Two Great Themes of the Bible part four

Herein lies the greatest paradox of the Bible. Jesus was all man and all God at the same time. Therefore, Jesus' dead body was the dead body of God Himself. The Spirit of Christ became separated from the Father, and therefore spiritually dead, when He descended into hell. God the Father turned His face from Jesus on the cross because of His agony and the filth of sin that covered Him there. God, the Father, was separated from His Son. God was separated from Himself. This condition constitutes the very definition of spiritual death. But if Jesus had to die in the sinner's place, He had to be separated from God just as any sinner would be. For the following three days, Nietzsche was right. God was dead. Yet, the world was not destroyed, and God became alive again after three days. Revelation 1:18; John 10:30. This has to be the all time record for paradoxes. This paradox is further complicated by the fact that Jesus said in John 10:17 that He would raise Himself from the dead. Romans 6:4 states that the Father raised Him, and Romans 8:11 reveals that the Spirit raised Him. Humans cannot possibly understand all this, but one revelation remains certain. God's Love is truly all-powerful. Not only this, but it would seem that God's Love is even more powerful when dead than when alive!

Eve was deceived by Satan while she was in a state of innocence. This means her sin was one of weakness. No rational human blames a child for being deceived by a predator. How much more would the infinite compassion of God be extended to Eve. Yet, Eve had to have known that she was fallen. She could feel it. Her cruel sin was that she gave the forbidden fruit to her husband just to bring him down to her level. This act was her deliberate sin against God. Her action demonstrates the difference between sin and evil. Sin can be weak or deliberate, but evil can only be deliberate. God cleanses and forgives all sins of weakness, but God never forgives cruel and deliberate sins. Deliberate sins are allied with Satan and never seek forgiveness. God does cleanse and forgive deliberate sins when one repents of them because faith and repentance quickens the compassion of God for the weakness of man. In the end, God will separate all deliberate evil from mankind and cast it into the lake of fire forever. Luke 23:34; Revelation 20:15; Revelation 21:8.

Adam's deliberate sin was that he knew full well that he was disobeying God when he ate the forbidden fruit. The worst part of his sin was the failure of his faith. He failed to call on God his friend for His help. Adam's sin of weakness was that he did not want to lose physical love with his wife. Adam knew that she was now a sinner and he was not. He was afraid for her and did not desire separation from her. So, in an act of self-sacrificial love he fell to her level in order to be with her to protect and comfort her. His loving action demonstrated that he had not lost that noble image of God that God had put into him and which still remains with every human. Adam's loving act constituted a prophecy in action that someday a loving God would sacrifice Himself to liberate all of humanity from eternal separation from Him. I Timothy 2:14; Romans 5:12-21; I Corinthians 15:45-47; I Corinthians 15:22.

God will cleanse, sanctify, and forgive all sinners who are still in the flesh when they put their faith in the shed blood and water that flowed from Christ on the cross. God will judge the souls and spirits of all unbelievers following their physical deaths and consign each one of them to one of the three regions of the dead which are called the sea, death, or hell. Because Christ left the sins of all mankind behind in hell when He rose from the dead, God will use His consuming fire to separate the sins of all mankind from their lives which He created, burn up their sins of weakness including deliberate sins for which they repented, and cast all their unrepentant evil sins into the lake of fire. God will recover and recreate all of His goodness and life that He put into mankind. The Old Testament burnt offerings symbolized how God would purge His universe of all sin and evil. Deuteronomy 32:22; I Peter 1:18-23; Ephesians 5:25-27; Revelation 20:5; Revelation 20:11-15; Matthew 3:10-12; I Corinthians 15:20-28; I Corinthians 3:11-15; Colossians 1:15-20; Revelation 21:1-5; Revelation 21:8; Revelation 22:11-12.

