Grace and Sanity Ministries

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RUMINATIONS
OF A FORMER HEATHEN

Everything was made by him and without him there was not anything made that was made. And the cross is included in all the things that he made. He gave himself up for us. What a deal! A way out of Death and Hell? Let me have it. A person would have to be completely insane to let that go. Yet, insanity is the most prevalent condition in the world today, a fact proven by the rejection of Christ. Here we go into the bottomless subject of election and free will. There is so much I don’t know about it that, for the most part, I only have questions. I know there are people out there who know everything. There are experts out there who know exactly what God was thinking all along. Myself, I have to confess my indecision on what expert to pick. There are so many different opinions among experts, that I would need another expert to tell me which one of those experts is right. Once in a while I get a letter from somebody who is trying to teach me something, but I am so stubborn, so cynical, so opinionated, so suspicious of men, that only God can take me by the hand. I’ve been around a while, and I’m not sure that anybody knows completely the whole subject of election and free will. And really, why should that be surprising? Why should it be surprising that many of the things of God are past finding out? But there are a few things I know, directly from the Bible and from my own experience. There is definitely election on the part of God, and there is definitely free will on the part of man. How and when, election and free will interact, what is their connection, is very intriguing to me.

One of the most important of these questions is, is everybody who is going to be saved, saved only from before the foundation of the world? Or, to put it another way, are there some people who were not elected at the time before the foundation of the world but who have a chance to be saved, anyway? And I don’t want to argue about the fact that before the foundation of the world there was no time. Whether there was time or not, as we understand it now, there was a point when God existed and we did not. There was a point before the creation and before there was time, and at that point God was already there, making certain choices about those who were going to be saved.

The question is: Does God keep track of the number of people born? Did God look into the future and know exactly how many people would be born for all time? Did he choose everyone who was ever going to be saved at that point? Is the number of people to be saved locked up for all time from the foundation of the world? Or did God choose not to keep tabs on how many people would be born, therefore giving himself the opportunity to save people as new people are born? After all, he has chosen to throw our sins behind his back and remember them no more. Obviously, it’s not that he couldn’t bring them back to mind if he wanted to. But he is choosing not to. When we are under the covering of Christ he treats our sins as if they had never happened. So, maybe God is choosing not to know the whole number of all the people who will be born. Though he can know how many hairs there are on a person’s head, he can know that without keeping track of how many of us are here. Maybe there will be more people saved as the world goes along, I wouldn’t know. I cannot be sure about these things, but that’s what I want to believe. Otherwise, it makes no sense to spread the gospel. Of course, we have standing orders to spread the Gospel, he told us to do it, so we have to do it. That ends the discussion as far as spreading the Gospel is concerned. But why do it if the outcome has already been determined? If God has already chosen all those who are going to be saved and this happened at, or before, the foundation of the world, what’s the use of telling anything to anybody? If God has already made up his mind as to who is going to be saved and who is not, there is no need for us to be in the picture. If they were elected from the foundation of the world, they were saved before they were born. How are we going to make any difference?

God has promised he will lose none of his sheep, so, if he is going to save them no matter what, he’ll figure out a way, there is no need to tell them anything. Those who are saved are saved and those who are not are not. The ones who were chosen to be saved will be saved so we don’t have to tell them, and, those who were not chosen to be saved will not be saved so we don’t have to tell them, either. That would be the logical conclusion if no one were going to be saved who was not chosen to be saved from the foundation of the world. If those are right who say it is completely a matter of election and once elected you could not get out of it, well then, God has made robots. Salvation is a charade. It’s all an illusion and meaningless words. But he didn’t make robots. Perhaps it would have been better, easier, to make robots from the beginning and avoid all this trouble of having people run off in every direction. Instead he gave us free will and a response. We have a very clear response to God. The response is that we reject him, push him away, despise his ways, we use free will to rebel.So, is it by election we are saved? Oh, yes, no question about it. How could it be otherwise? We don’t have enough sense of the danger we are in without the covering of Christ. We don’t have enough sense of our own need. We are blind people dancing at the edge of a precipice. The Holy Spirit reveals to us who God is, we cannot know for ourselves.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The man who is in rebellion cannot be enticed with gifts. But he will respond to brute force. I know this guy like my own face. The fear of God is a gift from God, it is a way to indicate where salvation is, in the blood of the Lamb, our Jesus.

