Will all those who practise non-Christian religions go to hell?

Everyone who dies without being reconciled to God appears before the Judgment Seat dressed so to speak in their own works and invariably there will be imperfections and sins such as separate the human being from God. In the Bible this metaphor of righteousness being like clothing is expressed in the verse “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). Religion per se has little, if anything, to do with it.

The offered way to be reconciled to God is to accept Jesus’ death on our behalf as our only hope. We have our hearts set so as to not plead any deserving of our own but are taught that if we have believed in him and repented of our sin, He stands for us as a perfect sacrifice, and there isn’t any other such perfect sacrifice as He is both God and Man, the only bridge between us and the Father. He takes our filthy rags on Himself and gives us robes that are washed white in the Blood of the Lamb.

If you think that you are good enough to get into heaven without relying on what Jesus did, you are effectively saying to God that what Jesus did is not your plea. Effectively you are pleading innocent but without being innocent. Or, you are maybe pleading that other works you did paid for the bad things. You don’t want to see that even these good things were also done with a sinful mind, with pride and other mixed motives. And they were things you should have been doing anyway, they don’t pay anything back to God for when you failed. Only Jesus’ blood can do that. Your plea that you also did good works is not balanced out against your crimes any more than you can escape a fine for speeding by saying you had driven within the speed limit quite a lot that day. If someone stands in as the driver and takes the punishment themselves, though, then you are in the clear. They won’t offer two fines for the same infraction. In a mortal court that would be seen as perverting the course of justice, but in divine justice this is allowed because Jesus did this in love, because if not for that you had no chance to escape hell.

People in Christian churches, people convinced that they are practicing the Christian religion also need to be convinced in their hearts that they have no deserving even if they have done many good works and avoided many of the egregious behaviours of those around them. The yardstick by which you will be judged is not the pathological family you look down on at the supermarket, but the perfect righteousness of a holy God. You don’t measure up, you need to place all your reliance on Christ’s sacrifice. If you do not, then it is merely academic that you are not a Muslim, Buddhist or outright atheist. We are Christians when we have placed all of our trust in Christ alone, and been justified only by our faith in what He did on Calvary. I am not speaking here only about sacerdotal, ritualist churches, the same mentality can affect people even in the most theologically sound Evangelical churches. Salvation is between you and Jesus, has He stood in for you on Calvary? If not, then sorry, but your destiny is the same lake of fire that applies to the most benighted pagan. Jesus says “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (Matthew 11:21).

If someone never heard about Jesus or had such a lot of lies told to them that they had no possibility to know the above truth, then God, who knows their hearts and minds better than they know themselves, is perfectly able to assess them based on what they would have done had they known this truth about Jesus. So someone who didn’t actually reject the gospel, never having heard it but who has felt in their heart that they deserve to be rejected by God unless God in love somehow forgives them, along with those who die in infancy, or are mentally unable to conceptualise these truths, most likely these people will be saved by God’s mercy. In such cases Christ’s sacrifice is imputed to them. Were this not the case then few of the Old Testament Jews would be saved either. But they knew “blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity” from Psalm 32:2. Paul also reference this verse applying it to the Gospel in Romans 4:6. Paul says that this righteousness of Christ’s was available even in the times ay before He arrived on earth, much less was crucified and resurrected, for God has known all along what the solution to sin will be, even Adam was told that his seed would bruise the serpent’s head.

We cannot rely on this passive and ignorant salvation, though, whenever we have someone in front of us who doesn’t know the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Those on whom God set His seal are thirsting and dearly waiting to know the person and the work of Jesus and to hear His voice in the New Testament. So we preach like eternal life or eternal damnation depend on it, whenever we have someone before us who is seeking the truth. Those who know Jesus and have accepted Him receive a peace and assurance they lacked before. Those who have had the Gospel preached to them fully and have encountered the person of Jesus in the words of others, spoken and heard or written and read, these are without excuse and if they neglect so great a salvation, how shall they escape? Such the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews asks, in chapter 2 verse 3, and it is, of course, a very good question.

Anyone who does not accept the Gospel of Christ, having heard it, even in such a condensed form as I have given in this answer, should ask themselves that question. What other escape do you think you will find, if not the cross on which your very Creator died for you?

