Don't F**k With Believers

A believer.  Better yet, a “true believer,” right? In the Christian faith its someone who believes in Jesus and/or God, but more precisely, someone who is “saved” as a result.  I’ve heard the terms exchanged for decades; the titles and the associated conditions that people will generously place on the backs of people they know and love and the same ones that they regretfully withhold from those they don’t, or don’t understand, or do not agree with in terms of their chosen religious expressions.  We’ve all heard them, right?

“Catholics are not believers.”

“Mormons are not saved.”

“Jehovah’s Witnesses are not Christian,” and

“Anyone who has not asked Jesus to save them, with their mouths, when they die, will go straight to hell.”

In the end, this last statement is what everyone really means from the heart, right?  That unless a person believes like they believe, attends the denomination that they attend, and practice what they have decided needs to be practiced is just a-okay with the living God.  The rest?  They are pretty in some type of trouble – the level being dependent on the persons involved.

I find this general assessment of people altered in the face of death however and having attended my fair share of funerals (especially as someone asked to officiate) I’ve noticed that dogmatic stances pretty much fly out the window when a person exist this world and amounts to most people, even some of the most dogmatic, assuming that the departed is with God.

So why all the arguments, debates, finger pointing and attacks on people of different religious expressions while their alive?  Is it our shared fear in being wrong, or not having certainty in the hereafter?  Perhaps it just a matter of we all love to debate politics and religion and not matter how many people ask, “Can’t we just get along?” the religiously and politically minded will forever refuse.

What is a true believer?  Maybe we can start there.  Obviously, there is a spectrum of opinions on what makes a believer acceptable to God along with a wide and varied range of definitions, demands and dogmas, so this will be something we address – what really truly makes a person a believer?

Then we will move forward and discuss how a believer lives.  Ironically, this too is so greatly misunderstood so we will spend a moment on trying to provide and answer.  Then we will ask, what do believers actually believe that makes them bona fide believers in the minds of most reasonable souls (and we will talk about reasonable souls in a minute).  And then finally we will talk about how believers have be messed with over the ages by those souls who believe it is their job to police the faith.   

Standard fare for what we might categorize as Evangelical Christianity today (but is in reality an expression of all Christian expressions) is the idea that some individuals can be seen and accepted by other people as “believers,” while others, despite the fact that they claim to believe, are not.  This book was written to address the fact that all of these presuppositional judgments are, in fact

• Irrelevant in the day and age we live in now.
• Not the responsibility of non-Apostolic Christians
• Is truly in the hands of God alone
• Prove truly idiotic when we really consider the mitigating factors involved.

Hopefully these insights will help reduce the tension that exists inter-denominationally and will help bring more and more true worshippers to peace, love and understanding.

NOTE:

I am not a Universalist.  I do not subscribe to the idea that all roads lead to God.  Quite the contrary. I subscribe that only one road leads to a relationship with God, and that is through faith on His Son.  The problems is I also maintain that many people, walking by the Spirit in faith do not realize that it is God’s Son who is bringing them along.  I suggest that every knee will ultimately bow admitting that Jesus is Lord, but some people looking back over the annuls of history embraced what they were given and in the end have or will discover Him and the author and finisher of all they rightly believed.

Additionally, I do not believe that all souls are saved.  But understand the caveat to this.  When we talk about saved (relative to scripture) there are really three expressions of it going on.

First, being saved from the promised coming destruction to the Nation of Israel, also known as the Day, that Day, the Great and Dreadful Day, and the Great and Terrible Day. (see Joel 2; Zephaniah 1; Zechariah 14 and Malachi 4)  I maintain that most of Jesus references to being saved speak of them being saved from that promised dreadful day.

Second, by walking in faith, there is also a promise in scripture of being saved from covered place or what the Jews called sheol and the Greeks called hades.  Many Christians refer to this place as hell.  For those who believed and received Jesus by faith that died BEFORE the great and dreadful day, they would go to the paradise part of sheol and escape the prison destination.

Finally, there is a “saved to” reference in scripture, which sort of dove-tails in with the saved from applications above.  Saved to speaks to those who by faith are ultimately saved to the Kingdom of God and will live and abide with Him in His Kingdom after this life.  Those saved to the Kingdom do so by and through faith in God.  I purposely state this qualification this way, as “faith in God,” and do not write faith in Jesus.  The reason is not all souls who have been saved to the Kingdom knew of Him in this life, but, as stated, would ultimately come to see that He is the Alpha and Omega, the author and finisher of all peoples faith.  

Those who will not choose to live by faith in God (and remember, Jesus was God with us so the general title works for those who have never heard His name) will not be saved to the Kingdom, if they were alive and died in Jesus day were not saved from the prison part of sheol, and if they were alive when He returned were also not spared from the ravages of the Great and Dreadful day.  

So again, when we speak of saved, we have to make sure that we understand our terms because they are not so apparent from the text as many people make them out to be.

Maybe for arguments sake, while admitting that from our perspective, Jesus is truly Lord, Savior and King and no person comes to the Father but by Him, we can now say that in this age of fulfillment, anyone who seeks the Father in spirit and truth, and calls out to Almighty God in faith and illustrates that faith in agape love, ought to be given the benefit of the doubt as to whether they are a believer  or not.

This is the transition that has to be made today in the faith – that if (or since) Jesus has had the victory over all things, and God placed EVERYTHING in His power and authority, and that He does reside on the heavenly throne ruling as God over His Kingdom and everything that happens relative to it, we ought to shift our thinking from all needing to claim Jesus to any seeking to worship God in spirit and truth IS, in fact, seeking Jesus.