Eternal Life Is Not Given by Measure

Eternal Life Is Not Given by Measure - By Gene Lawley - https://www.raptureready.com/2020/11/12/eternal-life-is-not-given-by-measure-by-gene-lawley/ The parable Jesus told of a vineyard owner hiring workers throughout the day but paying each of them the same wage for the day’s work seems to illustrate the principle,as in the title above. The parable is recorded in Matthew 20:1-16: “…For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. Now when he had agreed with the laborers for a denariusa day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and whatever is right I will give you.’ So they went. Again he went out about thesixth and the ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing idle, and said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also gointo the vineyard, and whatever is right you will receive.’ “So when evening had come, the owner of the vineyard said to his steward, ‘Call the laborers and give them their wages, beginning with the last to the first.’ And when thosecame who were hired about the eleventh hour, they each received a denarius. But when the first came, they supposed that they would receive more; and they likewise received each a denarius. And when they had received it, they complained against the landowner,saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the heat of the day.’ “But he answered one of them and said, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go your way. I wish to give tothis last man the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own things? Or is your eye evil because I am good?’ So the last will be first, and the first last. For many are called, but few chosen.” It is a rather long narrative, but there are three points to be considered as insight into the “likeness of the kingdom of heaven” so revealed in this parable—the same wagebeing paid to each of the workers; the first is last and the last first; and many are called, but few are chosen. The challenge is to learn how those three points are illustrated by this parable. It brings me to that proverb that says, “And knowledge of theHoly One is understanding” (Proverbs 9:10b). But wait! The first part of that verse also has an important input to this as well: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10a). The first item is the way the workers were paid—each one received the same amount, although their hours of work differed. As the article title indicates, it compares tothe gift of eternal life and how it comes to those who believe and receive it. No one gets more eternal life than anyone else. That seems to be a simple answer, but does anyone have difficulty with the realization that someone who receives the gift of eternallife through Christ at an early age and spends his life in service to the Lord, while someone on his deathbed accepts Christ and has no life left to live for the Lord, yet he also has eternal life? Perhaps not so much, but that is a reasonable comparison withthe details of the parable. That old Adam nature each believer spars with all day long, every day and night, has a way of crying out, “That’s not fair!” Remember how the disciples, James and John,wanted to sit on each side of Jesus when He was seated on His throne in heaven? Who doesn’t want special privileges to satisfy his self-centered soul? The passage that sheds light on this is found in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15: “For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood,hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’swork is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.” There is only one foundation for eternal life, and that is Jesus Christ. Likewise, there is only one full and complete eternal life. It is not handed out in pieces, dependingon how well we have served. Notice in that passage how well one has served results in rewards that are not burned up by the test of fire. Yet, the foundation remains firm and sure. That is the assurance of salvation, as so stated in 1 John 5:11-12: “And this is the testimony that God has given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son; he who has the Son has life, and he who does not have the Son does not havelife.” That thief on the cross who believed did not have time for any good works; his only one was his recognition of Jesus as the Savior. Yet, his salvation was as assured asanyone else’s. As an example, a man who accepts Christ on his deathbed might say, as his wife, perhaps, tells him of the Jesus he has avoided all his life, “I love you more now than Iever did before you helped me find Jesus to save me.” That comment of love may be the only “good work” he would be able to do, but it would be in the gold, silver or precious stones category and not burned up. As Jesus said to Peter when he asked about the purpose Jesus had for that other disciple, “If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you? You follow Me” (John21:22). Believers are saved one by one and not in groups as a whole. Believers are individually responsible to God for their own service. It is spelled out in 2 Corinthians 5:10, the reference that