Post for the start of Lent

It has been some time since this blog, or indeed my other blogs have seen much active content.

This is largely due to the effect of lifestyle changes that go along with the move to Zielona Góra, the running of an agrotourism ranch with Elena, namely Agroletnica, as well as an increase in activity in the audit market post Covid which I also would not like to miss out on, as well as several other factors.

Today is the first day of Lent, it is Ash Wednesday. My colleague went early to church and recounted to me afterwards the sermon he heard relating to Lent not only being a time to repent of one’s sins but also to focus more on doing good.

Certainly part of “metanoia”, the New Testament term for repentance, is a desire to please God, even though we cannot please God other than by reflecting Jesus back at the father and being thankful and loving Jesus.  With this mindset, motivated by faith, our walk will surely please the Lord.

Metanoia, the change of mind, doesn’t mean a casual alteration of our opinion, but the entre shift of perspective form what pleases us, selfishly, to what pleases God.

In a sense it is like the change that happens in the child from the id and ego mind to the super-ego (parental voice) mind in Freudian terms, but Christians know that this is merely a type of what happens in the change of mind when our true Father changes the heart so that the perspective is now to see what we have been in terms of how God views the sin, which automatically brings both a disgust at our own past failures as well as the determination to improve and to please God the best we poorly can.

When it comes to the world, however, there is no way to please them.  Now in this media age more than ever people try to be popular, strive to do what the bible terms “men pleasing”, but in fact society these days is set up in such a way that it is impossible to please them.

St Paul tries to “be all things to all men, so that he by all means might save some”, resulting in the old phrase, “you can’t please all the people all of the time”. It seems to me though that now there is simply no pleasing certain people. There are some voices who are now dictating the culture in western society who will never be happy with the Christian no matter what he or she does, and there is nothing we should be surprised about with that, neither should we kow-tow to their modern shibboleths.

For example, if you say that you support indigenous people to maintain their own cultures, then you will be blamed for bringing the Gospel to those places as it undermines their cultures. The statement that indigenous cultures of peoples untouched by the Gospel should be protected is one they might agree with, but you would have no right to make it without that comeback. They of course woud love to flood their cultures with Communist literature, but they have never really made a very good job of that on their own and only ever piggy-backed on the work of Christians who transcribed languages using their Shoebox program, described grammars, prepared dictionaries, opened schools, translated Bibles, etc. They cannot flourish without the planting work done by Christians any more than Globodera nematodes can if nobody plants potatoes, but that doesn’t stop them branding what we do as imperialist, colonising, etc etc etc.  We should not be contaminating these indigenous cultures, they say.

If we say that the Western Christian culture is also good and has a right to exist uncontaminated, then we are accused of being on the far right, practically Nazis or Ku Klux Klan.

If we say in that case we will adopt some elements of these native cultures and then wear headdresses or anything like that (which I advise against by the way as some have occultic significance of which we may be unaware) then the kettle really begins to whistle, because this is “cultural appropriation”. We aren’t good enough to adopt their culture, but they are allowed to adopt ours but only if they want to.

Basically they hate Christian legacy and will do anything to oppose it, because their thinking is straight from the devil.

If you try to help in Africa, you are an unwanted “white Saviour” as Communist David Lammy said against Stacey Dooley in recent history. If you don’t, then you are a hard hearted hypocrite.

You cannot win, with them, the only way to win, as the movie says, is not to play.

They say that cats are contrary creatures and my mother used to say that the best way to make a cat like you is to ignore them completely. In the case of the Godless left, ignoring them won’t make you like them either, but it may be at times the only way to deal with them.

Of course, we need to give them the Gospel, but the model of our Lord was to send the disciples out and if the message was scorned like that, they were to shake the dust from off their feet and take it elsewhere.

This may remind us of the dust and the ashes that we place on our heads at the start of Lent. We are but dust, the dust and ashes of the burnt whole sacrifices reminds us of the cross of Jesus so some people put an ash cross on their foreheads.

 

We have to recognise that the humility of the Saviour is such that He will stoop to save the lowest, but the dignity of the Saviour is such that we ought not to leave Him stooping as he is mocked and put to scorn.

Do Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Mormons and Protestants worship the same God or not?

