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Jesus Said Most Self-Proclaimed Christians are Deluded & Going to Hell [1]
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Date: 2023-06-09
As a child, my family was part of an independent small Christian church not affiliated with any Catholic or Protestant organization or denomination.
The church did not have any creedbook, theology statements, doctrinal coda, or other religious guidance…other than the Bible.
The guiding principle of our church stipulated that the Bible was the only inspired word of God. Not the Koran, Book of Mormon, Pali Canon, other religious tomes, personal revelations or those delivered by so-called gurus.
Only the Bible.
Even though the book was written by humans, the Holy Spirit ensured that the Bible was accurate and what God wanted us to know about how to live.
The Bible is the only template for religious guidance and practice. Studying it in original Hebraic, Aramaic, and Koine Greek, and with necessarily more emphasis on the New Testament than the Old Testament, our church eliminated guesswork, subjective “personal relationship with God” ideas, and heretical denominational doctrines common to all other Christian churches.
If you want to know how to name, run, organize your church, read the New Testament and do it exactly like the apostles did.
If you want to know what to think about spiritual matters, and how to behave in a way pleasing God and that imitates Jesus, read the New Testament.
If you don’t see it recommended in the New Testament, it’s not authorized by God, so don’t do it.
We would explain to people it is obviously not in God’s church template to call your church Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, Seventh Day Adventist, Unitarian, Christian Science, or any other name than the one in the New Testament, which is “the church of Christ.”
People claiming to follow Christ are authorized by God to call themselves Christians (followers of Christ), not Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, etc. It’s an insult to Jesus to say you’re a follower of Luther or John the Baptist, etc.
Nowhere in the New Testament do you see any church organization involving popes, the Southern Baptist Convention, human priests you have to go to if you want to confess your sins, or other trappings of modern “Christian” denominations.
I was taught that the instructions of Jesus and those who wrote the New Testament were a complete blueprint for how a person should think and behave.
The Bible including the New Testament is sometimes contradictory and confusing, and because its original texts are in ancient languages, there are a few issues that legitimately can be described as less than perfectly clear.
However, the vast majority of the New Testament is very clear regarding behavioral precepts and how to organize a church, and there’s one crucial fact that today’s self-proclaimed Christians do not want to acknowledge: most of them are going to hell.
Matthew, chapter 7, is where Jesus explains that, but it’s hardly taught at all, or accurately, in today’s churches. Why? Because Jesus makes clear that most of the people who claim to follow him are not following him, and they are in for a big surprise when they are judged after death. The big surprise is they are going to hell.
Churches are tax-exempt businesses and don’t want to tell their customers the cold, hard truth that unless you have fully dedicated yourself to understanding the New Testament and following what it says, you are not going to heaven.
It would reduce the numbers of people in the pews, which means less donations.
My church correctly understood that the “cheap grace, once saved always saved” canard regarding a person’s salvation is just a marketing gimmick to make people think all they had to do to get to heaven and avoid hell was to once believe Jesus was their savior.
Faith is all you need, they bleat.
That is totally not what you see in the New Testament. Jesus repeatedly said you will not be pleasing to God unless you follow his commandments and example continuously to the best of your ability, with maximum sincerity and zeal.
An initial conversion via simple faith and belief is only the beginning of your journey that will hopefully end in heaven rather than hell.
Faith in Jesus by itself is not enough. That’s made very clear in the Book of James, chapter two. “Faith without works is dead.”
To put it bluntly, if you only believe in Jesus and God, but you don’t do the works necessary to emulate Jesus, you’re deluded about your soul’s ultimate destiny, according to Jesus himself.
Given that Jesus was supernatural but also fully human, and had a specific mission of getting himself murdered as a blood sacrifice to erase God’s need to punish sins, it’s hard to totally emulate him.
You’re not expected to turn water into wine, raise people from the dead, walk on water, heal the sick, cast out demons, be crucified and resurrected like Jesus.
But the New Testament does contain a massive and unavoidably blunt and clear set of behavioral prescriptions and proscriptions.
Out of the thousands of people I’ve met who claim to be Christian, less than a dozen of them were obviously and zealously trying their hardest every day to live as Jesus and the New Testament advised.
These people were so unicorn, so different than regular humans, that it was obvious they must be on a sincere, comprehensive, life-changing spiritual path.
All the rest are hypocrites. They’re not sincerely trying with all their might to be Jesus-like, but inevitably failing because none of us are perfect and all need to repent and ask forgiveness on a regular basis.
Instead, they are conning themselves, coached to believe comfortable “I’m heaven-bound” self-delusion by feckless, heretical, tax-exempt denominations, taught that you can be pleasing to God while living a typical conformist, capitalist-consumerist lifestyle.
These folks are led to believe you can participate in most of the pleasures, ideologies, behaviors of modern society, but as long as you go to church on Sunday, or stand outside an abortion clinic or gay nightclub shouting hatred, you go to heaven.
That is not what the Bible teaches. Indeed, an honest reading of it reveals that an authentic Christian is a very different kind of person than most people who claim to be Christians.
The authentic Christian life is one lived with seriousness, sobriety, self-discipline, fear of internal desires, delusions, dodges, and evils, avoidance of hedonistic secular society, service to the congregation and others, with your main intention in life focused on managing your thoughts and behavior every second so you are as much like Jesus as possible.
How many self-proclaimed Christians do you see who actually match that description? One thing’s for sure, in the so-called Christian Right, none of them do. They are the polar opposite of Jesus.