RUMINATIONS
OF A FORMER HEATHEN

How much grief could we avoid if we knew everything? How can we know when we are ignorant? I am sure glad Christ has paid for my sins. His covering reaches entirely into the most wicked parts of me.

Places we don’t even know about, he has covered. How could it be otherwise? We don’t know who we are. We cannot confess all our sins because we don’t know them all, our wickedness is beyond our comprehension. But couldn’t good works offset some of that? No, that’s not possible. If we really knew the extent of our sins, it would be obvious we could not make things up. We cannot make things right. For the most part, people are by far unaware of their own malice, vengeful feelings, and cheating hearts. Only the Bible, because it is the word of God who knows us intimately because he made us, only the Bible, I say, can describe accurately who we humans are. How can we live next to him, have eternal life, be alive for evermore? The very fact that he is Holy, Pure and Undefiled makes it impossible for us. The undefiled would become defiled if it were ever to come in contact with the defiled.

Everybody dies. Old people die, young people die. One generation after another, we all die. A long parade of history passing by the window. The parade appears on one side of the window and disappears on the other. We are born, grow up, work for vanities, vex our spirits, struggle for nothing and then die. And after that, what? A short life full of trouble and death, and that’s the human being? You retire at 65 and your energy is almost gone by then. The vigor of youth you still have in your mind does not translate to your body. You’d rather take a nap than take a walk. It is easy to become embittered when you finally are in a position to relax and don’t have enough energy to enjoy it. Death gets closer and closer, we are the generation on deck for demise and our memory will soon be gone.

Aaah, the mercies of God! The unsearchable mercies of God! The promise we have from him is eternal life. Is it possible for us to jump up and grab a hold of his coat? Can we force him to forgive us? Can we force him to take us in? No, no, no, no, no, we cannot get near. His very holiness demands that he would have to destroy us before we can even get started.

The world is blind to this. The search for Holiness exists in every religion. The awareness of the vast gulf fixed between us and God exists in every human being. The Buddhist looks to the Eight-Fold Path of Righteousness. That’s not too far from the impossibility God gave to Moses. Right occupation, right thinking? What are these? Right thinking? How can I be not wicked?

I’ve done all the meditations. They don’t work. Why is the Dalai Lama occupying himself with the injustice going on in Tibet? Why does a Buddhist concern himself with the suffering in the world? Check it out, according to Buddhist doctrine the cause of all suffering is desire. To eliminate suffering you eliminate desire. There’s nothing to it. Of course, if you desire to eliminate suffering, you’re in fast moving waters without a paddle. You cannot desire to eliminate suffering if desire is the cause of suffering. Elimination of suffering is defeated by the desire to eliminate suffering, if desire is the cause of suffering. All this mumbo-jumbo never ends, it puts you nowhere and makes you crazy. If you can see this other guru, he has the answer. He will tell you what you can actually do to obtain peace. There is a practical thing, a certain ritual, a certain kind of prayer, a certain kind of meditation that will get you on the right path. When you go in and pay your money and come up empty, you will hear of yet another somebody, somewhere else, another person who has the answers, someone who will straighten you out and put you in the way to peace. Because that is what everybody wants. Peace. No more strife. No more struggle to live. Let me do what I want. Let me be creative, let me do something over which I have total control.

It’s a lovely concept. Peace that guarantees I will not go to Hell after I die. Who doesn’t want that? Even an idiot like me can appreciate that.

