Reincarnation Is A Lie

Reincarnation Is A Lie!

With the rise in New Age/Eastern oriented religions, it is becoming more and more common to hear people who claim they are “Christians” express belief in the teaching known as reincarnation. Reincarnation is the belief that the soul, after the death of the body passes into a newborn human body. A variation of this belief known as transmigration holds that the soul could be reborn into the body of an animal, insect, or plant. Reincarnationist Dick Sutphen a number of years ago also proposed the idea that a soul can abort its present incarnation and be replaced by a “walk-in” soul to finish out the life of the body. Mr. Sutphen believes he is such a soul. According to reincarnation, a person living today may have lived many lives prior to its present one, and it is believed to be the means of social evolution by which spiritual perfection is achieved. A law known as karma is said to govern the state a person is in and determines whether the soul progresses to a higher state, or is reborn again to correct a previous mistake. An example of this would be a person who has racial prejudice could be reborn as a Negro in his next life. A person who mocked, or mistreated a handicapped person may be reborn in a body that has no arms or legs, or with mental retardation. Thus this law of Karma is used to explain the seeming injustices of life. It has often been claimed that the Bible taught reincarnation and that the Catholic Church removed all references to it from the Bible, but this claim is utterly false as can be seen by comparing the Bible as we have it today with the ancient manuscripts. Reincarnation was never taught in the Bible, and is inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus Himself and the Bible. Jesus Himself said at Matthew 25:46, “and they will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” The teaching of reincarnation does not allow for everlasting punishment in Hell which is what Jesus and the Bible actually teach (see also Matthew 25:31, 32; Acts 17:31; 2Thessalonians 1:610; Hebrews 9:27 and Revelation 20:11-15). Reincarnation teaches that each person lives many lives and dies many deaths, but Hebrews 9:27 rules out any possibility of being born and dying over and over and over again, by declaring that it is appointed unto men to die once, and after this, comes Judgment. Reincarnation teaches that sins committed in a past life are corrected for in a succeeding life, but the Bible declares that all sins are potentially forgiven by

a one time event which is the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross, for Hebrews 10:12 declares, “But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.” Verse 14 of this same chapter adds, “For by a single offering he has perfected forever those who are sanctified.” The death of Christ upon the cross is a meaningless even to those who believe in reincarnation, thus reincarnation is incompatible with New Testament Christianity, and God’s Plan of salvation, which is not by a series of rebirths into succeeding bodies and lives, but by grace through faith in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:8-9). Reincarnation makes salvation works-based, whereas God’s plan of salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and His one time offering for sin upon the cross. Reincarnation is a lie! What about reports of children and adults supposedly remembering past lives? While many of these seem convincing of reincarnation, they aren’t really. For one thing, it has been shown that in many instances a person was not actually recalling a past life, but was remembering details from a book he/she had read. In other instances, especially where children are concerned, these “memories” have been shown to be the product of active imaginations, and in the other instances, the “past life regressionist” planted false memories of a past life in the hypnotized subject’s mind. In some instances, details of a supposed past life memory have proven to be amazingly accurate, and this has been taken as “proof” of reincarnartion, but is it really? No! In all likelihood it is a demonic spirit planting false memories of an actual person and the events of that person’s life into the mind, and deceiving that one into believing they have been reincarnated. The false teaching of reincarnation is a masterful deception by satan designed to make Jesus’ sacrifice upon the cross of no effect and thus thwart God’s Plan of Salvation, resulting in its adherents going out into a Christless eternity in the Lake of Fire (Matthew 25:41, 26; Rev. 20:11-15). Jesus said one must be born again (Greek: anew, from above – John 3:3-7). It is not a physical rebirth as Jesus clearly showed in His reply to Nicodemus, but a spiritual birth brought about by the Spirit and Word of God (John 3:3-7; Ephesians 5:26).