer gets its own set of chapters. Together, they answer the whole case.³²

Along the way, I will also make some concessions. When McClymond is right, I will say so. Chapter 37 is the most striking example: there I stand beside him and agree that any universalism in which the cross disappears has abandoned the gospel. Chapter 5 parts company with David Bentley Hart on the question of necessity. Chapter 39 shares McClymond’s concern about the antinomian and esoteric strands of modern universalism. These concessions are not retreats. They are the boundary doing its work.⁴⁰

But I want to be honest about one more thing before we begin. There is one place where the argument is not airtight. Human freedom is real. A genuine “yes” to God requires a genuine “no” as an option. The bare logical possibility that some free creature could refuse God forever cannot be ruled out by force. I will not pretend otherwise.³³

My claim is not that refusal is impossible. My claim is that it is, in the end, vanishingly unlikely to be final. A perfectly loving God, with all of eternity to work and full knowledge of every heart, can present each soul with the most persuasive possible appeal. Not a trick. Not a force. An appeal so fitted to the person that the person freely says yes. I believe that in the end, every heart will. I hold that with conviction, not with certainty, and I will carry that honest distinction through the whole book.³⁴

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:19–20, ESV)

The hope of this book is that Paul meant what he said. All things. Reconciled. Through the blood of the cross. By grace.

Nathan is still sitting across the table. His question hangs in the air: can I still hold the hope?

I think of what brought him here. He did not come to universalism through liberal theology or wishful thinking. He came the way many pastors come: by sitting with a dying parishioner who had never heard the gospel. He wondered whether God’s love was really as narrow as the sermon said. He came by reading Paul’s letter to the Romans and noticing that the “all” in Romans 5:18 was just as wide as the “all” in the verse before it. He came by holding his newborn daughter and knowing in his bones that the God who made her would not torment her forever.

That is not cheap universalism. That is a man taking the character of God seriously and asking whether the gospel is as good as it sounds.

McClymond would say Nathan is in danger. This book will show him that the danger is real for the counterfeits and absent for the biblical hope.

There is an answer. It will take forty chapters to give it. But here is the first word: yes. The universalism McClymond defeats is real, and this book agrees with most of his diagnosis. But it is not the only universalism there is. There is a strand that holds the full creed, the full cross, and the full authority of Scripture. It reaches the hope of universal salvation through grace, not around it. Grace is not eclipsed. It is, in the end, all in all.³⁵

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. … that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:22, 28, ESV)