We forget sometimes in recounting the story of the Exodus with such vengeful glee against Pharoah that each man & woman we ENJOY villifying in our preaching who did some pretty bad things in the Bible's accounts are each men and women who've had a repentant heart for thousands of years, whether our theologies allow for their ultimate restoration or not. Even among Christian Universalists, I've detected the fundamentalist tone about people & nations in the Bible who's specific members that were being cited when the Bible was being written are EACH people who've had humility before God for longer than we've been in the earth -- whether or not they've been restored, OR EVER COULD BE, or whether their chains of darkness continue unto some future eon.

I've been guilty of it, myself, in taking too much sport against REAL PEOPLE in the Bible who may have sobbed for CENTURIES about what they've done! Whether you believe redeeming grace is so amazing as to be the eternal anthem of Judas, Pharaoh, Kings of Babylon, Pilate, Caiphas, Nero, or whether you believe they've absolutely had it, no matter how repentant their hearts -- each of these people, from Cain onwards, have mourned their own sins greater and for infinitely longer eons than most of us in this life have! We project our carnality and DILIGENTLY cultivate our hatred against men and women of history, each of whom are a great deal more repentant and for much longer than folks we're so ready to see Amazing Grace for in our day!

Each of these people in the Bible, eventually saved or not even on God's redemptive radar; whatever your perspective, are potentially more broken than most of us will ever be in this life, yet we enjoy casting our stones a minimum of once a week, forgetting each of these are people with feelings, created in the image of God, and as much our brothers and sisters as anybody we rush to the defense of today!! Would any of us relish being a type of what's really wrong with the Church, our own governments, et. al.??  I guess God spared me more than most preachers in that I never really got into the stories of the Bible, besides the obvious ones in the Gospels and Acts, until the last 3 to 5 years or so, or not very many before that, 'cause I had a long way to go in my former days in the growth of my compassion before I was ready to say much about most of the people in the Bible we hold to eternal contempt in our generation and every recent generation we're acquainted with the ministry of the Gospel to!

While our more tempered speech about the wicked of the Bible doesn't need to fall into the error of verneration, and we'd be hard pressed to treat them to the mercies sheep show His brethren in Matthew 25, [who aren't described as being without spot or blemish in Matthew 25,] we should seek to maintain "an eternal perspective" regarding each of these people having been people that Christ died for, who likely saw the equivalent of the nuclear blast of His resurrection after He'd been made sin, which Scripture teaches us was a spiritual "big bang" (Big Bang 2) that began recreating the spiritual realm from that very moment as fast as spiritual light can travel, and not be so quick to presume that their hearts are eternal memorials to everything despicable that they've done -- WHETHER OR NOT we're ready to believe in an ultimate restoration for the worst there's been among us over the last several thousand years! 

When the first 80% of the Bible was written, the whole Creation was exploding under the weight of sin, which reflects some of it's quips along the way in judging and self judging all of it's inhabitants.  Christ Jesus threw Himself into an explosion when there was basically almost nothing left, from God's perspective of everything He'd created reaching a critical stage of not existing in the image He'd created it in AT ALL by that time, and we're too quick to make judgments in our preaching and meditation time about a universe or a multiverse that no longer exists!  Our Gospel preaching that recreates the risen Christ (that's ascended) into every situation where He's needed must be tempered with this "eternal perspective" of the heavens and earth that existed BACK THEN [Covenantally] no longer exist!

Christ Jesus threw Himself into the heart of our sin and recreated the whole spiritual cosmos around us and as time is unfolding under the weight of that explosion that happened when His resurrection [and ascension] met what was left of the exploding timeline that God had intended, each of us is being recreated by incorruptible seed, and when we talk about "the world that was," using Peter's wording in certain translations, we really can't relate as well as we think we can, on this side of that cosmic explosion!  Everything Pre-Cross is Precambrian in the way that we must look at EVERYTHING!