There are commonalities among the deceived; commonly held traits that cause people to reject Scriptural truths and accept lies and deceptions, all the while totally convinced what is believed is true, for from a strictly humanistic perspective, they are what is naturally assumed to be true.
But we are dealing with things outside the realm of the physical world we live in. What you grew up in; the environment, and the experiences based in the physical world, have an impact on the thought processes you develop over time.
In order to “get ahead” in this world, you have to do what it takes to get ahead, educationally, as well as other factors that can even include where you live. A competitive nature develops that can reflect itself in a number of ways, some of them following dishonest endeavors, criminal in nature. In many businesses, there develops a “department” of “pencil pushers” who seek to maximize profits while minimizing costs, so that the end product, whether it be fast food or widgets, people may well refuse to buy what they are selling.
In religion, specifically false religions, they are selling a lie; a “cheapened” product, where the difference however is that this trend can be reversed where salvation is sold as an expensive product that is going to cost you, plenty, and the real thing is compared to their more expensive product as merely cheap knockoffs.
And so, the truth of the matter when it comes to religion and Salvation is that the wolves, in order to achieve their goals, inflate the price of the product, while “exposing” the true product as the cheap copy; “cheap grace” if you will.
What Scripture reveals is that the cost of Salvation is beyond the ability of any man who ever lived to pay it. The deceiver’s work-around is to actually cheapen it, some, but still present it as achievable, albeit expensive comparatively, where human nature agrees with the assessment. You have to give up; surrender something in order to acquire something.
Salvation does not follow the physical patterns everyone becomes accustomed to dealing with. Salvation is a gift, not given to criminals. It is given to the family members of the family of God, sold by the deceivers as the kingdom of God in the sense of those in the kingdom being subjects of the kingdom, and not family members, constrained by law even as the Hebrews were when they were established as a nation; a kingdom.
The analogy given regarding salvation being a gift is that which is bequeathed to the children in the testament of the father, inherited from the father.
Take a concordance and look up and read all the passages of Scripture that use the words “inherit” and “inheritance.”
Understand that you acquire an inheritance upon the death of the one who bequeaths those things of his or her possession to you upon their death, where Jesus died in order to pass on to you an inheritance of eternal life if you be one who belongs to His family through a new birth of the Spirit and where your sins that made you a ‘criminal’ in the sight of God freed from your sins also by His death.
The price of your salvation is paid for by the One who in turn gives it to you. You cannot pay it, in full or partially, like some “matching funds” transaction.
The argument is put forward that people need to keep the old covenant law; the ‘works’ of the law, whether as a condition of salvation (compliance or ‘payment) which is in keeping with the conditioning we all received growing up in a physical environment described above in the opening statements. It is part of our conditioning received in the environment we all were born into.
The function of the law; its purpose, comes down to two things of note:
1) Produce wrath and make all guilty before God.
It lets it be known that no man can measure up to the standard of God and the perfection of God. All have sinned and have been found wanting when it comes to the glory of God.
2) It provides the way out of man’s dilemma through Christ Jesus paying the debt of sin prescribed by the law, that law being a blood covenant law where the sinner; the transgressor was to be put to death; their blood spilled out, which for a man produces a final and irreversible death where recovery is impossible, once the blood is drained out, seeing as the life is in the blood.
In this manner, the sin-debt is paid. You sin, you die. With Christ standing in for you, you do not personally pay the debt of irreversible death whereas Christ could do so, where He, being God, could not suffer irreversible death, being primarily a Spirit Being to begin with. He could survive what you could not, and where His death in the flesh made you legally dead to sin and dead to the law that prescribed that death, now freed from both, as Scripture declares.
Deceivers, who seek personal gain; wolves in sheep’s clothing (altered exterior appearance) have no leverage to use against those so freed from sin and the law. Their power and control revolves around there being a law that can still condemn, thereby instilling fear within people who are influenced by them, who manipulate the conditioning we all normally receive in this physical world and build on this. Faith in God who gifts us eternal live with Him through what He has done for us is supplanted by deceivers who insist it is you that must comply with requirements you must perform in order to acquire or qualify for eternal life, and they are there to guide you in the process… for a price.
Such people are led to believe, as a result, Jesus did not pay the price; the full price, and this is indicative of faithlessness in what He did and accomplished.
The price you pay the wolves so that they can feed their own bellies is both monetary and spiritual. You abandon faith in God even as Eve believed the serpent, thereby compromising faith in God and what God had declared; that partaking of that tree would result in death; a death penalty, no matter how attractive the fruit appeared; how beneficial appearing it was sold to them by the serpent.
The parallel here is the law. The typology of that tree was the law. When it comes to salvation, that was to be derived from the other tree; the Tree of Life, which was not available after choosing the other tree whose fruit was death.
The Devil is framed as the father of lies AND deceit. He used God’s tree as the means of subverting Eve, followed by Adam.
God gave them a life of relative ease, with abundant food resources. There was but one negative commandment; do not eat of that tree. Condemnation would result. You can perceive it either as a violation of the commandment of God, like the law, or look deeper and see that the real violation was in not believing what God had declared would be the consequences.
Now look again at the law; the consequences of the law as spelled out, plainly. The law produces wrath and makes all guilty before God. The only way to no longer be guilty before God is to pay the DEBT of the law; not try to keep the law that already establishes it’s sole fruit as wrath; condemnation and a death sentence. The solution is to actually believe God and what His inspired, written ‘testament’ states about the law and faith; that our salvation is tied to faith and not the law. There is no such thing as faith in God AND faith in the law. A faith in the law that the law will not condemn you; produce wrath with you by embracing the law is a fantasy put forward by deceivers that have something to gain by your disobedience to the faith. They gain, financially, and personally through power and control over your life, and the devil gains by having you abandon faith in God, even as did he.
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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )
Acts 17:11
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