speaks of the judgment seat of Christ: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.” Now, what does the phrase, “the last shall be first and the first shall be last” mean in respect to this parable? It is possible that it is an idiom, a saying, that meansall entrants will be equally together at the end of the day. That seems to be the picture painted by the parable, at least. But here is another way to look at it: In short, “the first shall be last and the last first” means that being first has no meaningin the kingdom of heaven, for everyone arriving there is totally on the same level. The difference comes in what a person’s calling for service is, as Romans 12:3-4 tells us that God does measure out our gift of faith to perform that calling: “For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealtto each one a measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function….” Then, the phrase, “many are called, but few are chosen” — how does it fit into this parable? It is a phrase repeated in another parable, the one of a king who prepared awedding feast for his son; invitations were sent out but none came who were expected. Instead, his servants were sent out to invite anyone to come, and many did. That parable is found at Matthew 22:1-14. In that parable, it is clear how the statement fitsthe passage. But in this one, when the owner of the vineyard came each time during the day, he found men standing around, waiting—as they said—for someone to hire them. Those who respondedto his invitation to go to work ended up being his chosen, while it was an open invitation for anyone to go to work. That is comparable to our sharing the gospel—the Great Commission. Some respond favorably, but many do not, then or even later. The Scriptures are clear, in spite of beliefs to the contrary, that God does not charge into a person’s life uninvited. He honors a person’s freedom of choice, just as Hedid with Adam and Eve in the Garden so long ago. It can be no better explained than is done in Revelation 3:20, as Jesus pictures His approach to a person: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come intohim and live with him, and he with Me.” It is also evident in the constantly repeated challenge in the Scriptures and by evangelists that “you must believe in Christ to be saved.” It is an act of the will. VISIT: PROPHECY WATCHER WEEKLY NEWS: HTTP://PROPHECY-WATCHER-WEEKLY-NEWS.BLOGSPOT.COM

Did God create over billions of years?

Often, people challenge biblical creationists with comments along the lines of, “I believe God created, and I don’t believe in evolution, but He could have taken billions of years, so what’s the big deal about the age of the earth?” Some claim that an emphasis on ‘6 literal days, 6,000 years ago’ even keeps people away from the faith, so “Why be so dogmatic? Why emphasize something so strongly that’s not a salvation issue?” It might come as a surprise that we agree—to a point. The timescale in and of itself is not the important issue. So why does CMI emphasize it? It’s important because the issue ultimately comes down to, “Does the Bible actually mean what it plainly says?” It therefore goes to the heart of the trustworthiness of Scripture. As such, compromising with long ages also severely undermines the whole Gospel message, thus creating crises of faith for many as well as huge problems with evangelism. The implications of a long-age timescale The idea of millions or billions of years simply is not found anywhere in Scripture; it is a concept derived from outside of the Bible. First, we need to understand where the concept of an old earth came from. The idea of millions or billions of years simply is not found anywhere in Scripture; it is a concept derived from outside of the Bible. In 1830, Charles Lyell, a Scottish lawyer, released his book Principles of Geology. He stated that one of his aims was “To free the science [of geology] from Moses.”1 He built his ideas upon those of another geologist, James Hutton, who advocated a uniformitarian interpretation of the world’s geology. Lyell argued that the thousands of feet of sedimentary layers (laid down by water or some other moving fluid) all over the earth were the result of long, slow, gradual processes over millions or billions of years (instead of the processes of Noah’s Flood). He believed that processes observed in the present must be used to explain the geological history of the earth. So, if we currently see rivers laying down sediment at an average rate of say 1 mm (4/100th of an inch) per year, then a layer of sedimentary rock such as sandstone which is 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) thick must have taken about a million years to form. This ‘present is the key to the past’ assumption (and its variants) is a cornerstone of modern geology. It involves a rejection of the biblical account of a global watery cataclysm. The millions of years assigned to the various layers in the ‘geological column’ were adopted long before the advent of radiometric dating methods—well before radioactivity was even discovered. But here’s the theological problem. Those rock layers don’t just have