They all claim that they worship the Creator God and that there is one Creator God but they ascribe different characteristics to this God. Even different names. The Islamic faith is like Mormonism for the seventh century, while Joseph Smith wanted to make a religion based around a biblical topic based on phoney texts that made the Americans the chosen people, Mohammed did that for the Arabs. While Smith was not much of a one for leading people into battle he did make a lot of parallels with Mohammed, including the multiple wives thing.  In the case of Mormonism you have texts which are supposed to have been written in a language called Reformed Egyptian, although nobody can see this language and Joseph Smith is supposed to have had something called the Urim and Thummim (a Biblical idea but we’re not sure what they are) to interpret this text, and the original is in golden plates given by the angel Moroni which nobody else was allowed to look at. They ask anyone willing to talk to them to pray and ask God whether these things are true,  but when I did so the answer that came to my head was that whenever before God has spoken, he has protected the language of these revelations so that Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek are still spoken or understood at least almost natively today in the face of overwhelming enemies and opposition. Even the Qur’an was in a language kept until today but in their case, they were the overwhelming proposition, so to speak, so I am not counting that.

Muslims

The Muslims claimed that Moses and others were all good Muslims but others had twisted their words and only the Qur’an (plus the Hadith and Sunna, as in fact you don’t get most of the doctrines in practice from the Quran alone) is a copy of the Umm al Kutub or Mother of all Books (if I got that bit of Arabic wrong excuse my memory) and is a copy of the Book which is with Allah in heaven. On the one hand they say that these texts are a revelation for the Arabs and have to be kept in Arabic, but on the other if taken all together you see they contain an expansionist statecraft which adds up to a political exceptionalism for Muslims, and especially for Arab Muslims. Unlike the Bible or other texts for that matter, the holy texts make demands on Muslims which basically prove it was intended initially only for one time and place. The Feast of Ramadan can’t be kept in the polar regions as you would never get to your iftar for half the times Ramadan is kept.  The Hajj can only be kept physically by a tiny proportion of Muslims if you look at the logistics, whereas the religion says every Muslim is supposed to do it at least once in their lives. I will leave you to to your own maths and if you can see a way to actually enable this to happen, by all means use the comment section. I don’t censor for disagreement as long as it is civilised and not spammy or vulgar or satanic.

Jews

Jews have developed their views in a rather complex way, adding layers of complexity with each additional text so that in essence you have a Talmud sitting there much much bigger than the Old Testament and taking certain ideas from Torah and Tanakh in very different directions than the New Testament takes them, but still they seem rather a lot closer to Christianity than Islam in that they do at least have three quarters of the same Bible as we do, pages wise, anyway.  And there are many flavours of Judaism so that in a sense talking generally about Judaism is nearly as prone to be misleading as talking in generic terms about Christianity. There are Jews on both sides of very big fences both in politics and in ethics, as well as in questions of our origins in Creation and our destiny in the afterlife. There’s nothing new in this really – Pharisees and Sadducees as well as other sects of Judaism where in deep disagreement about some of the most fundamental questions even at the time of the New Testament, as can be seen from the life of Jesus as well as the Acts of the Apostles and some of Paul’s letters, among others.

Christians differ from most Jews over the person of Jesus Christ and the authority of the New Testament. We believe in the Trinitarian formula which makes Jesus absolutely unique and the Bridge between God and Man. Son of God and Son of Man are titles used of Him almost interchangeably. John 17 shows an amazing secret about who Jesus is and who He is also before He was born of Mary.  Jews have not accepted this in the main however there have always been some who have indeed accepted this and come to know Jesus in a Christian way. There are then two opinions on whether they are still Jews if they do. Many will say that they are not, but others will say they are except only in the sense that Talmudic Judaism has gone its own way and defines Judaism around itself, whereas in fact there are many ways of being a Jew, and always have been, at least for a couple of thousand years at any rate.

