Catholics Don't Believe You Can Earn Your Way to Heaven

A man commits a serious crime, then he gets released. He has "paid his debt to society". But wait a minute, he's only ready for the half-way house. He's unlikely to get a prestigious job in his new prison suit coat, or any job at all; he has civil impediments, he can't vote or hold certain offices. His crime was serious enough that he won't be presumed to have been completely rehabilitated until he performs a notable service to society, or at least spends many years on the straight and narrow, so that his crime can be truly overlooked or forgotten.

In Catholic faith, your "debt to society" is paid by Jesus Christ on Calvary. It's called "eternal punishment", without Christ it keeps you from going to heaven. Supposing that you do take advantage of His sacrifice, you're truly sorry, have a firm purpose of amendment, if you relapse, you go again for forgiveness (to the Sacrament of Confession).

But your sin leaves a strong trace at another layer of impurity called "temporal punishment due to sin", like the civil impediments facing the half-way house prisoner. Because "nothing impure can enter heaven", there is a place or a state, a condition of purification to render you fit for heaven after Christ has finally saved you from hell. The Catholic Church calls it purgatory.

(Where is it in the bible? Where is the word Trinity in the bible? Where does it say that you only need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? Many valid principles aren't stated explicitly in the bible, but it does say to "hold fast to the traditions you have learned, whether by word or by letter", because much of the Gospel wasn't written down, as Jesus only wrote in the sand, the majority of the Gospel was taught from word to ear to people who couldn't afford expensive books, the exceptions were what tended to get written down. But the implication that there is a purgatory, is contained in the bible--see the comments.)

The ex-con can receive a pardon or commutation of his probation from a Governor, if he performs some heroic deed, saving numerous lives, or, like Chuck Colson, performs a long-lasting, valuable community service helping numerous people who can't help themselves.

In the Catholic Church there are 2 ways for the residual, temporal effects due to sin to be expiated: suffering in this life, or after life, undergoing purifying suffering along with other people who will finally be saved, but have to suffer for long without the vision of God--that is what causes them their pain.

Their suffering isn't meritorious enough to grant their release, the saints in heaven and those on earth suffering and practicing virtue can pray for the suffering souls in purgatory. In no way is their release by slow transfer of suffering or practice of virtue, "buying heaven". It's a long, excruciating process.

How the misunderstanding arose that Catholics think they can buy their way into heaven, is involved with history more than 500 years old. For a millennium of Christendom between roughly 410 and 1410, there was a Medieval civilization with harmony between faith and government.

Many small farmers would cluster around the manor house of a military lord who would protect them, in exchange for a certain fixed obligation of labor and agricultural produce. In most cases, those "serfs" had much more leisure than factory workers of the industrial revolution; there were a large number of holy days without work, and except for planting and harvesting, there were long stretches of idle time.

Another large sector of the economy surrounded monasteries, where the monks developed most of the farming practices that stabilized the serfs and their manorial lords. The monks who worked those monastic lands were sworn to poverty, so that monasteries built up large accumulations of economic value over decades and centuries of labor.

At the beginning, when lands were being cleared and put into production there weren't prominent town fairs ruled by merchants and bankers. Money wasn't used for sustenance, not even much barter occurred, life was mostly agrarian.

Charity was woven into the economy of monasteries. It was estimated that you only need travel 12 miles in medieval England between monasteries, where you could get a meal and minimal lodging for free, based on need. And the charity was also spiritual, including the ancient Catholic principle of prayer for the dead, which is biblical. (See "prayer for the dead" in the original King James Bible in the comment.)

There were foundations and benefices for praying for the dead, that allowed a person of means to support monasteries' charitable works, and in proportional response the monks would pray for the souls of the donors.

It happened at the close of the middle ages, that militarily strong nobles cast their eyes on the labor value accumulated by the poverty-sworn monks of the monasteries, which those nobles perceived as monetary wealth, especially where gold and jewels had been donated by the devout to adorn churches.

(Protestant writer William Cobbett wrote in his 1824 "A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland", an anecdote, that an incredibly valuable, hand illustrated bible was stripped of it's bejeweled, gold cover, the much more valuable hand-illumined manuscript, thrown in the mud and trampled by horses hooves by raiders suppressing the monasteries in Henry VIII's England.)

A new religion growing up around this seizure of monastic lands and valuables, that sought to discredit the Catholic Church, spread the black legend that the "sale of indulgences" was abusive. But this was very exceptional. Today the stipend of a Mass said for the dead is $10.

What you just said, Mark17, is what the Scripture text says:

"⁹But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain. ¹⁰A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; ¹¹ Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself" (Titus 3:9-11 AV).

I think that when someone who is religionist enough to know some thing about, say, the Ten Commandments, is a person whose pride is still not allowing him/her to admit that in the natural un-reborn state they are so depraved that no works they try to do can be enough to earn their way to heaven.

