Once Saved Always Saved vs Twice Saved maybe Saved??

I think I am blessed that I have been such a Church Hopper in my life.

(I dont recommend Church Hopping. Its difficult and destructive to your Christian life. Not having roots and good Christian friends is a bad thing. But its what I did and I dont regret it. Kids, dont try this at home)

Often Church Hopping is a seen as a negative and it usually is. I think in the end, it comes down to how you choose (there is that word choice, dont you hate that sometimes?) to see the world. Do you choose to see that glass as half full or half empty? (I have always wondered why I had this glass representing my life in the 1st place. If it were up to me, I would have chosen a large bucket. Then used that old saying of carrying your lunch to school in a bucket in 3 feet of snow, uphill both ways.)

Ok, back on track.... sort of. The point is that how you choose to see the world, people and situations, is up to you. You can choose to see things in a positive light (Glass half full),

or you can choose to see the world, people and situations as all bad and negative (Glass half empty). I choose to see my old Church Hopping days as a very positive thing. Why you might ask? Well, it gave me a pretty good perspective on what different facets of the Church believes and does.

For example, I was raised Southern Baptist. The Baptists believe in Once Saved Always Saved (OSAS for short).

Baptists dont believe that most of the gifts of the Spirit, like speaking in tongues, are for today.

There are a few others, but for the most part, no other denomination believes in OSAS. Non-Denominational Churches and Charismatic type Churches believe that the Gifts of the Spirit are for today. Most of these hone in on Speaking in Tongues. Some of these Churches, that believe in Speaking in Tongues, believe that this is a sign that you have been Baptized in the Holy Spirit.

(There are many Church's that I have not been too yet. I would really like to visit them sometime. On my list to visit is, Islam, Catholic, Mormon, Jehovah's Witnesses, Lutheran, Methodists, Jewish, Masons. Some will think it odd that I want to visit some of these Denominations and cults, but I look at it as an opportunity to expand my knowledge of their actual practices and beliefs, which often differ from what is taught in text books.)

The main thing I wish to look at it OSAS. But before I do this, we need to look briefly (Maybe, If I can keep it short) on why there is such division in the Church. Why do we all believe so differently? The main reason why there are so many denominations and Churches that have such a wide variance in beliefs lies in how they interpret the Bible.

I wrote another blog that covers some of this subject called "What was God thinking when he wrote the Bible?"

For those that dont want to read that entire blog, or want the cliff notes, I will summarize it here.

• The Bible was not written in English. It was written in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. This meant that it had to the translated. And it has been translated, a lot!
• Many words that were used by the original authors of the Bible dont translate well into English.
• Many other words dont have a direct translation into English at all.
• The Bible is open to interpretation. Different denominations, and even Church's within those denominations, interpret the Bible differently.

This is a pretty short list and summary. But I think these are the main reasons why so many dont agree. People that dont agree, separate. The ones that believed along the same lines, came together and formed denominations. (A similar story to the Tower of Babel. In the Tower of Babel, people separated because they spoke different languages. People that spoke the same language, congregated together to form people groups.)

ok, I can finally move onto my main subject, which is OSAS. Baptists, and others that hold to OSAS, take a lot of flack for their beliefs. They see this as persecution though, so it does not really bother most of them. On the opposite end of the spectrum, are those that do not hold to OSAS. These people and denominations believe that you can lose your salvation. They believe that your salvation must be worked out on a daily basis. The funny thing is that they also take flack from those that believe in OSAS and they also see it as persecution.

Both sides get very very defensive and angry when challenged.

In fact, I find that this anger permeates almost every single disagreement among the denominations. Everyone thinks that what they believe is right and the others are wrong. Some even go as far as to believe that they are the only ones that will make it into heaven and the rest of us are doomed (Being doomed is a phrase that I borrowed from a very good friend of mine that lives in India).

