Two Ways to Heaven

There are two ways to heaven: the impossible and the possible.

1.  Be perfect throughout your entire life.

That makes you superior to the rest of us. In fact, it must make you God, since only God is perfect. 

Proud people think they can earn heaven, but the Ten Commandments (and the over 600 more) do not show a way to heaven for us real people. Instead, they show us that we are condemned before God.

• Have you had anything in your life that was more important than God? The scriptures call that idolatry.
• Have you had any incorrect idea of whom God is and what he's like? Have you prayed through a statue? That's idolatry, too.
• Have you worked on the Sabbath (Saturday)? That's putting other things ahead of God, so it's idolatry, too.
• Have you used the Lord's name in vain? That's a personal insult to God!
• Have you ever spread gossip that turned out to be untrue? That's lying and murdering somebody's reputation.
• Have you hated somebody without just cause? That's murder in your heart.
• Have you looked with sexual desire at somebody other than your spouse? That's adultery.
• Have you wanted something that belonged to somebody else? That's stealing in your heart.

And God looks on the hearts, not just the actions. 

Remember, the Law is One Law with many points. You don't have to break all the points. Break just one point, and you've broken the Law and lost your place in heaven. If you think you've never sinned, just wait. You will.

Satan said, "I will be like God." Adam and Eve said, "We will know good and evil like God." And the self-righteous says in his heart, "I will be perfect." 

Yes, Jesus said, "Be perfect," but He was using the Law to break people's pride, to show that earning heaven by your own merit is impossible. The point of His instruction was not, "Attempt the impossible." His message used irony to show that we are condemned. Salvation comes another way, and only to the humble. 

2. God prepared a gift

The gift that can save us if we accept it as a gift instead of as something we deserve.

The Creator of time and space entered into His creation as three Persons, each fulfilling a distinct role, yet united as One God in eternity.  One of those Persons, God the Son, added a human nature called Jesus to His own nature (without changing in His essence). 

Jesus lived a perfect life. If He had not, He would have died for His own sins, not for ours. But He was God, so He could live a perfect life. And because of that, when He gave Himself on the cross, God could credit our guilt to Jesus  (like a big brother taking the punishment for his little brother) and credit Jesus' righteousness to us. And to demonstrate His approval of what Jesus did, God raised Him from the dead.

God offers that gift to those who (a) recognize God the Son and (b) in desperate need and humility, receive the gift as what it is, a free gift.

Many cling to the impossible way by mixing it with God's provision. They mix faith and works, and corrupt grace (which means "gift") by turning it at least partly into wages. They seek credit for themselves instead of glorifying the Giver alone.

The mixture takes two forms. The first form says you have to do ceremonies, or good works, or clean up your life; and then you receive some or all of the gift. The second form says God gives you the gift, but then you have to earn the right to keep the gift through works or perseverance. Both of these insult God's generosity.

The second (you have to work to retain the gift) also recognizes only half the relationship. Salvation becomes yours, but also you become God's. You become God's child and Jesus' "sheep." (People often lie about the following part because they don't understand it.)

You can't do whatever you want for three reasons (at least!).

• When you became a Christian, you hated your sins because they were evil and they condemned you. Since you hated your sins, and as a new Christian, God begins changing you to free you from those sins, you will try not to repeat those sins.
• God will chastise you, even to the point of killing your body if that's what it takes to keep your soul safe.
• The "whatever you want" will change because God works within you, making you want to do what pleases Him.
• If you do "whatever you want" and get away with it, your conversion was not genuine. Beware false conversions due to.
• Pride in self merit
• Knowledge without heart conviction
• Being carried along by emotion with only partial understanding or with misunderstanding
• Knowledge and emotion, but without prioritizing conversion over everything else

In the gospels, Jesus says, "Be perfect."

The sinner says, "I cannot. I have sinned."

Jesus says, "Be perfect, or be condemned."

The sinner says, "Woe to me, for I am a sinner, condemned!"

Jesus says, "Now you are ready to receive the gift."

