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The term translated "eternal life" is a technical term in Bible's Greek for the Same Type Of Life As God's. In other words, a plant has a type of life; a dog, a different type of life; a human being, still another-and-different type of life; an angel, yet another different type of life. But God Is Infinite Life: no beginning, no ending. So, when you believe in Christ, you also get GOD'S Life. Which you'd need, to live with God forever after the mortal body ends.
Obviously you Can't Lose What Is Eternal. You get God's Life the same way you got your soul: He breathes it into you, just like He breathed your soul into your body when it first exited from your natal mother's womb. That's why you are, technically, "born again", but spiritually. See the rest of John 3 for the Lord's explanation on this process. Titus 3:5 in Greek explains the Holy Spirit is the Person Who makes this happen, and that Eternal Life 'resides' in a human spirit. "Salvation Attributes" link at Home pagetop further explains this topic.
See, Bible repeatedly and in many ways in the original languages explains that all life begins and ends with an exhale; your first breath as a human being was an exhale, and when you die, you (literally) exhale your own soul out from your body. So, you are alive now; so, your believing was an exhale, based on an 'inhale' of information, the Gospel (here, John 3:16); so you get an inhale as a result, of God's Own Life. Your next breath is thus another exhale, and from that moment forward you are compatible structurally with very God. So when you finally exhale your soul, you will never 'perish', but instead immediately get a new sinless body to house both your soul and your human spirit, and thus will you live with God. Forever. (If the so-called 'Rapture' (not a Bible term) occurs after you die, you will get an interim sinless body to live in. See Luke 16:20ff for the fact of an interim body, though Christ took all believers with Him when He ascended, to Heaven: see Eph4:8-10's Greek. The Final Resurrection body everyone of "Church" (another technical Bible term) gets at the same time, that 'Rapture' date, whenever it may be. As you can tell from Luke 16:20ff, each person is recognizable at all times, so you will recognize your loved ones, etc. The new bodies are basically alike, perfect, wonderful; but also unique, kinda like each person appears unique even down here. So forget all the sci-fi UFO stuff with the floating blobs, lol.)
Despite Bible's clarity, a bizillion fake gospels are sold in ignorance, not malice: you yourself can prove that none of their versions are in the Real Bible. The fake gospels are easy to spot. They always ADD to "believe", or SUBSTITUTE OUT "believe" with a DIFFERENT VERB. Folks selling these fake gospels seem to think they package what in law is called "attestation" (fancy name for admitting you believe): so they add to God's Word and thus negate it, when they tell you to "invite Christ into your heart" or "receive Christ into your life" or "make Christ Lord", etc. Legally, the verbal clause in the "attestation" actually Negates Faith, so the person is Still Not Saved. Because, Instead of Believe, you are the subject of an Additional Meritorious Verb. Listen to testimonies sometime, hear the innocent-but-arrogant pride: I invited Christ into my heart! I made Christ Lord! I repented of my sins! See how horribly arrogant it all is?
The fake gospel sellers probably don't realize their extra verbiage negates the Simple Belief which God the Holy Spirit makes save you: John 16:9, Eph2:8-9, Rom5:1, Tit3:5, Eph1:13, 4:30b. It's Only Believe, to save you, and it's Only Believe, after salvation: for Belief in God is On Trial, not works. See here of Heb3 in any translation: compare 3:12 with 3:19, Heb11:1, Heb11:6. (In Hebrew, "shemah" of Deut 6:4 means to-hear-and-believe, which is the "obey" God wants. Writer of Hebrews is showing that precedence, in Heb3, because Believing was Always the Way to 'Obey' God, and is still True.) So we see that to get saved or to obey God after salvation, at all times, extra verbs Negate Belief; because any other verb is an assertion of SELF merit. Whether the person realizes it, or not. For if I invite, I accept, I repent, I receive, I I I I I am doing something. But to Believe means the Object Did Something On My Behalf. So believing stresses the Object, not the subject.
Christians aren't the only ones who sell fake gospels. Virtually every religion ever on this planet contends you have to do something to warrant Divine approval, however "Divine" is defined, because (sotto voce), you gotta merit Divine approval.
