This is a response to Deep Dad Nine, who picked apart two or three arguments for Christianity simultaneously for about five days. I admire his persistence and I was not very happy with the response of the Christians, though they tried very hard. I can not fairly say any more about any of these people, but I would like to offer these explanations to important parts of the argument. I hope this clears up the misunderstandings that any of you, and especially Deep Dad Nine, have about the distinction between religion and Christianity. I will start with one of DDN’s objections.: DDN
: 1) Then there IS something I CAN do to be saved: I can HAVE FAITH and LOVE, correct? So…whenever someone says that there is NOTHING I can do to be saved – they are either mistaken or lying, correct? I am told frequently (even by the Bible itself) that there is NOTHING I can do to be saved.
Therefore, according to you, the Bible is either mistaken or lying, correct?
Response:
First of all you are trying way to hard to make this hard. Christianity is both easy and incredibly deep. This is because it is truth.
Religion is the things that men do to make himself right with a God they feel they have wronged. Look at all the religions of the world, they are about what man can do for God. There is one flaw with all of these. They infer that after we do these things for God, he will react to us by saving us. God may love us, but he is God and compared to him we are nothing. He will not react to us, we must react to him. This may sound contradictory to such verses as Matthew 22, “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith,” but the truth is that God has already reacted to us. He has seen the way our sin separates us from him and being a loving God has seen it just and right to send his only begotten son to die for you. He reacted to your open rebellion with love, now all you have to do is react to his love with your own love.
Paul was very religious before his conversion. In paraphrase he said, “I was the most religious Jew I knew, I was a Jew of Jews, I could quote the Tora and as for zeal I killed Christian. But then when I met Jesus I realized that it was all trash. I threw it all away for just a chance to know Jesus.” A whole lot of modern church goers think that by doing religious things such as going to church they become saved, they think that some how they are doing God a favor. Every week they go to church and leave expecting God to react to their act of religious piety, and in some way saving them.
Romans 9: 30-33
30 What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith;
31 but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it.
32 Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the “stumbling stone.”
33 As it is written: “See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”
We need to react to God. Love, actually is at the center of it all.
: DDN
: 3) Romans 3:21-31 doesn’t say a damn thing about LOVE. It lists several requirements god has of us not one of which is love. They are as follows: having faith, believing in Jesus, and obeying the law.
4) You yourself have also added to the list of requirements: “change your thinking”, “believe in Jesus”, and “read Bible references”.
Given all of the above, once again for the 8 millionth time, I must ask: What must I do in order to be “saved”? What does God require from us that we might be allowed into heaven? And where is the biblical passage that gives these requirements? So far we have:
1) Believe in Jesus
2) Change your thinking
3) Obey the Law
4) Have “faith”
5) Read Bible references
Are there anymore requirements? Have we left anything out? If I passed this around to 10 random Christian priests would they all concur that these were indeed the requirements (no more and no less) for winning God’s favor? Why does Stuart not concur with this list? Is he not “Born Again”, Saved, etc.?
You are going to die right? Therefore everything you do is motivated by fear of death. We call this survival. If you were motivated solely out of survival, then you would act completely selfishly all the time, you would never help any one out. If someone were in need you would say, “To hell with them, Let the bastards die. When they die, they will not be competing with me for my resources and I can consume them.” That is the attitude of pure survival. But through observation of the real world we see that this is not true. It is not even close. We are not all “Reuses Monkeys on Crack.”
There must be a part of us that does not die. Therefore everything it does is not motivated by fear but by it’s opposite, Faith. Faith motivates us to Love. Love is that which lets us help others without any thought about ourselves. It is selflessness, that is opposed to survival. Love says, “You are not any more important than me so I will help you out because that is how I would like to be treated if I were in your place.”
Now if our survival hurts others then we are doing wrong. We have hindered someone else’s right to survive. That is why in law, every man’s right’s must be limited so much so that no one else’s rights are limited any more. But limiting your rights is not any way to go about surviving, it is the way you live if you love others.
So it could be argued that Love, Faith, Obeying and even Believing are all one and the same thing. And herein comes the part about religion. We must not think that by doing any of these things we save ourselves, rather we must do all these things in reaction to what God did for us. He loved us enough to die for us and in doing so he took our punishment for the sins we all have committed. What type of world you rather live in? The type where you have to do all the work to get saved because God didn’t love you enough; or the world where God loved you so much to do it all for you, so that if you just react to his love then you can be saved.
John 3:16-17 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
So at the same time we see that we can do nothing and that we must do something. Contradiction? No. It all comes down to our attitudes, are we excepting GOD to react to our piety or are WE reacting to God’s love by loving him back. Romans 10:13 says for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” We must react to God. I can not emphasize this enough.
And at the point of your life when this salvation begins its work in you, your thinking changes as a part of the salvation. It works in three stages that correspond with the three persons of the Trinity. The first stage of salvation is Christ’s sacrifice, during which he takes away your sins and makes you holy and able to enter the presence of God. The second stage is, now being in the holy presence of God, the beauty of his holiness compared with your own filthiness inspires you to become holy. This often discourages many new Christians, who realize that God wants them to be holy but are unable to do it on our own. This is where the third stage of salvation starts. The Holy Spirit comes in to your life and empowers you to live a holy life. In short, salvation is like a bath. Do you have to get cleaned up to take a bath? Of coarse not. All you have to do is get in. The same is true for Christianity; all you have to do is react to God’s love for you.
So as to an answer to the question, “What must I do in order to be “saved”? What does God require from us that we might be allowed into heaven?” God has already reacted to you, now you must react to his gift of love by loving him in return. Then this love manifests itself in our lives by the things we do.
There was an increadible argument about whether it was nessisary to read the Bible in order to be saved or if you could just hear it instead. It culminated with this:
: DDN
: 1) Could you reference the appropriate verse that says that reading the bible is not necessary if one has HEARD it instead?
The following verses could clear up the whole problem. Romans chapter 10:10-15 and 17
For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile--the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” And verse 17 “Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.”
If this helps any one please go and share this with all your freinds, spread the good news that we can be saved and that we do not save our selves, Jesus saves us! If there is any question as to if anything I have said is true or not, If any one wants to debate me please start a thread. I am only 18 and I may be wrong, I have spent a long time reasonging all of this out. But being a scientist I realize that there is no absolute fact, all theories can be proven wrong in the future.
