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God Discovered Jesus MeetUp Week 21  Is Jesus a Christian? Click the icon for the one-page, front and back, printable version of this small group lesson as  "Is Jesus a Christian? " Week 21     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz15vs418vw

The Jesus MeetUp    Is Jesus a Christian?      Week #21   Here are the 12 main Christian tenets of faith: 1 God created all that is seen and unseen. 2 Jesus is the Son of God and is One with the only true God. 3 Jesus suffered and was crucified. 4 Jesus died and was buried. 5 Jesus rose again. [the Resurrection] 6 Jesus ascended into Heaven. 7 Jesus will return. 8 Faith without works is dead. 9 Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. 10 Jesus died for the forgiveness of our sins. 11 God created Hell to send unbelievers for eternal fire and torment. 12 The Bible is the infallible Word of God. ​ Christian tenets 1 through 7 are things Jesus would agree with, as we know from what our Urantia Book tells us He said, did, or believed. Christian tenets 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 are BIG NO-NOs! ----> Jesus never agreed with these! Read on. ​ This is where things get really interesting.   Tenet 8 comes mainly from what Jesus’ brother James erroneously said, “Faith without works is dead.” James 2:14. Paul went on to somewhat agree with this statement. However, when we look closely at what Jesus said to the brigand hanging on the cross next to Him we can see clearly that the brigand had no opportunity to do any “works” since he was nailed to a cross and almost dead! Let us read what happened and what Jesus said to this man who had faith alone.   187:4.1 One of the brigands railed at Jesus, saying, "If you are the Son of God, why do you not save yourself and us?" But when he had reproached Jesus, the other thief, who had many times heard the Master teach, said: "Do you have no fear even of God? Do you not see that we are suffering justly for our deeds, but that this man suffers unjustly? Better that we should seek forgiveness for our sins and salvation for our souls." When Jesus heard the thief say this, he turned his face toward him and smiled approvingly. When the malefactor saw the face of Jesus turned toward him, he mustered up his courage, fanned the flickering flame of his faith, and said, "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And then Jesus said, "Verily, verily, I say to you today, you shall sometime be with me in Paradise."   So, Tenet 8 is a falsehood.   Faith alone is required to get the approving smile and confirmation of your secured spiritual state from Jesus. Will you desire to “do your Father’s will” if you love Him? CERTAINLY! YES! But God does not threaten you with losing your eternal salvation if you do not DO certain works!   On to Tenet 9. ​ Tenet 9 teaches that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and that His mother Mary was a virgin. We know this is not true as our Urantia Book tells us that Mary and Joseph had quite normal marital relations. Jesus knew He was born in the normal way in our world and that His parents were loving of one another and made love as any married parents will do. He approved of this as He knew this is His Father’s way on all material worlds.   128:0.1 As JESUS of Nazareth entered upon the early years of his adult life, he had lived, and continued to live, a normal and average human life on earth. Jesus came into this world just as other children come; he had nothing to do with selecting his parents. He did choose this particular world as the planet whereon to carry out his seventh and final bestowal, his incarnation in the likeness of mortal flesh, but otherwise he entered the world in a natural manner, growing up as a child of the realm and wrestling with the vicissitudes of his environment just as do other mortals on this and on similar worlds. ​   Tenet 10 begins to get into some very disturbing psychological abuses. ​ In terms of misrepresenting Jesus’ Paradise Father’s good name and character, Paul is indeed the great corrupter of Jesus true teachings.   Jesus never mentioned God’s need for blood to be shed in order for forgiveness to be applied to any one of His loved children. Paul erroneously attached the archaic practice of blood sacrifice to his personally invented new religion called ‘Christianity’. Ephesians 1:7 “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace.” ~ Paul. ​   However, Jesus NEVER said or taught this! Think how the atonement doctrine makes our Paradise Father appear to be ruthless, bloodthirsty and viscous in demanding the death of His own Son on a Roman cross. Christians make bold to rail against abortion and yet they shout from the rooftops that a Father demanded the blood of his own son to be shed so that someone’s mistakes could be “paid for”. Is this not what abortion does? It calls for the bloody death of a child to be executed so that an-other's mistake can be assuaged. Do you think this hypocritical?   Jesus said of His Father… 132:4.2 Always the burden of Jesus’ message was: the fact of the heavenly Father's love and the truth of his mercy, coupled with the good news that man is a faith-son of this same God of love. Paul’s failures are serious and grievous as they have caused our Paradise Father’s children to have great fear of Him and self-hatred for themselves as being “bad” with original sin and innate evil etc...   121:6.5 Paul failed...and that was the doctrine of the atonement;...Paul's theory of original sin, the doctrines of hereditary guilt and innate evil and redemption therefrom, was partially Mithraic [pagan] in origin, having little in common with ...Jesus' teachings. Some phases of Paul's teachings regarding original sin and the atonement were ORIGINAL WITH HIMSELF. ​ Tenet 11 WOW! Let us find the falsehood! 11 God created Hell to send unbelievers for eternal fire and torment.   86:4.8 Almost every group had a different idea regarding the destiny of the ghost soul. The Greeks believed that weak men must have weak souls; so they invented Hades [Hell] as a fit place for the reception of such anemic souls; these unrobust specimens were also supposed to have shorter shadows. So, Hell is an invented/made up story to convince people to be strong and have good souls. We now know that we do not need any fear tactics from supposed religious teachers/leaders to scare us into making good free will choices that thus grow our own souls. Because Hell is not real in the first place we have no need of :   1. Thinking that any erring human will be consigned to the fiery torture of Hades.   2. Thinking that WE are fortunate due to the fact that WE have chosen God, are better and more righteous than others so that we can be grateful to God that he will not send us to eternal torment. [Note: Jesus said that there are no chosen people. Our Paradise Father loves all of His children equally.]   3. Appreciating Jesus for taking my place since supposedly I deserve to go to Hell and experience God’s painful, burning anger and rage at me for my sins. I do not need to be thankful that Jesus willingly chose to be my substitute in Hell because THERE IS NO HELL! ​ These are all silly ideas and concepts.