Now, a couple of quick caveats…
The Bible is an ancient book. Secularists and atheists correctly point out the problems inherent to relying on ancient books. They point out the lack of objective evidence that the Bible God even exists, or that the Bible is that God’s instruction manual for us.
They say the Bible is just an unscientific, mythological, primitive book written by desert peoples, full of misogyny, supernaturalism, and other errors.
Atheists go even further than those critiques. They don’t believe there’s any proof for any miracles, god or gods.
And even if the Bible God is real, atheists say, they will not bow down to Him because in their view He is mean, capricious, dictatorial, violent.
Another huge problem is what I call “cafeteria Christians.” These folks are the type who, like when you choose only a few items of many from a food buffet, choose only the parts of the Bible that suit them, and ignore the rest.
For example, the same “Christians” who correctly note that both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible condemn homosexuality, totally ignore the fact that their hero Trump is the perfect example of why Jesus repeatedly condemned the rich and powerful, along with the lust for money that is so prevalent in capitalism.
When capitalist “Christians” extol the virtues of consumer capitalism, the “free market,” and technoindustrialism, they conveniently ignore the many Bible verses of which “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” is premier.
When they claim God gave humans “dominion” over the entire planet, the selfishly interpret that as a license to exploit and kill all other organisms and the planet itself, including other humans.
In doing this, they ignore the Bible’s clear message that God made all those plants, animals, forests, oceans, and other marvels of Nature, leading one to suspect that God is not pleased by the anthropogenic mass extinction we’re causing.
The right-wing faux Christians who constantly rage against abortion, women’s rights, and secular society, immigration, etc. ignore Jesus’ commandments to be generous, kind, compassionate, helpful to the poor, immigrants, elderly, widows and other disadvantaged people.
They ignore the fact that God authorized abortion, in the Old Testament.
And although Jesus once said he came not to bring peace but a sword, his overall message was one of surrender: pacifist non-violence. When Roman soldiers came to arrest him for torture and crucifixion and Peter pulled out a sword and started to fight for Jesus, Jesus said “we don’t use weapons.”
But many so-called Christians are all in on guns and reflexive self-defense and hostile aggression. There are even churches, such as Iron Rod Ministries, that have made machine guns into holy sacraments!
Of course, this whole article is based in a context that assumes there is a God, it’s the Bible God, and the Bible is 100% the inspired “word of God.” I can’t prove those assertions—they are beyond the realm of objective proof.
Many people, including some who claim to be Christian don’t believe the Bible is the only word of God. Many progressive and liberal Christians are themselves cafeteria Christians. I’ve been to Unitarian churches and heard their preachers say, “It doesn’t matter if you believe in God or the Bible, it’s all good.”
They pick and choose which parts of the Bible to embrace, which to ignore or reject. They rely on subjective, wispy, imaginary “personal relationship with God” visions to get their doctrinal and behavioral guidance from.
Problem is, the “small, still voice of God” they think they’re hearing is just their own ego and desires conning them into thinking they are pleasing God, hearing from God, and on their way to heaven.
Subjective, anecdotal, personal spiritual experiences have zero value when they are in conflict with Biblical teachings, nor can you ever prove they were actual interactions with God. The likely truth is they are just fabrications, like the brain chemistry-induced hallucinations that occur in near-death experiences
I know from what happened when I wrote articles about marijuana that a percentage of commenters at DK are trollish. They don’t have good reading comprehension, misunderstand or deliberately distort what I wrote, then attack me ad hominem and with bizarre talking points that are specious, factually incorrect, diversions, or violate DK site rules.
Then, when I respond to the trollish comment, my response is censored, lol. I put a lot of time and research into my work, and it’s very disappointing when comments are not thoughtful, sincere ideas based on a careful reading of what I wrote in the article.
Following is just a partial list of Biblical citations, and I’ve already included some earlier in the article. Read them yourself and you’ll see the accuracy of this article. If you have an argument with this article, it’s with the Bible’s words, not with me.
If you think that there’s a problem with God, Jesus, the Bible, specific Biblical teachings, your problem is with them, not me. So I don’t want to see the comments section filled with personal attacks against me or my article. These are issues of theology and Biblical language, and as you will see below, the Bible backs up everything I just said here, and I said it because the Bible said it.
The bottom line is Jesus made clear what astute, skeptical observers already know: most people who call themselves Christians are not following Jesus as the New Testament instructs.
Sadly, it’s not just right wing “Christians” who think they are on their way to heaven but are actually heading to hell. Many in the liberal and progressive communities are just as hypocritical and un-Biblical. One of the most common dodges used by liberal and progressive Christians is: “Well, that’s only what Paul said, not what Jesus said.”
Take a look for yourself, making sure your version of the Bible is an accurate translation of the original texts. Most modern versions are not.
Matthew 19:21-24 Revelation 3: 15-16 All of Matthew 6
2 Timothy 3: 16-17. Galatians 5:19-21 Jude 1:4-7 1 Peter 4:3
Colossians 3:5 Galatians 5:19 2 Corinthians 12:21 Mark 7:22
Romans 13:13 1 Corinthians 7:2 1 Corinthians 6:8-18
1 Corinthians 14: 34-35 Revelation 21:8 Ephesians 5:18 Mark 7:21-23
1 Peter 4:2 Ephesians 4:19 Hebrews 13:4 Ephesians 5
Matthew 5:28 1 John 4:1 1 Timothy 2:9 Ephesians 4:17-19
1 Corinthians 9:27 2 Corinthians 13:5 John 14:15 Matthew 24: 3-13
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