So though the Bible says baldly that you can't do anything to warrant Divine approval for salvation, hence Christ paid for all mankind's sins on the Cross, 'Christians' add to and thus negate that Truth with their i-do-something, 'tags'; thus they sell a FAKE 'gospel': for they substitute their idea that you must 'do' something besides/other than "believe", to get saved, get blessed, etc. ad nauseam. That's why most 'Christians' are unhappy, frankly: it's an inherent unhappiness, to believe a lie.
So, as you read the indented paragraphs below, note carefully how these fake verb clauses all (piously, cleverly!) signify you are doing something. You, not Christ. Thus you negate belief in what Christ did, in favor of what you do. So God will not accept these verbs, because by nature, the verb "believe" depends on the Object's merit, not the subject's. You buy the can of tomatoes due to its merit, not yours. You believe in Christ due to HIS WORK, not your own. So notice again how the SUBSTITUTE clauses and verbs all stress the subject's action, negating 'believe'. But God stresses the Object He Himself Judged, His Own Son.
A really common false gospel is an idea akin to attestation, that you must 'invite' Christ somewhere. The many American peddlers of this genre prove they need to learn how to read English: so Satan&Co. are mocking our stupidity. Look: Christians get the 'invite' idea from Rev3:20, but it's addressed to BELIEVERS ('Church' means believers, in NT) at Laodicea -- a Knock Of Disciplinary Warning. Clearly the Way/Door of Salvation would not Himself be knocking to get in...
Another common false gospel claim since WWII is called "Lordship salvation", viz., that you must 'make Christ Lord' of your heart, your life, 'commit' (what a farce), give some vow of obedience, etc. If I didn't hear such nonsense with my own ears, I'd never believe such lies were actually sold on TV! Right alongside those magic exercise machines! So look how easily the Bible refutes such claims: "NIV 1 Corinthians 12:3 Therefore I tell you that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, "Jesus be cursed," and no one can say, "Jesus is Lord," except by the Holy Spirit." See? One must be saved already before he can even admit Jesus is Lord. Romans 10:10 says the same thing (covered below). See also Matt22:43.
The "receive" salespeople can't read Bible, either. "Receive" in Greek really means "to welcome", and in Bible is usually the Greek word "dechomai". So when someone comes to your door, you welcome him inside. In the Bible, only believers "receive". Notice the welcoming analogy: if someone knocked at your door and you believed in welcoming him in, then what did you FIRST do? You BELIEVED in letting him in, before you actually would let him in. See? The Believing Precedes the Welcoming. And that's how Christ used it, when He warned the Pharisees that they must receive the Kingdom of God (salvation, its inheritance spotlighted) "like a little child" (i.e., Mark 10:15). Children BELIEVE, and that's why they are so vulnerable to welcoming strangers, etc. Another common usage of "receive" is really "hear-and-believe", in the Greek, idea that you welcome the information. Well, that's a synonym of believing, but you aren't doing anything: so such "receive" verses in translation are mistranslated, for in English there are different types of receiving, and the translation doesn't make clear it's BELIEVING; but God's Word in the Greek makes it clear. So, see? If you read Bible without God's Brains, you can't even properly read it in your native tongue, and are too lazy to learn what Word God Himself Wrote!
For, Who got paid for sins? Surely not man, who owed the payment, himself. So to claim you must tell man you believe in order to be saved, makes man the arbiter of your salvation! What whopping arrogance, to claim that one sinner talking to another sinner, SAVES the speaker! That's as insane as the claim getting wet ('baptism') saves you, lol! So saves you not at all!
The claim you must speak your faith aloud stems from an inexcusable MIStranslation of Rom10:10's 2nd "eis": the shortest corrected translation of the end of that verse should be, "as a result of salvation". For just as in 1Cor12:3, Romans 10:10 means you can't SAY you believe, UNLESS you ALREADY did (Rom10:9). Which common sense corroborates: since when could your mouth say what you weren't FIRST thinking, huh? Sheesh. We really DID lose our brains at salvation. And do you know, the 1550 Geneva Bible translated Rom10:10 reasonably well. No other English translation since, has done so. Sigh. For almost 500 years! translators have messed up this verse, and didn't even look at one of their own VENERATED Bibles! Talk about hypocrisy! We couldn't care less about God, and it shows. Click here for exegetical proof of Romans 10:10's mistranslation.
