Basic Understanding

By

Lee

The following are some basic things to understand in order to make sense of the scriptures.

Salvation or being saved is a future event that happens when Jesus returns. You do not have salvation now; it is a promise to the saints who continue in faith, obey the gospel and endure to the end.

Salvation is being changed from a sinful mortal flesh and blood human being into an immortal spirit being incapable of sin.

It is possible to lose salvation if you blaspheme the Holy Spirit and deny the faith and not obey the gospel.

Saints are still able to sin but these sins do not lead to death because repentance and forgiveness are available through Jesus.  Grace is the process the saints are under, not the law, but grace will not eradicate sin only cover and forgive sin, and the saints will always need grace because we will always have sins.  Grace is the straight and narrow way that leads us to salvation but is not salvation itself, the change from flesh to spirit and from sin to unable to sin is salvation.

Sin is a thought of our mind, which is our human spirit and can be manifested by outward acts and words. Sin can be hidden from other people if not acted out or spoken but not from God who sees our heart.  Sin is a spiritual thing and is not physical.  The human spirit is what is defiled by sin and our bodies are the vehicles we use to manifest the sins we speak or act out.  Lusting and coveting are a function of our human spirit and the source of all sin, you do not have to speak or act out sin just think it and it is sin.

The true definition of sin is whatever is not of God’s love.  We must become like God in love as Jesus demonstrated to us.  When we receive salvation at the return of Jesus and become immortal spirit beings unable to sin then for us grace will be over because we will be righteous and never sin again thus needing grace no more.  We are not immortal souls but mortal souls that die because of sin, sin brings death.  Jesus provided a way for us to escape the death sentence and the grace God provides or serves as a covering and loans God’s righteousness to us until we receive salvation and become immortal spirit beings with life and righteousness inherent.  Salvation is not a place where your immortal soul goes after death but is life itself, you are mortal and die, you need life of the kind angels have.  Salvation is being married, grace is the engagement period.

Jesus is not God, Jesus is God’s son and was a human being and a special one of a kind soul created by God in righteousness and true holiness incapable of sin.  The human spirit of Jesus was like ours will become when we receive salvation but in a human body.  Jesus came to reveal the Father in that he was as righteous as God but he was human and in this way, if you see Jesus you see the Father.

Jesus had the same character as God his Father but not the same abilities like omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience and being eternal with no beginning. 

No one goes to heaven or hell at death; they cease to exist until a resurrection from the dead after Jesus returns. 

There is no such thing as universal salvation, the idea that absolutely everyone will be saved, the lake of fire is the second death from which Jesus saves us if we obey the gospel.  Because of what God did through Jesus, two resurrections were made possible. All who have died that have not committed the unpardonable sin will be in only one of these two resurrections; the saints in the first and everyone else who was deceived in the second.  This means that our deaths are temporary and because we are mortal, we die naturally anyway; therefore, it is the second death, the everlasting death that Jesus saves people from.  If Jesus had not provided these resurrections then our physical death would have been everlasting. 

There are two kinds of righteousness; under the law, righteousness was of legal nature and will not provide the hope of salvation. God approved of this type of law righteousness if those who were under the law kept the law but God would not accept this law righteousness as equal to His own.  Righteousness of God by faith is the only type of righteousness God will accept and is not the same as righteousness under law because law righteousness was of the person under law and not of God.  The righteousness of God is by nature and not by command; it is how you naturally exist and not how you are commanded to exist.  God exists naturally righteous and needs no law to command Him to be righteous and that is what the saints are to become, naturally as righteous as God.

This confirms free will in human beings because God has free will and is bringing us to salvation by our free will desire for salvation.  The law had free will only to choose to obey or not but always brought death because no one could obey perfectly if the thoughts and intents of the human spirit could not be addressed under the law.  Under grace, there is a change of nature that addresses the human spirit where God’s love begins to change our way of thinking, to give true free will by being set free.  Under grace, spiritual knowledge is revealed giving us truth to understand our situation and the answers to our problem.  The love of God, God’s own nature of being righteous, is given to us by God’s Holy Spirit and we begin the process that leads to salvation called grace.

Again, grace is the engagement of us to Jesus but salvation is the actual marriage.  The marriage is yet future, the marriage supper of the Lamb.

 If Jesus is the first born of many and the first of the true creation of God and Jesus had no one to die for him in order to have salvation but was proclaimed to be salvation then Jesus had to be created by God with a human spirit that while being in a fleshly body was as ours will become when we enter the kingdom of God.  Our human spirits need glorified, changed so that we cannot sin but Jesus was created with a glorified human spirit and only needed a glorified spirit body.  Jesus was a human being with a glorified human spirit in a fleshly human body and this is why Jesus was incapable of sin.  Jesus was tempted with evil by Satan but Satan failed to tempt Jesus with evil.  The thoughts of Jesus during this temptation never included any evil or sin but he voiced his thoughts and countered every evil temptation Satan threw at him with the truth of God.  Jesus was victorious over Satan and had proved to us that what God promises to us He can deliver, salvation through a man who was unable to sin, a sure promise to all saints from Enoch to us today. 

I have not directly quoted any scriptures in this writing but have paraphrased many. I challenge all readers to search the scriptures with God only as your guide and believe them.