I find this all very interesting, sad, and amusing all at the same time. The only thing that Jesus prayed exclusively for the Church was that we would be united. I think that if Jesus knew what was going on with all these denominations, arguing and bickering, he would turn over in his grave. Wait... he is not in a grave. So I guess that would be" Jesus would turn over in his life". And of course Jesus did, and does, know what is going on.

To be fair though to our modern day denominations, division in the Church is nothing new. The Christian Church has been divided since the very beginning. There have always been arguments and disagreements among believers. If you research the history of what it took to come up with our modern day Bible, you will be in for quite a ride. Some books were approved (Canonized), and others were left out as forbidden. Other books just didnt fit in well with the story and flow of the Bible so they were omitted) By I digress yet again, so I will leave that one as it is for now.

The problem is that we think like humans and not like God. God wrote the Bible using both perspectives.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

Isaiah 55:9

He wrote certain things from his view and certain things from ours. All we tend to think about is ourselves and how we see things from our puny little point of view. If we are to really understand what God was trying to tell us, we need to broaden our minds and hearts.

The OSAS crowd has several scriptures that they point too that they say is solid proof that once we are saved, no matter what we do, we will always be saved and can never lose this salvation. There are a lot of them, but the main one that I want to use is this one.

John 10:28.

"I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them away from me"

A curious thing (That I think proves my point) is that both the OSAS crowd and those that dont believe in OSAS, use many of the same scriptures. They just interpret them differently. ( I am getting tired of typing that out. So I will call those that dont believe in OSAS, "YVYCLYS". Which stands for "Yes Virginia, you can lose your salvation")

The main reason why the YVYCLYS folks say that the OSAS crowd are bonkers is that their reasoning does not make any sense at all. Logically, if you are saved no matter what, you are free to go out and kill, rape, and do anything else that you want. No matter what you say, do, or think, you will go to heaven. Usually when approached with this argument, they will use this scripture.

1 Corinthians 3:15.

"But if the work is burned up, the builder will suffer great loss. The builder will be saved, but like someone barely escaping through a wall of flames."

Like so many other things, the problem is not with God and His Word (The Bible). The problem lies with us. We need to re-read these versus from a different perspective. From God's view, we cannot lose our salvation. No one, or nothing, can snatch us out of His hand. Period !!!

Once God saves us, that's it. From God's point of view, its all over. We are saved and sanctified. Our next stop is heaven. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

God will never leave us, but we can choose (There is that word choice again!) to leave him. He will never let go of our hand, but God is a gentlemen. We are free to make the choice to let go of his hand!!

So there you have it. From God's perspective OSAS is true. Once God saves you, you are saved forever.

But from our perspective, we can choose to leave God, go out and kill, murder, rape etc..., and therefore lose our salvation.

Post Script Notes This idea of Perspective is not new. I borrowed it from Star Wars. In this particular Star Wars episode, Luke has just found out that Darth Vader was his father. Yoda and ObiWan had always told Luke that his father was dead. Luke confronted them and asked them why they lied. Their response was that what they said was true..... from a certain point of view. Their point of view was that the emperor seduced Luke's father to going to the dark side. So the good man that was Luke's father died and became Darth Vader. ObiWan went on to say that Luke would find that many of the truths that they held to, depended greatly on their own point of view.

Another part of Star Wars

that made me think was when Yoda and the other Jedi Knights were discussing the prophecy. The prophecy said that one would come that would bring balance to the force. The Jedi took this to mean that the chosen one would crush the Dark Side and the Jedi would reign supreme. Yoda spoke up and suggested that the prophecy could have been misread (Miss-interpreted).

Now ultimately, it was true that the Jedi would prevail, but not for several episodes. In the now, it meant that the chosen one would fall to the dark side. The dark side would grow so that the Jedi (Good) and Dark Side (bad) would be more equal in power (Balanced).

All of this made me wonder if what we thought we knew about the Bible was all correct. An old Bible professor of mine once told me that, at any given time, what we think we know is about half wrong. The other puzzling thing to me was all the different view points and interpretations of the Bible. All of them convinced that their interpretation and view is the correct one.