Two Great Themes of the Bible part three

God meant exactly that which He said through the mouth of John the Baptist in John 1:29. Christ came to purge all sin from all humanity, some by His grace, and all others by consigning them to one of the regions of the dead in order to subject them to His consuming fire by which He will separate their total evil from their goodness and life which He created so that He can cleanse and recreate it. John 12:47; I Corinthians 3:12-15; Revelation 20:5; Revelation 21:1-5; Matthew 3:10-12; Ecclesiastes 3:14. God has proven to the Devil that His Love cannot be destroyed or even diminished.

Satan deceived Eve and caused her to sin because of her weakness. God's gift to her of free will caused her weakness. God knew that she could sin, but God also knew that through sin in the lives of humans, God could test His Love to the utmost and prove to His creations that His Love can never be destroyed. As long as sin and the Devil remained in God's universe, His Love would be in doubt, but God devised a plan to prove that His Love is all-powerful and to purge all sin from His universe forever. While the Devil was deceiving Eve, God had devised His own plan that through Adam and Eve He would destroy the Devil and all his works. God gave free will to Lucifer as a loving gift, but God did not know that this gift would cause a weakness for sin. At that time, God knew nothing about sin. God is Almighty and Holy, but He is also innocent. This fact does not mean that God is not Omniscient. God possesses an infinite knowledge of all that is good and holy. At the time that God gave free will to Lucifer, God knew nothing about sin because it is wholly negative and empty. Sin derives from negative consciousness which is less than nothing. The idea of nothing is positive because God can use it in creative systems like mathematics. All through the Bible, God refers to sin as being vanity and less than nothing. Isaiah 40:17; II Corinthians 12:9.

Nothing is a creative idea for God and man and constitutes a useful element in all positive systems. But nothingness which is not an idea must nonexist. Yet, it remains the source of all that is destructive and evil. Nothingness which is not an idea cannot be a part of positive reality, and yet in some mysterious way, it can have a destructive effect on reality. For example, all correct mathematical calculations are positive and creative systems. 2-2=0 is one such system. The zero represents the idea of nothing which is the useful result of this positive system. But if one mentally subtracts the two twos, the minus sign, and the equal sign as elements of this system, then one still has the idea of the zero which is useful in reality. But reality itself is a positive system. If one then mentally subtracts the idea of zero from this calculation which represents reality, then one is left with absolute nothingness which cannot be an idea and one cannot mentally grasp it. But one also notices when this mental experiment reaches the level of absolute nothingness, then it has also mentally destroyed both the positive calculation and the idea of nothing itself. Sin has a similar effect on human systems and reality. Sin constitutes an attempted negation of reality.

Eve sinned because of her weakness caused by free will. But her failure was a part of God's plan to rescue all of His creations from doubt about God's Love which Lucifer had instilled in them through his rebellion. All of God's creations must have complete faith and confidence in the power of God's Love to protect them from destruction, or negative consciousness will continuously inject destructive fear and doubt into God's creations throughout eternity. The Devil thought that he could completely destroy the life and goodness that God had put into Eve, and thereby destroy God's love for her. His effort was all a part of the Devil's plan to begin the process of destroying God Himself by destroying a part of His Love. But God's plan was to take Adam and Eve's sin on Himself on a cruel cross and suffer their eternal destruction in their place to prove that His self-sacrificial Love cannot be destroyed. God then rose from the dead to prove His Love was still alive and able to rescue all mankind from eternal destruction. John 12:47; I Timothy 4:10; I John 3:8.

Two Great Themes of the Bible part two

The existence of a creative realm of positive consciousness, and the nonexistence of a destructive realm of negative consciousness could explain God's statement in Isaiah 45:7 where He said, "I ...create evil." Since God possesses only an Infinite Consciousness of all positive creations, then He may have accidentally and unwittingly established an opposite realm of negative consciousness when He created the universe. God did not learn about false systems invented by negative consciousness until Lucifer's rebellion. No doubt, God created the feelings of "pain" and "sorrow," but only to be used in future creative systems such as the sacrifice of His Son on the cross. Satan uses "excessive pain" and "excessive sorrow" to be destructive effects of his false systems. God may have confessed in Isaiah 45:7 that He is the source of pain and sorrow, but also that He did not know that these feelings could be misused in false systems in destructive ways.

