Jesus Christ's Salvation – Biblical Teachings for Abundant Life by Gregory S. Supina - HTML preview

PLEASE NOTE: This is an HTML preview only and some elements such as links or page numbers may be incorrect.
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.

Who God chooses to save

Many churches want us to forget that God promised to save only His people, only those He chose to create for salvation. He chooses whom He saves. Churches do not want God to be the Father of their lives, the Creator of their spirits and the wills of their spirits. Instead, they like to think they created their own spirits. But God calls all whom He saves His “chosen ones” or His “elect” (see I Chron. 16:3; Ps. 105:6,43; 106:4-5; Isaiah 43:20-21; 45:4; 65:9,22; Mat. 24:22,24,31; Luke 18:7; Rom. 8:33; Col. 3:12; I Thes. 1:4; II Tim. 2:10; Titus 1:1; James 2:5: I Pet. 1:2; 2:9; Rev. 17:14). And, by calling us His “elect,” it clearly indicates that we did not choose Him or His salvation. Rather, as our Father, He chose to create us in order to save us. God caused our births, provides for our needs, teaches and trains our spirits throughout our lives, paid for our sins and is making us into His heirs.

Yes, all the elect eventually choose God and His ways. But, of course, this is only because He first chose us, because He made and shaped our spirits in a way that causes us to inwardly love and desire both Him and His ways. All love and laws are spiritual, from spirits who do not choose their parents. And the ability to love or to be just, by spontaneously doing God’s law, depends on the attributes a spirit inherits from the Father in heaven, and what the Father teaches to His child’s spirit. If a spirit’s father is not God, one inherits nothing and is taught nothing by Him. So one cannot love nor keep God’s law. Neither does a child’s spirit cause the Father to love it. The Father does not love His child because the child first loved Him. Rather, the Father first loved His child when that infantile spirit was still totally incognizant of Him, and even before He gave birth to that spirit. All good parents love their child first, before their infant children are even aware of the existence of their parents.

Only after a child matures and is able to love can the child return the parent’s love. Therefore, our Father loved us first, and we learned to love Him because He first loved us (I John 4:19). Also, it is because of His love for His children that God chooses to save His children. Yet God loved us before we even existed. Therefore, if He chose to save us when He loved us, and He loved us before we were created, then our salvation was predestined. And we cannot fail to be saved because God cannot ever fail to fully complete any task He chooses to do. But God does not love and choose to save all existing spirits. God does not love Satan and the demons, nor any of the spirits born of Satan. The father of many human spirits is Satan, not God. And those spirits can never love nor choose the real God. Yet most churches do not like this truth, since many of their leaders have spirits born of Satan. So they teach that the infantile spirits of men create and shape themselves. They insist, based on doctrines of middle Platonism, that all people control their own destinies through a “free will.” And the way they define this “free will” portrays the people as their own creator gods.

Clearly, most churches believe their “souls” create themselves. They may deny that they do, but they do. For they believe their own “souls” use their own autonomous “free wills” to make themselves either bad or good, which can only be done by creating their own wills and attributes of their own “souls.” But, if one creates the will and attributes of one’s own “soul,” then one creates the whole of one’s own “soul.” Also, because they believe Plato's doctrines of a “soul” (that each person has only one mind and will), they think the mind of the “soul” is synonymous with both the mind of flesh and the mind of the spirit, with both at once. But, in reality, what they call the “soul” is a deluded mind and the will of the flesh alone. Their “soul” is one and the same as the mind and will of the flesh.

So, when the mind and will of the flesh seems “bad” to them, they actually think the spirit’s mind and will is also bad. For humanists think the “soul” and “spirit” are one and the same thing. And they do not believe each person has two minds. Because they suppress the minds of their spirits with their minds of flesh, they know nothing of a separate mind and will of the spirit. So they trust only their “souls,” which are really their minds of flesh, to make them good or bad. Yet their flesh can never make them good. In the meantime, they also refuse to believe that parents, other people, cultures, genetics and so on can possibly make a “soul” (really a mind of flesh) become either good or bad.

