The Biblical Book of Psalms opens with a short psalm about the 2 ways to live.  Yeah, the psalmist said we only have 2 paths from which to choose.  You might think that is overly simplistic and from a purely human perspective it is.  But the psalmist, who is being guided by the Holy Spirit, is writing God’s point of view.  And He says there are only 2 ways you can go.  You either do it God’s way and be happy & blessed or do it whatever way you would prefer. His way is the right way.  He created you in His image, so it makes sense you’re designed for His way of life.  That means whatever else you choose is classed under the heading of not-godly. 

Take a moment and read Psalm 1, being only 6 verses long so it’s a quick read.  Notice the outcomes He defined for the 2 choices.  The person who believes God, reads and studies God’s word will thrive.  He compares it to a tree planted by rivers of water.  Its roots are anchored in well-watered soil.   That is a nice word picture for God’s word.  It is why it produces Fruit in its season.  A fruitful tree is one that has value, it prospers.  

Whatever other path you follow will not prosper.  You might have a good life for the short time you’ll be on this planet.  You might even achieve fame and wealth.  But when your time is up everything you will have accomplished will be like the inedible husk removed from cereal grains. Your life will not stand up to examination by the Lord.  For the non-believer it's a complete loss. for the one who believed in Jesus Christ it's a loss of abundance in the congregation of the righteous, what we call heaven. 

The way of blessing starts with belief in Jesus Christ for everlasting life.  That secures your future with God.  See it in Jesus Christ’s own words.

John 5:24 “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.”

John 6:47 Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life. 

There are a lot of big questions for which we have limited means available for finding the answers.  Why are we here?  How did the Universe come into being?  How did life begin?  Is there a continuation of existence after death?  Why am I me?  That last one I’ve had rolling around in my head for as long as I can remember me.  For all of those on my list we can only speculate about possible answers.  We don’t really have the means of testing any theory we might dream up. 

The things we can observe offer evidence to support any number of possible answers, but nothing that crosses into the realm of positive proof. I’m not sure most of them even reach the standard of beyond reasonable doubt.  Though that is at best a subjective standard.  However, there is one source that for me does meet that benchmark.  That is the Biblical narrative of the Creation’s history.  At least if it is taken at face value.  If we accept it as written, allowing for the normal features of human language such as idioms and cultural contexts, it does make sense. 

The Bible tells us there is a Triune God who exists eternally independent of the material world which He created.  A God who has a plan for His creation which included the human race.  Humans who have been given creative imaginations and the ability to make choices.  Choices which have not always lined up with His intentions which He has communicated to us over the course of history. 

The evidence that I have found to be compelling is the advent of Jesus Christ.  That evidence includes the details of His birth, life, death and resurrection which were foretold in the Old Testament prophecies and the testimony their fulfillment recorded by eye witnesses in the New Testament of the Bible.  The Prophecies are detailed, easy to understand and precise in content.  Even to establishing where Jesus Christ would be born and when He would be executed.  The eyewitness accounts likewise are detailed and supported by the character and conduct of the persons themselves. 
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The authors of the New Testament were not fanatics.  They were men of integrity who testified about what they had personally witnessed.  Most of them faced persecution and many were martyred for their knowledge of Jesus Christ’s life.  Notice I said their knowledge.  They did not die for a belief but for what they had seen and heard for themselves.  Think about that.  Would you suffer and die for something you knew to be a lie?  Someone might but what are the chances that so many would have done so?  I find that to be a very compelling reason to investigate what they wrote.   And one thing they made clear is that Jesus Christ said the Biblical narrative is true! 

Have you ever heard of the 18” rule on faith?  It goes something like this.  The difference between heaven and hell is 18”, the distance between believing the gospel in your head vs. believing it in your heart.  I suspect those who use that are getting it from Romans 10:9 “that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”  However, it’s clear Paul was referring to our conscious mind because his explanatory statement in v. 10 “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness;” clarifies it. 

I used the term conscious mind because it is the essence of who we are as individuals.  It is the center of our identity and understanding of the world around us.  BDAG defines its usage in Romans 10 as the seat of our physical, spiritual and mental life. 