They can not admit that in their natural state Jehovah considered their "good works" as one would look at "filthy rags" worth only to b discounted and discarded; that the only good works that count for them is the faultless, perfect life, death, resurrection of the God-Incarnated human Jesus, Whose substitutionary sacrifice for anyone who will plead to the Judge of All that they will let themselves to become obedient slaves of His Son, His Shed Blood levied by the Judge as paying for their sin debt to Him, completely satisfying His Righteous Lawful Demands be bought out, Jesus' Shed Blood the currency and Jesus' time of Agony in it allaying the Judge's Furious Wrath forever.

If one's false pride will not allow the sinful human to admit his/her inborn worthlessness and faulty conduct when called to accountability in life, then he/she will be left under condemnation when physical death arrives, though you or I try to warn them of it, asking the just to become as lowly as we have, to reach out for the totally gracious gift of pardon, eternal life, and fellowship with Him that the Judge freely endows when they complete the transaction of accepting Jesus as their Master to replace the Devil who had been even from their conception.

You and I are tasked with this news, and when ignored, must go on to both warn and notify others like us of the joy that awaits them. Thanks you for encourage me and others, Mark17! We do have good works that our Heavenly Father asks us to perform in this life, AFTER we are inducted into the Company of the Committed servants of Jesus by our utter complete trust in Him as our Savior, Teacher, and Lord of All.

Looking forwards to our trip into the Clouds with our new faith-born vehicles, my dear Bro!

>> 39. We are not of them. Tactfully, the writer includes all of his readers in the group that will “live by faith” (v. 38). The admonition of vs. 23–36 implies that some of them were in danger of drawing “back unto perdition.” But the writer now banishes the thought that any of them will actually do so. <<

Where you, Philsworld, and the Seventh Day Adventists (Ellen G. White, who is forbidden to teach Spirit-born men, 1 Tim. 2:11-12, but went on to usurp authority over men in an assembly claiming to be "Christian") utterly fail is to deny that this epistle was written TO people og descent only, across the whole diaspora of previously Temple-slanted Jews. perhaps including their proselytes (who have been converted to the Jewish religion but not counted as to the race until after a number of consistent allegiance of their descendants).

What apparently id left out by the less fastidious "scholars" is that this epistle was written (~63 A.D.) in the interim period after the formation of the Jerusalem prototype Lord's Day Assembly (instituted by the Spirit of God and Christ on the day of Pentecost (first day of the week, not the seventh, ten days after His Final Ascent), but before Peter wrote his Second Canonical Epistle to the Diaspora (~67 A.D.; see 2 Pet. 3:14-17), which was also written before Tisha B'Av (70 A.D.) that scattered almost all of the Jewish population of Jesusalem and complete cessation of any post-Cross anima; blood-sacrifices until this day, where the Roman Legionnaires destroyed the Temple of Error which was in disobedience both to God and to the God-permitted governors over Palestine.

In this period there were still hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been born before the Cross-episode, and been well-exposed both to the greatly-recognized personal ministry of healing of spirit, soul, and body by The Messiah Jesus of Galilee, the most significant His Substitutionary Death by Cross, which doctrinally terminated the Mosaic/Davidic Covenant of Atonement by perennial blood-letting of animals (the performance of rites that were allotted to the Hebrew tribes alone, the only humans who had been set aside (wholly sanctified as a nation of Jacob's descendants alone, no Gentiles included) by Jehovah as His People; their sins atoned for provisionally by the blood of bulls and goats and doves, etc. in the place of the human blood/death that should have been taken as a consequence of a capital sin.

Now, On the Cross, where Jesus' earthly task was concluded, the propitiary sacrifice performed once for all time, the Law Covenant done, closed, abrogated, and the recurring ineffective sacrifice of animals no longer accepted by God the Judge (Heb/ 10:1-4); then the New Second Covenant (the Age of Grace, the Church Age) instituted in June of 33 A.D., any Jews who still wished to dwell in obedience to, and in favor of Jehovah Elohim and The Messiah Jesus must now leave the 1,200-year-old heritage of continual Temple-sacrifice that Jesus' death should have ended--these Jews born under the Law Covenant MUST transition to the NEW Covenant of salvation by faith in Jesus, public profession of a person that he/she had irrevocably transitioned from the sphere of sanctification by birth into the Jewish race under OLD LAW COVENANT of priestly-administered religious rites, from that over to the sphere of the NEW GRACE COVENANT (Heb. 10:8-11) in which a person is set apart for Jehovah's possession and use individually by an individual second birth in the spirit-dimension, into a new race of children of God, and NOT AGAIN in the worldly realm as children of Jacob/Israel.