So, if a man is one of God’s elect, and God has not wakened that man’s spirit while his physical environment corrupts his mind of flesh, church humanists will blame the man for his corruption and will believe that the man made his own “soul” bad. They will think the man shall be justly cast into hell and tortured physically for all eternity. If an elect man was born in a Hindu town and learned Hindu ways, and God was causing him to love but never caused him to question those ways, the church will still call him evil and say he will go to hell. For they think it is right to cast “souls” into hell for unintentional sins of the flesh, even when God makes the elect spirit inside that flesh with a desire for God and heaven. They never admit it, but they actually do believe this. Since humanistic doctrines deny the existence of many realities, they lie to themselves and others about what is real.

Think about this. If their “soul” was eternal (which it is not, since their “soul” is the mind of flesh), and if they could make their own eternal being to be either good or evil, either fit for heaven or fit for hell, then it would mean all their “souls” must be omniscient gods. For, if a “soul” was not an omniscient god, how could it have enough knowledge, skill and power to do such a thing? If a “soul” was able to choose to make itself innately good or evil, in a way where it was actually culpable for that choice, then the “soul” would need to know literally all things. For it could not make its choices “freely,” and become culpable for its choices, unless it was omniscient. A “soul” must be omniscient and omnipotent to make all choices free from all influences of deception, ignorance or coercion. For, if it did not make its choices freely as an omniscient and omnipotent being, then it could not be justly blamed for its choices. Nothing but true omniscience and omnipotence can free one to make choices in a way that makes one totally culpable for one’s choices. Only if one is omniscient and omnipotent can one be justly condemned for one’s choices. Furthermore, since the humanistic “soul” is actually the mind of flesh, they are actually saying the flesh is omniscient and omnipotent when they say a “soul” is culpable for its choices. Ultimately, these churches believe, when their flesh makes a bad choice, it will be physically tortured in hell for all eternity. And how can any of this possibly be true?

We are forced to ask questions like: How can a “soul” initially exist without a will, so it can use its own “free will” (which does not yet exist) to create its own “free will,” making it either good or bad according to one’s own omniscient choices? For, in order to make a will good or bad, some kind of preexisting will must exist. For one must will to create a will. After all, the will directs and steers literally all a mind's thinking, learning, deciding and so on. Thus, if a “soul” begins life without any will, without either a good or bad will, it begins life without any mind at all. For one cannot possibly have a “neutral” will. Logically, there can be no such thing. If you are not for God, you are against God, and if you are not against God, you are for God (Mat. 12:30, Mark 9:40). There absolutely cannot be such a thing as a neutral will, a will which is neither for nor against God. And, logically, there cannot be such a thing as a mind born without any will at all, because a mind is not a mind if it has no inherent will. Therefore, every mind is created with a will that is either for God or against God. From the moment of creation, a mind is either drawn towards God or drawn away from God.

It is irrational to think a mind and its will is neither bad nor good at the moment of its creation. And, if a “soul” was born without any will, it would be born without any mind. It would be just a blob of “soul” substance, not a living, thinking soul at all. So, an external being needs to initiate a will and cause a mind to think. And who does this creating of a mind and will? Who initiates a will in a mind, making it to be either a good will or a bad will? Do one’s parents and society “kick-start” the will and the mind of a “soul”? If so, then they are to blame for making a “soul” bad when it is bad, or they are to praise for making a “soul” good when it is good. But that cannot be true! For we must then ask who “kick-started” the wills and minds of those parents and society? We cannot give any created being any credit for creating good or evil wills. For every created thing had a beginning and, when it began, its mind was created with either a good or evil will. Then, whatever that good or evil one created would inherit the same good or evil will its creator possessed. And the parent could not take blame for simply being what it was created to be, then reproducing what it was created to reproduce. Therefore, all blame must be attributed to the first and uncreated entity that created the first evil mind and will. Likewise, all the praise must be attributed to that same uncreated Creator.

