As I assume happens to every believer at one time or another, I sometimes have occasions where I’ll begin to question whether what those of us in the true body of Christ believe is correct, or whether we might just be fooling ourselves into believing lies. Well, when this happens these days, I simply have to remind myself of a certain factor that’s taken place repeatedly over the last few years.
You see, many years ago, I wrote an in-depth, book-length, Bible study going over our interpretations of all the relevant passages in the Bible that I believe prove the core doctrines of those of us who are sometimes referred to as “Concordant” believers (doctrines such as the facts that all humanity will eventually be saved by Christ, that two Gospels are taught in Scripture, that the dead are unconscious, and that “free will” is impossible, to name just some of our core doctrines) as well as all of the passages that are used to try to defend the opposing doctrines held by most “orthodox,” traditional Christians (such as the doctrine of never-ending punishment, the idea that there’s only one Gospel taught in Scripture, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of “free will,” to name just a few) in order to demonstrate that the latter batch of passages — which, like all passages in the Bible, are passages we ourselves agree 100% with — don’t actually mean what most people assume they do, but rather actually support our core doctrines rather than theirs.
Since publishing the study, I’ve sent it (or variations of it which contain the same information) to thousands of different Christians, with many of them promising to read it and send me a written refutation of the scriptural interpretations and arguments I made in it. Well, over the years, I’ve received exactly zero refutations of the study. To be fair, I received a few misguided attempts at refuting the first two or three points I made before they gave up, with many others simply sending me links to other articles, videos, or books that they mistakenly believed refuted whichever core doctrine(s) we’d been discussing, but had they taken the time to read the whole thing before writing what they did or just sending me random links (as I advised them to do in its introduction), they’d have discovered that every argument they (or the creators of said articles, videos, and books) made was already answered and refuted thoroughly further on in the study (sometimes in the very paragraph which came after the one they stopped reading at, ironically enough).
What’s also interesting is that a fair number of the Christians I sent it to, many of them highly educated, wrote back saying that they couldn’t make heads nor tails of what I was trying to say, with the term “word salad” tossed at me more than once. At least one of them, who claimed to have read many complicated university textbooks over the years, told me that the sentences in the document were pure gibberish, as though I’d just thrown random words on the page, and that he simply had no idea what I was trying to say in it.
Why this is interesting is because of the last group of people who got back to me (a group that includes now-former Catholics, evangelicals and other Protestants, and even atheists). You see, quite literally every single Christian who told me they actually read the whole thing through to the end without skipping over any parts of it also told me that they’re now believers in all of the core doctrines that I covered in the study (and that they weren’t before they began reading it), with many of them telling me that not only did it make perfect sense and that it was actually quite easy to understand, but also that they believed anyone who read the whole thing would definitely be convinced that the Bible indeed teaches the core doctrines discussed in the study. In addition, some of them also told me that they normally had a difficult time reading books, and that this was one of the few longer reads they were able to get through with no problem, contrary to the experience of some of the supposedly highly-educated Christians who claimed the study made no sense at all.
As just one of many such examples:
And this didn’t just happen once. Instead, it keeps happening over and over again, telling me that there’s a supernaturally-induced blindness being enforced on most people who try to read it, in order to prevent those Christians God doesn’t intend to see the truth right now from reading it and coming to believe Paul’s Gospel (of which the salvation of all, as well as the understanding that the dead are unconscious, are foundational elements), lining up perfectly with what 2 Corinthians 4:3-4 says: “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”
This, of course, also reassures me that the scriptural interpretations and arguments laid out in the study are indeed correct, and that God just won’t allow most Christians to read the whole thing because, if they did, they’d certainly come to believe the true Gospel as explained in the study, and they’d then get saved before the time that God intends for them to enjoy salvation.
So if you’re a member of the true body of Christ and are ever having doubts about the truths we believe, the fact that many otherwise intelligent Christians are incapable of even reading a study discussing the reasons we believe what we do should be all the proof you’ll ever need that you’re on the right track.