That is, a Jew MUST give up his/her old ritual-based religion in order to qualify the faith-based relationship to God as a child as was His Son, by a public profession of that faith, no "good works" previous to that induction as a recruited disciple credited at all to that disciple's record--only the works done by the God-human Nazarene counted to that new babe into The Faith, and the Righteous of the Nazarene imputed along with that confirmation of a Heaven-recognized new spiritual being (each of whom who will begin to be trained to have authority even over the best of "good" angels; 1 Cor. 6:3).

This doctrine is discerned spiritually by close examination of all the pronouns used in Hebrews, and what persons or groups they include or exclude according to the context (no "unsaved" theologians need apply; see 1 Cor. 2:13-16). Particularly you, Philsworld, are not likely to form, discern, find, or believe the true doctrine that you have already been shown in these comments on the article being discussed, from SDA commenters, or by your own discernment.

What I am saying is that in this interim period when hundreds of thousands of Hebrews that wanted to remain in favor with God the Father, and His Son Jesus the Messiah, and with the now-temporal-resident Comforter The Holy Ghost, it was absolutely necessary for a Jew to make the transition, abandoning even a necessity (but not the permission) of plain-literal physical circumcision (but not heart-wise figurative-literal heart-circumcision), accepting even a Gentile into intimate fellowship relationship--in order to be considered a "Christian" as a trade, an occupation, as did the Antiochians of that time (Acts 11:26) and a little later recalcitrant Jews (Acts 26:28), and finally even the original Apostles themselves (1 Pet. 4:16).

But in this book. it is only many Jews who by habit, by family rejection of others clinging to the Ols Law, and of persecutors, there are those who ". . . were once enlightened^{(saw or heard of Jesus and/or His Gospel that overrode the Law and its dismissal)not Indwelt, but healing of mind and body through Jesus or His still-living Apostles for their validation until the Holy Writings were finally completed by the last Apostle alive, then closed for all time)}, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost^{(in hearing the preaching of the faith-inducing Spoken Words of God, and its partially written testament that involved the once-and-final Cross-death of The Messiah in His love for His Created Souls, never to be re-performed ever, but applied to the sinner upon total acceptance of the entrusted gracious Gift of salvation and sanctification of the Bride of Christ and entrance to it of those who are willing to become the possession of its Groom)}, . . ."-- this is the segment of all earthly human inhabitants, limited by then the above scripture-defined boundaries, that are covered by the sentence of the Judge at their withdrawal from the tentative partial acceptance of a partial but not total acceptance of The Gospel and its Author, but not a final, total, irrevocable, unreserved commitment into the care and saving power of The Lamb of God; who then in their Satan-influenced pride withdraw from this transaction, and become irredeemable: "It is impossible . . . If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame."

Since the Temple sacrifices of animals were no longer accepted by God (though the unbelieving Sanhedrin, elders, and priests kept pn with them until 79 A.D.); once the one-time Sacrifice of Jesus was accepted by God, any Hebrews rejecting His provision had no other ways to have their sins covered to hide or erase them from Jehovah's scrutiny personally, or as a nation at the now-dismissed Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement).

It is this narrow segment within the total population of dispersed Hebrew/Jewish population of that time ONLY that can be included under the provisions of the Law that they still think applied, and that segment ONLY that Hebrews 10:26-28 applies. In that passage, where sanctification is mentioned, it is Jehovah's sanctification of THE WHOLE NATION is inferred, under which each individually could decide whether they wanted to participate or not, and be judged by the Law and its priests and nobles.

That passage DOES NOT apply to the Bride of Christ as a whole, or to any of its truly redeemed-by-complete-faith-and-regenerated individuals, ever. And that is the "we" that the whole context defines as the transitioned Hebrews from the Old Covenant into the theologically defined New Covenant, which one of the most important purposes of the epistles was written TO the Hebrews for THEIR application, for the understanding of the now-current Covenant in effect AFTER the coming to Earth of the Holy Spirit to each of the 120 Jewish members integrated and sanctified as ONE in Christ.

Later there were individuals whose initial enthusiasm and personal pride brought them to the point of profession of belief in baptism (but not by God's omniscient instant evaluation and spiritual rebirth). But even they do not come under the Hebrews 10:26 doctrine. Even current sectarian Jews do not, for as they have never been accountable to Hebrews 6:6 completely. No animal sacrifice has been made for their present sinning.

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Remember, the Bible student of the Hebrews epistle can now learn of how the Jewish religion was implemented before and in the first century of the Anno Domine calendar, but unless one's foundation is to understood that the audience was for Hebrews to see the mysteries of the Law revealed by the establishments of the New Covenant that demystified the rites of the Laws as they provided for their final activation to establish the New Covenant, they will not be "rightly dividing the Truth(s)" as Cyrus Ingerson Schofied demonstrated in his widely distributed volume of it, and had a volume of the Authorized Version of the Bible annotated by a select board of conservative scholars selected for it.

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