God is to be ultimately blamed for all bad “souls,” not those bad “souls” themselves, nor its parents and society. “You will say to me then, ‘Why does [God] still find fault? For who can resist His will?’” (Rom. 9:19, ESV). In the end, the humanists simply cannot answer this question with their irrational “free will” doctrines. But we can answer this question. For we do say that God alone ultimately determines the eternal destinies of men, whether they will spend eternity in either heaven or hell. And we can give a just reason for sending about half of mankind to hell. God does not send them to hell because He blames them for their evil. When God looks at men, He finds nothing except what He created them to be and what He has put in them during the course of their lives. God is the Potter and all human beings are vessels He created and shaped for either good or for bad purposes on this earth, according to His own will and plan. So it is not through blame that He condemns all evil ones to eternal hell, and it is not through earned merit that He rewards all His elect with heaven. No blame or credit is involved at all. God simply made hell to be the eternal home that all the evil ones prefer to heaven, while He also made heaven to be the eternal home that all His elect prefer to hell.

All who know the biblical doctrines of God’s election can explain why God mercifully and justly sends so many spirits to hell for all eternity, and can also explain why the evil ones prefer hell to heaven. But, through the irrational nonsense taught by humanists, it is impossible to provide any rational justification for God condemning “souls” to hell for all eternity. Humanists preach “free will” because they believe each individual “soul” is responsible for making its own will become either good or bad, and refuse to believe that God made it good or bad. Thus, we must conclude that “free will” preachers believe “souls” basically create the whole of themselves, using nothing but a blob of mindless, neutral, “soul” substance which God casually tossed into their bodies. But this cannot be true. Only another being, with great power, can create a mind and its will in any person.

The moment we acknowledge that evil exists, we must also acknowledge that evil beings exist to perpetrate that evil. Likewise, the same is true when we acknowledge that good exists. Then, if both good and evil beings exist, we must admit that these beings were created to be either good or evil. And there is only one Creator of all beings. So this Creator created some beings with minds that have inherently good wills and some with minds that have inherently bad wills. Every created being possesses a mind at the moment of its creation. And every created mind possesses a created will at the moment of its creation, where that will must be either inherently bad or inherently good from the moment of its creation. Neither our minds nor our wills existed before they were created and, when the Creator created our minds and wills, He made them to be either bad or good. And He did this for an ultimately good purpose. But, since He created some minds and wills to be evil, they cannot be held responsible for causing their own minds and wills to become evil, and do not truly “earn” hell.

Therefore, hell cannot be a place which was made to be a vengeful punishment of the bad, since that would be unjust. For it is unjust to blame a person for what that person did not do. Thus, hell must be a place which all evil spirits desire through their inherently evil wills. Likewise, heaven must be a place which all these evil spirits detest through their inherently evil wills. Only if this were true would God have a just reason for sending evil spirits with bad wills into hell for all eternity. Yes, hell can also be a kind of punishment, but a just and fair punishment, the kind which gives an evil spirit what it wants, although what it wants causes it pain. For, whenever evil gets what it wants, it cannot have all it wants, because, by definition, evil desires delusions, and desires for delusions are always contradicting desires. By definition, evil is that which is not real, not in harmony with the reality and truth God actually created. So evil can only desire in self-contradicting ways. Therefore, an evil spirit can only get what it wants most. It cannot get everything it wants. Now, evil spirits love their delusions. Through these delusions, they also want real things to exploit, to gratify their delusional desires. But they cannot be granted both the unreality of delusions and the reality of God’s creations, never at the same time. For they receive God’s created things without also receiving God, since the two can never be separated. And evil spirits hate God. Thus, they also hate God’s created realities.

So how can God let them keep their delusions in their evil minds, yet also grant them real things to exploit? For a real thing would constantly remind them of God, in the most painful way possible.

