You’re not taking into account context… “pleasing God” was relative to their service as faithful believing servants; something fleshly Israel failed to do.
Duly noted, and I’ll raise you one… Isa 43:19 “Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it?” God did a new thing in Christ… He abolished “the sin” that separated Him from his creation. All religianity seeks to do is rebuild that which is destroyed… and to no good end!
WELL YES exactly… and again He did something about it! You see, this is the schizophrenia of evangelicalism… it says it believes one thing and then practices the exact opposite.
Spiritual maturity into the grace of God is not marked by who you exclude, or the groups you exclude, or the life styles you exclude. The mark of spiritual maturity into the grace of God is marked by the circle that gets wider and wider, embracing more and more in understanding, that in no matter what a man does he cannot escape the incredible mercy of God.
It is little wonder that folk grow up struggling with any inner faith when we in our religiosity have learnt go around saying things like: “God loves you!” – to which a respondent might ask… “How much does he love me?” – “Unconditionally!” we will say… “He has grace for your life!” “What kind of grace?” they will query – “Undeserved and unmerited favour, it’s all yours!” “Well I’m not so sure I can believe all this” is their response – and what is our religious rejoinder… “then you’ll burn in Hell forever!” Talk about a toxic and schizophrenic message. The power and mercy of God’s grace is NOT limited to man’s ability to comprehend it, or the lack thereof!
I have a sneaking suspicion there hasn’t been a person born who has then come to stand in His Presence that hasn’t then duly “repented”.
There is of course my website… pantelism.com and of course on prêterism DKP is always a good read. But for the pièce de résistance on ‘covenant eschatology’ (aka prêterism) go to Max King’s opus magnum… ‘The Cross and the Parousia of Christ’ –– it is wordy and a hard slog but more than worth it.
I’m an ‘inclusionist’ as opposed to a ‘universalist’ as in I reject the typical universalist rationales around “hell” and “the lake of fire” which for the most part are no different in essence than that held by infernalists; the only real difference between the two is the amount of torturous time said to be spent therein. I also don’t buy into the philosophical type arguments lots of universalists’ often favour… I find them weak and unconvincing. IOW, I came to inclusion via biblical eschatology NOT philosophy.
Becoming an inclusive prêterist (a pantelist) was as natural as moving from partial to full prêterism, that is, it was IMO the most natural and logical progression to take when taking prêterism to it most obvious logical conclusion, that is, I found prêterism to be inherently inclusive and as such the pantelism extrapolated to be more exegetically and “prêteristically consistent”.
Example… prêterism maintains that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” – I agree! (BTW… this “death” was the death of Adam i.e., relational spiritual] separation from God; that which Jesus rectified). LOGIC however dictates that IF this is so then by obvious extension GOD HAS NO MORE ENEMIES because there can be nothing more AFTER “the last” has been dealt with – that’s pretty simple AND pretty INCLUSIVE. There are of course other texts that feed into this pantelistic rationale.
I encountered a lot of heat and opposition from both Arminian (DKP) and Calvinist (Frost) prêterists… but the best they could do at the time (early to mid-2000s) was rail against my conclusions with pejorative name-slinging like “universalist!” But apart from disagree they couldn’t (can’t) refute said conclusions.