rocks or granules in them. They contain fossils. And these fossils are indisputable evidence of death—and not just of death, but carnivory, disease and suffering. There are remains that have tooth marks in them, and even animals fossilized in the process of eating other animals. There is evidence of disease, cancers, and infection; and general suffering from wounds, broken bones, etc. Biblically, we understand these things only began to happen after the Fall. But because of the Bible’s detailed genealogies, there’s no way for the biblical Adam to exist millions of years ago, before death and suffering started happening in the uniformitarian time scale. The implication of long-age belief is that God ordained death before the Fall of man, but the Bible clearly states that it was Adam’s actions that brought death into the world (Romans 5:12). The god of an old earth The idea that death was in creation before the Fall has major implications for the character of God. The same problem arises if one thinks that God used evolution to create. Evolution is a random and wasteful process that requires millions of ‘unfit’ organisms to die. Countless transitional forms would have arisen, only to fall as casualties in the great march ‘forward’. At some point, this allegedly ‘good’ God ordained a lottery of death that finally resulted in humans, and then God looked at His image-bearers, standing on top of layers upon layers of rocks filled with the remains of billions of dead things, and proclaimed His whole creation—along with the evidence of all the death and suffering that went into creating it—to be ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). So we can see that long ages don’t fit in the biblical view, whether or not someone believes in evolution along with it. To summarize, the age of the earth was derived from the rock layers, which have fossils in them, which puts death, suffering and disease before the Fall. The Bible is clear that there was no death before Adam (Romans 5:12). The Gospel of an old earth Some alleged ‘experts’ try to sidestep this ‘very good’ issue by saying that the Fall only caused human death and disease. This cannot be true. For one thing, Romans 8:19–22 clearly teaches that the curse of death and suffering following Adam’s Fall affected “the whole creation”, i.e. the entire physical universe. But even if we set that aside for the sake of argument, there is another problem, because we have human remains that are ‘dated’ as hundreds of thousands of years old. This is well before any possible biblical date for Adam, which places him in the Garden about 6,000 years ago. Many compromising positions see these remains as those of ‘pre-Adamites’—soulless non-human animals. But these skeletons fall within the normal range of human variation. And Neandertals, for example, show signs of art, culture and even religion. And recently, the sequencing of actual Neandertal DNA shows that many of us carry Neandertal genes—i.e. we are the same created kind. To call them ‘non-human animals’ seems entirely contrived to salvage the long-age belief system. Also, Romans 5:12 states that “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned”. It gives no indication that the Fall caused only human death. To distort the interpretation of Romans 5 to say that death was limited to humans would mean that Adam’s sin only brought a partial Fall to God’s creation; yet Romans 8:19–20 tells us the whole creation groans under the weight of sin and is subjected to futility. And Genesis 3:17–19 tells us that the very ground was cursed so that it produced thorns and thistles.2 If only a partial Fall occurred, then why will God destroy all creation to bring about a new one instead of a partial restoration? Why not just restore humans if the rest of creation is still “very good”? Death the last enemy A central part of the Gospel is that death is the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death intruded into a perfect world because of sin, and it is so serious that Jesus’ victory over death cannot be entirely manifested while there is a single believer in the grave. Are we expected to believe that something the Bible authors described as an enemy was used or overseen by God for millions of years and was called ”very good”? A major part of the Gospel is the hope we have in this Resurrection and restoration of the creation to its original perfect state. The Bible is clear about the New Heavens and Earth as a place where there is no carnivory, no death, no suffering, and no sin (Isaiah 65:17–25; Revelation 21:1–5). But how can this be called a restoration if such a state never existed? An evolutionist Anglican priest gave a good summary of what accepting death before the Fall means for Christian theology: “ … Fossils are the remains of creatures that lived and died for over a billion years before Homo Sapiens evolved. Death is as old as life itself by all but a split second. Can it therefore be God’s punishment for Sin? The fossil record demonstrates that some form of evil has existed throughout time. On the large scale it is evident in natural disasters. … On the individual scale there is ample