Does The Bible Speak Of Reincarnation
Answer:
It is a pagan belief and contrary to everything God says. God saysHebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:
Reincarnation is a convenient belief to allow someone to continue to return to this earth, so that even if someone rejects Christ they will have other lifetimes beyond this one. The fact of the matter is hell is full of people who believed they would be reincarnated and rejected Christs promise and gift of eternal life.
It is probably going to take l lot of prayer on your part and persistence in doing good and loving these people because this is a very strong spiritual stronghold they are under. I too know people who believe this way and they are very, very stubborn in their beliefs. I pray they will come to humble themselves while there is yet time.
Reincarnation In The Bible
- The word reincarnation means “to come again in the flesh.”
- Reincarnation is contrary to several fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith.
- Many people who attend church regularly believe in reincarnation, even though orthodox Christian beliefs deny the teaching.
- The Bible says humans have one life to receive salvation, while reincarnation affords limitless opportunities to get rid of sin and imperfection.
What Does Emanuel Swedenborg Say About Reincarnation
Long before there was widespread knowledge of near-death experiences, and all of the information and experience about the afterlife from them, there was Emanuel Swedenborg .
As far as I know, no one else in human history has ever even claimed to have the length, depth, and clarity of experience in the spiritual world that Swedenborg did. By his account, for the last twenty-seven years of his life he was able to be fully conscious in the spiritual world while still living in the material world. He didnt just hear voices like a spirit medium. He lived and moved among angels and spirits as if he were one of them from his mid 50s until the time of his death at age 84.
During those years, he traveled extensively throughout heaven, hell, and the intermediate world of spirits , fully acclimating himself to the realm that we all pass into after we die. His most popular book, Heaven and Hell offers a verbal map and guided tour of the spiritual world.
While thousands of people have had a brief glimpse of the spiritual world during near-death experiences, and have come back to tell us about it, Swedenborg had several to fully experience the other world, and unlock its secrets. From that extensive experience, he made his few brief but illuminating statements about reincarnation.
In most of those statements, he quickly dismisses reincarnation as a mere fantasy. However, in Heaven and Hell #256 he offers more substance about how people came to believe in reincarnation:
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What Becomes Soul After Death
What becomes of the Soul after death? is an eternal quest of man since time immemorial. Soul is immortal. The other side of the death is scientifically examined and carefully described in this book of Swami Sivanananda Maharaj. It also gives an insight into different beliefs of various races and religions.
Bible Verses About Reincarnation
Is reincarnation Biblical? No, contrary to what others think Gods Word provides sufficient evidence that there is no reincarnation. Do not be conformed to the world. Christians dont follow Hinduism or any other religion. If you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior you will live in paradise forever. If you dont accept Christ you will go to hell and you will be there forever no reincarnation.
New Testament
1. Hebrews 9:27 And just as it is appointed for people to die onceand after this, judgment.
2. Matthew 25:46 And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.
3. Luke 23:43 And he said to him, Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.
4. Matthew 18:8 If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it from you it is better for you to enter life crippled or lame, than to have two hands or two feet and be cast into the eternal fire.
5. Philippians 3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ,
Old Testament
6. Ecclesiastes 3:2 a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot.
7. Psalm 78:39 He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and comes not again.
8. Job 7:9-10 As the cloud fades and vanishes, so he who goes down to Sheol does not come up he returns no more to his house, nor does his place know him anymore.
We will depart as we came
Bonus
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The Bible Does Not Teach Reincarnation
The Bible does not teach reincarnation. As a result, there is no mainstream Jewish or Christian group that affirms reincarnation. On the contrary, the Bible teaches several ideas that stand in opposition to the Eastern religious doctrine of reincarnation:
The Bible rejects reincarnation because it describes another destiny for human beings. Since Old Testament times and continuing into New Testament times believers have affirmed another truth that stands in direct opposition to reincarnation: resurrection. After a human dies, the soul of that person returns to God but the decaying body remains on earth, but the body will one day be resurrected.
