Freedom

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Freedom from God’s condemnation is a reality for every single believer, not because of any new found performance capabilities, but because we are made the righteousness of God in our union with his perfectly righteous son. On top of that, everything necessary to prove to us beyond any shadow of doubt, and to prove to Satan and his rebellious forces that we are totally secure in our union with God’s son, we need nothing more, God supplied every need already. There were a lot of people in Paul’s day and in our day trying to earn their righteousness before God by way of their performance. They thought God would measure their do’s and don’ts and thought they were actually measuring up. God would considered them righteous worthy of his attendance, worthy of being in heaven. In fact, they were bragging, boasting about their achievements as though God could do nothing other than to declare them righteous because they deserved just such a declaration. Paul warned to guard against those who would promote a righteousness through performance idea.

It is up to those of the world to either accept or reject their redeemer, but that does no less make him their redeemer. When we accept our redeemer and the price he paid, the ransom he paid, then we are joined to Christ and we have his righteousness attributed to our account. Those who reject the gift are thumbing their noses at the one who died to paid that price for their redemption. The price was paid for all, and through that payment Jesus redeemed the entire human race from the sin barrier that separated the world from God. It is now a son issue, not a sin issue. Will those of the world accept or reject the payment Christ made for their redemption? Those who reject their redeemer will face the ultimate consequences of that rejection. God did for us what we could never do for ourselves, he took all of our performance off of us and put it onto Jesus and judged him for our faulty performance. The only thing God is asking us to believe to be placed into his son, is to take him at his word concerning what his son did where our sins are concerned. The instance we take our stand with God, we are not only saved, but sealed until the day of redemption of these earthly tents in which we dwell. Flesh wants to say if I broke it, I can fix it. God is not asking us to turn from anything to be saved, he is asking us to believe Jesus accomplished salvation for us and we are simply to believe it. Jesus did it all, there is nothing left for us to do, God did all the giving, we do only all the receiving, faith is taking God at his word concerning what his son did on our behalf. 

As I had the experience of reading the bible several times through, being a seeker of truth in the bible for a while, and finding it unravel into a lot of components that I hadn't expected I might be able to speak to this somewhat.

The myth of the dying god is not new. It's a story about winter and spring, of the renewal of seasons for planting crops, the renewal of societies when they grow stagnant. Just as the sun goes to its tomb on the winter solstice and rises again three days later each year is a new beginning, just like each society learns from the mistakes of its predecessors and has the opportunity to start fresh with 20/20 vision to past mistakes and begin again wiser.

As a fledgling race we were enamored with the power of the sun and its life giving energies which it lent to crops. We were amazed by the moon and its ability to control the tides and aid the circulation of the waters which, as we know today, it would be highly unlikely for us to have such a rich system of convection as we do now to support life on the planet without it. Even before our molten core cools to a solid state and our planets magnetic field shuts off this could be gone if the moon drifts too much farther away. This is part of how we have, such as in the Emerald Tablet, 'Its father is the sun and its mother is the moon'. It's part of why you have three Mary's kneeling below the cross - mother, maiden, crone, Diane, Selene, Hecate, or in more modern parlance waxing, full, waning.

The Babylonian captivity was a fascinating time because it seems like this gave birth to all kinds of things including our 7-day week. The seven day week was first seen here, in 6th century BC Babylon, and it seems to have sprung up from the four phases of the moon, one lunar cycle being roughly 29 days and dividing that by four your nearest rounding will get you seven. The Canaanite/Hebrew alphabet writes from right to left and it seems like their fascination with the cycles of the moon as well as blood moon tetrads lead to the timing of the feast of tabernacles. There were also the seven Elohim, which might be familiar as the seven-eyed stone shown to Joshua in the book of Zechariah. Since we knew, quite validly, what the sun and moon did to the earth we also noted that there were five other bodies moving in the sky - what we've come to know as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Our days of the week, unless you live in Brazil which augmented their calendar out of piety, still have their names of the week based on the seven planets, seven Elohim, seven primary deities. The twelve tribes, twelve apostles, etc. probably don't need quite as much explanation because you can hardly walk past the grocery store checkout without some reference to your sun sign.


