You're listening to KFI on demand. Rich. Welcome to the Jesus Christ.
Hello Jesus Hi Rich. Thanks for doing the show. I enjoyed very much.
It's uplifting and very informative. Thank you very much. Yeah. Well,
you know, I I call myself a Christian, probably not the best,
probably not the worst, but I believe in you and what I've come
to discern as basic tenets of Christianity coming from your life and the Old Testament.
And my question is basically about denominations. It's a theological question. A
few just parts of the questions. Question I guess could be did you intend
there for to be denominations as such? You know this strength call and he
called earlier a little bit angry about Catholicism. Sure you know, and uh,
god, my my, Uh, I don't care. You know,
I think you're important and the lessons that come from the Bible. And I
say I call myself a Christian because I don't follow any particular denomination. I've
been a couple, I've been a few, and uh is it important you
think for me or for anyone for that matter, to be in a denomination.
It seems over years, I just see that our human natures as such,
we tend to want to create division out of anything. Mm hmm.
Man and division is okay. I mean, there are some wounds that you
mend and bandage, and there's some wounds you amputate to save the rest of
the body. Correct If something gets gangrenous, you you you know, you
sever it. You don't want it to kill the rest of the body.
I understand that there are cults, there are quote Christian calls to be avoided,
you know, indeed, and that's a part of the protection to the
body of Christ. But throughout scripture and and a lot of people misunderstand this,
denominations aren't necessarily embattled with one another. The essentials there should be unity.
There's an old saying that in the essentials, unity in the non essentials
liberty, and in all things charity, and that really kind of focuses the
light in the proper spectrum first, in the things that have to be Who
do you say that I am the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, these types
of things that those things, once you start peeling them apart, it stops
being Christianity. So you can't mess with with the with the essentials. Now,
as a kid maybe you colored with Crans Well, well, the Krean.
If you looked at the old Creola brand with all of their you know,
you get the big sixty four pack or whatever it was, and if
you look through it was you had your primaries, and then you had your
secondaries and tertiary colors, and then you would have some you know, combinations
of the colors. And so you'd go from oh, you know what orange
is. Everybody knows what orange is. But if you remember, in the
same pack, you'd have orangish red, and then you would have reddish orange,
which is humorous. You look at that and you go, well,
goodness, how do you tell the distinction from those? Well, really it's
about the amount of red to orange ratio, or the amount of red or
orange to red ratio. So really, in Christianity there are things that are
essentials and you can't waiver from them. If you do, they stop being
Christianity. So there's a point where if you put too much red in with
the orange, it just becomes red a form of red, whether it's a
dark red or lighter red. But now it's all red. It's not orange
red or it's red. Now there's a point where if you start tinkering with
the essentials, they stop being Christianity. Just like you know, it's like
how many corners make a circle a non circle? Well, only one,
because circles don't have corners. So if you do anything to change it,
even if it seems slight, it stops being Christianity. I don't care what
anybody says. However, the non essentials, whether it's an infant baptism or
full immersion or sprinkle or these types of things, they get into areas where
it's not the essentials of the faith and they form denominations because people adhere to
these things as being important or more important to their group. But it doesn't
disturb the essentials, and that's the key aola box. This would be a
little change in the color and flavor of the thing, but not away from
the essentials. Indeed, so I ask you, this rich ice cream is
ice cream. It's a matter of cream and sugar under a certain temperature that
makes ice cream. However, the flavor of the ice cream is based on
the individual who eats it. Well, I'd rather like chocolate, or I'd
rather like vanilla, or I want strawberry, whatever it is, But ice
cream is ice cream. Once you change the concoction, it becomes frozen custard
or frozen yogurt, but it's not ice cream. It may look similar,
but it's not ice cream. So there's a difference between it being the same
thing of a different flavor versus something different. And so that's people get caught
up in that. Now, as far as being one, yes, throughout
scripture every time you read, you read about focus and being one. First
Corinthians one ten plead with you brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that you all speak the same thing. Okay, you don't want
any divisions, you don't want any separations or anything like that. However,
you look at Acts, the Book of Acts, and you've got the very
man who wrote that Paul in a disagreement with his close companion Barnabas, and
those were two great leaders of the church that disagreed, and they never said
either was wrong. It just said that they disagreed, and they let them
go their separate ways. So it's okay for there to be disagreements in the
church. You should be of one mind and one voice when it comes to
the things of Christ. Absolutely, if it pertains to me, and it's
about the trinity and things like that. They should all sing in harmony.
But when it comes to the non essentials or some of the areas that might
be considered gray areas of scripture for the faith, then that's to be discussed.