Roman Catholics

Roman Catholicism is one of the Christian churches, but has the problem that it holds particularly closely to ecclesiastical traditions and structures and derives as much authority from them as from the apostolic writings to the extent that they consider themselves to be in a straight line from the apostles and that the protestants have gone off at a tangent. The fact that they still have larger numbers than the rest seems to confirm them in this view, despite Jesus’ warning that it isn’t about numbers. Protestants however see themselves as having abandoned a lot of medieval entropy and gone back to the very text of the New Testament. Along with this, we focus back on the central role of Jesus in saving us and applying this salvation to us via faith.  Apostolic succession seems to Protestants to be a self-serving doctrine wrung from a handful of verses by those who would be served by thinking thus. And in practice, when  we consider via what kinds of people this line of succession has gone and how many of them put carnal, earthly considerations before those of God’s kingdom, the doctrine seems to ring very hollow indeed.

Roman Catholicism uses certain terms in quite different ways to the way Protestants use them, for example they use the term “sacraments” to cover quite a lot of things while for us there are only two: baptism and the lord’s supper. They say that the lord’s supper, which they call the Eucharist, is a “means of grace”, a term also used by Protestants but with the meaning of praying and reading the Bible. They think that the bread and wine turn literally into the body and blood of Jesus but as a Passover meal, but what these things do is show that Christ is the Passover, it was because of Him being that Lamb that would take away the sin of the world that in the first Passover the blood on the lintel and the lamb eaten by all who were to be saved turned away the avenging angel and got them through the Red Sea which fell on their pursuing enemies. The Passover Lambs did not need to turn into the blood and body of the the future Messiah for this purpose but it got them through the Red Sea.

Protestants

And then within Protestantism also we have various disagreements as to who should be baptised, how often the Lord’s supper should be taken, predestination versus a total volitional approach, as if these were contradictory, which in fact they are not (unless you have the mind of a child who also cannot understand how Quantum mechanics can be true and Newton’s or Einstein’s physics also true) and questions of Church governance, end-times prophesies and worship styles.

Same name, different God

So in a sense we have the same God but at the point at which we ascribe to God varying characteristics and varying expectations from us, in a sense we have a different God. Just as Paul warned the Galatians against accepting “another Jesus”. He didn’t mean a different person coming along claiming to be Jesus (the NT warns about that also, in other places, but this isn’t what Paul has in mind when talking to the Galatians) but another view of what Jesus did and what it meant, and how to apply it for our salvation. It was tantamount to having another Jesus and thereby, another God.

Question received: “He could always get off his butt and put in a public appearance. He’s been on a long holiday it seems: the Bible is full of burning bushes, visiting angels, miracles etc and for the last 2000 years or so…. Crickets. Just radio silence.”

The Bible also talks about lengthy periods when God was not speaking to Israel. This occurred during the time of the Judges and in the run-up to Samuel, for one, but there are numerous further examples.

In fact the Bible talks about a series of interventions whereby at critical times God showed Himself, but even when you talk about burning bushes and visiting angels, very often these were to very limited numbers of people who believed already, so they were not to make unbelievers believe.

The accounts of them are what are supposed to make unbelievers believe. If you perform a miracle in front of someone, in lab conditions so to speak, then their acceptance of it has nothing to do with belief, it is a proven fact. It is knowledge.

We’re not saved by knowledge, we’re saved by belief. This is intrinsic to the Christian message. If it were not so, then either we would be showing you God or we ourselves would have to abandon Him. But the point is that salvation is through faith and you can only actually have faith through “hearing” (which includes reading, but at any rate a second-hand account).

Those who believe already may receive or may not receive first-hand knowledge of God. They may receive healings and see things which are unlikely to pass as mere coincidences. Their accounts in turn may be believed or not by other people.

That’s how it works.

Response to Ian’s challenge: “The accounts of these things happening to Jesus are no more than copycat stories of mythological prior accounts found in Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Babylonian and Mesopotamian sources.”

“On the other hand there is more than adequate evidence from pre-Christian religions of exactly the same things that supposedly happened to Jesus. Scourging, whipping, suffering and crucifixion feature in these pre-Christian religions.

Conclusion: the accounts of these things happening to Jesus are no more than copycat stories of mythological prior accounts found in Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Babylonian and Mesopotamian sources.

Of course, in that case, the gospels’ accounts are also mythological, not real historical ones which were completely misunderstood and misrepresented by the early Roman church. Another one of their historical blunders. Think about that this Easter.”