I think what happened after reading the Old Testament end to end that jarred me was not only the hairpin turn that the gospels seemed to take, away from the severity of the Old Testament, but also in particular John's writings. The language of Jesus - If you've seen the father you've seen me, I am the true vine, none of these concepts make any sense unless you're speaking of the world, consciousness, life itself, as an emanationist which is a type of monism rather than dualism. In the Old Testament the devil is hardly mentioned, hell is never mentioned, and to the extent that the devil does show up in Job and in the gospels it's the agent of the world that tries the righteous toward their completion, in nearly the same exact way that Mara tried Buddha under the boddhi tree. This gets into the vasanas, which in Advaita are the more fruitless and distracting sides of our evolutionary wiring which cause us to be pulled toward base impulses, purely self-serving behaviors, and activities that don't help us truly actualize the best of what we are. This is really what 'sin' is, it's coming up short of what we could be but more importantly - again in today's narrative - its our failure to grapple with our own wiring correctly. It really comes up two ways - a) by sheer irresponsibility to truth and doing what we want to do anyway or b) by breaking laws, such as repressing rather than sublimating desires, expecting that we can abuse down these impulses and just make them go away - which is equally untrue, and studying cultural pathologies and the ebbs and flows we've seen since the Victorian era we've come to see a lot of the pretzel knots people's subconscious minds can get twisted into with repression.


As we've been able to study the world, as a species, we see that humanity goes back well over 50,000 years, some estimates as far as 100,000 to 200,000 years for Cro Magnon man. When looked at this way one wonders what to make of the story of Adam and Eve. Strangely enough it actually does tell a coherent story along the following lines. We were once animals. Animals don't have a sense of right or wrong, they live by function and lack the extension of thought to make a lot of moral choices. Some higher mammals may have this to a degree but it's at it peak in us. We eventually crossed thresholds from hunter-gatherer to planting crops. Adam's first wife was Lilith and for good reason - man was getting eaten by all kinds of different large cats, getting mauled by bears, parasitized by various organisms, nature was truly red in tooth and nail and was dominating him. When he began to till the earth he ended up with Eve. One of the side effects of crossing from hunter-gatherer to agricultural life is that Abel died, Cane lived on in his stead.


I won't go too much farther with modern bible analogies but what we have today is an awareness, at least for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, that our sentience has problems, it's largely still in the form of our evolutionary weaknesses. We're an animal that, whether by design or utter lack of it, is barely keeping its head above water and we're forced to realize that clear truth, as nuanced in its understanding as possible and lived accordingly, is about the only thing that can keep us from burning ourselves down. While I won't doubt the possibility that there might be a cosmic logos as well as a cosmic mother watching over our progress, giving us as much liberty as possible to make mistakes and tapping us as gently as possible toward learning and forward movement, this story is not about us burning the world down so badly that Christ comes again. If we have the entire universe as deity then there's no Satanic no-God 'stuff' that we're implanted in to be burned away for the creation of a new earth. Dare I add more heresy - this kind of thinking, Zoroastrian and Manichean, is a gift we can likely thank Cyrus for - the pre-Constantine Constantine. The invention of the Exodus, as far as historians and cultural analysts can tell, is a reworking of Hebrew/Canaanite history through the Zoroastrian lens. Revelations seems to run with this description of the world, mostly telling of the sacking and destruction of Jerusalem between 66 and 70 AD as well as predicting the fall of the Roman empire.

As far as what our goals really should be, if we're going to size ourselves up through the lens of world history, the lessons taught by the cause and effect of its tides and through the mouths of its historians, poets, prophets, philosophers, and everyone whose done their best to give good testimony to what they've observed, one of the most dependable maxims of the ancient world seems to be this - know thyself. The more profound version - know thyself and you will know the universe and the gods. It's an understanding that we are, very much in a way, a microcosmos. We operate by the laws of the universe and, understanding the gods either as physical laws and emergent forces, perhaps both deity and physics dynamic (actual and symbolic) at the same time, we can reflect on our own conscious choices to see how well we're balancing ourselves and our expectations to the realities of our universe. We can consider the parsimony of our own actions, the effects those actions have on other people, the effects our inaction has on certain problems, and I think our moral philosophy actually has a great deal of richness and depth that it still has yet to attain.


