Believing in God – Is It Enough?
There are a lot of people in this world who see Heaven as a foregone conclusion. I’m not talking about the people who don’t believe in God, and think that the concepts of Heaven and Hell are fiction. I’m talking about the ones who believe in the existence of the one God and a paradise in which they are to spend eternity. Too many of these people, because they’ve been wrongly taught, think that they are destined to go to Heaven when they die because they believe in God, have been good people, and maybe even went to church.
I worry about these people.
It starts with the concept of Heaven and Hell. Maybe I’m off-base with my beliefs, but I understand the paradise of Heaven to be an eternity in the presence of God. I likewise understand Hell to be an eternity in existence without God’s presence. Is Heaven a wide open countryside with rolling hills, green grass, rivers, flowers, birds? Maybe. I don’t know. What I do know is that God is there, and that’s good enough for me.
Is Hell a pit of fire and brimstone where one suffers the burns and stings and eternal torment? I don’t know, but God isn’t there, and that’s bad enough for me.
Whatever Heaven and Hell are, there must be a way you can go to the one, and avoid the other. Many believe that you go to Heaven if you’re a good person. Others think that belief in God and following the basic rules is good enough. I’d beg to differ.
So, here it is in a nutshell, Lockjaw’s lesson on how to go to Heaven.
God is an all-powerful being. In the work that he does, he saw a need for a class of helpers. To perform this task, he created the angels. This system worked for a long time, but eventually some of the angels decided that they didn’t like being under God’s yoke, and rebelled. They saw themselves as powerful beings in their own right, and decided that serving God wasn’t what they wanted to do. For this transgression, God cast them out of his presence.
God decided to try again. For this second attempt, he created Earth, the Universe, and mankind. Through the lives of man, God passed along laws, advice, and clues. The clues were to be used to recognize the arrival of his son, a willing sacrifice to absolve mankind of its sins. One day, that son was born of a woman. He lived a life of 33 years and fulfilled the prophecies, so that those who understood the clues might recognize him as the messiah. The end of his life happened as the clues said it would, and he died as a sacrifice for our sins.
Through this sacrifice, God’s will in creating this second group of servants came to pass.
Because of this sacrifice, we have the chance to have all of our evils and sins to be forgiven. All we have to do is make some serious decisions.
First, we must choose to serve God. We must ask to be joined in his family as adopted sons (and daughters) with Jesus as the firstborn. As members of the family, we are to serve the father through the commands of the firstborn son. It is this family, who looks up to the Father and to the firstborn son, that will be allowed a permanent place at his side.
The first group of servants was endowed with great power from the beginning. Eventually, some chose to leave the service of God. The second group, mankind, was created powerless in his eyes. Through free choice, mankind can serve God. Once a man decides that he WANTS to serve God for eternity, he can be allowed to do so.
Choose you this day whom you will serve.
Oh, and if you’re going to believe something, I suggest you study it so you better understand your own beliefs. If Heaven is of God, and you want to go to Heaven, then take a look at what God says about it. It isn’t like he’s hiding this information from you. He’s even given you a book to read.
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