I know the people who push the idea of head knowledge vs. heart knowledge mean well.  And they don’t mean to confuse people about faith, but in reality, that is what they are doing.  They are suggesting there is more than one way to believe.  Just like those who speak of genuine faith or saving faith vs. non-saving faith they are implying there is a way to believe in Jesus Christ that does not bring everlasting life.  And that can create doubt which will rob people of assurance and peace with God. 

Jesus Christ always treated believing as a binary function, you either believe Him or you don’t.  There was never an almost kind of faith.  Believing is recognizing a proposition as being true.  So, why not just say it the way Jesus Christ said it. 

John 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

John 6:47 Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.

Paul warned the Corinthians to not corrupt the simplicity of the saving message. And that warning applies to us.  Don't complicate what God has made simple.

2 Corinthians 11:3 But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
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I’m sure you don’t want to trust your final destiny to a false doctrine. And I hope you don’t want to contribute to someone else getting it wrong either.   So, again stand on what the Lord Jesus Christ said.

2 Corinthians 5:19 says “that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them.”  So, what does that mean.  When reconcile is used of relationships between people it means to restore friendly relations.  And that certainly seems to be the meaning Paul applied here under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  Not imputing sin to the world means no one is being charged with the sins they have committed.  In John 1:29 we have the testimony of John the Baptist who said Jesus Christ is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  The apostle John confirmed that in 1 John 2:2 when he wrote “And He (Jesus Christ) Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.”

So, if God is open to having friendly relations with the world because Jesus Christ has removed the one thing that had driven a wedge between us, what is the missing link. 

That would be 2 Corinthians 5:20 “Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.”

That could be one of two things.  1. it could be the failure of His ambassadors to reach out with the good news about His desire to join with us.  Or 2. your reluctance to be reconciled to God.  Either way the issue is not God.  If you’re reading this and have not yet believed in Jesus Christ for everlasting life then the problem is your unwillingness to believe and receive the gift of everlasting life.  Belief is simply taking Him at His word that everlasting life is a gift freely given to those who will believe Him for it.  It is a gift that will last forever and includes other benefits. 
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Like a declaration of righteousness.

2 Corinthians 5:21 “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

When Paul pointed out in Romans 3:25 how “God set forth (Jesus Christ) as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed” he was referring to the sacrificial worship system the Lord implemented the day Adam sinned.  Specifically, Genesis 3:21 “Also for Adam and his wife the Lord God made tunics of skin, and clothed them.”

We know God gave them an explanation about what this meant because chapter 4 begins with the story of Cain and Abel's offerings in worship to God.  Abel obeyed the instructions God had given his parents on the order of worship, Cain did not.  It was this system of worship built around animal sacrifices that provided a way for God to remain righteous while carrying out His plan of recovery for the human race and the Kingdom.

Forbearance is not patience.  In this case it is God willfully holding back from taking action on sin even though it creates an internal conflict for Him.  That is where the real issue resides.  Because He feels the need for justice with the same intensity by which He wants to express His mercy and Love.  His need to do what is right is every bit as intense as His need to express compassion and seek mercy.  

This internal conflict within the Godhead was not resolved until Jesus Christ died on the cross and took away the sin of the world.  This is something the false doctrine of limited atonement fails to consider.  If Christ only died for the elect which is defined as those who God willed to believe in Jesus Christ, then the internal conflict He endured would have remained unresolved.  Propitiation would not have been achieved and the Scriptures not fulfilled.    
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2 Corinthians 5:18-19 Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, 19 that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

For us justification and reconciliation to God is the really big deal about the incarnation of Jesus Christ.  There isn’t anything more important for us than assuring our final destiny will be with God in the New Heaven and Earth.  But for God there was a much bigger objective driving the advent of Jesus Christ.  To understand what that is we need to go back to Genesis, the book of Beginnings. 

Genesis opens at the same point of history at which that John began his Gospel. 
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Why?  The Bible gives us part of the answer in Genesis 1:26-28.
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

God created the human race in His image and likeness.  Not multi-personed individual life forms, but intelligent persons with some of His characteristics.  We’re not divine nor do we have super powers, but we do have creative imaginations and a will to exercise that creativity.  God then commissioned mankind to rule over this planet.  I also suspect His intention was that we would expand into the rest of the universe.  Why else would He have made it so big? 