All of these people cant be all wrong, nor can all these people be all right. The truth had to lie somewhere in between the extremes.

I am a child of the movies. I love movies. They are like modern day prophets. Everything that has come to pass as always shown up in movies 1st. Space flight, Landing on the moon, Lasers, Unmanned drones, Organ replacement, and on and on. It all showed up in the movies 1st. So if you want to see whats coming, go out and watch a movie.

All this brought me to a conclusion. God gave us the Bible. As he gave it to the authors, it is the inspired word that is without error. So the only logical conclusion is that the problem is with us, how we translated it and interpreted it.

All of the controversies that we are so adamant on fighting about can be resolved if we look at them from a different perspective. God wrote the Bible to dummies. Dummy is another word for sheep. God wrote the Bible using mostly simple language that we can understand. But at the same time, he wrote it so that truths would be hidden from those that dont need to know.

1 Corinthians 2:7

"No, the wisdom we speak of is the mystery of God--his plan that was previously hidden, even though he made it for our ultimate glory before the world began."

and

Matthew 11:25

At that time Jesus prayed this prayer: "O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clever, and for revealing them to the childlike."

Understanding the Bible is simple.

Do you really think God would have made understanding him and his word sooooo incredibly difficult that it would take super intelligent Bible scholars to figure out? Thats not the Jesus I read in the Bible. Jesus was against the established religious order that thought they knew it all. His words were aimed at the simple, the unlearned, the poor and the downcast. It defies logical thought and reason that he would write a Bible that was so far beyond anything that anyone could understand, that it would take those very religious leaders that he hated to interpret it correctly.

To understand the Bible, you just need to understand a few simple things.

• The NT part of the Bible Bible was not written to us. He had us in mind of course, and it does relate to today and us as well, but it was written for an audience of mainly Jews in the Middle East some 2000 years ago.
• God wrote the Bible to a people that did not have a great understanding or intellect.
• The Bible is written mostly in the language of K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple Stupid
  

• God wrote some things in the Bible using our perspective
• God wrote other things in the Bible using his perspective
• God wrote other things in the Bible from both perspectives.
• God lives outside of time. Therefore to him, the past, present, and future are all the now.

Well, I think thats about it. I went on longer than I intended or probably should have anyway.

A car shopping experience

We went to a car dealership on Sunday. It was a very grueling time that I just had to blog about.

We had just started looking for a new used car Sunday. We had seen all the commercials on TV for this place, so we were excited to look around and see if we could find our next car. We had already been pre-approved for a car loan, so we were all set to buy if we found the right car, the right price, and a decent sales person that was honest and straight up with us. What we found we when went to the dealership was anything what we wanted. The experience we had made us never want to shop at this dealership again.

I am in my 50's. My wife is in her 40's. My daughter is 8. We have learned from past experience to mistrust sales people, especially used car sales people. Most every car salesman we have ever dealt with has been dishonest, and has taken advantage of us.

We we have learned to go shopping on Sunday, when most car dealerships are closed so we are not harassed by sales people. We take the further precaution of not walking, but driving through the car lots just in case. Well, when we pulled into this dealership, we were shocked to see a salesperson walking around. My wife wanted to just leave, but I talked her into sticking around and looking.

Then I told her that we needed to take the next step of actually getting out and walking around to see the cars. As a Christian , I try to see the best in people. My long held hope is that I will actually find a good, honest car salesman, that will not placate us but tell us the truth about pricing, not try to pull the wool over our eyes and tell us out right lies just to make a sale.

As soon as we got out of the car, we were assaulted by this young kid salesperson. His eyes were odd looking, Like he had a hang over, or was on something. He said that the other salesman was in a meeting, so he was all alone on the lot.