All of that said their is a lot of beauty in the concept of the Cosmic Logos, ie. the great all-knowing mind, perhaps Adam Kadmon or platonic archetypal man, perhaps even the logos of the sun, which stepped into human drapery as a 1st century son of a carpenter and strove to teach us how to live. Unfortunately, taking this story as seriously in the raw literal sense as many modern fundamentalist protestants and Catholics do, ie. salvation on grace and profession in particular, means that we aren't responsible for solving the worlds problems, that we can blame mayhem and destruction on a third party (ie. the devil), and then be as closed off to real problems and problem-solving as those who have shelled themselves off in a different faith-based religion known as Leftism. If we're not careful - especially with the challenges we face in the 21st century with climate as well as leverage of destructive potential with our technologies - that excuse will be written our race's tombstone. This is partly why I think antitheists are so adamant on beating up on Christianity and slowly also bringing themselves, even under threat of death, to criticize Islam just as fiercely based on the ability for literal interpretations of these books to fatally distort cause, action, and consequence in the human endeavor.

Assuming that a literal Adam, Noah, or the demons knew a version of the Gospel, lookalike religions could be counterfeits.

One way to tell is salvation by works, vs. by grace.

The Bible says that people are chosen by God, not the other way around.

In all of the other religions, and even fundamentalist cults, you are being told that you have to earn the approval, of some all powerful, all knowing, all provident force, which couldn't possibly require any contribution, on your part.

I find that word studies reveal interesting nuances.

To the best of my understanding, the anti, as in Antichrist, does not carry the same connotation, as in modern use. It is not an opposite, but equal, force. Anti refers to a false or counterfeit Christ. You're telling us that there are lookalikes, in other religions, and those christs are greedy for matériel.

I, pretty much, agree with everything the OP seems to be saying.

nice try, but I won't be converting anytime soon...

Paul is letting us know here in the book of Romans that God didn’t make Heaven for good people, God made Heaven for sinners who are justified freely by his grace. There are a lot of misconceived notions out there concerning the doctrines of faith, are there not? We have a self-sanctification in the positive sense of separating ourselves from those things we know that are not good for us or not good for others, not in order to merit any more righteousness before God through that performance, but in light of all that God has already made us to be in the Savior. On the opposite end of that self-sanctification spectrum, we have those who suppose that their behavior is the source of their right standing with God. That's self-sanctification negatively. They suppose that becoming more righteous in practice will make them more righteous in God’s sight. Faulty thinking! Paul called it foolish. It will not gain you Heaven. You will only be standing in your own righteousness at the Great White Throne Judgment only to face the second death. Whether they will admit it or not these people link practical righteousness with their salvation to some degree. 


The Word of our salvation washes away any notion of self-cleansing for righteousness as an approach to God. Paul’s good news message rinses any notion of people’s production as the basis of a right standing before God right down the drain and leaves the believer standing only in the purified state of the Savior’s righteousness. It could be said this way: the washing that the Word of God rightly divided provides, cleanses the tidy-bowl of people’s religious stinkin’ thinkin’. Away it goes right down the drain. Only when the truth of reconciliation achieved through Jesus is believed, does a new creation become a reality as far as that individual is concerned. The new creation hinges upon the acceptance that Jesus accomplished reconciliation. The new creation is who you stand to be in the Savior. A new creation is your new identity in the Savior. It’s not how you perform in a different way, or strive to perform in differently, or make commitments to perform differently. It all has to do with your being placed into the Savior. That’s the new creation. When a person believes in the reality of reconciliation, that person becomes an instantaneous member of the new creation called the Body of the Savior; joined to him.

Due to my time-constraints I am just going to keep my response short and simple...
James 2:26 «Faith without works is dead.»
Revelation 20:13 «and they were judged every man according to their works»
Romans 2:6 «God will repay each one according to his deeds.»
Galatians 6:7 «All will reap what they sow»
Luke 13:28 «There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth» (i.e.: lots of people who THOUGHT that they were worthy of or guaranteed to get into heaven being rejected at the door of the Gate of Heaven)

«It is easier for a camel to enter in through the eye of a needle than it is for a greedy man to enter into heaven» -Jesus (The Spirit of Truth in the past)
«It is easier for a prosecutor to walk through a mountain of razor-blades than it is for him to simply forgive a perceived offender» -Terence (The Spirit of Truth today)

«ALL walk the WIDE road to HELL...» -Jesus (and now Terence whose spirit incarnated here last time as Jesus)

«If your eye causes you to sin, then pluck it out; if your foot causes you to stumble, then chop it off; if your hand causes you to do the wrong things, the cut it from your arm; etc., for it is better to enter into heaven without a limb than to cast one's entire soul into the abyss of hell for an entire eternity or two of eternities and a day» -teachings of The Messiah in the past that were written down in the «scriptures» of old

2 Peter 3:16 «Man will wrest the scriptures unto their own [spiritual] destruction»

Regards
DL