Because of the fall of Adam and Eve, all mankind has become infected with negative consciousness which ineluctably produces sinful and evil systems. Whenever a person surrenders to his negative consciousness, wholly rejects God and righteousness, and becomes deliberately cruel and evil, then that person has become allied with the rebellion of Satan, will never seek forgiveness, and will never receive God's forgiveness for that totally evil part of his nature. God never forgives total evil in Satan or men. God has determined that He will cast all spiritual deadness, which is totally evil, into the lake of fire in the end of the world. Matthew 12:31-32; Revelation 20:11-15.

God created Adam and Eve in His own image which meant they were good and righteous, although also innocent. Genesis 1:27, 31. Their goodness did not dissolve because they sinned. Their goodness simply became sullied by sin. Isaiah 64:6. To this day, man still retains his image of God. God can never lose anything He has ever created. Ecclesiastes 3:14; Romans 11:36; Revelation 21:5; Revelation 4:11. In the end of the world, God will recover all of His goodness and image which He put into all humans and recreate a new, righteous humanity to live on His righteous, recreated earth. But all humans saved by grace will have already been recreated to live with God in heaven. Revelation 20:5; Revelation 21:1-5; Colossians 1:15-20.

Although total evil has become a part of man's nature, it is foreign to man. Satan injected sin into man like poison. The goal of the Devil is to so thoroughly poison the image of God in man that he completely ruins it and causes it to be separated from God forever. The Devil aims to prove that God can lose that which He loves to evil, and by that also prove that God cannot be Almighty. Should the Devil succeed, he will weaken God, become equal with God, and possibly able to destroy God and take over His universe. But should any human totally surrender to evil, he still cannot lose his image of God that is in him. Job 1:11-12; Luke 17:20-21.

But God proved the Devil wrong when Jesus got up from the grave. Love cannot fail. Love cannot be destroyed. I Corinthians 13:8. Christ now holds the keys of hell and death which the Devil thought belonged solely to him. Revelation 1:18. Christ has destroyed all of the works of the Devil; that is, spiritual death and sin. I John 3:8. Christ came to destroy the works of the Devil, not humans whom He created and loves. Christ came to destroy death itself, not humans who spiritually die. I Corinthians 15:26. Christ will destroy hell and death and all total evil, which has poisoned mankind, by casting it into the lake of fire forever. Revelation 20:11-15. Christ will recover all that He has created and loves, purge it of all sin, and recreate it. Colossians 1:20; I Corinthians 3:12-15; Revelation 21:1-5. The Devil and evil are the enemies of God, not humans whom He created in His image. Ephesians 6:12.

Two Great Themes of the Bible part one

One of the great themes of the Bible reveals infallible and inerrant truths about God, about mankind, and about God's relationship with mankind. This truthful theme reveals that every person, except for one extraordinary man, has become a sinner because every person has been infected by a spiritual death and darkness which compels each person to commit sins.

God creates only good, useful, and beautiful systems. God creates His good systems from basic elements that He also created. For example, all mathematical systems are based on two basic ideas, the number one which is the basic idea for something and zero which is the basic idea for nothing. The basic elements of the periodic table produce all of the chemical systems of the universe, including life. The basic ideas of love and faith produce all good moral systems.

One of God's greatest creations, an angel named Lucifer, invented a method by which he could combine some of God's elements into destructive systems which produce only nothingness and deadness. God created a system called "pleasure" but meant for it to be used only in wise and controlled ways. Lucifer invented systems that greatly increased pleasure in the short run but proved to be destructive in the long run. Drugs and alcohol are two such systems. God knows how to use the two basic ideas called "excess" and "pride" in His creations of good systems. Lucifer combined these two basic ideas into a false and destructive system called "excessive pride." Lucifer applied excessive pride to his own being which caused him to believe that he could overthrow God and replace Him as ruler of the universe. God stripped Lucifer of all his good elements that He had put into his system and cast him to earth as a totally evil and empty entity called Satan. Ezekiel 28:13-19.