Even so, to enjoy their beloved delusions, evil spirits require something to exploit. For all their delusions ultimately originate from their desire to be gods. So the only way they can gratify their delusions is by exerting absolute control over their own lives and by being served by other things. Of course, these evil spirits are all selfish gods, and will not serve each other. So who or what will serve as the property of these selfish gods? At one time, they had earthly beings and realities to exploit.

But the only reason those earthly beings and realities were available for exploitation was because they were made to exist in a place which allowed both good and evil to exist side by side. Yet nothing like that can possibly exist in spiritual places like hell or heaven. Spiritual realms only have spirits and spiritual substances. So heaven allows no evil spirits to enter. Then hell allows nothing good to enter it, neither good spirits nor any good things created by God, because anything good would cause great pain to evil spirits. Hell is void of anything good from God. And, since God is just, He could never send heavenly creations to hell, just so evil spirits can exploit them. Thus, God must deny any gratification of their evil desires, while allowing them to cherish those evil desires.

And this lack of gratification is very painful. Nor does this pain ever stop. It forever burns in theirs hearts like a searing fire, and eternally gnaws at their souls like undying worms. So these evil spirits get to keep their most cherished possessions in hell, all the dark delusions and lies they love most. God mercifully grants them as much as He is able to grant them in hell. And this is why they prefer hell to heaven. For, in heaven, God’s light would incessantly pierce their beloved delusions, which permeate their whole beings. It would feel like a million long needles stabbing right through their whole spiritual bodies all at once, over and over again, every moment, yet never destroying them.

Clearly, each human being has two very different minds steered by two very different wills. Each has an ignorant, worldly mind and will of the flesh. And each has an infantile, ignorant, barely-cognisant mind and will of a spirit. And neither created itself. Neither made itself either good or evil. Each spirit was created with a propensity to either work for God or work against God. Meanwhile, the flesh is not spiritual. So nothing of the flesh can be either innately good or bad, since good and bad are entirely spiritual qualities. By definition, good is something that pleases God and bad is something that does not please God. And God is a Spirit. Consequently, good and bad are spiritual qualities that God’s Spirit defines. The flesh is just a temporary tool of spirits, who can use it for either good or evil. But the flesh itself is neither good nor evil (although, ultimately, all temporary material creations are actually good, all material existence ultimately serves God’s good purposes).

Because all material existence will soon end, heaven and hell are for spirits only. And, since God will give bodies made of a spiritual substance to our spirits after our flesh dies, then will send each of us to either heaven or hell, our eternal destinies depend entirely upon God. And we must conclude that God’s judgements in this matter will be just. For God is always just. Therefore, if a spirit's mind is created with a will that desires good, real justice demands that this spirit must go to heaven, even if that spirit’s body of flesh did not do much good, even if that body sinned. Or, if a spirit’s mind is created with a will that desires bad, real justice demands that it be kept out of heaven, for nothing evil can dwell in heaven. Yet real justice also demands that an inherently evil spirit must be granted what it wants, since that spirit did not make itself evil, so it is not culpable for its evil desires. So that evil spirit is sent to hell, where it can cling to and fondly cherish its evil, delusional desires forever.

If God sent a truly loving spirit to hell just because that spirit’s flesh remained ignorant and did bad things, or did not do enough “churchy” things (because external influences caused that flesh to do those bad things, or did not cause the flesh to do “churchy” things), how could this be called just? If one’s body of flesh was not baptized as an infant, or one accidentally missed an evangelical rally which could have used professional music and a motivational speaker to stir fleshy emotions enough to repeat the words of a dictated “Sinner's Prayer,” should that one be sent to hell? How just would that be? Yet “free will” preachers insist that things of the flesh, like “sacraments” and prayers recited through the emotions of the flesh, are required for salvation. As a consequence, those who are the best at playing these carnal religious games in the church end up being the leaders of the hierarchies in those humanistic churches (and all humanistic churches love their hierarchical systems). Yet every elect spirit loathes carnal religious games, and avoids playing them as much as possible. Therefore, very few elect ones are ever accepted into the inner circles of humanistic churches, and the more awake and Christ-centred an elect one’s faith might be, the more those churches will reject that one.

