Transactions

In journalism school at The Ohio State University, I was taught there are two types of people in the world: those who want the truth and those who don’t. The latter prefer to live in a comfortable reality that is perceived by them to promote their best personal interest, etc.

The Bible says the truth of God’s Word will commend itself to a man’s conscience that wants the truth. When it doesn’t commend itself to someone, it’s simply because what the person’s looking for is something different.

The reason God uses words to communicate and do His work is because there’s a spirit transaction that takes place through the sharing of words, ideas and concepts.

“If God is a Spirit, you can understand why He gave you a spirit, because essence needs a point of contact,” explains Jordan. “Your spirit has intelligence; it has intellect. Just like you and I communicate with words and we know things because of the words that we communicate, we know the things of God because God has communicated them to us by words.

“People look for the Spirit of God to be working out in the physical realm, but the Spirit of God, if He’s a Spirit, is going to work with your spirit. The spirit is what gives humans the capacity to communicate with each other and with God.

“Now, lost people can’t communicate with God, but their spirit still works; they can communicate with other humans with their spirit as well as ‘the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience.’ ”

The spirit is connected to the soul, which represents each person’s own personal identity. The soul has a bodily shape and the capacity to animate the body and use the body as a vehicle.

This is something people don’t grasp the reality of: It’s your soul that goes to hell and there’s a spiritual fire in the spiritual realm that will torment the soul the same as a fire in the physical realm will torment the flesh.

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One of the key things you learn as a Bible student is that the Bible contains God’s own built-in dictionary.

Here’s an example: If you look at Acts 4:25-26, it says, “Who by the mouth of thy servant David hast said, Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ.”

Part of this passage is a near-direct quotation from Psalm 2, which says, “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed.”

Immediately you realize that the title “Christ,” which is a Greek word, compares with the Hebrew word “anointed.”

So the term “Christ” means “anointed” and when you read in the Bible about an “anointed one,” you’re reading about a Christ.

But notice in Acts 4 it describes “the Lord” and “his Christ.” That’s because there’s more than one.

In Ezekiel 28:15, referring to Satan in his original position as Lucifer, it says “thou art the anointed.” Satan’s counterfeit M.O. hinges on him as a Christ and an anointed one.

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In Bible scholar Gail Riplinger’s 1994 book, Which Bible is God’s Word?, detailing the promotion of the Antichrist system through New Age bible versions, she writes, “How can Satan deceive the various religions of the world to join together and worship him? ‘Deceiveth’ implies the true identity of the dragon may be hidden.

“The book called, Toward a World Religion for a New Age, tells us his plan. It says: ‘When an appropriate, common vocabulary [and those are the key words, ‘common vocabulary’] is developed, each group can help toward a world religion.’

“To this end, New Age literature has changed the names Buddha, Krishna, Lucifer, and all the national and occult gods, to ‘the Christ,’ ‘the Lord,’ ‘the One,’ and ‘the Spirit.’

“All the new bible versions, with the exception of the King James Version, are unknowingly making changes and gradually evolving to conform to this One World religion.

“So we see Jesus Christ, Jehovah, and the Holy Ghost, disappearing and becoming ‘the Christ,’ ‘the Lord,’ ‘the One’ (capital ‘O’), and ‘the Spirit’. . .

“When you read New Age books like, The Bhagavad-Gita, or The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Luciferian The Secret Doctrine, you will see that ‘the One’ is the god of the pagans and the New Age. . .

“Even in Isaiah 14:12, in the NIV and the new versions, Jesus Christ and Lucifer are being confused. Instead of putting Lucifer in Isaiah 14, they have the ‘morning star’ there. We know the ‘morning star’ is Jesus Christ.

“It is the New Age doctrine to believe that ‘Christ is the same force as Lucifer’ (Spangler). The new versions continually replace ‘Jesus,’ ‘Christ,’ or ‘God,’ with the generic ‘him.’

“In Philippians 4:13 where the King James Version says, ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me,’ some new versions say, ‘I can do everything through him who gives me strength.’

“Who is this ‘him’? It can be a sort of fill-in-the-blank deity. If you are a Buddhist, you can fill in ‘Buddha’; you can fill in any name there.”