The self-righteous man says, "Let me do ceremonies, chant repetitious prayers, and do good works for the gift."

Jesus says, "Go away and do not insult me by trying to earn my gift."

The misled man says, "I receive the gift" but thinks "and I will do good works and persevere so that I don't lose it."

Jesus says, "Come back when you are ready to stop insulting my faithfulness."

The humble man says, "I deserve condemnation. I can do nothing to earn or to keep the gift. I surrender. I trust You to have mercy upon my sins and grace upon my need."

Jesus says, "I give you the gift. Now you are mine and I am yours, and I keep my promises. Welcome to my kingdom, little brother! Now, let's get to work!"

Copyright 2019, Richard Wheeler -- Permission granted for personal or non-profit, non-published use. Please give credit where credit is due.

I was forgiven. I need forgiveness. Contradiction?

The Bible teaches that salvation means you have been forgiven; yet it also teaches a continuous need for confession and forgiveness. Skeptics twist that into a contradiction. Arminians and Wesleyans twist it into "proof" that salvation is conditional and not secure. Both reflect a need for greater understanding. 

Forgiveness or being forgiven means either an action or a state. The word forgiven has more than one meaning.

• Past participle of the verb to forgive — You were forgiven, meaning, God forgave you.
• Adjective — You are forgiven, meaning, since you were declared forgiven, now you are in a state of forgiveness; it is one of your attributes.
• Present participle — You are forgiven, meaning, I forgive you.

I forgive

Before discussing forgiveness in the spiritual context, we need to recognize a practical context. Sin affects everybody.

• My sin affects me because it has consequences for me.
• It affects God because it desecrates His creation, it is an affront to His holiness, and it rebels against His sovereignty.
• Some sins directly hurts others.

So if somebody says, You are forgiven, they might mean that, assuming you have obeyed the gospel, God has forgiven you. However, they might mean that they forgive you for what you did to them.

God forgives

The state of forgiveness cannot be reversed. Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1, NASB).

This is because Christ fulfilled the Law — the Old Testament commandments that condemned us. God God reckons Christ’s death and payment of the debt to our accounts, so in the new birth, we died to the Law of Condemnation and were born into a Law of love.

Romans 7:1–6 uses marriage as an analogy. Marriage is a lifelong commitment. When one spouse dies, the other is free from that first commitment and free to marry another. Similarly, when Christ’s death is imputed to us, it’s like we’ve died to the Law of Condemnation, and God places us under a new law, the Law of Love. So the passage concludes in verse 6,

• But now we have been released from the Law [of commandments that condemn], having died to that by which we were bound [the Law and our guilt], so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter [the Law].

Because God remakes us as His children, His role in relationship to one whom He remakes into His child changes from Judge to Father. Formerly, His end role was to pronounce guilt, hand down the sentence, and execute justice. Now, His role is to train us; and by being trained, we can bring more honor to Him, earn rewards, enjoy fellowship with Him, and become more of a blessing to those we encounter. His end role will be to judge our performance and give rewards rather than to condemn.

On the other hand…

All this means that sin cannot condemn us, but it does not mean that sin does not hurt is. Sin still

• brings embarrassment to God’s name
• wastes rewards
• interferes with our fellowship with God
• interferes with our fellowship with others
• makes us a hindrance to others instead of a blessing
• weighs us down with guilt

Even though we have been forgiven by our Judge so that no penalty of condemnation remains, we still seek forgiveness from our Father because a penalty of lost joy and usefulness weighs us down.

Whereas the book of Romans focused on judicial forgiveness, the book of 1 John focuses on daily life.

• [I]f we walk in the Light… we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin…. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:7–9, NASB)

This passage would seem self contradictory. “He forgives us of all sins, yet we need continued forgiveness?” This is resolved if you recognize the difference between forgiveness by our Judge and forgiveness by our Father.

Again, judicial forgiveness cleanses us from all our sins — past, present, and future. But within that state of forgiveness, we still need that cleansing of conscience and restoration of fellowship with our Father.

