It is Enough to be an Israelite, But Enough for What?

Apparently VLC on Windows, which I have used to apply metadata for years, has been ruining podcasts. But only some listeners had problems while others did not. So once again, I have resampled and uploaded a new file, as of 11:30 AM on the 22nd. Thank you for your patience! 

It is Enough to be an Israelite, But Enough for What?, Part 1

The medieval Roman Catholic paradigm relating to salvation and heaven, or judgment and hell, has been ingrained into all modern Christian theology to such a degree, having been imbued into our thought from perhaps as long ago as 1,800 years, that it may be one of the most difficult errors of Roman Catholicism to overcome. But it really cannot be overcome at all, until one learns the proper differences between the wheat and the tares, the sheep and the goats, and can identify the good race of fish in the parable of the net. While Bertrand Comparet did know those differences, in my opinion he nevertheless had not fully thought them out in other areas of Scripture, and especially in this area. But we can forgive him, since the subject of salvation and the common perception concerning salvation is probably the deepest rabbit hole in Scripture. No matter how many times one may read the promises to the fathers and the words of Christ, there is always that one verse by which one may imagine that a child of God may ultimately and eternally be cast into the pits of hell, or the Lake of Fire.

It is Enough to be an Israelite, But Enough for What?, Part 2

As we had seen in Part 1 of our critique of Bertrand Comparet’s sermon, Is it Enough Merely to be an Israelite?, he had clearly taken Romans 11:26 out of the context of the epistle itself so that he could critique Paul, and he even accused Paul of having misquoted scripture. Then he denied the veracity of Paul’s statement that “All Israel shall be saved” where he compared it to Isaiah 45:17, while he ignored Isaiah 45:25. While for many other reasons we may love Bertrand Comparet, this approach to scripture is what even he himself had professed to have rejected, and he must be corrected. If we truly believe Yahweh our God, and if we love Yahshua Christ, then we shall seek to reconcile and understand all of Scripture, without ever assuming that one verse can cancel out another, or that we can arbitrarily pick a favorite and ignore others.

In Romans chapter 9 Paul began by praying for his kinsmen according to the flesh, those who truly were of Israel, as opposed to the Edomites in Judaea for which he had then contrasted Jacob and Esau. Continuing at the beginning of Romans chapter 10, he continued his prayer where he addressed his Roman readers and said “1 Brethren, truly the preference of my heart, and supplication to Yahweh is for preservation on their behalf. 2 I attest to them that they have zeal for Yahweh, but not in accordance with full knowledge.” So there he was still speaking of his “kinsmen according to the flesh”, of those true Israelites in Judaea for which he had prayed in chapter 9.

Here we shall continue our presentation and critique of Bertrand Comparet’s sermon, Is it Enough Merely to be an Israelite?, but doing so I will probably have to repeat myself at least a few times. That is because Comparet opened his sermon by criticizing Paul of Tarsus in Romans chapter 11, where Paul had properly paraphrased the prophet Isaiah and said “all Israel shall be saved”, yet Paul was speaking of the salvation of the spirit and eternal life, within the context that temporal salvation may not be attained, whereas all of the examples by which Comparet attempts to refute him relate only to the temporal salvation of the flesh or the nation. Disagreeing with Paul where he said “All Israel shall be saved”, Comparet mentioned not one of the many promises of eternal salvation, resurrection, or redemption from death and the grave which are found in either the Old or New Testaments. He only mentioned Isaiah 45:17 while criticizing Paul, and neglected to note Isaiah 45:25, or perhaps he may have realized that he could not have justly criticized Paul.

But Comparet was a trained attorney, and an attorney is never going to introduce evidence which hurts his case. Here he has tried to make a case that Paul of Tarsus was wrong, and that all Israel shall not be saved, and it is our endeavor to defend Paul and his statement. So now, as he continues, while there are indeed many good ideas found throughout his sermon, he only provides examples, some of them quite lengthy, of temporal punishment and temporary deliverance. But those examples do not relate to any of the promises of eternal salvation found in Scripture, and it seems as if, at least in this sermon, Comparet completely failed to distinguish between the two, and to rightly divide the Word of Truth.

It is Enough to be an Israelite, But Enough for What?, Part 4 - Our Rebuttal to a Sermon by Bertrand Comparet

We have now taken three of these presentations to both present and critique the entirety of Bertrand Comparet’s sermon, Is it Enough Merely to be an Israelite?, which is contrary to our own view of Scripture, and, at least in our own opinion, we have discredited all of his arguments and all of his witnesses as either being inaccurate or as being irrelevant to the subject of eternal life. As we have seen, all of Comparet’s examples from Scripture concerned only temporal punishment or salvation, whereas he was errantly using them in a context which disputed the basis for eternal salvation.

But it is not sufficient merely to deconstruct what we believe are some of Bertrand Comparet’s errors, without offering support for our own position. So we also offered an allegory as we closed our arguments against him, that since he was a lawyer and we have cross-examined all of his witnesses, now we would present our own case. As we proceed, we shall also provide proof texts which inform us that these are indeed two separate issues, that eternal salvation and temporal salvation are two different subjects. It would be a joy to have Comparet here to cross-examine our witnesses, but of course that is not possible.

So here we shall present our own point of view, and our own witnesses which inform us that it certainly is enough merely to be an Israelite in order to attain eternal salvation. But that alone does not mean that there will be any reward in that salvation, so in our rebuttal we added the question, But enough for what? We will discuss that here as well, even if the full implications are not revealed to us in Scripture. As the apostle John wrote in chapter 3 of his first epistle, “2 Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” In this area especially, we cannot claim to know anything more than what John had known.