Kingdom Come

WORKS. NOT WORDS. “Accepting” Jesus, “Asking” Jesus to come into your heart, “Praying the sinner’s prayer” are meaningless if not followed up with correspondent works proving repentance.

“I [Paul]…shewed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should

1. repent and turn to God,
2. AND do works meet / fit for repentance.” (Acts 26:19-21)

“And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” (Revelation 20:11-15)

Diverse interpretations of how one’s name gets written down can be found among Christian denominations as well as non-Christian religions.

For example: “To properly understand the Book of Life, you must realize that there are really two Books of Life. One is called “the book of life”; the other, “the Lamb’s book of life”…the book of life or the Lamb’s book of life was never mentioned in the Old Testament as such. Of course, the “mystery” regarding the new covenant concerning the Law of Grace was not to be known to those of the Old Testament. One’s name is not written in…by the sovereign choice of God. A person’s name is written in the Lamb’s book of Life only because he or she chooses to ask God to place it there.”

Wow. Doesn’t that make a human a higher sovereign than God?

How about we stick with the source document instead of a religious cult?

Hebrew poetry repeats phrases of thoughts rather than ending sounds. The following poetic communication provides us with the understanding that there is only one book – the book of life.

• Because for thy sake I have borne reproach;
  • shame hath covered my face. 
• I am become a stranger unto my brethren,
  • and an alien unto my mother’s children…
• and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none;
  • and for comforters, but I found none…
• Pour out thine indignation upon them
  • and let thy wrathful anger take hold of them…
• Let them be blotted out of the book of the living,
  • and not be written with the righteous.” (Psalm 69)

There is only one book of living human beings in the Bible documenting all living humans.

“This is the book of the generations of Adam.” (Genesis 5:1)

A “generation” (noun) is “a body of living beings constituting a single step in the line of descent from an ancestor”, as well as “a type or class of objects developed from an earlier type” where the verb form “generate” means “to create by means of a defined process. Details in the relevant posts

• beginning with ha-Adam into whose body YHVH breathed his breath of life.
  • passed to the wo-man cloned from Adam’s rib,
    • then to all their descendants through the mitochondria in the woman’s egg / seed.

This life is in its essence connection

1. to the mother who forms, develops and sustains new life in her body, 
2. to the environment for essential air that every living child gasps into their lungs upon disconnecting from the mother’s umbilical cord,
3. while remaining connected socially and environmentally for food and protection,
4. until the body disconnects from environmental means of life.

David’s response to the death of his first child by Bathsheba informs us that young children go to heaven. What happens to aborted and miscarried fetuses whose neurological system have not developed yet into a functional soul is beyond my ability to analyze other than the documentation of Jesus stating that “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (John 3:5-6) By this we understand that being born as an independent person is the means for getting one’s name in the Book of Life. 

“there shall in no wise enter into [the holy Jerusalem] any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” (Revelation 21:27)

I know a woman who comforts herself that when her son was a toddler she guaranteed that he would go to heaven by having him repeat the Sinner’s Prayer after her. As a teenager he joined a gang, and as an adult he deals drugs. Surely we understand that her leading a recitation as meaningless to her child as “Twinkle twinkle little star” does not cancel out his adult choices. 

And yet, modern Christian outreach is based on the transactional higher success rate of leading children to the Lord over adults. The current Barna study indicates that nearly half of all Americans who accept Jesus Christas their savior do so before reaching the age of 13 (43%). Less than one out of every four born again Christians (23%) embraced Christ after their twenty-first birthday. “Families, churches and para-church ministries must recognize that primary window of opportunity for effectively reaching people with the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is during the pre-teen years.”  Yet no-one at this age is legally responsible for their decisions.

While it may seem like an 18, 20, or 22-year-old is able to make adult decisions, they are not developmentally ready just yet. This is because the brain’s frontal lobe, especially the prefrontal cortex, isn’t fully mature until around age 25.

Furthermore, the Sinner’s Prayer is nothing but a pagan transactional ritual if the reciter is imagining that “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13) under Name It and Claim It / Word of Faith or salvation from whatever inconvenience or personal bother or deserved consequences of one’s own actions because the speaker is presuming personal control over the Force of Creation.

In the beginning there was just one law that covered all aspects of physical, social and spiritual needs for connection to YHVH the Father / the Creator Authority. “Don’t eat the fruit or you die / disconnect from my eternal source of life.”

But the Adams ate the fruit.

Afterwards they didn’t get saved from their sin, death and hell through learning what they should do by reading the Apostolic writings, but what they did is the same as what is documented in them to do.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness…the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” (I John 1:7-10)

Just as

• “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression…
• even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord [from Adam onward].” (Romans 5:14, 21)

Additional laws added to explicitly define sin in other ways that oppose the Singularity’s control over creation give us to understand that the definition of sin is anything that results in harm, destruction, chaos, entropy of energy in YHVH’s Creation.

The opposite – right-ness / righteousness – is choosing to maintain order, in other words, identifying with / uniting with / connecting with the Singularity / Creator by taking dominion over destruction / sin – and therefore death.

The biblical way of salvation is incontrovertibly grounded in recognizing, respecting, honoring, and conforming one’s life on earth to the plan of an Intelligent Designer to keep the system running properly without undo damage and destruction.

This is spelled out in the part of the Bible claimed by Christianity’s narrow depiction of salvation.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful…Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.” (Romans 1:18-32)