  • Ian on Quora

Introduction

What you are describing is no problem to Christian theology, Ian, and I would like you to read from my message to you now exactly how we account for these things, as of course it is a perfectly reasonable point, but thankfully one we have a very satisfactory answer to. I say “satisfactory”, meaning that those who want to believe will be satisfied by it, and those who want to disbelieve, well, they’ll obviously find holes to pick in it. I ask you to try to be open-minded.

The idea of “typology” in Christian apologetics

Here goes. We include in our theology something called typology. We see so-called “types” of Christ in the Old Testament. Jesus Himself gives an example of one when he tells us the brazen serpent in the wilderness was Him. In another case he states that Jonah prefigures Him, His use of Psalms indicate that in many respoects the life and sayings of David prefigure Him.  Look and Live: Christ as the True Bronze Serpent will give you more on that, including the scriptural references, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typology_(theology) contains more information from a not specifically Christian viewpoint about this idea in Christian theology. It’s an important idea and until you get to grips with it, you haven’t done justice to the claims of our faith on your heart.

We see clear types of Christ in numerous pagan religions, and if Christ demonstrates Himslein a brazen serpent then He can also be represented in a number of pre-Christian religions. What we notice is that that around the world as missions went into the field, they found many Christ figures, sons of God, who died for us, various sacrificial animals especially lambs, When they realised that these were forfigurings of the person and work of Jesus as shown in the New Testament, they readily exchanged their former belief systems for these. Nobody believes right now in Hercules or Osiris or various Norse deities that claimed to be sons of Gods.

The God who winks?

In Acts 17 we see from verse 15 onwards an account of St Paul’s arrival in Athen’s and his sermon to the Athenians from Mars’ Hill. He told them that their altar to the Unknown God wasn’t a different God that they worshipped, but the true God, only worshipped ignorantly. Today we might make the same Pauline comment to Muslims who state that the 100th Name of God is unknown to men. The Bahai’s already tried to claim this but we know that it is of course Jesus. The summary to Mankind of all that God is, in very human flesh.

I recommend you to read the whole passage but in particular please note these verses:

v30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:

v31 Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

 

We see God being willing to “wink” or overlook ignorance, but now a day is appointed for the judgement of the workld, and we know from Jesus’ own lips that this day will only come when every tribe and nation has heard the true gospel of His sacrifice on our behalf, and each nation which has never heard the gospel is no longer limited to the hints of the way of salvation that the human conscience and the types scattered across the world’s native cultures can have given them.

Once we have properly heard the Gospel, there is no more excuse for ignorance, there is no more winking by God, no more “hyperidōn” as the Greek puts it, no more overlooking the fact that an idol was worshipped and instead gracious imputation of the worship of Christ as it was with the bronze serpent in the wilderness.  We now have the full Acts 4;12 scenario: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” than solely in the name of Jesus Christ.

They want to place Christ in a no-win situation

But we are left between a rock and a hard place with atheists. When they hear that we preach those without Jesus are going to hell, they say “how unfair on those who lived in the past before the gospel reached them or before Jesus lived”. But when we show the myriad of these types of Christ, these brazen serpents, to whom the elect persons of all ages could look and live as they were deemed to be reacting toe the Gospel, had they encountered it, then atheists say “you see, there’s nothing original about Christ, all He is is a hodgepodge of pre-Christian religions!”.

Please give this your heartfelt consideration.

I want you to be ready

There are wars increasing around us, new plagues, famine is coming, awful plans by people whom we are paying taxes to be trustworthy, yet they merely work out the agenda of the demons who possess them, often fully convinced they are doing humanity a great service, and completely unaware of the lethal tools of Satan that they are. If I did no know that Jesus is victor, I would be walking around with a cold feeling of fear in the pit of my stomach, a feeling many know today and need to know that Jesus is the answer.

Sooner than we know, history comes to a conclusion, Jesus returns in glory and power. As He does so, there are all over the world groups of people working in offices and factories together, or asleep in the same houses – one is taken, others are left, to their destruction and endless regret. They see Him, but the age of grace is over. The call to repentance and faith which we proclaim today then no longer maintains its validity. This age is soon gone, whether by your own death or the end of the entire world, which rolls nearer and nearer with Newtonian acceleration.

I want you to be ready.