A rough approximation of that which happened with Lucifer's rebellion can be made with the following example. Automobile engines are useful systems involved in another useful system called transportation, if used in controlled ways. Those who engage in excessive gunning of automobile engines and excessive speed will usually shortly find themselves in a state of nothingness as far as transportation is concerned. Lucifer invented false systems that gunned some of God's good systems of ideas which caused God to reduce his false systems, including himself, to a state of nothingness. Lucifer has never created anything. He only misused God's good ideas to invent false systems. Nevertheless, even in a state of nothingness, Satan retained a system not created by God called "negative consciousness." God, and all of His good creations, know only a positive consciousness. Positive consciousness can get no idea whatsoever of what a negative consciousness could be except that it produces only false and destructive systems by misusing good ideas. Time and reality are positive systems produced by positive consciousness. Logically, this means negative consciousness can only come from some nonexistent realm which nonexists nowhere and at no time. In some mysterious way, negative consciousness emerged from this nonexistent realm to infect Lucifer and cause him to invent false systems. Satan still retains this negative consciousness and power. Ezekiel 28:15; II Thessalonians 2:7.

The Infallible and Inerrant Word of God part three

God had the Bible written from man's point of view looking up to God. As such, the Bible reveals the inerrant and infallible truth about all of man's feelings and attitudes about God whether good or bad. Proverbs 20:27. For example, Job's comforters commented much about the nature and character of God, some true statements and some false. The true and inerrant message of God's Word is that sinful men can accidentally speak true and false comments when speculating about God, or anything else. Another example occurs in Psalm 137:9. Critics contend that God cannot exist because how could a merciful God approve of such a horrible action as this verse allows. But the true message of this verse is that it simply records how the psalmist felt when he wrote it. Even Godly men can have sinful feelings. God's message about the nature of man constitutes a basic part of the inerrant and infallible Word of God. Many other such examples exist in scripture.

Defenders of the Bible contend that every word of God must be true because it was written by holy men inspired by the Holy Spirit. II Peter 1:21. But God also had these holy men quote true and false statements made by sinful men because this is the simple truth about the nature of man. For example, Ecclesiastes 1:2 cannot possibly be a true statement. This verse espouses an atheistic and nihilistic philosophy, but the truth in this statement comes from the fact that it accurately records how Solomon felt when he wrote it. Godly men can make sinful statements even when writing the true Word of God.

Another truth about God's Word is that some of it was not written by Godly men, but was accurately copied by Godly men. In Acts 17:28, the Apostle Paul quoted two pagan poets whose words became a part of the true Word of God. In Acts 23:25-30, the Apostle Paul copied a letter written by a pagan Roman soldier into the true Word of God. Nehemiah inserted letters written by pagans into the true Word of God. One of the true messages from God's Word is that God can cause even pagans to write His inerrant and infallible Word.

Every judge knows that two different witnesses on the stand can insert minor contradictions into the same truthful story. Only when their contradictions begin to affect the truth itself can their veracity become doubtful. To the believer, whether Christ healed two insane men in Matthew 8:28 or only one in Mark 5:2 remains relatively unimportant. The same can be said about whether Jesus healed two blind men at Jericho in Matthew 20:30 or only one in Mark 10:46. The truth is that the Holy Spirit extracts the inerrant and infallible Truth from the written Word of God and imparts that Truth to the heart of every spiritual believer. God deliberately designed His Word so that unbelievers would see only the contradictions. The central, true message of the Bible is that Christ is God and that He can heal and save men. For this reason, every sincere seeker for the Truth often finds it when he reads the inerrant and infallible Word of God.

The genius of the written Word consists in the fact that those who despise God only find contradictions and errors in it. God deliberately wrote it that way. The Bible only imparts subjective Truth, not objective truth. God does not want anyone to be compelled to believe His Word, as we are compelled to believe objective truth. God wants people to choose to love Him and have faith in Him. God wrote His Word so that sincere seekers for the Truth will find it through the power of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, believers should always pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit when reading the Word of God. John 16:13.

