Can A Catholic Who Believes Also In Interceding Through Mary Can Ever Be A Truly Saved Person?
Question : I was watching the interview of a young Indian evangelist [i.e. Mario Joseph : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjUXd4qW9mg] who is being used by God to preach the good news to various people in a challenging way. He says that once he was a young Muslim priest, and in his search for truth in Holy Quran, it converted him to Christianity. But later in his interview he says that he believes in praying to Mary and says that Catholicism is the real deal. What can I believe? He speaks about Christ in reality but then later along with that he also says that he is a Roman Catholic. Is he a really saved person who is a true witness for Christ?
Answer : As you have watched the above video clip of the interview with Mario Joseph, the Muslim priest who is right now a Christian, preaching Jesus all over the world, across many countries, I believe you would have been blessed greatly. This 34 minute video clip so touched me to enlarge my thinking to think out of the box, and I believe that it would have enlarged your thinking out of the box too to understand of how God can really reveal the truth of salvation even through the book of Quran, through directing the real seekers of the truth to move beyond it to open the Bible and find more truth for salvation of their soul. In other words the Holy Book of Islam, also talks about Jesus Christ to reveal Him to the true seekers with in the Muslim community to be saved for eternity. Even though I do not subscribe to Mario Joseph's view about the catholic Church and his belief about praying to mother Mary which cannot be Biblically justified as right and accurate, yet I consider that God has his people even inside the catholic Church and wants them to come out and live in the liberty of the Spirit of Christ, and to glorify Him in a greater and visible way by revealing the Christ within them to the world in darkness (Rev 18:4; 2 Cor 3:5-6; Rom 8:9). In the rapture, even those believers who have not still fully come out of their tradition but have received Jesus as their Savior by confessing themselves to be sinners in need of the salvation of God would be saved from the end time Tribulation, and therefore will be raptured and taken away by the Lord because they too belong to Him who has redeemed them with His very own blood (Acts 20:28; Rev 5:9-10). Praise the Lord!
Make a paradigm shift from now on to understand that God can save anyone as He pleases through His Son, who died to save all the sinners of the entire world (1 Tim 2:3-5). But nobody in the entire world can enter heaven outside of Jesus Christ (John 14:6), God Himself will reveal to all true seekers the truth of Jesus Christ for salvation because except through Him even good and the best person on earth cannot be saved because of the fallen nature of all human beings (Acts 4:12; John 7:17). Certain saints and people of God may lack certain revelations regarding the deep truths of the Bible (Acts 19:1-7), but that doesn't make them any inferior before God, as God always asks account to each person of how much effectively they used what they got, and does not ask account for why they haven't received in their lives. How we have used the truth we got to multiply its effect upon ourselves and our surroundings matters the most (Matt 25:21, 23; 13:10-17; James 3:1; Luke 12:48), because God gives each one of us reward according to how much effectively we have used the truth we got (Rev 22:12). At the same time those saints who lack deeper revelation may lack the grace to understand and operate in higher level of the Truth and the Spirit (Matt 11:2-6; 1 Cor 14:24). One thing that saves sinners to receive eternal life is not how much of the truth they believe, but it is the person of truth who is Jesus Christ whom they confess and believe in their heart that saves them (John 3:16; Rom 10:9-10).
People who are really saved hardly stay within Roman catholic Church because of the lack of sound doctrine, idolatry and false belief that binds them. Only those people who have the rest of their family and loved ones within the Roman catholic Church struggle to come out of it, and yet others like the above case coming from other religious backgrounds in their search for truth would have first encountered the truth of catholic Church first before they could explore in to main stream Christianity. As the search for Jesus and the truth of God was sincere in the above case, he would have been saved (Jer 30:11; 29:13; Luke 11:9), and then seeing his testimony the Roman catholic people would have taken him in to their fold, persuaded him with their doctrine and got him indoctrinated, so that he could be used for the propagation of the gospel. So God need to open up his mind again in the above areas, if he needs to see the full truth of the gospel. But the salvation he has received is eternal one in Christ Jesus (Heb 5:9). Each person is saved by God apart from works of any kind even until they reach heaven (Rom 4:5-8; Eph 2:8-9; Titus 3:4-7). Yes I believe the above person was saved and have got attached to the Roman Catholic Church by his first contact with them, then he got stuck there to continue in it through their persuasion and his exposure to it. So as I said above if he seeks for further revelation concerning the truth of the Bible, he will clearly come to understand the problem within the Catholic dogmatic doctrine and the deception within the Church. But I also believe that God can continue to use the young man to awaken the Roman catholic Church with his passionate testimony that he shares, anyway once the rapture happens those true born again saints of God within the Roman catholic Church also will be taken away and then the Great Tribulation of the end time will start as God has promised. So my question is, so what do we lose if the saints of God and born again believers are scattered by God within the dark areas of deception, thus giving them a opportunity to light the candle and reveal God to people in the dark. Nothing we lose, but everything we gain by scattered saints (Acts 8:4; 11:19-26). So I believe it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Let those saints stay true to God and their calling and glorify God in what they know, and seek for more constantly, one day they will come to understand the full truth of the gospel of Christ (Acts 20:27; 19:2; 2 Peter 2:9).
Much Blessings....
Share:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment