Monday 28 September 2015

A reply to: Pope Francis assures atheists: You don’t have to believe in God to go to heaven

I must confess that I was leaving the office on Friday, 25th September 2015 but I got so compelled to leave a reply on an article appearing on http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis-assures-atheists-you-don-t-have-to-believe-in-god-to-go-to-heaven-8810062.html. Stay with me because it’s quite long but I believe it is worth it.

Let me start by making some statements for the insight of the reply;
(i) God is Sovereign as His WORD (As long as God does not speak He is Sovereign, but when He speaks His Sovereignty ends there).
(ii) God is limited by His WORD (Whenever God speaks, what He speaks automatically becomes a law not only to the creation but even to Himself. Psalms 138:2).
(iii) God will never violate His WORD (Psalms 89:34. God’s faithfulness to His WORD obligates Him to watch over His WORD and perform it even if nobody else observes or keeps it. Jeremiah 1:12).

I divert a little but stay with me. Death gets its power from sin. The wages of sin is death. Sin has to do with rebellion or doing that which is not right. Death on the other hand was a creation of God. But death was dead initially because it was created dead. Case in point: Gen 2:16-17 “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat: FOR IN THE DAY THAT THOU EATEST THEREOF THOU SHALT SURELY DIE.” Check the statements above and follow me now. God set a precondition that man had to observe/keep or else he would die. From the context, death did not have power over an obedient man. As long as man was obedient death remained dead. Death gets its power from sin. The moment man rebelled or sinned against the command of the LORD GOD, immediately death was activated to life and now possessed the power to kill the man. Right there man was detached from the presence of God (check on the law of detachment). The death God referred to was spiritual death. After Adam sinned he lived 930 years: and he died the physical death after all those years. That means it is possible for a man to be alive physically but dead unto God spiritually.

Man was created to be in the presence of God always. Just as soil is the foundation of a plant to be alive or water to a fish, so is the presence of God to a man. Worship is universal. Man was created or engineered in such a way that he much worship. If there is no deity for him/her to worship, he has to invent one e.g. automobiles, science, money, illusions, animals, erroneous ideologies e.t.c or carve an image of something to fill that vacuum.

When man rebelled against the command of God, he became alive in sin. The life of any living creature is in its blood. Thus when man rebelled against the LORD GOD, his blood became contaminated by sin and the penalty was death. Therefore sin entered the world through one man. I know you’re already asking; why did God not prevent man from falling on the trap of temptation set by Satan? Refer to Genesis 1:26 and connect with the statements above. God gave man dominion on earth(for more on this drop me a DM on twitter @Gardiy). Just as sin entered the world through one man, God had already made arrangements of redeeming man back to himself through one man who did not know sin but obedient. Romans 5:1-21.

The wages of sin is death. I thank God for Good Friday because it was death pay day. Jesus Christ paid death its dues in full and shed his pure, sinless, righteous, uncontaminated BLOOD re-attaching us back to the presence of God. 1 Corinthians 15:55-17. I pause here to state how the TRINITY works; It is imperative to know that God is the faithful judge. That is why whoever comes to God, before He passes His judgement to him or her, requires that the HOLY SPIRIT must convict the person of his/her sins. If the person repents his/her sins then, the HOLY SPIRIT takes the repented soul to JESUS CHRIST to be marked by His BLOOD. That is why when one goes straight to God, God is quick to ask the HOLY SPIRIT, “as you work on him/her take him/her to Jesus FIRST to be marked with the BLOOD. When one is convicted, repents and marked with the blood both the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ escorts the person to God for the judgement to be rendered and upon seeing a repented soul marked with the blood passes a sentence, therefore there is now no more condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1.

The antithesis is also true in that, if one goes to God, he is not convicted, does not repent, neither does not bear the mark of the Blood of Jesus Christ; the sentence is condemnation condemnation…..! Nothing in this life is to be feared, rather it should be understood. We are all candidates of the Kingdom of Heaven citizenship. How do you become a citizen of a country? It is that simple also with the Kingdom of Heaven. You see before the earth existed Heaven was. That is why whenever one believe in his heart and confesses with his mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and that God raised Him from the dead, you’re saved Romans 10:8-11, and handed the citizenship, Philippians 3:20. So no one can impose laws or opinions to God because Himself is the legislator with or without your consent. He does not Change neither is there a shadow of Him turning. Actually He speaks, He is well able to fight for Himself and He’s complete with or without you and me. You and me we’re here for a short period of time, Him (God), He has being here since and even when we are gone, He will remain to be.

Therefore, by writing this reply I am not trying to be God because I cannot or trying to have an understanding of deep things or secrets of God, but this one thing I know is that He does not change like we do. Malachi 3:6. God is constant in all that He does or says and by that alone we can rely on Him to trace ourselves where we stand relative to Him. So let God be God, and every man a liar.

As I conclude, stop blaming God on the evil there is in the world today besides atrocities and heinous crimes prevalent all around us. Get back your belief systems in order by knowing what you can and cannot do. The devil is not your enemy either. The devil is not after you, he is after your belief system. Fight not the devil but fight the good fight of faith 1 Timothy 6:12. Get your belief systems right back by relying on the constant God is. The shot that won the fight was the one shot through the pain.   

GOD BLESS YOU for reading to the end.