You Can’t Cheat Eternity :: By Alice Johnson Childs

(Mark 8:36-37)

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Folks, the pre-trib rapture is real. It is also imminent. The coming seven-year Tribulation is real, and it, too, is imminent. Not long after the RAPTURE event occurs, a covenant between the man who will be the Antichrist and the nation of Israel will be made. At that point, earth’s final seven years will commence. This fact, as well, is reality. Additionally, Heaven as an actual place is real. It is the destination where the Remnant Church, both living and the resurrected dead in Christ in New immortal bodies, will go when Jesus comes to rescue His body/bride in an event so instantaneously quick and sudden that it cannot be quantified or measured – an event that will happen any day, any moment now. You need to understand this reality.

Another thing you need to realize is that Hell, too, is just as real a place as Heaven. Hell is as real a place as the room in which you are sitting.

On a video today, I heard a man state that his legacy, that is, the body of work he has amassed and will leave behind upon his death – that all his accomplishments (and his body of work is indeed impressive and prodigious) will mean that once he dies, he will have cheated death by the sheer quantity and quality of his life’s work that he will leave behind. If I could have talked to that man face to face, I would have told him that what he was assuming was a bald-faced lie. No one cheats death, except for those believers still living whom Jesus will snatch out of this world at the rapture.

Could I have spoken to this man, I would have asked him this: “And what about eternity, sir? What then?” Just because he, or you for that matter, may not believe in eternity does not make its existence any less real. That attitude is the height of arrogant folly and prideful foolishness. The Bible tells us that “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1-3).

Contrary to this man’s foolish arrogance, when he dies, he will not have cheated death regardless of how much of a body of work or the amount of wealth he will have amassed or left behind, and he most certainly will not cheat eternity. Neither will you. His and your immortal soul will end up in one place or the other: Heaven or Hell, depending on what he and you do with the gospel of salvation.

Once again, I beg you – in the exceedingly short time we have left before the rapture happens, examine very carefully what you believe and in whom you have placed your trust. If your faith and trust lie in anything temporal – if your trust rests in ANYTHING or ANYONE, including your own efforts and self-righteousness – then according to God’s Word, you are lost and on your way to an eternal Hell, a real and dreadful place from which your immortal soul will never escape. These are not my opinions or words; they are God’s.

Until you repent Biblically, that is, until you change your mind from unbelief to belief and trust in Jesus Christ alone for the remission of your sins according to the scriptures, then you are not prepared for eternity. What must you do to be saved? The Bible says: ACKNOWLEDGE that you are a sinner helplessly and hopelessly lost. You have been born under the curse of sin, separated from God by your sin-infected nature. You need a perfect, sinless Savior to pay the penalty incurred by sin – a penalty that is demanded by the justice of a holy and utterly righteous God.

Sin’s penalty is the infinite penalty of spiritual death, which is eternal separation from God. It is a penalty that is incurred by all fallen, sinful humanity because we are all born under the curse of sin. It is a penalty that neither you nor any other sin-cursed, sin-infected human can ever pay (Romans 3:23; Romans 10:9-10; Romans 6:23).

ACKNOWLEDGE that you can never say, do, be, or become righteous enough on your own merits or by your own efforts to save yourself from the wages or penalty for sin that must be paid. Neither can you, by any effort on your own, keep yourself saved. This is because the very best we can offer is, in the sight of God, like filthy rags next to His glorious holiness and righteousness (Isaiah 64:6).

ACCEPT that only Jesus Christ, who is God the Son, being both fully God and fully man, has already come to earth – God incarnate, God in the flesh. He alone is qualified, able, and willing to save you, to give you eternal life, and keep you eternally saved, sealed by the Holy Spirit of God (John 6:27; 2 Corinthians 1:21-22; 2 Corinthians 5:5; Ephesians 1:13-14; Ephesians 4:30).

BELIEVE – place your faith and trust in Jesus Christ and in Him ALONE. Accept His freely offered gift of salvation for the forgiveness of ALL your sins: past, present, and future. ACCEPT that Jesus has already, once and for all time, paid in full the eternal penalty for the sins of the world and that He alone freely offers complete forgiveness and a full pardon to whosoever is willing to believe in Him.

BELIEVE – that means place your faith and trust in His deity, in His sinless life, in His substitutionary death in our place, in His burial in a borrowed tomb, in His FINISHED work on the cross that paid our sin debt. Believe in His bodily resurrection from the tomb on the third day, according to the scriptures (John 3:14-18; 1 Corinthians 15:1-4).

This is the gospel according to the scriptures. This is the only gospel that can eternally save your immortal soul. It is what must be believed and accepted for one to be eternally saved and eternally sealed in Christ. If you reject this gospel, if you add anything to it, including your own self-righteous efforts, or if you take anything from it, then doing that changes the gospel of grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. Once changed, it then becomes a different gospel, a false gospel that God, through the Apostle Paul, says is a false “accursed” gospel that can save no one (Galatians 1:8-9).

With all my heart, I implore you — perhaps for the last time before Jesus appears in the air to deliver His Remnant Church in the rapture — believe THE gospel according to the scriptures that I have given to you yet one more time. Do it now. You cannot halt or delay the rapture by one millisecond. You cannot cheat death, and you will not cheat eternity.

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