Elijah John wrote:
Romans 10.9
If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
vs.
Matthew 7.21
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
Are Jesus and Paul saying the same thing here regarding salvation? How so?
No, not even close.
In Matthew 7.21 Jesus is saying that only those who do the will of the Father God will enter the kingdom of heaven.
In other words, entering the kingdom of heaven has nothing at all to do with Jesus. Only those who EARN their own salvation by doing the will of the Father God will enter the kingdom of heaven.
In fact, Matthew has Jesus making this clear in 25:46 too, "And these (
the unrighteous) shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal."
Righteous people go to eternal life. Not those who believe in Jesus or call him Lord.
I'm not suggesting that there is any truth to these ancient rumors, but this is apparently what they are saying.
Paul, on the other hand, seems to think that merely believing that Jesus was raised from the dead and proclaiming him to be "Lord" will be sufficient to be granted undeserved amnesty as a free gift of belief and having proclaimed Jesus to be Lord.
Again, just more evidence that various authors of these ancient scripts have very different opinions on what they imagine God to be like. Clearly Paul and Matthew have very different ideas.
No need to even speak of any "
Jesus" since it cannot be shown that Matthew's opinions correctly reflect anyone's other than his own. It's ridiculous to think that Matthew could dependably quote a "
Jesus" verbatim decades after Jesus had supposedly died.
So we really have nothing that can be reliably attributed to "
Jesus". All we have are hearsay quotes being claimed decades after Jesus had died.
But if we do allow that Matthew did correctly quote Jesus, then Jesus is saying something dramatically different from Paul. Paul would then be far more likely to be a "
False Prophet" that Jesus warned would come.
After all, where did Jesus ever prophesize the coming of Paul? He didn't.
Why anyone would believe anything Paul wrote is beyond me.