That's in house discussion. And that's like saying telling somebody they're wrong for
liking chocolate versus vanilla because vanilla is the most pure flavor, it has the
least amount of additives and all this this type of thing not necessarily the case.
Right. Well, may I actually thank you again for your show and
for this explanation. Then to just say that I think your analogies and metaphors
are out of this world. Well, I appreciate that. That's very nice
you're at and you know, you know, analogies, analogies are like,
get it, just having a little fun with you, Rich. I appreciate
all the kind words and you calling, yeah, that's what I get for
using one O'Neil's jokes. Fall's flat. Well, they can't all be winners,
Tony, Welcome to the Jesus Christ Show. Hello Jesus. My question
is on on hell okay, from from I'm gonna say just from from my
reading or I'm gonna say my my understanding that I'm coming now is they talk
about hell being an everlasting place of torment. But if that's the case,
then when God told Adam and Eve while they were in the garden, if
you eat of the fruit, you will surely die. Yes in Genesis when
but when the devil told Eve that if you eat of the fruit, you
surely will not die. So if there is, if hell is an everlasting
place of torment, then the devil is right that you surely won't die.
Now, then you'll be in miserable shape for forever and ever in eternity,
because you will be in eternal torture. Whereas say, at the end of
the world, when God comes back to you know, take numbers and collect
deaths, that death is just what it is, complete destruction. So okay,
which would be right? Okay, it's the assumption that they're both talking
about the same type of death, not the case. You've heard the term
born again that comes from scripture. It's a reference. I'm having a conversation
and I'm talking about being born first the of uh one way, the physical
birth, and then second spiritually. Now everybody dies twice too. Everyone has
a physical death and a spiritual death. Unless they have reconciled with God in
that sense, they will not have a spiritual death. They'll only have a
physical death. The devil is the god of this world. The devil was
saying, if you bite that apple, you will not die in the flesh.
Right now, God was saying, if you bite that apple, you
are going to die in the spirit, because you are going to now understand
the potent of evil. And so the context was specific. If you start
reading more about the concept of heaven and hell, I would recommend maybe going
to Matthew chapter twenty five, verse forty six, and I'm going to read
it quickly as we're running out of time, and these will go away into
eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. The term there ionius in
the Greek is the exact same word for both. So if hell's not eternal,
then heaven's not eternal, which wouldn't make sense in scripture. It's not
about the absence of life the way you know it. The death that's being
spoken about in that context is a spiritual death, which means a separation from
God and the salvation properties of God. They're two different things. That's why
it talks about being born again. It's not about going into your mother's womb,
which is the question that comes after, Oh, I'm supposed to go
back into my mother's womb and be born again. No, it's about being
born of the spirit. So first you're born of the flesh, second of
the spirit. If you are a believer, you die in the flesh,
but you continue to live in the spirit. If you are a non believer,
you die in the flesh and you die in the spirit, meaning separation,
total separation from the salvation of God. Billy, Welcome to the Jesus
Christ Show. Hi Jesus, how are you. I am well, how
are you good? Good? Thanks for taking my calls today. Have a
question for you. It's been a tough topic for me for many years.
I've recently made peace with it, but since I have an opportunity to talk
to you, I thought I would bring it back up. It's been a
bit of a faith stumbler, if you will. It's caused a lot of
crisis of faith for me, and it's concerning basically what I understand to be
two doctrines that are in the Bible, the doctrine of free will, uh,
where anyone, if they come to a saving knowledge of you, are
are able to uh receive your uh forgiveness and grace and uh receive eternal life.
And then the and then what seems to be an opposing doctrine of election
and predestination, where you have predestined and chosen only some people to inherit the
kingdom of God. And I believe this is called the two concepts, you
know, Calvinism and Armenianism from my amateur lay research, and I just wanted
to see how those two two doctrines reconcile with each other since they're both discussed
in the Bible. And uh, I'm just like I said, it's created.
Uh. I grew up free will. And then when I learned about
the doctrine of predestination, I was in dis police. And then have some
people sit down and explain it to me and say, well, by golly,
it is in there. How did the two reconcile? And so it
was kind of sent me into a tells the end, But like I said,
I made peace with it. But I wanted to see what your thoughts
were. Okay, I have a few thoughts and I'll go down and break
down the three basic views when we return that we're up against the clock.
But I do want to get into this a little bit and maybe give you
a different perspective. We were talking with Billy Billy there, Hi, Hey,
all right, so you're there, you're ready? Now are you predestined?
