Generally, Christians do not know what they are talking about, so how would the non-Christian? They indeed are lost!
Christians rattle off biblical quotes
until they become clichés. Of course, “God loves you,” is said often without the
declarer understanding what love is even about. To many, love is love,
just as the “woke” crowd believes. Strangely, love is not love as God
defines it. However, the concept of love has been covered often and people
still do not understand it.
Probable the best concept of love
is from John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten
Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting
life.”
First off, who is the “world’? It
is literally the cosmos. God loves what He has made and that includes objects, souls,
and beings of all sorts. Foremost, God loves the souls of some people;
those who trust Him. It is not that he has no empathy for the “lost” but that
they deserve what is important to them. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23),
so sinners get their rightful payment. Sinners are justly rewarded for their
actions and thoughts.
James, the brother of Jesus,
helped with that concept, “Wherefore lay apart all filthiness
receive with meekness the engrafted Word, (in italics that which
follows): which is able to save your souls” (Jas 1:21).
John wrote the conditions for
salvation. The person must believe (pisteuo) in Him. People fail to
understand what belief even means. — to have trust in something. Demons
believe in God but trust Lucifer rather than God (Jas 2:19).
Believing in Jesus from rebirth to
death — “…he that endures to the end shall be saved” — is saving faith.
Hence faith is dynamic; and it is trusting God until the end. “Born again” is
the moment in time when any sinner first believes, to wit: “…now is our
salvation nearer than when we believed” (Rom 13:11), or better said, first
trusted God for salvation of the soul.
Hence, the love of God is
conditional but also unconditional in the sense that the free will that God endowed
everyone with allows them to either choose eternal life or to reject it. Each
person must decide whether they trust themselves for salvation, or God, all the
while knowing that they have no power to save themselves. So irrationally, they
reject God because they fail to believe that there is a resurrection of the faithful.
God is impartial; doing good
things to gain His favor (works) does not bias the “Judge” who knows what is in
the mind of the person. God detects sin by both thoughts and actions. James
revealed the actions: “…lay apart all filthiness receive with meekness the
engrafted Word.” Laying apart is the action and meekness the right
thinking.
Martin
Luther rejected that notion and sought to eliminate the Book of James as
biblical canon.
Canon are the sacred books that
are the genuine Word of God. Luther believed in sola gratia (by grace
alone); so do most Christians. However, “works” are the evidence of gratitude
for His Grace. Being engendered by God (born again) is made like God, or as many
say without knowing what it means, “in Christ.” If anyone does not have the “engrafted
Word” in them, they are not in Christ and their souls shall not be saved,
as James rightfully acknowledged.
To understand what “in Christ”
means, consider the “Word engrafted” within you. The “Word” is the actions of
God, what He thinks, says, and does. It is the “Dynamic” of God that is in the
Christian. Dynamics are just actions but in the case of those in Christ who are
engrafted (entangled) with Him, they are good works, or “virtue,” and are also
of the mind.
In this case, “entanglement” is
like God but not God. Christians are not Christ but like Christ in their
actions. We do come short of being like Christ!
Like the blind man who received
his sight because of faith in the Christ, “Jesus said unto him, ‘Go your way; your
faith has made you whole. And immediately he received his sight and followed
Jesus in the Way” (Mark 10:52). The blind man who had just sat there became “whole;”
he was engrafted with the Genome of God in a spiritual sense (“born again”).
He had trusted Jesus one time, but once he saw that he was restored, out of
gratitude, the once blind man followed Jesus in the Way — on the journey
that Jesus was going. Where did the journey of Jesus end? On Calvary. The blind
man may have not been at the crucifixion, but Jesus was crucified for him because
of his faith.
The
once blind man was to follow Jesus, not for just that day, but for the entire
journey to his death, just as Jesus made his journey to His.
The journey for the blind man was
the same journey for any follower of Jesus, “If any man will come after me, let
him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mat 16:24). “Now” is
any time on the journey and as Christians go the Way of Jesus, the journey
leads to salvation, just as Paul wrote to the Roman Christians.