That’s why we should, even though our sins are forgiven, live in a continual state of repentance, confession, and attempted reform.

Copyright 2019, Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for personal or non-profit use. Please give credit where credit is due.

Parallel Passages Strengthen the Bible

Someone asked, "Aren't parallel passages in the Bible redundant?"

First, let’s define parallel passages as texts that discuss the same subject. A subset of these includes passages that contain similar or identical wording; and a further subset includes passages that use the same words, especially (but not necessarily) with reference to the same subject.

Passages that discuss the same subject may approach it from different perspectives and provide different, complementary details that would be tedious to read if combined. Parallel passages can provide emphasis to a point, too. The third type is useful because reading a word in a different context can help define it.

Old Testament

Several major examples of parallel passages exist in the Old Testament.

Genesis contains two accounts of creation. One focuses on chronological order at a high level, and the other focuses on the creation of humans. Skeptics say that this means there are two authors, but repetition, parallelism, and restatement of ideas from different perspectives are staples of Hebrew literature.

The Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, contains repeated passages. For example, first God might say something, then Moses conveys it to Israel, and then, years later, Moses reminds Israel and appends details. Repetition emphasizes the message.

One group of parallel passages is in the histories presented by 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, and 1 & 2 Chronicles. After the reign of kings Saul, David, and Solomon, Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel to the north and Judah to the south. 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings cover the history of Israel leading up to the split and the histories of both after the split. In contrast, 1 & 2 Chronicles repeats much of that history but focuses on Judah, omitting many details already covered and adding other details.

The two perspectives serves a purpose. First Israel, and later Judah, were conquered by other nations and their citizens were deported. Later, Israel remained scattered, but Judah was returned to the land.
According to Stephen Bedard,

Samuel/Kings was written at the beginning of the exile. It was a time of repentance and reflection of how they had come to that terrible situation. Chronicles was written after the exile was over and the Jews were trying to re-establish themselves…. Chronicles was written for a Jewish people who needed encouragement and strengthening. (What is the Difference between Samuel/Kings and Chronicles?)

The presentation of different perspectives sometimes gives the appearance of contradiction, but the contradictions can always be resolved. For example, according to 2 Samuel 24:1, God caused David to count the people of Israel and Judah, whereas in 1 Chronicles 21:1, Satan caused David to conduct the census. If you have read Job carefully, however, you realize that for a higher purpose, God sometimes tests or allows the devil to tempt, and God takes responsibility for the things that happen under His control. What happens behind the scenes is much more complicated that simplistic "contradictions," and we don't always have need-to-know. 

New Testament

The most obvious case of parallel passages is among the Gospels. They serve several major purposes.

• In Jewish law, establishing a fact required the testimony of two or three witnesses. Three of the gospel authors were eye witnesses to the events in Jesus’ ministry. So at least three gospels were needed to establish their truthfulness, and then needed to have coincident accounts — yet not so much coincidence that one might become considered redundant, and not so much word-for-word agreement that they presented the appearance of collusion between the authors.
  
  
• Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all have different literary styles that present a different focus. Whereas Matthew focuses on Jesus's teachings and presents Him as King, Mark is action-oriented and presents Jesus as the perfect Servant to a Jewish audience, Luke presents Jesus as the perfect Man to a Greek audience, and John focuses on theology and presents Jesus as God. A single, combined account could not have conveyed the various messages effectively.
  
  
• In The Life of Christ in Stereo: The Four Gospels Combined As One, Johntson Cheney resolved all the so-called contradictions and weaved the four gospels into a single book. I read the book once. Borrr-ringg. Combining all the parallel passages makes for excessively long, complicated sentences, and it obscures the messages of the authors. It’s a valuable aid when putting parallel passages together. Movie-makers ought to use such harmonies of the gospels instead of basing them on a single gospel. But if you try to read such books, you will learn to appreciate the value of four Gospels instead of one.
  