Genesis 1”26-28 is actually the first mention of the Kingdom Jesus Christ spoke of in the Gospels.  All of that was put on hold when Adam sinned.  Adam and Eve had brought sin into the creation and with it, death. 

Romans 5:12 “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.”

The human race would now have to be redeemed, bought back from the curse of death.  However, for God there is also an internal conflict that must be resolved.  He is perfectly righteous and just as well as compassionate, loving and merciful.  These moral attributes are all equally active within His person so any solution to the problem of sin must be consistent with and satisfy the requirement of each attribute.  That is why Jesus Christ offer Himself to die in our place. 

Romans 3:21-26 But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, 22 even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, 26 to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
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I’ll break that down in my next post. 

I've been away for a couple of weeks attending the Grace Evangelical Society annual conference and officiating at my granddaughters wedding.
Time to get back to work.  The next Post:

The gospel of John starts with a profound statement about the beginning of space and time. 

John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.

At the commencement of this reality in which we live, the universe, the Word was already present.  Interestingly, John says the Word was both with God and was God.  The word God is a singular noun, so I believe this to be a preliminary introduction to the concept to a triune God.  A single deity who exists as 3 separate yet equal persons.  One of those Persons is the Word.  Later in the book John will introduce the Father and Holy Spirit, but for now he is interested in the Word who he identifies as Jesus Christ in 1:17-18.

Jesus Christ is the one who created everything that was made.  That would be the entire realm of reality.  The universe we see and the metaphysical world we cannot see.  That would include time.  Time did not exist before there was a 3-dimensional material universe.  If you have questions on that, take them up with Einstein and Stephen Hawkins. They explain it better than I can.  I only bring it up because according to the Bible, God and therefore the Word, existed before anything was made. 

John 4:24 quotes Jesus Christ saying, “God is Spirit.”  He didn’t say a Spirit but just He is Spirit. If Jesus had said “a Spirit” it would suggest a boundary, that God occupies space.  That would be contrary to the Bible’s consistent portrayal of God as being infinite in all His attributes.  Those include His knowledge, presence, power, transcendence and moral qualities.  There is no developmental progression in His person or attributes.  In other words, God is who He has always been.  He doesn’t change. 

Note this from the Apostle John:
1 John 1:5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.
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John wanted to highlight the absolute purity of God’s character.  There are no boundaries to His moral attributes.  At no point does His goodness end and any shadow of evil appears.  His love and kindness are everlasting.  His grace, mercy and truth are unending.  But so is His Justice and Righteousness.  The perfect world God Created has been corrupted by evil and He will not let that stand.  And that is really what the Bible is all about.  How God has worked to repair what has been ruined and do it in a way that allows Him to remain just while justifying those who will turn back to Him.   

  

Some of you reading this might be thinking I’m making too much to much of what is nothing more than insignificant issues of grammar or use of certain words.  To which I would reply that Jesus Christ made such distinctions.  He thought things like use of specific words, verb tenses and such were very important.    So, did people like Moses.  He reminded the nation of Israel their wandering for 38 years longer than God intended was because they didn’t believe what God had said. 
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Deuteronomy 8:3 So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.

You might recognize the underlined part as Jesus Christ used it to counter Satan’s challenge to turn stones into bread, Matthew 4:4.  There is another significant statement by Jesus Christ that shows even the verb tenses are inspired. 

Matthew 22:31-32 But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God, saying, 32 ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” 

Jesus Christ defended the truth of resurrection on the basis of God using the present tense when identifying Himself to Moses.  He said “I am” not I was.  God is precise in His use of language and therefore we must be precise in how we read and interpret what He had recorded in the Bible. God commands all believers to read and study His word.  That means He knows all of us can understand it, He used every day language in writing it.

If you fear it is too hard for you then turn to what James wrote in his epistle.   James 1:5-6 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. 6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.

God will give you the wisdom you need.  But you need to get into you Bible and read it.  As I tell the folks at Trego Community reading just 4 chapters a day will get you through the entire Bible in under 10 months.  If you’re a first-time reader then then I’d suggest you start with the Gospel of John then go to Genesis.  But no matter where you begin, the important thing is to get into the habit of reading your Bible daily.                          