So people misuse Rom10:10, claiming you must speak your faith aloud in front of them to be saved. Which even common sense proves false: for, since when do humans supplant God, The Only Relevant Witness? Always suspect as a lie any claim about Scripture which emphasizes man, his behavior, or his role. People want to 'peg' others as being part of the 'in' group or the 'out' group, so they 'read' into Bible a 'requirement' that you must tell them you believe, to get saved. Well, sheesh: surely God would not make satisfying human prejudice or approbation, a requirement of salvation!
In Acts 2:38, for example, Peter says simply "repent", but next says "be baptised WITH REFERENCE TO the forgiveness of sins". (capped words are corrected translation of the preposition "eis", in the Greek: alternate translations can be RESULTING FROM, or BECAUSE OF, or DUE TO -- there's a link below on Romans 10:10 which also mistranslates eis, so you can understand this problem better.) Notice how BELIEVE isn't mentioned.
Because, Changing Your Mind Is Adjunctive, and so is the baptising. If you didn't believe in the Gospel, it's because you believe it's not true. So, before you believe, you first discover why is it true, and thus Change Your Mind about it. Then, you believe. Having believed, were you in Peter's day you'd have followed the then-popular custom of dipping yourself in a river, to Illustrate The Identification With Christ On The Cross (going down in the water), and identification with Christ forever (coming up out of the water). Greek word "Baptismos" means IDENTIFICATION WITH: it's an EFFECT, not a cause. Greek Hoplite recruits had a graduation ceremony where they BAPTISED their graduation swords in pig's blood because they GRADUATED, not to get graduated. So, being baptised is an optional ceremony illustrating the effect of salvation, not causing it. The term Baptismos is repeatedly covered in my other sites in more detail.
If course, sheer common sense would tell you, if the Bible says belief in Christ saves you, then says belief and something else in another verse, it can't be that the something else is also needed for salvation -- or God would be a liar. Hence the presence of the something else, is ABOUT something else, not how-to-be-saved.
Even common sense proves that if Christ paid for all mankind's sins a whopping 2000 years ago (see 1Jn2:2), how can there be anything to add, for crying out loud? Just Believe It. Even common sense proves you're not saved if you substitute or add anything to belief. Because, Christ Is The Only Object Of Belief, Because He Is The One Who Paid. Use Your Brain: if you must 'repent' (etc.) to be saved, then you are believing in What You Do (repentance, inviting, accepting, etc.), instead of in Christ..so you'd reject Him in favor of yourself.. so, not saved! Just as He explained in John 16:9, "Concerning sin: Because They Do Not Believe In Me." Him. Alone. Believe. 100% SUPERnatural, no human additives, Alone pleases God: Heb11:6.
Religion always is from Satan, and religion always makes stinks about human merit. God's saying there is NO AMOUNT of human merit or demerit which can count, since He Is Infinitely Holy. So He Did Something About The Problem, since Only Infinite God can Solve a Problem Related To Infinity. Hence John 3:16, no additives, no works, no emotion, ritual, and definitely no MAGIC (baptism, incantations, etc). If you can do something, it's not the solution. Believing in the Object however, isn't doing anything. You believed a can of tomatoes was good, so you bought it. You believe Christ paid for your sins, so you 'buy' John 3:16. Without money, and without price, Isaiah 55!
Again, God doesn't need anything from you, Because Christ Paid, get it? So don't add anything: Just Believe Christ Paid For All Your Sins. If you added anything to faith in the past, you are not saved, because ADDING is works, which CANCELS faith (Eph2:8-9, Rom4:1ff). So Simply Believe In Christ. Read John 3 for yourself, or ANY verses the Lord speaks, even in the Gospels. He never says anything BUT "believe", saves.
