How Can You Make Mentally Retarded People Believe In Christ? Will All Humans Be Saved Even Without Their Personal Faith?
Answer: Greetings to you in Jesus name! Thanks for writing this important thing. This pastor is knowingly or unknowingly without self-realisation is a classical universalist who wants to make a case for salvation outside of the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I choose to say the truth of the Bible that Salvation is for all humans but not outside of accepting Jesus as one's Savior and themselves as sinners through hearing the gospel of Christ.
Here is what the apostle Paul says about this issue, "3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time, 7 for which I was appointed a preacher and an apostle—I am speaking the truth in Christ and not lying—a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth." (1 Tim 2:3-7). In the above verse we see that God desires all men to be saved, but how?, through coming to know the knowledge of truth which is the fact that there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time, so that all who hear the gospel through preacher's and apostle's should receive in faith the truth that they hear to be saved by God from sin and receive eternal life. So the truth of the gospel of Jesus creates a faith in the heart of those who hear and believe it, this saves the sinful people from sin to have friendship with God for eternity ahead (John 3:16).
So can a person be saved apart from hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ and believing it?
No it is not possible at all, that is why one of the greatest of all apostle like Paul, clearly revealed in his writing asking all of us the question such as, "How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?" (Rom 10:14). In other words, Paul the apostle was asking all readers of the Bible, how can someone believe the gospel unless it is preached or shared with the hearers or readers. So he emphasizes that God appoints people to preach the simple message of the gospel which is actually the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ which saves people from sin and death, and imparts eternal life to them (1 Cor 15:3-4). Praise the Lord!
So what does this teach us? It teaches us the importance of the Gospel message and its proclamation. Then it teaches us that only those who believe the message will be saved. Not all people who receive the Gospel accept it and humble themselves before God as sinners to receive salvation (2 Thess 3:2). But some do believe and get saved (Acts 17:34; 18:10; 16:14). With out faith, no one can please God to get saved from sin and receive eternal life (Heb 11:6). There may be thousands of people who hear the message of the gospel when it is preached to them, but the Lord opens the heart of only the sincere humble sinners who accept themselves as sinners and seek for God's salvation from sin through Jesus Christ his only begotten Son (Jam 4:8-10).
To those people who think that people can be saved outside of the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, here is what Paul the apostle says to them, "20 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe." (1 Cor 1:20-21). In other words the apostle Paul was saying to people who believed universalism which is actually the wisdom of the Greek world, and those who thought that miraculous sign of the power of God as when Moses did against Egypt and thereafter, is the authentication for a Jew to accept some new belief from God, got tripped by the message of the Gospel which has become a foolish message to them because of their worldly belief, so that knowingly it pleased God through the foolishness of the message of the Gospel of Jesus preached to save those who believe. Even today in our twenty first century God has not changed one bit, but expect to save all the foolish things of the world who believe.
Can all the people in the world can get saved? Yes indeed, but all do not get saved because even though they hear the Gospel of Jesus atleast once or many times, the message seems foolish to them and therefore they do not believe it. In others words, all have the potential to get saved if they believe, but they choose not to believe because the good news of Jesus seems very foolish to them. God gets pleased when he sees the simple guys who dare to believe the good news of Jesus and therefore he saves them from sin and gives them eternal life through Jesus Christ his only begotten Son.
How can you make mentally retarded people believe in Christ?
See one of the way people who believe universalism try to justify their wrong belief is by diverting people and themselves to the question of unknown, and then point back to their lies, and then try to justify what they say to be right because all of their hearers do not have an answer for a unknown question they ask. This is one of the Satanic way to justify his lies and sugar coat it with half truth (John 8:43-45).
This is the same that Satan had done from the beginning of time,
"1 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3 but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’” 4 Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”" (Gen 3:1-5).
In the above verse we see that once Eve expressed the half truth to Satan, immediately Satan speaks a full lie and she accepts without any rational thought or question the full lie of Satan which led her to sin and lawlessness, and thus the downfall of the whole humanity. Satan knows that half truth is the best way to deceive people and make them susceptible to sin of unbelief.
What is the half truth with this question, "How can you make mentally retarded people believe in Christ?". The half truth is God planned and allowed mentally retarded people to be born on earth (Exo 4:11). What is the lie that is mixed with the half truth? God is unjust to make people to be born retarded, and therefore he cannot justify his fault by condemning the retarded for something that they do not have the capacity to make a conscious decision to believe the Gospel? Therefore, God has to allow all humans to get saved through the Gospel of false grace that assumes that people can get finally saved by God without their belief of faith in this life. What does the Bible say about this? The Bible says that, "Once a man dies in this life, he does not have the ability to get saved after this life in the after-life, but will head straight to eternal judgment of condemnation only." (Heb 9:27, Paraphrased).
What are the lies assumed and spoken against the word of God? When the Word of God says, "God's way is perfect. All the LORD's promises prove true. He is a shield for all who look to him for protection." (2 Sam 22:31, NLT), the universalist try to assume that God is not perfect in creating mentally retarded people, and therefore is a harsh and hard master who reaps where he has not sown seed and gathering where he has not sown the seed of the Word of God (Matt 25:24; Luke 8:11). Because they falsely assume that God is unjust, they also assume that God will let go of unbelievers in to heaven to justify his own failure.
