Beliefs
about the afterlife -- “salvation” -- are the biggest barriers keeping
many Christians from straying away from their long held beliefs. This is
completely understandable when so much is at stake in their minds – spending eternity in Heaven or Hell!
Of
course, there isn’t just one Christian Belief System in existence today.
According to World Christian Trends AD 30
– AD 2200 by David B. Barrett & Todd M. Johnson (© 2001 by David B.
Barrett; William Carey Library, Pasadena, CA; p. 33):
In 1970 global
Christianity had 18,630 denominations/paradenominations.
In 2000 global
Christianity had 33,820 denominations/paradenominations.
Estimates
in 2017 indicate there are now probably 40,000 or more. Paradenominations are
groups with religious agendas that specialize in specific areas, i.e.,
families, abortion, etc. What this means is that when someone asks questions
about Christian beliefs, creeds, doctrines, etc., they may get a lot of answers
that do not agree.
Y
Team members learn skills for dealing with situations like these. However, for
people considering becoming a member of the Y Team, we won’t make you wait for Yeshua’s
position on the afterlife. Below is a brief overview. If you decide to join the
team, you will learn how we discovered this information later. This is Yeshua’s
answer (from an English translation):
“The righteous shall enter into eternal life.”
According
to Yeshua-- the righteous will enter into
the afterlife. The English word “righteous”, however, is a loaded
theological word. One skill you will quickly learn to use in your Bible studies
is this – keep things in context. In
other words, the first place we look for the definitions of words, especially
Yeshua’s words, is in the context in which they appear.
In this context, the righteous are the people that did righteous acts.
The
context in which they appear is Matthew 25:31-46. Below is the section that
defines what righteous acts are:
“Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the
kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and
you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you
took me in; I was naked and you
clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me.”
34-36
Now let’s take another look at what the righteous did:
(1) gave food to hungry people
(2) gave drink to thirsty people
(3) gave strangers a place to stay
(4) gave people in need of clothing clothes
(5) visited people who were sick
(6) went to visit people in prison
As
you will learn later, Yeshua taught a revolutionary message in ancient Israel
about the Kingdom of God:
(1) It was a radical interpretation of the
commandment of mutual love – the only way to love God is by loving yourself and
loving those you encounter in life like you love yourself.
(2) He called for a new morality based on the
words of Isaiah and doing acts of love to all people, a movement that spreads
beyond Israel to all nations.
(3) The Kingdom of God has arrived already and
it consist those doing acts of love like Yeshua taught.
So,
let’s take one more look at Yeshua’s teaching about who will be blessed and enter
the afterlife:
(1) They loved hungry people by feeding them.
(2) The loved thirsty people by giving them drink.
(3) They loved strangers by giving them a place
to stay.
(4) They loved people in need of clothing by
giving them clothes.
(5) They loved sick people by visiting people.
(6) They loved people in prison by visiting
them.
The bottom line
is that they loved others by doing things for them they would have wanted
others to do for them if they had been in their sandals!
If you are a Christian and you have been
taught something other than what Yeshua taught about the afterlife, you may
want to join with the Y Team and tackle that elephant in the room – or figure out why you believe something that
disagrees with Yeshua’s position on salvation. If you want to learn how to
tackle the other elephants in the room, we have a place on the Y Team for you!
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