Sin shrinks your soul, eventually making you mean and small, unable to enjoy your life; making everyone around you, wish they could be a million miles away. Goes like this: with every sin you sin, you LOSE the ability to enjoy; for you INCREASE the addiction to the same sin. If you know anything about addiction to anything, at some point the initial 'high' of it becomes instead, a tyrant over you, and that tyranny replaces the enjoyment. So you end up just trying to appease the tyrant, never actually enjoying anything, anymore. Doesn't matter if it's drugs, booze, sex, TV, church attendance, works, beauty pageants.. if you have this URGE to do it, you're looking at the tyrant. And if you appease it (which you are urged to do), you will reduce your freedom, your ability to enjoy, and you will instead increase the very urge you are trying to get rid of. But you can't lose your salvation. You can only lose a whole lot of enjoyment that learning to say NO to the urges, builds. Which is why you need a Bible to learn: it fights the urges, you fire Bible at the urges. Kinda like sports practice, where you practice the same moves over and over.
Self-righteous people are addicted to their self-righteous sins, like the Pharisees were, so they bristle when they hear the Lord forgave David when he fornicated, Moses when he murdered, Paul when he persecuted others, the adulteress in John 8, etc. See, you can truly sin all you want after salvation -- these self-righteous people sure are, infecting TV with their activism, their prolifer lies, as if God were so stupid (or sadistic) as to put a soul in a womb! Yeah, and look how they prove the foregoing paragraph: small, mean souls, enjoying nothing, constantly appeasing their own self-imposed tyranny of self-righteousness, even abusing interpretation of Bible, so they can falsify spirituality as something YOU do, falsify the Gospel as something YOU do, adding to Gospel and spiritual life just like Satan added verbs in Genesis3! Just like Cain, who was ticked off God didn't want his hard-won vegetable crop, in Genesis 4!
So notice what else is missing from GOD's Truth about your life, post-salvation: all the religious tyrannies. There's no penance, no ritual, no need to attend church, no need to give money or be 'a good person' (see Isa55, Rom5:8); in short, none of what is pandered as 'needed', is. Further, nobody has spiritual power over you, for you are your own priest! The first time you simply believe Christ paid for all your sins, all these things happen to you. If you want to know Right This Second what it means to be a Royal Priest, (Royal Ambassador-for-God, really) Click Here. (Yes: ROYAL.)
Bible uses special vocabulary, poetry, wit, wordplay. If you are self-righteous, all that enjoyable reading just goes right over your head. So Bible is a "mystery" to self-righteous Christians. Yeah, and "mystery" is one of those special vocabulary words the Bible uses to designate the Body of Christ, aka all believers in Him between Pentecost and Rapture, aka "Church". Bible defines all these terms: but if you're busy hating, you can't read it very well. Satan is busy hating. So the term "mystery" is applied in Rev17 to show Satan's out to make Christ and Bible a "mystery" to us, since we are the "mystery", the unknown solution until Christ announced it in Matt16:18, Church. Unknown, in the OT, because until Israel rejected Him, there WAS no such thing. So now a "mystery": Greek word "musterion" means an exclusive KNOWLEDGE, not an unknown; but because exclusive, it's unknown to those outside the group. Church is that group. So the mystery harlot in Rev17, is unknown to hapless humans, a satanic counterfeit. See the wordplay? Satan reverses the "mystery" we are, to make God mysterious, foreign to us!
So now see Satan's wit: since the Church is a "mystery", he wants to make it mysterious to the Church, what this Bible says! So fosters a FAKE Church, so to confuse us as to what's Christian, and what's not; what's "Biblical" and what's not; even, what books are the Real Bible, and which are not. The Jews got put through all this as well, so.. well, the Last Bride gets even more obfuscation. That's what Rev17 is all about: a religio-political 'Church' which passes itself off as being from God. Not any one denomination, but a character of false Ambassadorial representation (priesthood), teaching, etc., ad nauseum. Which by the way, looks like every other religion ever on the planet, except it has the name "Christ" slapped on.. preening. History shows how this harlot has behaved, and you can watch her parade in nearly every pulpit and 'Christian' station you turn on, at any given moment of the day.
So "TITHE" is misused, too: real Bible says it's SECULAR INCOME TAX, not something you give to a church, for crying out loud. This blatant misuse of Scripture you can prove in translation, lol. Read Leviticus and Deuteronomy yourself. Notice the difference between the Levitical offering and the "tithe", remembering that the Temple was a fortress, the safest place to put the state treasury's income tax. For, that's what "tithe" was: a National Income Tax, not for 'church' at all (God imposed a flat tax). Levitical offerings were for what we'd call 'church' today; always voluntary, never based on income at all (see also Luke 21, NASB or NIV).