The people who believe universalism fail to consider the important truth that all humans are born in sin as the sons of Adam (Psa 51:5), and therefore all are declared to be sinners by God because all have sinned and have fallen short of the righteous requirement of a just God (Rom 3:23), so that God now can show mercy to those who accept honestly that they are sinners in need of the Savior Jesus (Rom 5:12, 17, 19; 9:14, 15, 16, 22-24). In other words, we as humans all deserve only hell for our sinful behaviors, but God has chosen to save the honest sinners who believe the foolish message of the Gospel and admit to God humbly that they are sinners in need of the Savior Jesus, to save them from sin to give them eternal life of heaven thereafter. God is just and therefore there is no way one sinner will ever have the opportunity to enter heaven outside of Jesus Christ.
We know that the mentally retarded people cannot be made to believe in Christ because they do not have the mental capacity to make a decision for or against Christ, so will a just God demand a mentally retarded on the day of judgment why they have not believed the Gospel when they had no capacity to believe? By no means a just God will ever demand unjustly a mentally retarded person to have a faith that was not within his conscious capability in the life that he lived on earth? So God will save these mentally retarded person from birth just like He saves the millions of children from the beginning of the world, as they do not have the capacity to take a decision on their own for or against Christ (Matt 18:10; 19:14). Until the age of accountability, all children born on this planet earth will be saved through Jesus Christ by His mercies as they do not have the conscious capability to take a decision for or against Christ (Rom 7:9; Deut 1:39; Matt 7:11).
Because God is just to sacrifice his own sinless begotten Son Jesus Christ for the sin of all humans, he can be just and also the justifier of all those who have faith in Jesus which is the righteousness of God presented as gift to all humans who do not deserve it (Rom 3:26). So just because a lie is assumed by universalist, it cannot make their half truth to become a full truth. A lie is a lie and also any percentage of truth that is less that the perfect 100% truth, it becomes a lie. So the truth of God is, no matter whether a person have sinned once in life or have been a sinner all his life, if he only humbly comes before God as a wretched sinner in need of a Savior and comes to believe God for salvation apart from works of his that he has done (Rom 4:4-5), God saves Him through Jesus Christ immediately and gives Him eternal life.
Apart from belief and faith personally received in one's heart, no truth proclaimed has the power to save. Now we know for sure, that unless a man was given a chance by God to hear the good news at least once in his lifetime, how can a just God judge any human in all the globe for rejecting the righteousness of God? Because God is a just God, he will make sure that all humans gets at least one chance to hear the Gospel of Jesus once in their life time where they would have rejected it. So we know that God never saves people without the gospel of salvation.
So universalism is not just a modern day heresy, but a age old lie of the devil to keep the world deceived from receiving the true salvation in Christ Jesus. To defend a lie, he is accusing you as judgemental and condemning others always. To tell the truth that people will go to hell fire without Jesus Christ is not judgmental or condemning, it is love that is concealed and expressed, and apostle Paul said the same about the unbelievers in love saying, "8 Those who refuse to know God and refuse to obey the Message will pay for what they've done. 9 Eternal exile from the presence of the Master and his splendid power is their sentence." (2 Thess 1:8-9, MSG). Is the above passage a judgment? Yes a righteous judgment. Is the above passage a condemnation, yes a righteous condemnation for all the unbelievers who have rejected the good news of God given to them for salvation. Is it really love of God to speak the truth? Yes it is the love of God to speak the truth of faith with love (Gal 5:6; 1 Cor 13:6).
As I have already said, the universalist will always use half truth to justify their lies and will not stand on the perfect truth of the Word of God, these following statement you can notice are half truth and very general, Christ came to this world not only for Christians, but for all mankind....so will all mankind be saved without faith? By no means, consider the goodness and severity of God, to those who are saved goodness and those who remain unsaved severity (Rom 11:22).
Then when that pastor says, 'hell is not fire, it was Gehenna, a place to burn waste only', he is playing with words...simply read what Jesus has already said about hell which is fire, "47 And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire— 48 where ‘Their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched." (Mark 9:47-48). Here the Greek word used is 'Gehenna' which can only mean hell fire as all the references to gehenna, except James 3:6, are from the lips of Christ himself, and there is an obvious emphasis on the punishment for the wicked after death as being everlasting, fire is never quenched, nor does the worm die, and both will torment the unbelievers as they will gnash their teeth in it forever. All the unbelievers will go in to the lake of fire after the White Throne Judgment of works of unbelievers (Rev 20:11-15).
In the last days the so called pastoral wolves who feed the sugar coated lies of half truth to satisfy the itching ears of those who live for themselves in sin and unbelief, will not stand in truth but will deceive and will be deceived themselves (2 Timothy 3:13; 4:3, 4, KJV), "And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables." Paul uses the word fables, or myths, to describe the remedy that people seek in order to scratch their itching ears. The Burning Garbage Dump of Gehenna is also a myth to deceive and turn people to trust lies. Turning again to the Gospel of the truth of Jesus Christ is the only cure for deception and lies. Yes this pastor's so called gospel of universalism is purely an another Gospel of the end time and last days (Gal 1:8).
Remind yourself with the reminder of the great prince of preachers quote, "Avoid a sugared gospel as you would shun sugar of lead. Seek the gospel which rips up and tears and cuts and wounds and hacks and even kills, for that is the gospel that makes alive again. And when you have found it, give good heed to it. Let it enter into your inmost being. As the rain soaks into the ground, so pray the Lord to let his gospel soak into your soul."
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ keep all the believers in the true Gospel of salvation which is only by grace through faith and not turn away to a different gospel to fall from the grace and thus lose all the heavenly reward that God has for all true believers in the future life of glory with Him (Gal 1:6; 5:4).
Much Blessings...
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