We told him that we were just looking, but he did not take that for an answer. He made suggestions and we did look in a few cars. Every car we looked at, he followed us like a vulture. We wanted to just look in the cars, but he unlocked the cars and told us that we needed to sit in them. Then he practically shoved the keys in my face and wanted to to start the cars.

So far, I was not too annoyed, because I know that dealerships have very stringent quotas that they make their salespeople meet and I know they are often aggressive. The 1st thing we asked at each car was the price. It seemed like a valid question. He did give us the price, but then said that "they (whoever they is) are very negotiable on the prices of the cars and he had seen "Them" comes down as much as 8k on the cars.

This seemed good at 1st, but later when I got home and did my own research on the prices, I found out why.

At the very 1st car we looked at, he asked about our financing. We said that we had it already taken care of. He asked that if he could beet the percentage rate we were getting, if we would be interested in using him for financing. I said maybe, but really I was just being polite. (Though in retrospect, I should have just said no) We love the Christian Credit Union that we are with and feel that it was God that we were approved for financing with them and wont leave them.

At one of the cars we were looking at, I mentioned that we wanted better gas mileage that this one car offered. He said that 30 was the norm and he had never seen anything higher then this. I knew that this was a bold faced lie and tried to call him on this, but he would not leave it alone and just kept insisting that I he had never seen anything higher. We did spend some time at the dealership because we did find some cars that we were interested in. But this salesperson hovered and followed us around like a dog. I love dogs, and love to have them around, but they tend to follow you around and are very aggressive at wanting your attention to the point that you just want to kick them into next week. Of course I would never do this to a dog, because they are sweet and just want to love you. But that rule does not apply to used car salespeople. It took every ounce of restraint I could muster to not kick this guy into next week!

After about 4 cars, we had had enough of this guy. We just could not stand it anymore. We made a bee line for our car. This guy though was in hot pursuit. He was like a Rottweiler. Once he had us in his sales grip, he was not about to let us go without a fight.

At the end, I just had to say; "We are leaving". I asked him for a business card just in case we decided to return. But he said he did not have anything. After we got home, we looked up the Kelly Blue Book on one of the cars we had looked at and been interested in. The sticker was over 20k. According to Kelly, the car had a value of around 17k at the absolute highest.

This dealership was the absolute worst experience we have ever had. It was exhausting and overwhelming.

Flying the US flag

I usually stick to more Church related topics. So this would seem on the surface to be a god departure from my usual. But then again, Im not sure it is. Respect is respect. No matter if that respect is for God, our president, your boss, or the US flag. They all deserve respect even if we dont agree with their methods ( in the case of the Pres)

I go for walks in the sub-division that I live in. I go out every day and I notice some houses that are flying the US flag outside. I love that these houses are attempting to be patriotic. But some of these houses are not hitting the mark. Maybe they just dont know how to properly display the US flag. Maybe they are too lazy to do it right. I really dont know. And by the way, its not just private homes that get this wrong.

In fact, the main abuser of flying the US flag improperly are businesses, especially retail ones. I think when it comes to retail businesses, most of them that fly the flag dont do it for patriotic reasons. They do it so they can appear to be patriotic so they boast about this and sell more to those of us that are patriotic.

What I see in some houses and businesses just down right bothers me. I have seen flags displayed that are old, ripped and torn.

To fly a flag like this that needs repair is very disrespectful!

If you fly a flag, it must be in good condition. If your flag becomes ripped and torn, then it must be taken down. If you cant afford a new one, then its best to not fly one at all, instead of flying one that is all ripped up.

The 2nd mistake I see are flags that stay out all night long and are not lit up.

This is also disrespectful. You must take your flag down at sunset. If you do want to leave it out at night, then it must be permanently lit so that the flag is never in the darkness.

The Flag of the US deserves respect just like our God deserves respect. Its wonderful that some people want to be patriotic, but please please please learn a few simple rules to display our flag properly !!!

Why do non-Christians feel compelled to come to Church on Easter and Christmas?

Happy Easter!!!