Guess it's no surprise then, that Christian teachers nearly all focus on teaching you how to use the Word, rather than Simply Teach What Bible Says. Just like they add to the real Gospel, other verbs you do, they add to the Word what they think you should do with it. But that's not God's Will: God's will is that you yourself Learn The Word and you yourself Live On It. Which you can prove pretty easily, since in nearly every Bible verse, you are exhorted to Live On It (e.g., Matt4:4).
So teachers should merely teach you what the Word says, proving to you from the original languages what the actual inspired words, are. In short, the "pastor" is supposed to teach you how to fish, not give you fish to eat. For example, congregations are inspiringly exhorted to have faith, be patient, do for others, avoid sin; the brilliant oratory makes one enthuse to get cracking, too -- but how? Before WWII, American soldiers were drilled and exhorted and pumped up: but they had only cars, no tanks to train with. They had broomsticks, no guns to practice shooting. So too, today's churches. Lots of great and enjoyable speeches, but no spiritual fuel -- so the people perish for lack of Knowledge Of God (Hos4:6). Not for lack of rah-rah.
Christ Himself didn't use His Own Power to have faith, be patient, avoid sin: but instead, Ate The Word (Matt4:4). The Word did the work (central theses in James, 1Jn, Romans8). But how is a congregation gonna eat a Word which it doesn't HAVE? Pastors have the Word, and prove they really eat it: but they don't pass the Word onto their congregations, they pass the use of the Word onto them: use, but not the Word itself -- folks can read the verses, but don't really know what the verses mean. They are left to fend for themselves on how Bible words interrelate across Scripture, and eat too little, too infrequently. Because instead of being taught the Word itself, they are assumed to know the Word itself, so are taught the usage. Bible is too rich in nuance, to get it by reading yourself. You need a pastor to beat his brains out LEARNING THE MEANINGS of a passage -- and then he takes you through the meanings, passing on that info TO you. Now you have it. Directly.
Imagine telling a man to build a spaceship, when he has no math or physics background. Imagine further that you build the spaceship, and he watches: that's what most sermons are. The pastor knows the Word, but doesn't explain the Word ITSELF, but rather only the usage. So now you try to build the spaceship, but.. um, you don't have the knowledge underneath, to really do it. You can only ape what you saw/heard. That will build a few parts to the ship, maybe.. but the vehicle certainly won't fly. Catholicism got started via a sincere belief that teaching do's rather than Know's of the Word somehow 'helped' people. Look at all the historical havoc wrecked in and by Christians, as a result. Exact same trend goes on now, but via the independent churches.. Rev17 harlot. Christian, beware...
Another example. In math class, you learn the math, but then you APPLY the math, i.e., get homework exercises to use what principles you learned. Bible is spiritual math par excellence, and you need it TAUGHT to you -- at which point, you as a Priest are to apply it 24/7. Never-ending homework, since it's really Your Life. Idea for it to become a thinking pattern (secular math, even, is a thinking pattern). You need words and grammar and sentence structure and style data to craft sentences and paragraphs and papers. You need Bible to craft Divine Thinking, which is why we Got The Book. But the Book is Designed to be Taught: Matt4:4 uses the word "rema" for "Word"; in Greek, "rema" means Taught-by-Teacher-Word (regular word for "Word" is logos). Eph4:11-16 is blow-by-blow explicit about the role of the teacher in making you grow up in Christ (very graphic, trans from the Greek is in RightPT.htm).
Look: my pastor taught his congregation how to study the Word, by teaching us the Word ITSELF. As is. Daily. Verse by verse, mostly, from the original languages of Scripture, over 53 years. So, as I Learned The Word Itself, that Word became my own thinking, because I habitually ate (believed) it and live on it. I didn't need my pastor to tell me how to use it, I needed him to teach me WHAT IT IS. So, now that I know what IT is, It cycles in my head 24/7, even while sleeping. Sure, as he learned fantastic uses of the Scripture, he taught us those also: but we already knew first what the Scripture WAS, so we could understand the uses of it he explained. So we ourselves could ourselves USE it. But had he merely explained the use without the Meaning Underneath, we'd have been aping what he said like kids ape their parents, clomping around in Mommy's/Daddy's shoes...