Can we ever approach the love of God? The depth of his love? We have to consider we are talking about love toward ungrateful children. Love in spite of being despised. Would we be able to love when that love is despised? To be despised is to be shunned, to be pushed away, to be the subject of scorn. Could we love anyone like God loves us? I know about Eros, Phileo, and Agape. If I have to get to Agape in order to be saved, I can tell you right now, I would not make it at all. It wouldn’t be even close. I am rotten to the core. This admission is no more than what God says about me. I agree with him 1000 percent. My heart is desperately wicked, who can know it? All the thoughts of my heart were evil from my youth. The love of God surpasses understanding. There is absolutely no reason to save me, or someone like me. Why go through the trouble? Let him go to Hell, that’s what he deserves. By all rights, without any fabrication of evidence, there is no question that’s what he deserves. I’ve made up my mind about all this. I don’t want to go to Hell. Hell is a place of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I’m all for avoidance of pain. We all know something dreadful is waiting. Is it true? Is it true that there is something dreadful waiting? What if there is? Can I take a chance? Well, some people say it is all superstition. Man has to find some meaning to his life so he invented God. Yeah sure. Maybe. Maybe there is no God. How dismal would that be? How dismal is it to be born and have to die? Anything outside the Bible is dismal. Only the God of the Bible gives us something for nothing.

RUMINATIONS
OF A FORMER HEATHEN

The day of Judgment will separate those who will go to Hell from those who will not.

The problem is that the only way to avoid Hell is to be Pure, Holy and Undefiled. If those are the conditions, what hope is there for me? I don’t know where to go except to the God of the Bible. Only he assures me of a free passage out of Hell. He also says that he will give me eternal life with him. What? Eternal life with him? Let me have it. I don’t want to hear anything but that Christ is the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, the lamb slain to give the covering to Adam and Eve, the lamb appointed from the foundation of the world to pay for my sins. All my weight is leaning on the Bible. There, only, is a substitute for me that makes me Pure, Holy and Undefiled in front of God. There, only, is a way to eternal life. Everything else is nonsense. What gift could Jesus give unto man? The end of man is death. Everything pales in front of death. Eternal life, and sure escape from Hell, that is the enormous, stupendous, incomprehensible gift of God unto man. As for me, I’m not taking any chances. I am putting my greedy little paws on Leviticus 17:11 that says, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” A life for a life, that’s my Jesus, and I so love him.

Why should I think about these things? Que sera, sera, right? What difference does it make? Anybody can believe what they want. Believing one way or another doesn’t make it so. Why not reincarnation, as Hindus and Buddhists affirm? The Samsara, the wheel of life, you continue to go on through many lives always ascending, until you reach that point of purity that will allow you to be in the presence of the deity, or whatever it is that is out there. Again, why not? You believe this, I believe that. Who is right? You pays your money, you takes your choice. Of course, there is no guarantee that this is so and there is no guarantee you will not go to a Hell. Perhaps temporarily (maybe only a few thousand years) to do some kind of purifying before you go on. You could have it bad for a while but you’ll be O.K. eventually. And if your karma is fairly well balanced or you have more good deeds that bad deeds you will just go on, onwards and upwards towards that purity. But the way one as cynical and calculating as I would put it, is, I can’t go wrong with Christ. If reincarnation is really what’s going to happen there is no loss. As a Christian one does good deeds, whether out of guilt or not, and perhaps those will count towards karma-fixing. But the other way around is not so benign. If Christianity is true then it means that all our works are filthy rags, filthy rags, and, therefore, completely unacceptable to God as payment for our sins. Our impurity remains on us no matter what the effort. It looks to me like the not going for the sure thing that is Christ, could be pretty bad, resplendently bad, astonishingly bad, beyond description bad.

Does Hell exist? That is the question. If Hell exists, all efforts must be made to avoid it. Nobody can afford to go to Hell. Hell is an horrible place, a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, unending desperation, cut off for ever from God.