Peter warns us of the inevitability that false teachers will infiltrate the Church.  2 Peter 2:1 But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction.

These false teachers will come in under the radar saying things that sound good and reasonable but which actually distort the meaning of God’s word.  It is the same tactic Satan used with Eve in the Garden.  They may say salvation is by believing in Jesus Christ, but then use terms like really belief or truly believe.  I’ve even heard things like you must believe in your heart vs. just believing in your head.  Some call that the 18” rule of faith. 
Anyway, those who say such things are implying there is more than one way to believe.   And that doesn’t make sense.  Something is either true or it is not.  You either believe something or you don’t, there is no such thing as almost believing.  I do not know of a single place in the Bible where the word believe is modified by an adverb.  Jesus Christ simply said believe. 

The Lord did sometimes remark about the disciples having little faith.  But faith is a noun. It is not a verb like the word believe.  Being a noun, it referring to what is believed not the action of believing.  And the volume of what we believe can change from person to person or over time.  Here is an example of what I mean.  Read Matthew 8:18 & 23-27 for the context in which Jesus said “O you of little faith.” 
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The Lord said to the disciples let’s go to the other side of the Lake.  The same Lord they had witnessed healing Peter’s Mother-in-Law, the Centurion's servant and the leper.  The same lord who had delivered the sermon on the mount.  As they crossed the lake it got rough, big waves and wind were tossing the boat round.  The disciples got scared woke Jesus up and urged Him to save them.  They believed Jesus Christ could save them.  So, what was wrong with their faith?  The issue was they had not believed everything Jesus had said.  The focus of their faith was too small.  They had forgotten it was Jesus who said let’s cross to the other side.  And if Jesus said we’re going to the other side, then they were going to reach the other side even if He, Jesus, was a sleep.   

Their faith was deficit in content; it was too small.  It does not mean their belief was weak.   

I want to explain an important aspect about the structure and content of the Bible.  You would expect that God, being the creator of language, would be precise in His use of it.  We also need to take in to account that He is the all-knowing, powerful and wise sovereign owner of the creation.  Therefore, it is only natural we should expect He is able to accurately reveal truth to us through human agents even down to in the choice of words and grammar.  That is exactly how the Jesus Christ had explained it to the Apostles.  So, Peter in warning his readers about the danger of false teaching wrote the following.    

2 Peter 1:20-21 knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, 21 for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. (NKJV)

What did Peter mean by private interpretation?  If you read this in other English translations, they generally render the phrase in the sense of either the reader or the prophets personal understanding.  So, we are not free to interpretate the Bible by what it means to us.  While that is true, I don’t believe that is what Peter meant.  The Greek word being translated as ‘private’ is idias.  That is a legitimate rendering, but the author’s intended meaning is drawn from the context. 

idias is used 5 other times in 2 Peter so we can check to see if there is a pattern to how Peter used this word.  What we find is that he consistently used idias to tie the noun it describes to the subject of the sentence.  2 examples are 2 Peter 2:22 “A dog returns to his own vomit,” and 3:3 “scoffers will come…walking according to their own lusts.”  The other 3 uses are 2 Peter 2:16, 3:16 & 17; so, check them out for yourself.

The subject of v. 20 is Scripture so contextually the interpretation of prophecy is owned by the whole of Scripture.  No particular prophecy in the Bible is to be interpreted in isolation from the rest of Scripture.  Because the Bible covers a lot of different topics, we have to interpret what we read in light of the context in which it is found.  By context I mean the “who, what, when and where” that is being discussed.  A common error made today is the assumption that saved (Grk. Sozo) always refers to deliverance from eternal damnation.  Actually, only about 1/3 of the 111 times it occurs in the N.T. is it used that way.  It is also used to mean being healed from a disease, spared from physical death or deliverance from a bad situation or harm.   
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Peter was addressing the danger of false teachers.  They do take things out of context and end up confusing people.  They rob Christians of the peace and rest that comes by faith in God’s promises.  This is why we have 2 Timothy 2:15 Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. Correctly organizing the varies topics of Scripture by their subject matter. That is how we can grow our experience of God’s grace and peace (2 Peter 1:2-4).