Something that has always puzzled me. Easter and Christmas are the 2 days of the year that non-Christians come to Church. Its on these days that local Church's swell in attendance. Its always seemed a bit odd to me.

Its on these 2 days a year that Church Pastors get a chance to preach to more Non-Chrisitians, in one fell swoop, than at any other times of the year. It seems atheists, Agnostics, and other non-believers come on these 2 Sundays when they wouldnt even dream of darkening the Church doors any other days.

Why is this?

What unseen force compels them to come to Church on just these 2 days? If would seem logical that if they deny God the other 363 days of the year, that Easter and Christmas would be no different. Why on these 2 days, would people deny their belief systems and come to pay homage to a God that they dont even know?

Well, I would like to purpose that there is a part of them that knows that God is God and nothing else will fulfill them. I would like to put forth that even though they dont know God, they deny God, and even battle against him, that on these 2 days of the year, something inside them, perhaps deep inside, just tells them that they must go to Church and recognize their God.

The group Audio Adrenaline sung a song about this that in my opinion summed it up the best. I tried to find a youtube video on it, but was not able to. Perhaps the song is to old.

"And every heart, and every soul, everybody's got a God-shaped hole. " I think they put it very well.

In every single person, God built into their very genetic code a knowledge that God is the creator. Every person knows, even though they can choose the deny it, that Jesus is the Son of God and he is the only thing that will fill this whole inside them.

• Ganhdi Could not fill it !
  
• Pat Robertson Cant fill it !
  
• Your Local Pastor Cant fill it !
  
• Your Dad or your Mom Cant fill it !
  
• Your son or daughter Cant fill it !
  
• Money Cant fill it !
  
• Toys Cant fill it !
  
• Cars and trucks Cant fill it !
  
• Muhammad Cant fill it !
  
• Confucius Cant fill it !
  
• Brigham Young Cant fill it !
  
• Shaq Cant fill it !
  
• Your Job Cant fill it !
  
• Barack Obama Cant fill it !
  

But !!!!!

• JESUS CAN FILL IT !
  
• YAHWEH CAN FILL IT !
  
• Elohim CAN FILL IT !
  
• EL-SHADDAI CAN FILL IT !
  The God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever CAN FILL IT !
  
• The God Who Heals CAN FILL IT !
  
• The God Who Sent His Only Son To Earth To Die So That You And I Can Live CAN FILL IT !
  
• The God Who Loves You CAN FILL IT !
  
  
• The God Whos Son, Jesus Christ, rose from the grave so that we can have eternal life that we celebrate in Easter CAN FILL IT !
  

Happy Easter Everyone !!

What was God thinking when he wrote the Bible?

The Bible is the owners manual for our lives. But yet, it is one of the most difficult books to understand and figure out.

I have read a lot of owners manuals in my life. I got one just the other day for a telescope that I purchased. At the start of the manual, it said that the assembly of my telescope would take 30 minutes. I remember thinking to myself; Yeah, right !

I went through the manual and read the instructions carefully. Some steps were fairly easy to follow. For others, I had to read and re-read them, but finally got it right. Others seemed to be just plain impossible. I was about to give up, when God gave me the thought to look on YouTube. Thank God for YouTube! I found the assembly instructions for my telescope right away. I was able to watch the videos and finish assembling my telescope.

Just like those telescope instructions, most people find the Bible to be a very difficult book to figure out. That's why we have so many Preachers, and Evangelists. If you ask 20 different Pastors, Evangelists, and Christians what a certain passage in the Bible means, you are likely to get 20 different answers. (If you stick to asking people that are all a part of the same denomination, you might have a better chance of getting the same, or similar answers. Pastors that are of the same denomination probably all attended the same type of college or seminary, so they were all taught the same thing.)


To make things even worse, we have a lot of versions of the Bible. At my last count, there were about 150, and those are just the English ones. The more popular and accepted ones are the New International Version (NIV), New American Standard (NAS), the King James and a handful of others. In fact, there are many Churches that will only read a specific version of the Bible and refuse to even recognize any of the others.

