Category: Blog only

This is where there’s no TV here on Huliganov TV. It gathers together in one place where I’ve just used words and images without video links.

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.

Part of a discussion on whether we have free will in Heaven, and if not, is it a problem for theology.

Just as faith has significance in the life of a human where there is room for doubt, so what we would refer to as doing the will of God, or good works, has meaning only when there is a meaningful temptation to do the opposite.

These two things, faith and works, are placed on apposition if not outright opposition to each other in various passages of the New Tesstament, whether we are talking about Paul, James or the Lord Himself. Moreover much discussion of the faith Vs works dichotomy informs writing and philosophy throughout Church history, but I would invite you to consider that faith and works is all there is to behaviour in terms of seeking to please God, and then you can make a matrix of four windows with faith and works along the horizontal and doing God’s will Vs the credible or meaningful alternative to doing God’s will along the vertical, so that you get four panels, like the square window in CBeebies, with such labels as “doubt” “belief” “temptation” and “obedience”. Of course there is another set of windows you could add in showing what happens if you succumb, namely “unbelief” and “disobedience”.

Here’s a version I made including the third way of pleasing God, ie He decides to set His love on us, this is seen as the real deciding factor by Calvinists but in any event this we cannot change, we influence the criteria on the two more left columns but in fact those who are not in the elect will never want to do so. The fact that you want to do so means you are most likely in the elect, so it is not something you should use as a barrier to God.


Having set up this image, I would like to suggest that before we are in Heaven we are afflicted by these alternatives and can therefore fall into the lower categories of unbelief and disobedience despite having chosen not to do so. It is the result of what theologists have described as the three-fold problem of the World, the Flesh and the Devil. I could enlarge on that if need be, but for economy I will not do so now. I will also skip over the issues of the New Heart, the Church and the Holy Spirit, which are the opposite three-fold chord. This we can discuss separately.

Once we have attained the end of the age, whether by our death and entering the next life, or because we are alive at His coming, we will be resurrected in a perfect and uncorrupted form so the flesh has not its old power over us. The world is passed away for us, we are entirely beyond the reach of societal pressure, and the Devil is entirely bound from us.

Faith is no longer actually a criterion for us, once we reach that point, as we know at that point.  “We shall know as we are known”. Faith as it is described by Jesus and also by the writer of Hebrews 11 is only possible to have while you don’t actually know, although some are confused on this point, and will state that they know when in fact they do still only believe, however there are some who have experienced enough to be able to know for sure that God exists and loves them, but this is not always as good as having faith in the face of doubt, as the risen Lord explained to Thomas.  This is why God severely limits His direct manifestations to people unless they are in fact already believers, and even for believers very sparingly, as He loves to see our faith. Moses saw God face to face but in the end never saw the promised land, while those who believed his reports without seeing did see the promised land.

Thomas was still saved because he was able to say “My Lord and my God”, whereas the Resurrection in itself was not empirical proof of the Deity of Christ in as much as there are those who assent to the Resurrection but do not know Jesus as their Lord and God. Had Thomas had no more confession than what he had seen empirically, I am persuaded that this would not have constituted saving faith and therefore the detail of his confession of our Lord’s deity is a vital inclusion in the holy text.


We therefore at that point of entering that next world which we call heaven, know God, we have a perfect physical reset and no reason nor pressure whatsoever to be distracted from doing the will of God and worshipping Him purely. But this is what we have chosen now, in this life, what we have asked Him for and what we now thirst for every day of our lives, whilst being too weak in the flesh to bring about what our Spirit is certainly willing.