Is Jesus a Fear-Mongering War-Monger?
This contradicting characterization of God never made any rational sense to me! How could God love all of us so much That He wants us all to be with him, but then punish and send the vast majority of us to hell, only because we didn’t pray the ‘sinners prayer’? The Gospel was presented as "plundering hell to populate heaven" and if you didn't repent and say the sinners prayer you were going to populate hell. This was suppose to be the "Good News Gospel". God's love was limited to only the "saved people" and changed to hate for "sinning people.
“I was a bible-toting, scripture-slinging hell defender for many years. My questioning the "hell fire doctrine" took me on an adventurous enlightenment journey of realization that had I been duped into believing a delusional lie as truth. I began to understand those famous words of Jesus, ‘I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly." No longer am I wasting my life walking the hot-coals of hell fire telling people they are going to spend eternity suffering in such a place.
I came to the point where the character and nature of God was investigated from every angle with out the baggage of religious man-made beliefs. Orthodoxy and denominational double mindedness doctrine was questioned and now stands out to be to be doctrine without bible substances and was brought to the realization that I was blinded, deluded and realized I was working against the Gospel of God's Mercy, Love and Grace.
The Gospel is the greatest Love Story ever told...yet...a lot of people are living in a delusional heightened daze, believing in a Jesus who is coming back to the earth realm as a vengeful retributive military General riding a white horse followed by a bunch of "saved commandos" ready to war on people with a cold-blooded sword (Rev. 19). His revengeful pursuit is such, He even will wear a robe dripping blood from His killing of God's loved people. As if that wasn't demonic enough, because these people He killed did not decide to side with Him while they were alive, God will assign them to the torture chamber of hell to suffer an agonizing existence for eternity. This is the deranged thinking masses of people believe about Jesus and God. Not only that...The saved will take pleasure in such torture of people and it would add to the save's bliss. Yet they claim that God hates what ISIS terrorizing is doing to the "saved", while believing God is going to do something worse to people who are not "saved"!
How ironic is that!
As a a believer in Christ people believe they will be a participant participating in this mass slaughter of the sinful scumbag "sinners", which includes any of our family members and friends, who didn’t say the "sinners" prayer and turn to Jesus.
As if that wasn't enough, they are going to be in a place of eternal bliss and happiness, while knowing that these "scumbag sinners" will be forever in a conscious state of suffering, fueling the fires of hell! To think that we actually believed such a twisted translated and interpretation of the Bible by mere fallible men, and was told the love of God without the wrath of God was not the Gospel of God's Grace and Love...causes me to wonder what kind of a deluded state was "I" in.
This misunderstanding of hell and the misunderstood view of Jesus and God has profoundly shaped the "Christian Religion" through the tireless efforts of many misguided...yet...loved and highly respected preachers throughout history as the following quotes substantiate:
Jonathan Edwards: “The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardour of the love and gratitude of the saints of heaven. The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever. . .Can the believing father in Heaven be happy with his unbelieving children in Hell. . . I tell you, yea! Such will be his sense of justice that it will increase rather than diminish his bliss” ["The Eternity of Hell Torments" (Sermon), April 1739 & Discourses on Various Important Subjects, 1738].
“The pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive the wicked: the flames do now rage and glow. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much in the same way as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked…He will trample them beneath His feet with inexpressible fierceness; He will crush their blood out, and will make it fly, so that it will sprinkle His garment and stain all His raiment.” Works, vii. 499.
Charles Spurgeon: “When thou diest, thy soul will be tormented alone; that will be a hell for it, but at the day of judgment they body will join they soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood, and thy body suffused with agony. In fire exactly like that which we have on earth thy body will lie, asbestos-like, forever unconsumed, all thy veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string on which the devil shall forever play his diabolical tune of ‘Hell’s Unutterable Lament’” (Sermon on the Resurrection of the Dead).
John Calvin (who burned dissenting Christians to death over green wood and who is believed to have elicited the greatest Christian hypocrisy and injury to the world’s perception of God today): “Forever harassed with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of his hand, so that to sink into any gulf would be more tolerable than to stand for a moment in these terrors.”
No wonder people have the view that Jesus is an indignant fear-mongering war-monger coming back to reap havoc on "scumbag sinners". After all, He is only acting in line with the writers reported character of His vengeful, punishing Father in the Old Testament...a Father which stoops to an even lower diabolical character in the New Testament by damning most of His own children to suffer in hell forever, first dangling them over the fire as “loathsome insects”...and then somehow brushes His hands off such indignation and yet, blissful satisfaction.
This is the “blessed heritage” we were handed down by our the great stalwarts of faith our forefathers, beginning with miscommunication, miscopied, mistranslated and misunderstood Scriptures (Jer. 8:8-10), and then proliferated by vengeful “sons of thunder,” the nickname given by Jesus to James and John, who said the following to him:
“Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume [those heathen unbelievers who rejected you]” (Luke 9:54)?
But, thank God for the real Jesus...the one who represents the Mercy, Love, Compassion and Heart of His loving Father God...interrupts the party and says in rebuke: “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them!”
I thank God that my understanding of Him has changed. He is not the monster that He is taught and made out to be.
I now believe in a God that is forever Loving, Merciful, Compassionate, and Graceful, and is not to be feared as a terrorizing terrorist!
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