I therein lies the confusion if you're asking me on free will? Okay,
until you tell me something different here, this does get difficult. And
it's not like it's been figured out. Yes, there are different views on
predestination and free will. And John Calvin whom you mentioned, obviously has a
view, Saint Augustine of Hippo obviously of you, and so on and so
forth. There's many different views. And then you said the Armenian view,
and this is one of those in house discussions and very philosophical discussions that people
go back and forth on. However, at the root of this and the
basic difficulty is dealing with the nature and attribute of God. It's like arguing
the omniscience or omni benevolence of God. Those are not things that man can
truly understand, just can't. Academically, you can go, okay, it
can be everywhere at once, or it can be all knowing or all loving,
all these things, but really you don't understand that. You understand it
on paper, but you yourself could never be all loving, so you don't
know what that would be like an actuality. You can't be everywhere at once.
Now you can't even comprehend everywhere you look at the physical realm. Go
does that mean it could be anywhere on the earth, But you don't understand
the reality of everywhere. To God is different than just being anywhere in the
world. So those things in themselves are difficult. The Trinity is difficult.
There's many difficult things to understand when it comes to the attribute of God.
Predestination is one of those things that can be very unwieldy because it seems,
well, either God decides everything and you don't have a choice as a human
being or as creation, and therefore you're kind of bound to it, so
what does it matter, And or you have free will and could decide to
accept or reject God and to have the consequences of life and all of these
things. There are problems with the predestination model where God's deciding everything. There's
obvious problems as to how active God is now in evil, participating in evil.
And also the removal of free will removes the possibility of true love exactly,
So there's definite problems there. However, on the on the flip side,
there's concern because there's scripture that one could argue saying, hey, this
is dealing with this, But I would say that in context in something called
hermoneutics or the harmony of scripture and the way it reads together, not a
verse here and a verse there, but the way it reads together shows a
larger picture. Now, for the sake of time, we can't really,
you know, pull out the big chalkboard or the whiteboard and sit there and
start scrolling out a bunch of examples. So I'm going to whittle it down
to something a little simpler. If there was such thing called Billy's House of
Pies, and Billy's House of Pies is no across North Carolina because of the
fact that they have one hundred different types of pies. So good for you,
Billy, that's an excellent marketing model. A hundred pies. Now you
decide as the owner what kind of pies those are. However, every individual
that comes in there has a choice of which are those pies they want?
Correct, But you've predestined every flavor or every possibility of choice that they'll have
at Billy's House of Pies. However, they still choose which pie they want,
So there is a difference between the orchestration the orchestration of choices. God
being the author of all truth and all possibilities and all things. Evil is
not a thing. Evil is the rejection of truth or good or perfection.
So if God creates all of the perfection, all of the good, all
of the truth, then man has the ability to accept that truth or reject
that truth. But God is still the author of all the possibilities, every
possibility has been preordained in the fact that this is an option. Also add
to that God's foreknowledge that he knows before it's done, who's going to choose
what, And you put that together and you get the confusion of predestination and
free will. But free will has to be has to stay intact no matter
what the belief system, because without that element of free will, you can't
have the love demanded by God to be able to have the mere concept of
heaven and unity forever. You can't right because you don't have the ability to
reject it, and then you'd have to get to the point where God sends
people to hell, and really that's not the case. People choose to go
to hell by rejecting God and God's offer and God's love and God's salvation.
So this would become now strictly punitive rather than the absence of water when you're
thirsty is essentially what hell is, it's the absence of the salvation of God.
You have no more choices. You've made your final choice to not be
with God, and now you realize in the fullness of what it is to
be absent from God in the power of God. So all these things tie
in to an argument that's been going on for more than hundreds of years and
will likely continue to go on. But what needs to be preserved is that
God always remains God. All true choice comes from God, but man and
creation has to have a choice. So a hyper Calvinists and all of this
stuff. I know that Calvinists believe that God is a Calvinist, but really
the Bible is there to shed light on all things. Whereas a lot of
commentary there's an old joke that thank Heaven that God created the Bible to shed
light on commentaries, rather than commentaries to shed light on scripture, because people
get them backwards. But Billy, I think when you land with with the
reverence upon free will and the nature of man to be able to make that
choice when you when you keep that in a place of of height and respect,
is a good thing as far as predestination really that when you go through
it. And the three basic points, by the way, the three types
of predestination as when as it regards to salvation, is general pre destination.
That's the belief that God wills every one to be saved and foremos who will
respond in faith. The second one is single predestination, that God chooses who
will be saved. And the third one is double predestination, which is God
chooses who will be saved and who will be damned. And all of these
have their pluses and minuses, both theologically and scripturally, but they all play
a part in some form. The biggest problem arises when somebody tries to make
one part of that bigger than the other in a way that mutes the balance
that's going on there. So be sure not to fall into that category.
