Blessing is when we receive not accordingly efficiency of our work (which is quite poor after Adam felt to sin), but accordingly efficiency of Jesus’s work.
Category: Theology
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Bearing a cross
(Matthew 16:24) “Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”
The words of Christ should first be taken literally. He called anyone who desired to (literally) come after him (that is to follow physically his human body on the Earth) to take a literal cross.
I don’t know whether people literally following Jesus literally did it.
But to take a cross and move with it may seems the silliest and the least efficient way of doing things. If one bears a cross, he cannot for example cook a meat, cannot earn money for a ministry, cannot do anything useful.
Yet, we believe that the words of Christ are wise (that is efficient for a business, be it an earthy business or heavenly business). This looks the least efficient of all possible variants, but we should believe in efficiency of words of Christ.
The reason why Christ wanted us to do this, becomes more clear from the following Bible verses (Matthew 16:25) “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it.”
This mean that our main purpose is to stop doing the old way of our life. Not to do good but just to stop doing bad. Not only we should stop doing bad in this life but in afterlife also.
But now I should tell you what was a secret in the past:
I don’t know whether literal followers of Jesus complied to his commandment to carry a big piece of wood to keep their hands busy and to be able to do nothing.
But now we should not do it anymore.
The “cross” here means “gospel”. We should stop live accordingly the word of gospel, but move to live accordingly the spirit.
Read my book End of Gospel about switching to the next stage. In the epoch of gospel we were slaves of Christ (borrowing his cross not to be able to do what we consider good), but now he makes us free people, not his slaves anymore.
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The step-by-step guide to repentance under faith in Christ
How to repent of sins (by a former maniacal killer)
In this short note I tell how to repent of your sins correctly. I strongly recommend to repent as described below.
Who knows how to repent of sins better than me, a former maniacal killer? Yes, I was a maniacal killer. I mean that I repeatedly attacked people with a knife with the purpose to kill and was unable to stop myself doing this because I had serious problems with my brain. Or, for example, once I said to a policemen “I am a maniacal killer. Give me a gun”; weirdly the policemen gave it to me; I tried to kill that policemen with a gun, but another policemen prevented me to do it.
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Salvation is death
In this post I will present my theological theory of spiritual salvation, as described in New Testament.
This theory is not a dogma, but just my opinion which may be wrong.
The theory is as the follows:
Sin is a thing which happened but show happen no more in the future.
Salvation is ceasing of a sin.
The personality of a sinner is sin. So in salvation a sinner ceases to exists.
What remains of a sinner after salvation? The remaining thing is “negation” of this personality, that is prevention (the things needed to prevent of repeating in the future) of his personality to exist.
Salvation is taking a imprint of the sinner’s personality. But imprint is similar to the thing imprinted (however reverse). This way the soul of a sinner is presented in an inverse form. This is expressed by the Greek word μετάνοια (turning mind 180 degrees around) used in New Testament to denote repentance.
“Saved” persons are selected as worst sinners, which need to die to clean the world.
This theory (that salvation is in some sense death of a personality) seems confirmed by Bible:
“He who loves his soul will lose it. He who hates his soul in this world will keep it to eternal life.” (Jn. 12:25, refined translation)
“He who finds his soul will lose it; and he who loses his soul for my sake will find it.” (Mt. 10:39, refined translation)
“For whoever desires to save his soul will lose it, and whoever will lose his soul for my sake will find it.” (Mt. 16:25, refined translation)
“Whoever seeks to save his soul loses it, but whoever loses his soul preserves it.” (Luke. 17:33, refined translation)
“He called the multitude to himself with his disciples, and said to them, “Whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his soul will lose it; and whoever will lose his soul for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” (Mrk. 8:34-35, refined translation)
“For whoever desires to save his soul will lose it, but whoever will lose his soul for my sake, the same will save it.” (Luk. 9:24, refined translation)(The quotes are taken from World English Bible.)
This mean that to receive salvation we need to agree that our sinful souls should “die” as Christ died.
Thus the topic that we need to “die” with Christ is now elaborated.
See also my books:
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Christ passing through the sin
The following is a rough idea and my explanation may be not detailed or not exact enough:
As I state in my New Testament commentary, Christ is the radio waves (well, not only radio but also other parts of the spectrum) of the universe. Christ is also the truth (the true information contained in the cosmic radio waves).
When information passes through the sin, it is damaged, that is loses its content.
Christ is the only kind of information which can pass through the sin without being damaged.
So in likeness of sinful flesh it appeared the essential content of cosmic radio waves. All other kinds of information except of Christ has faded away, but Christ has appeared in likeness of sinful flesh, without any damage but remaining true.
This way, despite of being bad, sin reveals Christ, filtering away anything other.
Get my rough idea on how Christ is related with sin.
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On the purpose of Jesus’s death
I continue to think about the purpose of Jesus’s death.
He died for us? By his deaths he restored the God’s justice? Yes, but WHY is it necessary?
Yesterday, I have got this idea:
Death of Jesus means that he stopped to do business as a human.
Now it is a step more clear, why he did it.
The next question: Why he considered it profitable to stop all human activity?
One (but probably not only) possible explanation is that he quieted fighting the forces of evil and “by inertia” forces of evil continued to struggle so to say in the place where he was, so confronting each other instead of Jesus. This way, probably, forces of evil harmed each other.
If you have any other concrete ideas why Jesus allowed to kill himself, please leave comments.
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God and divine council
Hello Dr. Michael S. Heiser,
What do you think about this idea? (It is my idea, but I am not quite sure if it is true.)
One of many ways to describe God (I mean Yahweh or Christ or maybe Father): “God is the democratic way of governance of the infinite universe.”
This way God and “divine council” are essentially the same. (But note that extrapolating of what we know about finite council to the infinite one may be wrong, moreover there may be several different ways to extrapolate finite systems into the infinite.)
This aligns with my social description of Christ in my free e-book:
http://books.portonvictor.org/nt-commentary/Note that I duplicate this email in my blog. I ask your permission to possibly publish your answer too in my blog.
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Why evil is necessary?
It is often asked: If there is God, He can everything and He is good, then why evil exists?
The only possible answer is that evil is necessary, that is absolute good is impossible without evil.
My supposed answer to this is the following possible argument:
The only mean to prevent evil in the future is remembrance of evil in the past. This follows that evil in the past is necessary (unless we would allow false memory of past evil, but false memory is an evil itself).