Resurrection teaches that after you die, your body sleeps for a time. Your soul continues to live in either Paradise or Hades, but your body remains on earth until the first or second resurrection. The first resurrection is the Resurrection of the Just and the second resurrection is the Resurrection of the Wicked. The Book of Daniel summarizes this teaching: And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.
Did The Bible Ever Teach Reincarnation
Lets dispose of one common rumor right away: the idea that the Bible used to teach reincarnation, but those evil Christian councils changed the text hundreds or thousands of years ago, so that it no longer does.
Hogwash.
There is absolutely no evidence for this.
Now, I have no great love for the so-called Christian councils. Most of them just mucked up Christian doctrine and said nasty things about everyone who disagreed with their particular heresies. But one thing they didnt do was change the text of the Bible. It wasnt really possible for them to do that. There were too many manuscripts of the various books of the Bible, going too far back. Any changes they made would have been so obvious that they would have been rejected.
The only thing the councils could do was decide which books would be in the Bible. However, for the books they did include, the text we have is as good as or better than any other text we have from that far back in history. Though a few minor scribal errors made it through, and there were a few sections added to the originals , for the most part we have a fairly reliable text of the entire Bible. And none of the changes that did take place had any effect on what the Bible says about reincarnation.
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Genesis 2: 12 Jacobs Ladder
In the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis, that covers the time of the patriarches, comes the concept of reincarnation, of the continued come and go of the spirits between the spiritual realm and earth. Jacob, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, had a dream in which is delivered to man this revelation. Some believe that this passage refers simply to the divine privilege of sending messengers to communicate with man, but if this was so, the order would be the other way around: first they would descend and then they would ascend. When specifiyng that the spirits first ascend and then they descend again, it implies something much deeper the death and the reincarnation . The clue is in the phrase set up on the earth which means that the ladder is based on earth, the body. Messengers such as the angel Gabriel that appeared before Mary never took body, they manifested only through spiritual visions.
And he dreamed, and behold a ladderset up on the earth,and the top of it reached to heaven and behold the angels of Godascending and descending on it.Genesis 28:12
The Book Of Ecclesiastes
In the following allegory that it is found through diverse verses of the Book of Ecclesiastes, also called The Preacher and whose writing is attributed to King Solomon, son of David, by the use of the figure of the flow of the rivers to the sea back and forth to describe the incessant come and go of human life, its a clear reference to the continuous reincarnation and disembody of the spirits. He even refers to the veil that causes us not to remember previous lives. And once again, he refers to reincarnation calling it restoration in the original text .
All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full unto the place from whence the rivers come,thither they return again.The thing that hath been it is that which shall be and that which is done is that which shall be done and there is no new thing under the sun.Is any thing whereof it may be said See, this is new?It hath been already of old time,which was before us.There is no remembrance of former things neither shall there be any remembranceof things that are to come with thosethat should come after.Ecclesiastes 1:7,9,10,11That which hath been is now:and that which is to be hath already been and God requireth that which is past.Ecclesiastes 3:15
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What About Suicides As Influenced By Reincarnation
There are different reasons and situations that contribute to the cause of one taking his own life.
These are but a handful of situations that could lead to one taking his own life.
Percent Of Us Christians Believe In Reincarnation Whats Wrong With This Picture
Earlier this year, the NBC evening news presented a story about a boy from the Midwest who claims he is the reincarnation of a man who died more than 50 years ago. The presentation included an interview with Dr. Jim Tucker, associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, who has studied the cases of children, usually between the ages of 2 and 6 years old, who say they remember a past life.
Two days later, I participated in an afternoon of dialogue sponsored by a group in Fairfax county, Virginia, called Interfaith Communities for Dialogue. The theme of the session was What Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs Believe. It included presentations by speakers from all three religions, followed by breakout discussion groups involving Jewish, Christian and Muslim participants as well. In my particular group, I could not but note how the topic of reincarnation dominated the conversation, serving as a microcosm of the larger picture in America today.