Then there is the problem of denominations. There are hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of denominations (Denoms) in Christianity. The Baptist Denom alone has about a hundred different divisions.

So is it any wonder that the average Christian is completely confused?

Lets get back to my example of the telescope and the users manual for it. Lets say that the manual for my telescope was originally written in Greek. It was then translated into English by 150 different authors . None of the 150 authors could agree on the proper interpretation of the manual, so all 150 of them came up with their own version.

Interpretation of the manual for this telescope was so controversial, and so disagreed on, that hundreds of thousands of Colleges and Universities sprung up to teach people how to properly interpret the manual. These colleges, and universities generated hundreds of thousands of professional teachers that had the sole purpose of teaching others how to properly interpret the manual. These teachers started hundreds of thousands of smaller schools where they taught others how to properly read the owners manual, and put together the telescope.

Soon, several of the smaller schools that believed the same, or similarly, began to come together to form Unions. Each of these Unions had a different idea on how the telescope should be assembled and used.

The Union of "Southern Telescopes Users" (STU for short) believed that before the telescope could be used, it had to be immersed in water.

The Union for "Thats a Really Dumb Idea" (TARDI) believed that immersing the telescope in water was stupid and just sprinkling it with water was enough to make it useful.

The Union for "That's still a really dumb idea" (TSARDI) believed that putting any water at all on the scope was just plain dumb and the TARDI and STU were morons.

The Union for "Telescope Speakers" (TS) believed that if the telescope was assembled properly, it would begin to speak in strange languages. They further believed that if the scope didn't speak in these weird languages, it was not a useful scope.

The Union of "Telescope Speakers Anonymous" (TSA) believed that the Union of TS was full of BS (Buggy Swillology, which meant "Crazy Turtle People" in Greek).

I could go on and on with this analogy, but I think I had better stop there. Besides, I think I made my point. In case I didnt, I will state it plainly.

Here are the problems I might run into when purchasing this telescope;

• Hundreds of versions of the manual.
  
• Hundreds of thousands of Colleges and Universities that were there to teach me how to build and use it
  
• Hundreds of thousands of smaller schools that had teachers that all taught different ways of building and using the telescope
  
• Thousands of Unions that all thought different ways to build and use my scope.

If you were faced with all this, you would probably throw up your hands in disgust and return the telescope. I know I would !

As Christians, this is exactly what we have to deal with.

I know its taken me a while to get here, but I have finally arrived at my original point.

What in the world was God thinking when he wrote the Bible?

Its important to understand that all this mess that I just described was not God's doing. We made this mess.
We invented Denominations.
We invented these Colleges and Universities.
We invented all these different versions of the Bible.
And we invented all these Pastors and Evangelists that have all these different ideas of how to build the proper Christian and make him or her useful.

But even the Bible itself can seem to be a pretty confusing book. Lets take a look at that a bit.

The Bible was not written in English. It was written in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew. The entire old testament was written in Hebrew, expect for a few chapters that were done in Aramaic. The entire New Testament was written in Greek. To make things even more difficult, most authors of the New Testament used common everyday Greek, while some used a more classical form of Greek.

After the Roman Empire was Christianized, the entire Bible was translated into Latin. In the coming decades, the Bible was translated again and again as needs arose. Then around 1611 AD, the Bible was put into what we know as the King James Bible. The King James bible was written in the style and common usage of the English people that lived in.... you guessed it, England.

This was the Shakespearean era. Shakespeare used words like Thou, Wherefore, Wherto and other words of this nature. In fact, calling the Bible by the one that authorized it, King James, seems strange to me. I think the version should be renamed to the "Shakespearean Bible"?

There have been hundreds more versions since the King James. Some have stuck and some have fallen by the way side. Perhaps the versions that didnt make it were the ones that were sown in poor soil?

