| Christianity Explained Information Find Christian Unity in Biblical Explanations of the Doctrines That Count! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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What Is Religion and Where Did It Originate? What Is the Bible, and How Relative Is It to My Life? What Are Messianic Prophecies? Who Was Jesus of Nazareth, Really? Why Are There So Many World Religions? Why Are There So Many Christian Denominations? What Is the Law and How Does It Apply to Me? What's All This About the End of the World and End-time Prophecies? Isn't the Book of Daniel a Closed Book? Revelation: How can anyone understand all that symbolism? Who or What Was Jesus' Mother, Mary? Didn't Darwin Disprove Creation? What's the Truth About Faith and Works? Christian E-mails: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Complete Directory of Articles/Studies
Title Abbreviations for Books of the Bible Genesis - Ge | Why So Many Religions? The foundation of all religion is how we relate to God, to the Gods, or to becoming Gods. There are those who believe in one supreme being, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-wise, all-loving, supremely just and good, without any evil, who cannot make a mistake and does everything perfectly. Some believe in a supremely powerful being who is vindictive and looking for souls to condemn to hell for all eternity so he can watch them suffer. Some believe in a supreme being who got everything started, and then went off to "do his own thing" without caring one way or the other what happens with his creation. Other people believe in (or at least there were those who used to believe in) a god society, where gods have supernatural powers, but act in much the same way as humans. Still others believe in a supreme force into which humans are absorbed after they die, if they're good enough, but they must be reborn to many lives on this earth in order to become good enough to be absorbed into the eternal. Whatever their reasoning or their methods for getting there, most humans seek a connection with perfection. When it becomes evident they will never be "perfect" so long as this world tempts them to selfishness, they seek a religion to give them hope. Some seek hope by separating themselves from the world that "makes them bad". Others seek to do good works to prove they are better than they think. Still others seek hope by abusing themselves, punishing themselves for their own sins. Jews and Christians, however, seek hope in the payment of their debts by the one who created them, knowing that they would be unable to stand against the one in whom sin originated and who seeks to take as many of Gods children as possible into eternal destruction in order to hurt God for all eternity. This seeking of hope can be seen as the measure of faith that is given to every human by the Creator God, according to the Bible.
When I was little, I would look around at all the nice people at church and think, "Boy! Everybody else must have gotten a much bigger measure of faith than I did!" In fact, I said that often throughout my life until I learned that a measure was a specific quantity in biblical times, not a relative term as it is now. Now I realize that everyone was dealt a measure of faith, but what each has done with it determines whether it has grown or withered. But that's another study . . . There as many religions as there are people, for every human has a different "take" on whether or not there is a God and, if so, how we are supposed to relate to Him, her, or them. That's because every human has a different view of him/herself. Some believe they are their own Gods. They have no interest in admitting there might be a supreme being who knows more and can do more than they, and their egoes won't permit them to admit God gave them the ability to do what they do. Women who are vain don't thank God for their looks. Inventors who are brilliant don't thank God for their intelligence, or drive, or concern for those for whom their inventions are intended. Others believe they are ignorant, worthless beings who continuously make mistakes and appear to have no control over themselves, let alone what is happening around them. These people have 3 choices. They can be angry with God for creating them the way they are, they can decide a perfect God wouldn't create them this way, so there must not be a God, or they can believe that God created mankind perfect, knew we wouldn't stay that way, and offered his own son to suffer a substitutionary death for the death we deserve. I
choose to believe the latter, and I believe the Bible supports my
choice. I know we are intelligent beings with a will that we can allow to be ruled by "evil" impulses or "good" impulses--evil, for our purposes, being defined as harmful to self and/or others, and good being defined as helpful to self and especially others. Many are wondering where all the world's religions originated. If they believed the Bible, they would know. [Biblical account of flood and tower of Babel] [Research Geological Evidence for Global Flooding and offer links here.] It seems obvious that all religions had their bases in what Noah taught. If God told him the people were sinful and had to be destroyed, wouldn't He have told Noah why? Surely He gave Noah the rules to live by that He gave Adam and Eve! Ever played the Gossip Game? That's where a person at one end of a line of people whispers a sentence into the ear of the person next to him/her and that person whispers it to the next person in line, and this repeats until the sentence reaches the other end of the line. Then that person repeats out loud what he/she was told, and it is NEVER the same as the starting sentence. Are you getting a clue how all the new leaders of their own