evidence of painful, crippling disease and the activity of parasites. We see that living things have suffered in dying, with arthritis, a tumor, or simply being eaten by other creatures. From the dawn of time, the possibility of life and death, good and evil, have always existed. At no point is there any discontinuity; there was never a time when death appeared, or a moment when the evil [sic] changed the nature of the universe. God made the world as it is … evolution as the instrument of change and diversity. People try to tell us that Adam had a perfect relationship with God until he sinned, and all we need to do is repent and accept Jesus in order to restore that original relationship. But perfection like this never existed. There never was such a world. Trying to return to it, either in reality or spiritually, is a delusion. Unfortunately it is still central to much evangelical preaching.”3 So, one can now see the slippery slope that ensues if we allow for billions of years with or without evolution, because it puts death and suffering before the Fall. Its logical corollary is that it also places evil before the Fall (which no longer exists in his view, as such, since there was nowhere to fall from). And in the process it rules out the hope of a return to a perfect state, since there can be no return to what never was. The Gospel itself has been destroyed in the process. So what did Jesus come to save us from, if not death, suffering, sin, and separation from God? What do we do with passages like Hebrews 9:22, which says “ … the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”, if death and bloodshed were occurring as ‘natural’ processes for millions of years before Adam? If that is the case, then the death of Christ becomes insignificant and unable to pay for our sins. And what is our hope if it is not in the Resurrection and the New Heavens and Earth? If death is natural, why do we mourn it so? Why can we not accept death as a ‘normal’ part of life? This view robs the Gospel of its power and Jesus’ sacrifice of its significance. Following the thought to its natural conclusion has led many people to abandon the Christian faith altogether. The effect on the church The widespread teaching of evolution has dire consequences for our youth, who are leaving the church in droves. Christians who ‘hang in there’ but accept a billions-of-years timescale will have a much harder time defending their faith, and thus, this affects church growth. One of the major stumbling blocks to faith is the question: “Why does a good God allow all the death and suffering in the world?” Such believers cannot adequately explain the origin of death and suffering as a reaction to human sin. Conversely, believers who have a biblical view of the world’s history have a logical platform for introducing God to people with no scriptural background. Incidentally, this was precisely the approach that Paul used when preaching to similar Gentile audiences (Acts 14:15–17; 17:23–31). In Lystra, he used creation as a key identifying factor that set God apart from mere men like himself and Barnabas. And in Athens he took the stoics and other philosophers of the day ‘back to Genesis’ to lay a foundation to introduce them to the true God in the hope that they would repent from their useless idolatry. If belief in the Bible as plainly written strengthens one’s ability to explain the Gospel, and compromise can have such damaging effects, why would anyone compromise? Practically every Christian leader and theologian who lays out his reasons for believing in long ages rather than the biblical timescale has to admit that Genesis—when read at face value, in the Hebrew as well as the English translations—teaches a straightforward creation in six normal-length days. And that this is powerfully backed up by Exodus 20:11, part of the Ten Commandments, which shows the Genesis days were understood as normal-length days, with no room for millions of years or gaps in the text to insert them. But they unfortunately accept that science has somehow ‘proved’ millions of years, which is actually not the case. Inconsistent Christianity? While it is possible to be a Christian and believe in an old earth, it would indicate that one has either not thought through the consequences, or that the Bible is not the ultimate authority for one’s faith. If Genesis is not real literal history, how can one know where the truth actually does begin in Scripture? Today’s ‘science’ also ‘proves’ that men don’t rise from the dead. So if we allow that same science to tell us that Jesus has not risen from the dead (which would be consistent in the compromiser’s worldview) then our “preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” as the Apostle Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 15:14). Placing our trust in man-made philosophies is reminiscent of the man that Jesus described in Matthew 7:26 when He said: “But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.” Conversely, in verses 24–25 He stated: “everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” And because Jesus clearly believed in a literal historical Genesis, so should we.