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Jesus Himself said, I am the way and the truth and the life; no one cometh to the Father except through me;
Which is reminiscent of what you are saying you would reject as being the statement of someone you would never listen to.
Jesus Christ is not in all of us. He dwells in those who have been born again.
And I don't deny that Jesus is the Word...
I just say alongside of it that the Bible is the word of God (especially the kjv).
You believe in 2 words of God. Your bible clearly teaches to look to the one your bible testifies of. You look to the Bible NOT Jesus Christ, a grave mistake which keeps you rooted in the ignorance of the superstitious who guessed what God was like and were a million miles off. At least they had an excuse, you having heard about Jesus Christ still remain in the same ignorance as them, which is why you flat out reject that He IS the Savior of All.
Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God...
But there’s more.
Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell... A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony... if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality... sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting “the gospel” is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no... God create, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe... so when the Gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club.
"He pre-destined us to be adopted by Himself as sons through Jesus Christ--such being His gracious will and pleasure-- to the praise of the splendour of His grace with which He has enriched us in the beloved One. It is in Him, and through the shedding of His blood, that we have our deliverance--the forgiveness of our offences--so abundant was God's grace, the grace which He, the possessor of all wisdom and understanding, lavished upon us, when He made known to us the secret of His will. And this is in harmony with God's merciful purpose for the government of the world when the times are ripe for it--the purpose which He has cherished in His own mind of restoring the whole creation to find its one Head in Christ; yes, things in Heaven and things on earth, to find their one Head in Him. In Him we have been made heirs, having been chosen beforehand in accordance with the intention of Him whose might carries out in everything the design of His own will, so that we should be devoted to the extolling of His glorious attributes--we who were the first to fix our hopes on Christ. ~R.F. Weymouth
Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God...
But there’s more.
Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell... A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony... if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality... sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting “the gospel” is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no... God create, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe... so when the Gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club.
The good news is better than that.”~Rob Bell
The reason millions do not believe and come to God is because of this very demonic teaching you just mentioned...
''A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony"
Satan played his trump card and paralyzed the church with this twisted doctrine, rendering it totally powerless. Revival? Signs following believers? Believers doing works and miracles greater than Christ? Not going to happen until the devil gets bound and that cannot happen when the church is in bondage to this devilish teaching. At least that's what I believe.
The reason millions do not believe and come to God is because of this very demonic teaching you just mentioned...
''A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony"
This is a caricature of the Catholic doctrine on hell.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HAL-5
Satan played his trump card and paralyzed the church with this twisted doctrine, rendering it totally powerless. Revival? Signs following believers? Believers doing works and miracles greater than Christ? Not going to happen until the devil gets bound and that cannot happen when the church is in bondage to this devilish teaching. At least that's what I believe.
You discount the veracity of miracles performed by Catholics? Because they've been doing it with regularity for 2,000 years...
This is a caricature of the Catholic doctrine on hell.
True, and not just the Catholic version. But it is a real effect. It is the popular "meme" version of hell - we see it in hollywood horror flics. People cannot understand how does God LOVE you, yet still can let you (or other loved ones) be tortured in flames forever? The more sanitized version is "eternal separation", but that still would be an endless torment that can be easily remedied by God.
These beliefs actually turn people away from God and turn many people into atheists. I've seen several de-conversion stories where hell doctrine was instrumental in their turning away from God - because it just didn't make sense. And it doesn't.
We on the universal salvation side simply believe that God can and will easily bring all to repentance and understanding so that all can be made righteous.
On that note I just saw this quote from Christopher Hitchens on twitter, apparently from 2019:
"It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us, who knows our thoughts, who can create us sick, then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again; to demand this, to wish this to be true, is to wish to live as an abject slave."
So we see here the damage of traditional hell teachings. He has a lot of wrong ideas here, like many atheists. But someone like this influences many people to turn from God, because they have a caricature of God as some tyrant who tortures his enemies.
Our Father who is the Source of Pi & the expanding universe, declares He will fill the universe with the knowledge of Himself.
He climbed the high mountain, He captured the enemy and seized the booty.
Is it not true that the One who climbed up also climbed down, down to the valley of earth? And the One who climbed down is the One who climbed back up, up to highest heaven.
Our glorious Father/ Pater fills the universe with Himself.
On that note I just saw this quote from Christopher Hitchens on twitter, apparently from 2019:
"It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us, who knows our thoughts, who can create us sick, then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again; to demand this, to wish this to be true, is to wish to live as an abject slave."
So we see here the damage of traditional hell teachings. He has a lot of wrong ideas here, like many atheists. But someone like this influences many people to turn from God, because they have a caricature of God as some tyrant who tortures his enemies.
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