According to data released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life , not only do a quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation, but 24 percent of American Christians expressed a belief in reincarnation. This represents a significant deviation from the traditional Judaeo-Christian narrative with which most Americans in the baby-boomer generation grew up. You were born. You lived. You died. And after a judgment you went to heaven or hell forever.
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The Council Of 451 Emphasises The Law Of Reincarnation
As already mentioned, during these religious controversies, reincarnation was never once a topic of discussion. It was held to be a fundamental dogma, which was even reinforced by the Council of 451. Who could have imagined then that Christian theology would so essentially change with the ascension of Justinian to the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire in 527 and what profound repercussions the following centuries would suffer as a result?
The real actor in the shadows was a woman: Theodora, Emperor Justinians wife. She had made a sharp social ascentand this daughter of a bear tamer from the Constantinople circus had used a womans oldest weapon to make her climb. Earlier, she had been a young and beautiful prostitute whose services were happily sought by the aristocracy. Hacebolus, the young governor of Pentapolis, fell for her charms and took Theodora with him to North Africa. But she abused the governors trust and, at the peoples cost, amassed great riches. When, in her greed, she overstepped the mark and Hacebolus was overwhelmed with complaints from the people, he threw Theodora out of his palace and confiscated all her goods. With only the clothes on her back, she fought her way through to Alexandria. At the gates to the city, she was taken in by a hermit named Eutyches. It was the same Eutyches who had originated monophysitism and was now living out his exile there. Later, Theodora would remember this fallen monk and use him to carry out her dark plans.
Reincarnation Robs Us Of Our Humanity
It all has to do with our humanity.
And that has to do with our freedom to choose our own life and our own destiny.
What I personally find so troubling about the systems of belief that include reincarnation is precisely what those who do believe in them find so attractive and comforting.
In every form of reincarnation that Ive encountered so far, there is no eternal hell.
Sooner or later, every soul ends out either re-merged with the Divine or in a state of blissful nirvana that is the Eastern equivalent of the Western heaven.
Whats so bad about that? Isnt it good that everyone would end out in the highest attainable state?
In a word: No.
Theoretically, God could have created the universe so that it contained no eternal evil, or even so that it contained no evil at all. But the cost of doing so would have been the absence of any created beings who were truly human. If real, eternal evil did not exist in the universe, there could be no beings in the universe capable of real, human relationships of love and mutual understanding with God and with one another.
You see, for love to be real human love, it must be freely chosen. God could have created us pre-programmed to love God and love our fellow human beings. But it would have had exactly as much meaning as programming a computer to print I love you on the screen. The computer doesnt actually love you. Its just mindlessly displaying what it is programmed to display.
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What Is Reincarnation Is It Biblical
Since the beginning of time people have wondered when someone dies if that person will be reborn to live on this earth again. In my own experience before salvation, I was told by a Christian Psychic that a reoccurring dream I had when I was younger of me walking up a desert mountain trail in dusty sandals was a memory of me in an earlier life when I was Moses walking up Mount Sinai. It was only later, after salvation and I read the Bible that I realized that there was no such thing as a Christian psychic. However, many people, including some who claim to be Christians, believe in reincarnation. What is reincarnation and is it Biblical?
The Bible And Reincarnation
The Bible makes no mention of reincarnation, but there are several biblical passages that set forth how a necessary purification occurs and whether we are granted more than one lifetime. The Letter to the Colossians states the Christian understanding: When you were dead in your trespasses . . . God made you alive together with him when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross . And the Letter to the Hebrews responds to the question of more than one lifetime? in saying that it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment .
If the record of all our trespasses has been erased, there is no need to come back again and again trying to expunge, by dint of our own striving, the negative imprints on that record. The central message of the gospel is that our fulfillment is not our doing or the result of our own efforts, but rather a gift of Gods grace. So neither one nor many lives can be adequate for reaching perfection. At the heart of Christian faith stands a Savior. This saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, wrote the apostle Paul: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners .
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