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Do you believe all deathbed conversions are legitimate?
I have no way of knowing, which should be obvious. I'm not a false prophet like those in so many fake Christian churches today; That's between the God and the confessor which is why I asked if God's grace is no longer sufficient? It is not for me to judge or decide.
I have no way of knowing, which should be obvious.
Shouldn't it be just as obvious that thrillobyte has no way of knowing either? All I'm saying is that you accused him of saying something he never really said. He never said that all deathbed conversions are illegitimate, now did he? There is no way any of us can know which deathbed confessions are legitimate and which ones aren't. None of us are justified in judging anybody's heart, but I sure do see a lot of people doing so. The issue, at least to me, is not whether Christ's grace is "sufficient" or not. His grace is "sufficient" to do anything He wants it to do. Whether it's "sufficient" or not is beside the point.
The scripture Matt. 20:12-13 is exactly what came to my heart also when I read the post and its remarks about the deathbed conversions !
Praise the Lord's mercy always intervening especially in the last moments in a person life...... giving them that choice too choose Him before that last breath, amen, thank You, Lord Jesus !
I have been reading these posts and it strikes me that everyone is still treating themselves as a singular finished product that is either Evil or Good. We are not. We are an ongoing project that is continuously evolving over time. We are more like a musical composition or symphony with many movements and parts . . . than we are a singular entity. I like Milic Capek's description of the becoming of our reality (cosmic becoming) as an analogue to our individual becoming.
Let us consider a piece of music . . . It is hardly necessary to underscore its successive character. As long as its movement is going on, it remains incomplete and in its successive unfolding we grasp in the most vivid and concrete way the incompleteness of every becoming. At each particular moment a new tone is added to the previous ones. . . The quality of a new tone, in spite of its irreducible individuality, is tinged by the whole antecedent musical context which, in turn, is retroactively changed by the emergence of a new musical quality.. . . Every musical structure is by its own nature unfolding and incomplete; so is cosmic becoming, the time-space of modern physics.
To make the analogy clear I will paraphrase Capek:
It is hardly necessary to underscore our embryo Spirit's successive character. As long as we are alive, it remains incomplete and in its successive unfolding and developing we grasp in the most vivid and concrete way the incompleteness of every human character. At each particular moment a new characteristic is added to the previous ones. The quality of each new state of mind, in spite of its irreducible individuality, is tinged by the whole antecedent character which, in turn, is retroactively changed by the emergence of any new characteristic or trait.
It is easy to see the vagaries of life as analogous to an elaborate symphony. It takes a bit of abstract thinking . . . but I believe it is worthwhile to contemplate. The bold in the above about how the latest aspect of the music is changed by and changes the overall aspect of the entire symphony . . . suggests that last minute alterations of our character are indeed capable of altering our entire life symphony.
Like Capek . . . Arthur Schopenhauer captured this significant aspect of music and reality in The World as Will and Idea.
. . .in its language, which is understood with absolute directness, but which is yet untranslatable into that of the reason, the inner nature of all life and existence expresses itself.
. . . As quick transition from wish to satisfaction . . . is happiness and well-being, so quick melodies without great deviations are cheerful; slow melodies, striking painful discords, and only winding back through many bars to the key note are, as analogous to the delayed and hardly won satisfaction, sad.
. . . The short intelligible subjects of quick dance music seem to speak only of easily attained common pleasure. On the other hand, the 'Allegro maestoso,' in elaborate movements, long passages, and wide deviations, signifies a greater, nobler effort towards a more distant end, and its final attainment.
. . . All that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universal, . . . always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon, the inmost soul, as it were, of the phenomenon, without the body.
. . . According to all this, we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing, which is therefore itself the only medium of their analogy, so that a knowledge of it is demanded in order to understand that analogy.
While Shopenhauer's sensitivity enabled this discernment, he was unable to employ his own mandate that "a knowledge of it is demanded in order to understand that analogy." His highly philosophical approach was the only way he could support what he knew to be true, since contemporary physics was unknown to him. Today it is obvious how music and nature are "two different expressions of the same thing," once a knowledge of quantum wave theory is employed. After all, music is merely waves of sound at varying frequencies, and matter is merely waves of energy at varying frequencies.
2) Yes. Without the blood of Christ, he remains under condemnation. See John 3.
This is what is really sad. That people in their heart of hearts can really believe God would do this to someone.
Bishop Carlton Pearson, to his credit and integrity, was thrown out of the Fundamentalist Corporate Machine hierarchy headed by that scoundrel of all scoundrels, Oral Roberts of "Jesus will call me home if you good fools don't donate 15 million to my Oral Roberts University Medical Center". Pearson watched a report on Muslim Rwandan refugees covered in dung and flies trudging across the border to Tanzania to flee horrible slaughter at the hands of Tutsi warlords and said to himself, "Surely a God of mercy cannot condemn all these poor souls, already living a life in hell here on earth, to an eternal pit of fire and torture after they die." When he publicly renounced eternal torment he lost his position in a mega-church, his influence with political highbrows, a 10-million-dollar salary--basically everything because the Fundamentalist Corporate Machine felt a threat against the deadliest hammer they wield against dumb church-folk to keep them in line, "eternal torment in hell."
Sad. Pathetic. Heartbreaking that people can still think like a Medieval Spanish Inquisition.
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