Since enduring to the end
is the crucifixion of the body, the soul is saved once the person dies. Of
course, Christians are to die to the world, but that would mean that they all
become ascetics, giving up the world. That is “legalism,” or salvation by
works.
At
death, just what is saved?
The
body returns to the dust from which it came, just as God says (Gen 3:19). The
body of man (Adam) was made in Genesis part two. His soul was made
before the foundation of the world, perhaps in the realm of heaven in Paradise,
before the world was made in part two.
The
soul of Adam was the invisible image that was like God but not God. The soul of
mankind has the same substance as the Substance of God.
Like God, the soul is immortal. It
can be compared to the Holy Ghost of Jesus; the human soul is immaterial but in
the shape of a man (Luke 3:22). Although it cannot be seen under normal conditions
the ghost of a Christian can be seen by its action. When Jesus was baptized,
the Holy Ghost was seen by its movement onto Jesus in as wave-pattern like a
dove would glide.
Christians
cannot walk one way and the soul another way. They must walk together until
death do them part.
The most important case of overcoming
that parameter in the world was the event when the Body of Jesus went one way,
and the Ghost of Jesus went another way. Jesus overcame the world because that
was impossible theretofore. Now, because Jesus went one way in person and His
Ghost went another way, Christians can do that as well!
Jesus was providing hope to His
followers when He said, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John
16:33). Because He could defy death, so can His followers… if they
follow Him to their end when their bodies go one way (to the grave) as their
souls are saved as they glide into another realm with ease.
Salvation is not physical. It is
the soul that is saved from torments. All souls are immortal; the choice is
where the person spends eternity. “Love,” then is God’s desire that the soul never
perishes, just as John 3:16 indicates.
God
truly desires that the body die, and Paul wanted his to die as well; he said, “For
to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21).
“Salvation” (soteria) is
at death when the soul separates from the body and goes a different way. For Paul,
it was gain because he was in Christ. If not in Christ, then the “gain”
is the pain of torments. Paul did endure to the end and then suffered decapitation,
according to legend. Why was that gain to him? Because he was entangled with
Christ and would go where Christ had gone!
Many
say with enthusiasm, “I got saved today!” Not so! They began to trust Jesus for
salvation which should come if they remain faithful. (The unfaithful do not
enter Paradise but Hell.)
Whether they trust Him to the end is up to
themselves since they are sealed by God (2 Cor 1:22). God will never leave
nor forsake them, but they, again, are not God nor even gods. They can freely
leave and forsake God as they want (Heb 6:6). God does not imprison them but
puts a “garden” (gan; hedge) about them as Satan accused God of doing
for Job. God keeps them safe, but as with Job, safety to the end was how
far Job would trust in God. He trusted God all the way to the end!
So,
God loves you so that He desires that you never perish. In other words, God has
so much “goodwill” for you that your soul is indispensable in the eternal scheme
of things. He will keep you “safe” (sozos in the Greek), but salvation
occurs the moment that the end comes for you.
For most, the dead will rise in
Christ, but for a blessed few, the living will be raised while alive (Thes
4:16-17). Only those living in Christ when Christ returns will have their
bodies saved. All those already dead in Christ will be regenerated from the
dust from which they came. God, indeed, can raise dry bones and put onto them
tallow and flesh as He proved long ago (Ezek 37).
Your person will not be
saved. You will not look like the ugly person that you are within. The human
body is not the glorious body that Adam had. The flesh that you wear so proudly
is at most temporary flesh that you wear (Gen 3:17) to keep you safe until the resurrection
when those in Christ will have a genesis in the same manner as Adam and shall also
be glorified.
Christians are blessed. The two
glorious creatures, not Adam and Lucifer, but Adam and the woman Adam, were
meant to be like God in mind and spirit. They failed God in mind, so their
spirit was made devoid of their glorious flesh. The mind goes with the spirit
wherever it goes since virtue is the dynamic (dynamis) of God.
Either way you go, your mind goes
with the soul; somehow, just as Lazarus and the rich man went their separate
ways but each retained their mental faculties (Luke 16).
So far, hopefully you understand
love, rebirth, the soul, and the end; perhaps even trust and faith, but do you
understand sin and glorification? That will be revealed next.
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