The Bible authors wrote the books of the Bible in languages that we dont use today. The Greek language that was used in the Bible is a dead language. So in order for the Bible to be useful to us English speaking types, it had to be re-written. Trouble is that no one can agree on the proper interpretations of the languages used in the Bible. There are many words in Greek that just dont translate well into English. Many Greek words dont have a direct translation at all.

One good example of this is the word "Love". This word is used hundreds of times throughout the Bible. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, there are 4 words that all mean different kinds of Love.

Agápe means unconditional love. In modern day Greek, it means "I love you". Éros is passionate love, with sensual desire and longing.
Philia means friendship or affectionate love in modern Greek. It is a dispassionate virtuous love, a concept developed by Aristotle. It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity.
Storge means "affection" in ancient and modern Greek. It is natural affection, like that felt by parents for offspring. Rarely used in ancient works, and then almost exclusively as a descriptor of relationships within the family. It is also known to express mere acceptance or putting up with situations, as in "loving" the tyrant.

There are hundreds of thousands, depending on who you ask, of other words in the Bible that just dont translate well and in some cases not at all. So this is why no one seems to be able to agree with how to interpret them. So therefore, we have all these hundreds of versions of the Bible.

The difficulty with this is that if a word is not translated properly, it can completely change the meaning. We can get an idea of the problem if we go back to my story of the telescope with the manual that was originally written in Greek. Lets assume that when the manual was translated into English, 1 word was translated incorrectly. The word "Screw" was improperly translated as "Hammer". So when the manual meant to say "Screw the left and right parts together", the bad translation made it to say; "Hammer the left and right parts together."

This 1 word would change the entire project. Instead of a telescope, I might have wound up with a very large well beaten metal toothpick.

The story is the same with Christianity. Lets take 1 of those 4 Greek words for Love and intentionally mess it up. How about using for an example "Love your neighbor". Now the intention of God's statement was that we should have unconditional love, or feelings, for our neighbor. We should have "Agape" love for them. But what if this word was mistranslated as Eros. Now instead of having this unconditional love for our neighbor, we are to fall in love with with our neighbor, which is everyone.

When I found my telescope instructions on Youtube, I was able to skip the written ones and get my telescope assembled easily and quickly. Unfortunately, God didn't use video for the books of the Bible. It had not been invented yet, so he couldn't. But surely there were people that could draw. The Bible does not even have any good illustrations in it. Though you can find some versions today that have these in it. Oddly though, its children's versions of the bible that have these. For some reason, it is seen as a weakness if you need pictures in your Bible. Something I dont get. Personally, I would love to have an adult version of the Bible that has lots of good pictures in it.

This blog may have come across as a bit on the negative side. If it did, that was not my intention.

If we are to point blame at anyone for this mess, its rest securely on us. God is perfect. In his writing of the Bible and setting up the Church, he had to rely on the imperfect, which is us. God gave us an excellent owners manual. If we follow it, we can build a good Christian life which will work just as the master meant it to.

But just be careful who you listen to, and what you read.

If I were to give new Christians, and even old ones, suggestions, they would be this.

• Dont believe everything you hear or read.
  
• Read from more than 1 version of the Bible and compare what they have to say.
  
• Go to whatever Church that God has led you to attend.
  
• Listen to the Pastor, your elders, and those Christians that God has put over you, but your ultimate authority is God, not any man. (Even Pastors make mistakes. If you Church's Pastor says, or thinks, that he is totally right and right all the time, go someplace else.)
  
• Be careful who you let speak into your life.
  
• Test everything you hear and read against the word of God and when in doubt go to God in prayer.
  
• Pray constantly
  
• Study the Bible for yourself from multiple versions.

The bottom line to all this is that God is perfect, but we are not.

• God's Word is perfect and was perfectly inspired. But what we have are translations and as such certain words and phrases can and do vary from translation to translation.
  
• God's Church is the perfect and spotless bride of Christ. But the Church is made up of people that are not.