Show me in the Scripture where there is a perpetual penalty box, where one must sit until an outside force determines you may either ascend to Heaven or descend to Hell. (Unless of course, your friends and family contribute enough money for you to catch the express train out)
I’ll see you Matthew and raise you a Timothy.
1 Tim. 2:5
For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus
Christ never abandoned his faithful, the RCC chose to go with its own version of events rather than the Scripture.
“Show me in the Scripture where there is a perpetual penalty box, where one must sit until an outside force determines you may either ascend to Heaven or descend to Hell.”
Isn’t that what it means when it says that our works will be tested by fire? Isn’t that sort of like a penalty box? You sit there until the works have been tested, and if you fail, you suffer and are cleansed by the fire.
“Unless of course, your friends and family contribute enough money for you to catch the express train out”
That’s a different issue, indulgences, not purgatory. You are quite right, that family and friends do not need to contribute anything for souls in purgatory in order for them to pass through. Which is what the Church teaches.
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus who gave himself as a ransom for all men—the testimony given in its proper time.”
Is ‘mediator’ the same as ‘intercessor’? No. You are quite right that there is only one ‘mediator’, and that is Christ who gave Himself as a ransom.
Christ never abandoned his faithful, the RCC chose to go with its own version of events rather than the Scripture.
“Christ never abandoned his faithful, the RCC chose to go with its own version of events rather than the Scripture.”
If what you say is correct, that the Catholic Church isn’t the ‘one true church’, than Christ did in fact abandon his people for 1500 years until the Protestant Reformation.