Liberating you from bad ideas about God
Many people are terrified about going to hell when they die.
But does the Bible actually teach that God sends people to suffer forever in a pit of flames? No!
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By carefully studying the context of 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9, we learn that the references to fire, vengeance, and everlasting destruction in this passage are NOT warnings about people suffering forever in the burning flames of hell. There is a dire warning here, but it is not about everlasting punishment in hell.
When John writes in 1 John 3:14 that we know we have passed from death to life because we love our brethren, he is not talking about how we know we have eternal life, but how we know we are in fellowship with God and one another.
Is Paul teaching in Ephesians 2:1 that unbelievers cannot even believe in Jesus for eternal life unless God first regenerates them? Must God give unbelievers new life (regeneration) before they believe and so that they can believe? No. This is not what it means to be dead in trespasses and sins.
According to 1 John 1:7-10, the blood of Jesus cleanses us from sin by exposing sin for what it is and then calling us to no longer live in the way of sacred violence.
The blood of Jesus is not a spiritual antidote to sin which somehow removes the polluting presence of sin from our lives. Instead, the blood of Jesus exposes our sacred violence to us so that we can see in our own lives how we make scapegoat victims out of others, and then calls us to no longer live in this way.
Jonah 4:10-11 contain the final question of God to Jonah. But Jonah does not answer. The ending of the story is very abrupt. We will see why in the final study of Jonah next week. For now, we learn that God loves all people, even those we consider evil.
What is repentance? What is evil? If you think you know, here are some harder questions: Does God ever need to repent? Does God commit evil?
Jonah 3:10 seems to indicate that God does commit evil and does repent of it. Yikes! What does that mean? This is what we look at in this study.
What if there was another way to defeat violent groups of people, other than with more violence? What if there was a better, godly ways to defeat violence? This is one of the questions we consider today from Jonah 3:6-8.
This is what we are going to learn about today, as we see how God brought the violent and evil empire of Assyria to its knees in sorrow and repentance. If you want to defeat evil, if you want to beat an evil empire, the best way is to follow the way of God, which is also the way of Jesus.
Jonah 3 begins in almost exactly the same way as Jonah 1. Jonah 3:1 is nearly identical to Jonah 1:1.
Jonah 3:1 reveals that God is a God of second chances. After Jonah’s blatant rebellion and shameful disobedience of chapter 1, and after Jonah’s self-righteous, unrepentant behavior in chapter 2, God still calls Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach to it the message that God to him.
Many Christians say that if you are truly a Christian, you will have the good works to prove it. I argued in last week’s post that this is not true.
Let me provide three more reasons that good works do not prove that we are a Christian (and that the lack of good works do not prove that we are NOT a Christian).
I have written a new book called Nothing but the Blood of Jesus. It comes from a much larger and longer online course I am teaching. The book looks at 5 words and various texts related to each one. The course looks at 52 words, and various texts. Yes, the course is going to be HUGE! Buy the book to get a flavor for the course.
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