The Infallible and Inerrant Word of God part two

The written Word of God is inerrant and infallible, but not in the way that most believers contend. Most believers maintain that because holy men of God wrote the Received Text, then the written Word has to be entirely inerrant and infallible. Acts 1:16; II Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 3:7; II Peter 1:21. For this reason, these believers try to defend the written Word against every charge by its critics that it contains contradictions. These believers attempt to explain every contradiction as being no contradiction at all. In some cases, these believers succeed in explaining how some contradictions do not exist. Mostly, these believers succeed where the critics charge contradictions in areas where they cannot understand the doctrines of the written Word. But these critics also indicate some contradictions where believers have great difficulty in explaining them away.

One such difficult contradiction occurs in Proverbs 26:4-5. The critics contend that God Himself, if He exists, had to have put this blatant contradiction into His own Word. The critics correctly assert that God put this contradiction into His Word, but this contradiction exists only for unbelievers. Believers rightly contend that one must be guided by the Spirit when applying one or the other of these scriptures in knowing when or when not to answer a fool. The believers' explanation correctly explains the contradiction for believers, but not for unbelievers. Unbelievers, not guided by the Spirit, still correctly read a blatant contradiction in these scriptures.

Believers could safely ignore these critics' charges if they would simply come to understand that the Truth of the written Word of God can only be imparted to the believer by the inerrant and infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit. II Peter 1:19-21; John 6:63. God wrote His Word in such an ingenious way that believers will find the inerrant Truth in it, but also so that unbelievers will rightly find contradictions in it. Jesus revealed this very truth in His sermon to believers and unbelievers in John 6:41-71. In John 6:52, the unbelievers rightly understood the deliberate contradictions that Jesus put into His sermon. John 6:64-66 informs us that Jesus deliberately drove these unbelievers away from Him because He did not want them to be His disciples. In John 6:67-69, Peter and ten of the other disciples remained with Jesus because the Holy Spirit had imparted to them the Truth that Jesus had taught them in John 6:61-63. In John 6:70-71, Jesus revealed that one unbeliever remained because he had been put there by the Devil.

The Church has partly misunderstood God's purpose for the preaching of the gospel. God desires that sinners become spiritually saved through the preaching of the gospel, but God also desires that unbelievers be driven away from Him. Isaiah 6:9-10. For this reason, Jesus often used parables in His preaching so that believers would diligently search for the truth in them while unbelievers would reject them as being nonsensical. The Spirit reveals the inerrant Truth to devoted searchers, not to the shallow minded. God despises unbelief and the lukewarmness of believers. Matthew 6:6-12; Revelation 3:14-19. Christ would rather His believers be cold rather than lukewarm because when one is cold, he will sooner or later realize it and either put on more clothes or turn up the heat, but the lukewarm will just continue on in their comfortable unbelief. God does not want unbelievers in His churches. They only cause trouble. Many churches have severely diluted sound doctrine because they have accepted too many unbelievers. Just as Jesus had to put up with one unbeliever sent by the Devil, so the churches have to endure some unbelievers. For this reason, churches that preach the true gospel should not be sad when known unbelievers walk away.

The Bible often teaches as much by what it does not say as by what it does say. The Word of God does not state in Proverbs 26:4-5 that one must rely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit to realize how to use its contradiction, but that truth becomes obvious to the believer. When the rich young ruler confronted Jesus in Mark 10, Jesus quoted only the commandments that he had kept and remained silent about those he had violated. Jesus wanted him to realize for himself as guided by the Spirit that he was a hopeless sinner in need of Jesus' salvation. God knows that the lessons we hear from the Spirit are the ones we learn the best. For this reason, when a sinner hears the gospel and the Holy Spirit convinces him that he is a sinner in need of a Savior, God leaves the decision to the sinner as to whether he will accept or reject the Truth that he hears. In Exodus 19:3-8, God did not directly tell the Israelites that He had already saved them by His grace, and therefore, they needed no laws. But because they did not realize this amazing fact for themselves, they demanded that God give them laws to keep so that they could make themselves good enough to be saved. So God gave them a huge set of intricate laws that He knew they could not keep so that, sooner or later, some of them would come to realize that they were hopeless sinners in need of God's grace. Many other such examples exist in God's scriptures.