And, by preaching fleshy deeds for salvation, “free will” preachers slander the name of God. When they say God requires these deeds of the flesh before He will save anyone, they make God look petty and unjust, like an uncaring, impassive and inequitable judge. But the real God always judges justly according to the motives of the spirit. And, when God casts a spirit in hell, it is for truly just reasons, so that wicked and unrepentant spirit will never harm anyone ever again. If a spirit loves the spiritual darkness of hell's destructive delusions more than the healing and life-giving light of heaven's truth, that spirit would hate heaven infinitely more than hell. So God is also merciful when He places an unredeemable spirit like that into hell. Then it is their own beloved delusions and lies that torment those spirits, not God. Even their father, Satan, torments them as he reminds them of all the evil pleasures they could have had if they could have remained on earth, if they could still have the power to exploit God’s creations. As for God’s elect, Jesus completes His work of rebuking, teaching and training literally all of them on the judgement day, so they repent from every sin into a perfect knowledge of His truth. Jesus makes them utterly holy and fit for heaven. Furthermore, the full price for their lifetimes of unintentional and repented sins has already been paid by His work on the cross. So absolutely nothing is unjust about God letting these reformed, redeemed sinners into His heaven.

God justly and rightly places all elect spirits, all who inwardly desire the real God and the light of heaven, into heaven. And He first teaches all these elect to be entirely holy, before they enter heaven. As for their sins, they all become unintentional and forgivable by their repentance on the judgement day. So there cannot possibly be any just reason to deny any of them entrance into heaven, into the light of their Father’s home which their spirits were born to love. Yet God does this through His free and unmerited grace alone, simply because He loves those spirits of His children. Just as every good father takes responsibility for His beloved children, God does. In heaven, God even repays all the worthy ones a hundred-fold in eternal rewards for all the damage or loss His children caused by His elect through sin. In all His ways, God is truly just, not subject to even one accusation of injustice.

When God creates an elect spirit, God creates its core mind and will, all of that spirit's potential for all its thinking and learning, all its propensities to choose whatever it chooses, all its attributes that cause it to think. A spirit makes all its decisions according to its created will. Yes, the mind and will of every elect spirit is still infantile while it lives on earth. So a spirit's mind and will is often taken captive and carried into sin by the mind and will of its worldly flesh. However, every elect spirit's inner nature is made in the image of its Father in heaven. Then a long judgement day, perhaps like a thousand years of earthly time (II Pet. 3:8), will bring every elect spirit to maturity and completion. Jesus, the Intercessor, Judge, High Priest, Friend and Brother of His elect spirits, will surely do this.

It is ridiculous to think the will of a “soul” creates its own will to be either good or bad. Nothing can create itself. Before anything exists, it cannot exist to make itself exist. In reality, the inherent will and propensities of both our bodies and spirits are created, then shaped by others. And God both creates and shapes the wills of all elect spirits. Satan creates and shapes the wills of all other human spirits. Parents and society partly create and partly shape the wills of our minds of flesh, through genetics, then by their nurturing and care. But, ultimately, God creates and shapes the flesh as well.

God is the Father of our elect spirits, the One who created the minds and wills of our spirits in His image. He created the spirits of His own children from His “breath,” that is, from His very own personal Spirit, with attributes, desires and a will like His own. Our Father did not create our spirits by His spiritual power alone, in the way He created all other spirits. Yet He created their wills too, when He created the minds of their spirits. God is also chose which spirits He would create as His children. We do not choose to be God’s children any more than we choose who will be the parents of our bodies of flesh. It is our earthly parents, with their weak and limited wills, who usually choose to create their own children. Parents normally have the power to decide whether or not they will bear a child, and when the child will be born—although they do not have enough power to control what that child will be, nor much else occurring in their own lives, and even less in the lives of their children. Even so, a parent’s choices are manipulated by things that only God controls. Therefore, God is ultimately the one who controls the parent’s choice to give birth to a child. And all God's choices are always perfectly informed, controlled and regulated by His infinite wisdom and power directed by His loving will for us. God knew exactly what kinds of spirits He would create before He created any of them in their appointed times and places. When human parents create the bodies of their children, they know very little about how their own genes will mix to produce each unique child's body. For that mix ultimately depends on God's will and His decisions. And our omniscient, omnipotent God cannot help but know exactly who He will create long before He creates them. So He only creates precisely the very children He plans to create. Then He also shapes each child's will.