nations, who after the Tower incident could no longer ask each other, "How did that teaching go again?" developed their own religions? List laws of judaism and possible corruptions of them in other religions. Then, along came Abraham. Biblical account of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac: Abraham was accounted as righteous by God because he believed God. He showed this belief by doing what God instructed him to do. He left his homeland and wend to a place that God showed him. Biblically, it is obvious that reliance on God (as opposed to reliance on other humans) is what God desires of us. When he says "believe", he means a whole lot more than just mouthing the words that admit an intellectual opinion that he exists. It means accepting his fathership with joy and doing what he asks. My children used to ask me what they could give me for Christmas or my birthday or Mother's Day, and one time I told them, "I don't need 'things'. I just want you to love me. Just do what I ask you to do and forget about buying me something." This is what God says to us. "Love me enough to do what I ask, and we'll all be happy forever!" It's really quite simple. Now some people like to warp this message into an excuse to do their own will in the guise of "instructions from God". That's why it is so important to continually study the Bible. You can see the divergence of man's will from the will of God in the Bible. Take the religions that were formed from the attempt of Abraham's wife to hurry God along in his promise to make of Abraham the father of many nations and bless the world through his seed. Because the promise was so long in coming (boy does that sound familiar), Sarah gave her Egyptian maidservant Hagar to Abraham, to have a child with her. And Abraham went along with it and they had a son which Abraham named Ishmael. As the child grew and Sarai still bore no child, it was assumed that Ishmael--the only child Abraham had and whom Abraham loved as any father would--was the child of promise. However, he was the child of human impatience. A human who had little faith in God's ability to work out his own prophecies arranged an outcome of her own devising. This is a common occurrence in the history of mankind, and it created the first of many rivalries that man's misconceptions concerning marriage would dump into what started out as God's perfect world. Scripture speaks for itself:
Now, are you beginning to see where the confusion over religion is Bible based? Here it is mentioned that Ishmael would have "12 princes" and later Israel (Jacob) had 12 sons. There are many parallels between Jewish history and statutes and the history and statutes of other religions. Although the sons of Ishmael advocate the belief that the promise goes to the firstborn, the sons of Isaac believe that God's promise to Abraham was 1) you will be the father of many nations--hence the birth of both Ishmael and Issac--and 2) your wife Sarah will bear you a son whom you shall name Isaac, through whom all nations shall be blessed. Like many of their Jewish and Christian counterparts, Muslims are appreciative of scripture until it appears to turn against their preconceived ideas of how God should treat them; then they accept only what they want to accept and disregard the rest. The blessing of the seed of woman was given in Genesis and Sarah shared in that blessing, Why else would God bother to give Sarah a child at all? The seed of woman is the basis for the prophecy of the virgin birth in Isaiah 7:14, fulfilled in the story of Mary the mother of Jesus, but it was forecast in Sarah. She was well beyond childbearing years yet miraculously conceived, which was God's method of helping humans (whose natural inclination is not to believe in what they cannot see, else why were only certain biblical characters pointed out as receiving blessings for walking with God?) to believe in the virgin conception. If even Abram and Sarai could not believe she would conceive in her old age, what hope would we have to believe in a virgin birth?
Ishmael was not to be the one from whom the Messiah would come, but God still blessed him as a seed of Abraham and still blesses "Ishmaelites" today. All who seek a relationship with the God of Heaven, the Creator of all life, will find him.
The promises of scripture are for all who want to follow God. The three angels of Revelation 14 give a message for the end time world population, and since the Jewish leaders refused to recognize in scripture the timing of and probability of the Messiah prophecies being fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, Christians are now commissioned to spread the word. First Christ told his disciples:
And Christians have been doing this, unfortunately among other things, for the last 2000, plus or minus, years. But now, another message that is the same message, the everlasting gospel, that has been preached all along is being preached in some, but unfortunately not all, Christian Churches. The scripture identifies just what the Everlasting Gospel is and follows up with warnings that are specifically for the last day people who claim to worship God:
God is trying to reach all nations, families, language groups, and people. Anyone of any bloodline who comes to God, he will in no wise cast out!
Please, my brothers and sisters, seek! Coming someday . . . History of Ishmaelites and Israelites with links to sites specifically dealing with same. Study of the 3 angels messages throughout scripture. Study of all of God's Covenants in the scriptures. |
Related Links Written in the HeartThe Truth About Mary Magdalene
Scriptures: Within Text: name chap:verse-s More Study: name chap:verse-s | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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