You probably have never thought of it, have you? The power of repetition. If someone says something once, it might well be forgotten by the hearer soon after it has been uttered. This has proven to be true in many trial situations where a witness is asked, under oath, if they can recall the defendant having made a certain statement. Often the witness will say, “I can’t recall.” And oftentimes they are telling the absolute truth when they give that answer. But if the defendant said it again, and again, and again, day in and day out, well, that’s a different story, isn’t it?
The power of repetition is a phenomenon understood very well by Satan the devil. I think it was Adolph Hitler who said that a lie repeated long enough and often enough will be accepted as absolute truth by the majority of those who hear that lie. The power of repetition has the power to both bend as well as absolutely destroy the truth. The scriptures are very clear about the state of the dead – that they are just that, absolutely dead, awaiting a resurrection to bring them back to life. But when the opposite is repeated again and again, year in and year out, century in and century out, by countless thousands and thousands that the dead really are not dead at all but very much alive somewhere in the ether, or on another planet called heaven, or inside the bowels of the earth where the fiery flames of hell torture them, or on another plane of existence or dimension then the power of repetition begins to work in the minds of the hearers and it becomes accepted as fact that death is merely an illusion. No one really dies. They just move on to another realm called heaven, hell, limbo, purgatory, or a host of other sites. Did that pagan Chinese farmer who was struck by lightning in the year 746 B.C. go to hell at that moment and has he been there for almost three thousand years now screaming and beating at the flames.
Most folks seem to never follow to their logical conclusion many of the beliefs that they hold to be true. What happened to the pagan Aztec Indian warrior who died in battle in 1429? Pagan that he was, did he go to hell? Has he been there now for nearly 600 years crying and writhing in agony? Wouldn’t you say, “Enough’s enough.” How long would you watch and do nothing as your neighbor took lighter fluid, squirted a bit on his disobedient dog, lighting it and burning a little of the dog at a time, first one foot, then the other, then an ear, then a bit of the back. If you looked out the window and hours later the dog was still yelping and writhing in horrible pain in the neighbor’s backyard, would you just turn away and go back to watching your favorite TV show, thinking, “Well, God does much worse than that to billions of human beings who died lost!”
Haven’t you ever wondered WHY, when the Bible speaks of death and the state of the dead, the Bible writers and characters in the Bible only use one of two terms in describing the dead, saying they are just that – dead – or asleep? These two terms are used interchangeably by the prophets, the apostles and Jesus Himself. Jesus said, “Lazarus is dead….Lazarus is asleep.” But millions believe the very opposite to be true. They believe the dead are now more vibrantly alive in death than they ever were in life!!!
Of course they have several passages of scripture to which they refer that they think shows that Lazarus was not asleep. It never seems to dawn on them that their erroneous beliefs and interpretation, or MISinterpretation, of some scriptures portrays Jesus and many other writers of scripture as being in error or teaching false doctrine.
And what a can of worms I have opened up with this short email article, as to really see the truth of God in this matter one must minutely examine many widely scattered texts throughout the Bible, including those speaking of the “soul”, the “spirit”, immortality and several other related terms and texts. Well, at least I have given you something to think about, huh?
Christ’s Servant (Galatians 1:10-12),
Donald Wiley