  
• Matthew, Mark, and Luke contain a lot of nearly identical text. Contrary to the speculation of “scholars,” Matthew, Mark, and Luke did not need to copy from a hypothetical document called Q. When a group of disciples witness the same thing, their notes tend to match up. When they preach together, their accounts dovetail even more. Moreover, Mark reputedly became a disciple of Peter and included much of Peter’s preaching in his gospel. Luke was a disciple in the early church and, besides recording much of Peter’s preaching, interviewed many other eyewitnesses to verify and fill in details. So the agreement is not a matter of copying, but of sharing experiences and recall.

In General

Whenever the same points need to be addressed to multiple audiences, parallel passages can result. This is handy because you get to read a point from different perspectives. Different details get addressed whereas compressing all the details into a single passage would make for tedious reading.

• Citing other passages creates parallels. For example, Jesus’s teachers are saturated with citations of Old Testament passages. When He quoted a portion of a passage in Genesis, he probably wanted readers to find the passage and get more background to understand what he was teaching.
  
  
• Skeptics like to point out passages that supposedly disagree with each other. Usually, however, the “contradictions” merely reflect differing perspectives. When you read about a supposed contradiction, remember that if an explanation is possible, then it is dishonest to say with certainty that there is a contradiction. This simple logic usually escapes skeptics who must discredit the Bible in order to evade accountability for their broken relationship with God.
  
  
• Skeptics contradict themselves when they complain that there are too many similarities and also complain that there are differences between the similar passages!

This answer is not complete. It could use specific examples, but the major points have been made, and you will recognize those points as you read through the Bible. Like a combined version of the four gospels, any more would make it even more tedious that it already is.

Copyright 2019, Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for personal or non-profit use. Please give credit where credit is due.

Answering Moral Relativism

Background

By a traditional definition, the morality of something is measured against a definition of right and wrong. In a materialistic universe, there is no right and wrong; there are only ethics and preferences. A relativist’s morality stands relative to preferences, so it is subjective and malleable. What the relativist calls right and wrong are actually beneficial and detrimental to either self, a third party, or society because, without a Higher Power qualified to declare right and wrong, neither right nor wrong exist.

A society can agree with an ethical or legal code, or those in power can impose such codes and call them “moral.” However, those that govern learn, grow, or grow corrupt, and are eventually replaced by other parties, so no moral code determined by whoever happens to be in power is really a moral code. It is only a set of ethics or laws. 

A moral code depends on a source that defines good and evil or right and wrong. Even if that source is a church, it remains fluid and is therefore not a true moral code. Any familiarity with “Christian” church history will reveal constant changes, especially during the Reformation, which was characterized by a backlash against the power-trip enabled by the merger of the Roman Catholic church and its constituent nations. 

When the relativist speaks of right and wrong, he really means approved or disapproved according to his preferences. The extreme end of relativism is anarchy. “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25, NASB). Everyone was, in fact, his own king.

Recommendation

• Emphasize use of accurate, honest terminology, and how any practice inherits its justification from a line of standards. If the ultimate standard is subjective self, then it is by definition unscientific, unsupported, and transitory. The rejection of objective morality is, by definition, immorality.
  
• Point out how an ethical code based on the individual’s conscience is (a) unstable and (b) a source of conflict. Since we grow, change, or surrender to temptations, our standard — ourselves — also changes. Since we are nurtured by different environments, we will disagree about standards, which causes unavoidable conflict.
  
• Moral relativism, in its current, post-modernism form, has extended to the magical thinking that emotions and words alter reality. Belief in magic runs contrary to the principles on which a secular society should run. It imagines that a mother’s desires or words turn a “fetus” into a baby or a lump of cells, that emotions and brainwashing turn a boy into a girl, that calling a someone a worker sanitizes the illegal way they entered the country. This is magic, and using reasoning that is divorced from objective reality to justify laws mixes religion and state. 

Don’t expect to score a touchdown in a single play. If you can move the ball just a few yards at a time, sowing doubt and correcting one or two arguments, be satisfied. Bring home the arguments you can’t answer and study. Then move on to the next scrimmage.