Benjamin, welcome to the Jesus Christ Show. Good morning, Jesus, Hi
Benjamin, how are you doing? I am well, and you I'm doing
excellent, great, good to hear. I have a quick question in regards
to the original name of Jesus. Okay, I noticed in various Bibles,
because I do a lot of study good the Bible, about other texts,
about other religions, and I was always curious because different preachers have given me
different answers to this question. And my question is why does the Bible not
use the original name of Jesus Christ? Okay, Well, interestingly enough,
the people when they ask that question are usually referring to my name, but
even Christ wouldn't have been used either, if you want to be super specific.
But the reason why add to the defense of those that are answered before
me. The reason why you're probably getting different answers is because it's for multiple
reasons. So you might have gotten a partial answer from somebody, and it
doesn't mean that it's false. It means it's only part of the answer.
I'll give you kind of a roundabout answer, kind of a little bit of
everything. First of all, if you go back, the actual name is
people say Yeshua, but that's not the name that's like calling you ben it's
your name, but it's an abbreviation of your name Benjamin. So it's not
even Yeshua. It's Yehoshua, and it translates in English as Joshua. However,
there are more than one Joshua's in scripture, and just like in movies,
if you notice in movies they'll portray me with like blue eyes and very
Caucasian looking. That has, you know, all kinds of reasons as well,
but one of the reasons that's done is so that I stand out in
the group, so that there's and that's why I have lighter hair and things
like that. It may be kind of a turn off to some people,
but a lot of times that's used cinematically to make my character stand out to
look different from everybody else. That's you know, my followers and so on
and so forth. And in the case of scripture, it's similar where if
you were to use that name Joshua, there are many other Joshuas in scripture
and it could get lost. So what ends up happening is they take a
version that it kind of deals with the Greek and the Latin, and then
that's been modified in English, and what comes from that is the word or
name Jesus. So that's used to stand out and so people know that when
it's referring to me, this Joshua, that it's referring to me specifically,
so that stands out as Jesus. But it's really a combination of going through
in the Old English, going through the Greek, and going through the Latin,
and coming out with this named Jesus, which is focused on me specifically,
separating me from the others in scripture so that people don't get confused.
So it's it's to separate you from from josh from the others were the same
name. Oh I see. I have one other quick question. Well,
I was at a elder's house. I was helping my elder and she's up
in age, and she had this Nativity. She had this last suffer scene.
Okay. It was a huge, old, old old picture. Okay.
It was probably about five feet five feet about six feet long. Okay.
So because it was so large, it showed everyone in detail. Okay,
Okay, of course it had all of the men and everything, and
then next to Jesus was this this person that was obviously not a man,
all of the men. I think John, I think John would differ with
you, but go ahead, all of the men. And I pointed this
out to her because another elder said the same thing that I said, and
she was one hundred and four okay. I pointed out that every last one
of these men have beards, including the young The younger of the group of
men now sitting next to Jesus was obviously a pretty woman. Well, can
I explain to you who it was, Benjamin? Yes? Please. If
you go back and you study art of that period, there is a specific
style of art that's done when denoting a young student, and the young male
student ends up looking female. As a matter of fact, the original done
by da Vinci. The sc is the original commission. Sketches still exist to
this day and are labeled, and the individual that you're talking about is labeled
John simply so. It deals with the style of art at the time the
way you, just like I was saying that artistic license in films will often
make me white. I wasn't white. Now African Americans will say, oh,
he was black, but that's not true either. My skin was dark,
absolutely, and closer to a black man's skin than a Caucasian absolutely,
However I wasn't African. So in context, what ends up happening is the
artistic license adapts a style to make the character stand out or exaggerate the character
in a way that denotes something about them. So in the case of da
Vinci's painting of the Last Supper, the painting that looks effeminine really is showing
the youth of John, my beloved, which is who I referred to as
my beloved throughout scripture quite often. So this young boy was younger than everyone
else, and there's denoted with feminine attributes. And this is very common and
you can see it throughout the same time period painting wise, and was used
by many artists, including Da Vinci. And so if you go back and
take a little you say that you like to study, and I appreciate that,
and you do a little poking around, you'll see that not only was
the style was this kind of effeminine student the style of the day. Also
the sketches still exist to this day of the original commission of the Last Supper,
and it explains exactly who it is. But there's there's the truth,
and I hope that that that helps I appreciate that you join us every single
Sunday right here on the Jesus Christ Show. Check out the website, won't
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