Let’s take the God of the Bible out of the picture for a moment. There is no explanation for the world as it exists today. How did it get here? The Big Bang? Everything started from a singularity, from an infinitesimally dense, small point? Sure, why not? A quantum leap in the fabric of space and time. A new universe that comes out of the small end of a black hole after the old universe is sucked into the big end of it. A something that occurs every few eons of time stretching back out into infinity. Well, why not? There is, however, a small technical point: Truth, by definition, can only be one. A cat is a cat and a dog is a dog. So, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I am going to hang on to the God of the Bible. I’m going to take my chances and go with him. Contrary to good advice, I’m not going to hedge my bets. I am putting all my eggs in one basket. I am hanging all my hopes in that the death, the blood, the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ is the payment for all my sins and that his resurrection is proof that these hopes are not in vain. Hell does not await me, but eternal life with God. I’m sorry, I’m looking out for myself. I want to be saved. Do you know how wicked I am? I am living proof that God saves to the uttermost. Those who are way out on the fringes, lost beyond any possibility of finding their way, those, precisely, he goes out of his way to save. How merciful is that? We are nothing but cheap harlots, even harlots who don’t charge but give it away for free, adulterous wives who go out to strangers and not to their own husbands. That’s what we are, worse than worthless.

Yet, inexplicably so, how can one understand this?, God loves us. He bids us to return to him, adulterous and filthy as we are, he loves us.

Rambling on, ignorance of the Law is no excuse. Any cop will tell you that. The fact you didn’t know that you were going 45 on a 35-mile an hour zone doesn’t make any difference. You’ll get a ticket. You should have paid attention, the signs were all around.

Why does God go after the rebellious ones? Oh, I’m so glad he does. How could I possibly have been saved except for the direct intervention of God? Election and free will again. Do we have free will to come to God? Or is it God who chooses us? Can somebody be chosen of God and have the free will to resist? Can I say I heard the call of God and came running? I’ll tell you what I heard. I heard the crackling of the fire of eternal hell. A fire that burns but does not consume. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Regarding the call of God maybe I can say I moved with free will. The free will was that I jumped out of the building that was on fire. The free will was that I grabbed the rope that was thrown to me as I was drowning. Is that forever? Or is it until our individual punishment is accomplished and then we are thrown into the lake of fire to be destroyed? Is the suffering eternal or temporary? I don’t know and I don’t want to find out for myself.

My problem is the extent of my corruption. I see it every day. I’m a thief and a murderer at heart, what hope is there for me? I have to absolutely depend on the blood of Christ. I have no other recourse. Are you kidding? What can I give in exchange for my soul? I have nothing to look forward to except Jesus and him crucified. Past that point I only know one thing. If Jesus is the Son of God, God himself, his death is the payment for my sins and I will not go to hell after I die.

But I’m going to tell you something. The only reason I am able to recognize the extent of my corruption, the only reason, I say, is that my salvation is assured. I have it in writing. He says that if I present myself to him preceded by the sacrifice of the lamb without blemish, he will accept me. Oh, what blessed assurance. And I don’t find these assurances in the Bible by inference, or by something that can be interpreted different ways. The Laws of sacrifice for sin, all kinds of sins, the ones we know about and the ones we don’t know about, are spelled out without equivocation. I am completely confident that Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. Nobody can take Jesus away from me.

Nothing feels as solid as knowing that you are saved. Everything in life is wide open now.

This is not a weird Jesus of any kind, this is Jesus of Nazareth, the one whom Pontius Pilate crucified. This is not some kind of esoteric and new meaning. All this goes to the absolute assurance of salvation. This goes to the roots of Judaism, the tree of Christ.

Assurance of salvation is paramount. The heart of stone is replaced with a heart of flesh. Repentance is possible only with complete assurance of salvation. And repentance is cathartic. The part of you that is dreadful to look at does not condemn you to hell. Finally you can unload all the causes of your anxiety. You can acknowledge your secret corruption and there is no punishment waiting.