The Infallible and Inerrant Word of God part one

The history of Christianity, and of the western world, happens to be quite different from that which has been written in most history books. This discrepancy stems from the heavy influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church claims to be able to trace its origin all the way back to Christ, but this claim is not true. The Catholic Church began in Rome in the third century A.D.

The true history of the Christian Church began when the Holy Spirit baptized it on Pentecost in Jerusalem in year one A.D. Immediately, the Apostle Peter began to preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ which alone saves Christians. This pattern continued with the Apostle Paul and the rest of the Apostles. I Corinthians 15:1-4 describes the simple gospel which the Apostles preached. The book of Acts makes no mention of any basic Catholic doctrines. None of the Apostles were ever called special priests. In fact, the Apostle Peter taught in I Peter 2:9 that all Christian believers are priests, and the Apostle John agreed with him in Revelation 1:6. The priesthood of the believer means that any individual believer can talk directly to God through Christ without any intervention of a special priest. Romans 8:34.

The method for becoming a Christian is quite simple. An unbeliever hears the gospel, becomes convinced by the Holy Spirit that he needs to be saved from his sins by the Lord Jesus Christ, repents of his sins and puts his faith in Christ's power to save him. At that very moment, the Holy Spirit baptizes that believer into the Church of Jesus Christ, cleanses him of all inner sin with the blood of Jesus, and recreates his soul and spirit by giving him the righteousness of Christ Himself. This miraculous moment, Jesus called the "born again" experience. John 3:3-8; John 3:16; I Corinthians 6:11; I Corinthians 12:13; I Corinthians 15:1-4. Infants cannot actively repent and believe, therefore, infant baptism cannot make one a Christian.

The true Word of God which informs us of this true gospel has come to us through the Apostles and the true Christian Church that was in Antioch, Syria. Acts 11:26. The Catholic Church derived much of its doctrines from the so-called Church fathers who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. These men were heavily influenced by gnosticism and even paganism. This fact alone makes it quite impossible that they could have preserved the true Word of God for the Christian Church.

The Antioch Church preserved the true Word of God and the true gospel which they also called the Received Text. The common believers also called the Received Text the vulgate because the common believers accepted it as the true Word of God. The Catholic Church produced a corrupted version of the Bible through one of its fathers called Jerome which they also called the Vulgate, but the common believers never accepted it. Eventually, the Catholic Church even banned its people from reading the Received Text. The people of God succeeded in preserving the true Word of God despite terrible persecution from the time of the Antioch Church to the present day. In 1611, the Received Text was translated into the King James Bible which is the true Word of God in English. Down through history, the Catholic Church has persecuted the true people of God and called their churches by many false names, but the true doctrines of the true Word of God continues today in some Baptist Churches. Just as John the Baptist did in John 1:29, the true Baptist Church has always pointed directly to Jesus as God and Savior.

The inerrant and infallible Word of God has come to us through His persecuted Church to impart to us the true gospel message that Christ can save any believer through His personal interaction with them, and that the Church has no part in this interaction except that it preaches the gospel to the people. This direct Truth, who is Christ, imparted to the inner being of the believer constitutes the inerrant and infallible Living Word of God, and not the written Word. John 1:1; John 1:14; John 14:6. God has caused the written Word of God to be inerrant and infallible only to the extent that the Holy Spirit uses it to guide the believer to its Living Truth. Psalm 12:6-7. The written Word does not provide objective truth that everyone has to accept because God desires to preserve free will. God provides evidence that His Word is true but not proof because He desires that hearers of His Word decide for themselves to accept the absolute subjective Truth that Christ is Savior and God. John 1:12-14.