Because God creates the minds and core wills of the spirits of His children, He knows how they will ultimately respond to all the situations in which He chooses to put them throughout their lives on earth. He also knows exactly how each will respond to His counsel on the final judgement day. So God's foreknowledge of the future salvation of His children is based on His knowledge of the core attributes, propensities and will that He initially created in each spirit, and on how He has shaped their wills by circumstances He controls. His judgements are likewise based on all the many details He Himself put in their lives, to govern each one's life—using His ability to simultaneously see all the past, present and future times He makes happen. Ultimately, God's foreknowledge of our future choices is based upon His predestination of the kind of mind and will, with its inherent propensities, that He created in each of us, as well as all the circumstances He chose for each of us to experience. In other words, God's foreknowledge is entirely based upon His predestination of literally all things.

It cannot possibly be the other way around, because that would be ludicrous. God's “predestination” cannot be based upon his foreknowledge, as some churches say. They want us to believe that God predestines nothing, only foreknows most things. Scriptures say, “For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Rom. 8:29, ESV). And this makes sense, because the only way God could foreknow something is if He also caused and predestined that thing. Here, the word “foreknow” is translated from the Greek word προγινώσκω, meaning “see or know beforehand.” And the word “predestine” comes from an entirely different word, προορίζω, which literally means “mark out a path or boundary beforehand,” indicating that the route taken has been predetermined and is controlled by someone with the power to do so. So, in life's journey, it means, “appoint, decree, specify beforehand; determine, limit, ordain beforehand.” It means “predestine.”

But the “free will” preachers say this Scripture really means, “For those whom he foreknew, he also foreknew would be conformed to the image of his Son.” And that is a ridiculous interpretation. For, in context, what they are actually saying is: “... all things work together for good, for those who are called according to God’s purpose (and ‘free will’ churches insist that everyone who ever lived is called by God), because those who choose God (and remain faithful by doing all the fleshy deeds which their particular brand of church prescribes) are those whom God knew would do these things before they did them, so God also knew beforehand that they would be conformed to the image of His Son.” Now, I ask you, do literally all things work together for good for all churchy choosers of God? No! Neither spiritually nor physically! For many churchy choosers of God are children of the devil and go to hell. And, are all who choose God and do churchy things truly being conformed into the image of the real Jesus? Clearly not! Many are ruthless, self-seeking hypocrites, not like Jesus.

Besides, logically, if God foreknew who would choose Him (and do churchy deeds of the flesh to keep their salvation), then we must conclude that God also must have known exactly what kinds of minds and wills these ones possessed at birth. God must have known how and when those particular kinds of minds would eventually react to all the circumstances of their lives to cause them to choose Him and to choose to do all the fleshy, churchy things they would think were necessary to be saved. Otherwise, God could not have “foreknown” anything. So, in reality, what these “free will” churches are actually saying is: (1) God did not know which attributes and propensities each one’s mind of flesh, and each one’s mind of the spirit, would possess at birth; (2) only after each one was born could God see how all one’s attributes and propensities would eventually cause one to either choose or reject Him and churchy ways; (3) the omniscient and omnipotent God had no control over which attributes and propensities any mind of flesh or any mind of a spirit would possess at birth; and (4) therefore, God was not the one who created their minds of flesh nor the minds of their spirits. What a mess of contradictions! How can they interpret these Scriptures so carelessly and irrationally? They twist Scriptures to imply the Platonic doctrines they teach but, at the same