RUMINATIONS
OF A FORMER HEATHEN

What’s in the future for this world? We see international turmoil, the wickedness of man, death, loss and destruction everywhere. The words “we live in perilous times”were spoken a long time ago. Has it always been this way, or is it getting worse? Where are we going with all this? Are we going to have peace? And if we are not going to have peace, how close are we to the end of the world? In recent events at the United Nations, the leaders of Iran and Venezuela received much applause as they attacked the United States. Bush found a passive-aggressive audience, our haters were celebrated. Is this the moment when all the nations of the world will be arrayed against Jerusalem as the Bible says it will be just before the end of the world? Jerusalem itself is under siege right now, but also we who belong to Christ are Jerusalem, and the United States is the only Christian country left in the world. The only other Christians were our close friends the British, but they are becoming more apostate every day, more anti-Semitic and more anti-Christian. The Church of England is falling away fast, with the head guy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, holding Druid services, imagine. Prince Charles, when he ascends to the throne, will have, among others, the official title of Defender of the Faith, the Christian Faith that is, in England. But, presently he dabbles in New Age stuff, witchcraft light. Christianity is pretty much dead in the rest of Europe. They retain the beautiful church buildings, but the buildings are cold and empty inside. It fits, then, according to the Bible, that both the United States and Israel, would be more and more isolated in front of the world, as we approach the end of time. Regarding what the future holds for this world, I can tell you what it holds. It holds more of the same, more wickedness, more death, more loss and destruction. And it will not slow down, but increase. That’s what my Bible says that the future holds. But at the very least it holds death. Even if we are spared the witnessing of the end of the world, a hole in the ground is what awaits us individually.

And then what? Many say nothing will happen, you die and that’s it. Lots of smart people over the centuries, and today, have said that. Is that what’s ahead? Obliteration, non-existence? Would that be stupid. Study and struggle for what? Everything is for nothing. The memory of my existence would last maybe a couple of generations past my nearest family members, and then it will disappear. It will be as if I had never existed. Is this the future? The dreams that were never fulfilled, the projects never completed, the wonders never investigated, the streets never crossed, nothing got done at the end, what was it all for? What a waste of time. Is that what life is? Birth, a short time full of trouble and death? Being born and having to die without any possibility of living again would be the most cruel joke ever imagined. Why ley me taste life at all? I didn’t ask to be born. But to let me be born, taste life and then die..., I don’t know. It sounds pretty pointless to me.

But the man who is in rebellion cannot be enticed with blessings, no matter how good they are. The man who is in rebellion is cynical, cruel, scornful. I know him. Intimately, I know him. I see his beady eyes staring at me when I shave. Oh, yes, I know who that guy is. Of course, God in his mercy brought me to my senses and changed all that. I’m not in rebellion against him anymore, no way. How can anyone go against God? He is the self-existing one from everlasting to everlasting, he is all wise, all powerful, all resourceful. Who can stand before that? What can this world tell me that I don’t know? The sum of this world is that life is hard and then you die.

The really bad part of rebelling against God is that not only would it be bad just to die, but what if Hell exists? If Hell exists it would be infinitely worse than just dying. The same smart people who say that when you die that’s it also, of course, scorn the idea of the existence of Hell. They have said, and say, that Hell is simply an invention of the Church to frighten people into behaving the way the Church thinks is right. Hell does not exist. Where is Chamberlain when I need him? I saw him coming off that plane waving that piece of paper in his hand. He was so sure. Peace in our time, he said, Hitler will not attack us, he said. I have his signature in this piece of paper, he said. Where is one of those smart guys that will guarantee me with his signature that Hell does not exist? I guess the dead ones of yesterday and the live ones of today will find out in the Day of Judgment.

I’m not done with this yet, I’ll continue next time. Salvation is paramount. Goodbye for now.