Bible Teachings or Traditions of Men?

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Why, because technically it COULD be a mere name and not a literal prophecy of God incarnate therefore it MUST be that? No wonder you'll never get it.

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If you think that misrepresenting my position is going to convince me that I'm wrong, then you are sadly deluded.

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So much for your discernment.

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I'm discerning your pride and arrogance all too well.

The idea that one could "share" the living Christ by ignoring the written Word, which is the only testimony there is TO the living Christ, is a doctrine made in Hell. That's how we are to think of scripture. Psalm 119 is another glorious testimony to the written word. We're seeing all kinds of fables take the place of the word of God these days, and I would suggest that thinking you can preach Christ without preaching the written word is one of them. So there you have King David and Paul both extolling the supreme value of the written word.You can't know anything or do anything apart from the scriptures.================================================================Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The trouble is Faith you prioritize Biblical inerrancy over the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. As John writes, it is Jesus who is the Word of God and it is through the message of the Jesus, the one who embodies God's Word that we are to understand the Bible in its entirety.

I have tried using the Gospels with you Faith but you reject those readings. Let’s try reading a piece from Paul’s second letter to the Philipians.

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1 If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4 Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-- even death on a cross! 9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

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The point of being Christian as Paul points out is that we are to be united with Christ. As Christians it is Christ that is to be central in our life and specifically that we would have the same love, spirit and purpose. To be very frank Faith, when I read your posts, whether to me or anyone else, I’m just not feeling the love. ( I do not pretend to be perfect in that regard either, so we should probably both clean up our act. )Paul then writes that Jesus did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but became a humble obedient servant and as a result was exalted by God. Paul writes that this was in spite of being in very nature God. God made Jesus, (The Son of Man in Daniel 7) Lord of all. Jesus became part of a triune unity with the one true God.Also as a point of interest Paul talks about under the earth. If we are to get scientific facts from the Bible I’m curious as to how you would explain that.Edited by GDR, : No reason given.

Shall I call you a liar GDR? I should, because you keep saying that about me falsely that I deny what Jesus himself taught. For one thing He is the author of ALL the scripture. To deny the parts of scripture you happen to dislike, as you do, is an offense to Him.And again, it is delusional to think you can know anything at all about Christ without knowing Him through the written word.===================================================================Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I think that we would agree that Jesus is the Word of God in the flesh. Read the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus' whole message is that we are to love our enemies. We are to forgive, go the extra mile, turn the other cheek etc. Jesus lived in what was supposed to be the promised land but they were being cruelly and exploitively controlled by the Romans, yet he tells them that those that live by the sword die by the sword.With Jesus giving us the word of God without any cultural or personal conditioning there is no way as Christians that we can then understood that it would be part of the nature of God to have His chosen people commit genocide or public stoning.It is easy to say that God is beyond our understanding but remember that we are made in His image so that argument just doesn’t cut it. We know that genocide is wrong. We know that death by public stoning is wrong for any offence let alone for picking up firewood on the Sabbath.As Christians it is Jesus who we look to for our understanding of the Father, and it is Jesus that we look to so we can understand what God has to tell us in the Scriptures.So what do you believe? Do you believe the words of Jesus in the Gospels or do you believe in a god that is capable of ordering genocide and public stoning. You may protest that you can, but in truth you can’t have it both ways.For myself, I worship God as revealed in Jesus, and the God we see in His interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. I reject the notion of God that is portrayed as a cruel and vengeful tyrant.

You are some day going to have to account for your accusation of God as anything but righteous and just in His judgments of the peoples you are calling "genocide." And Jesus IS Jehovah so He's the one you're going to be doing the explaining to. Your either/or is human arrogance to the max.

I think his point is that since he believes that God is righteous, he has no alternative but to believe that the horrifying accusations made against God in the OT are a filthy blasphemous slander.If I believed in the afterlife, I might speculate that some day you will have to account for going around telling everyone that God really is the evil stupid pig he's portrayed as in the OT.

But Faith, it is you that is calling God unrighteous. It is you that is saying that mass slaughter is a righteous act. It is you that is saying that public stoning is a righteous act and that those actions are part of God's nature. It has nothing to do with being arrogant. I humbly worship the God that I see incarnate in Jesus.If we are made in the image of God, and if it is ok for God to order mass extermination, then why on earth would it be wrong for us to do it now? Why, would it be wrong to drop nuclear weapons on all so-called non-Christian nations? Why don't we engage in cruel public executions for everyone who doesn't agree with what you like to call orthodoxy? Maybe you think that is what we should be doing. Is that what Jesus would want?

You aren't normally given to making obvious statements, but this one is just that. You share his vile blasphemous slander of God as genocidal, which IS his, and yours, and not the Bible's. The chutzpah, the arrogance, of those here who are willing to condemn God for just and righteous acts of judgment is breathtaking. We are supposed to learn from His judgments what judgments yet await unrepentant sinners, but you throw out the possibility of learning anything by putting your own opinions above the revelation of God. Of course you would, because like GDR you derive your speculations/knowledge/opinions about God from your own fallen capacities rather than from the revelation of God which was given to us to make up for our fallen capacities.

Believe it or not, THAT is an arrogant statement, since it rests on your own judgment and not on God's. It is you who are CALLING God's righteous judgments by denigrating names, calling them "mass slaughter" and "genocide." God gave all those peoples time to repent of their idolatries, their human sacrifices, their fornications and adulteries in their temples and all the rest of it, and after centuries of giving them time He brought the judgment they deserved. Just as they accumulated sins deserving of judgment, so are many nations today doing the same, and in fact judgments have begun already in the West. 9/11 was one. Because we AREN'T righteous, we're sinners ourselves who are under His judgments. He'll judge us too in the end. The image of God was obscured and twisted by the Fall. See above. We have courts and systems of justice by which judgments are to be made of criminal behavior by a fallen people. CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR, not beliefs. We supposedly have guidelines, rules, safeguards against the errors to which fallen humanity is prone, though it seems to me we're losing all the protections against error in those systems that were once more or less in place so they are becoming systems of injustice just as often as not.God cannot err, human beings can and do. He may certainly use sinful human beings as his instruments of judgment, but woe to those who take that role.=========================================================================Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If you agree with me, you have a funny way of showing it. I've never accused God of genocide, 'cos of not believing in his existence. The Bible does, however, as do you. The fact that you avoid using the word "genocide" while doing so is neither here nor there.

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Well, since you did in fact misread it, I thought that was apter advice than: "Rub yourself repeatedly with a small marsupial while singing My Way". I pondered my options carefully.

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I didn't misread it and I said Sharp considered John 20:28 to be an exception. The "Trinity Delusion" argument (Message 158) is incorrect. Thomas was not referring to two different beings. He was referring to only Jesus, but that doesn't mean he was calling Jesus YHWH.Your other examples would fall under the same exception.

I completely trust in God’s judgement. One of the great truths that I believe from Genesis is that in some way we are made in God’s image. If that means anything it means that we have a knowledge of good and evil and the knowledge of which is which. We are both theistic which means that we believe in a God that is active and interested in what it is that has been created. We would also both agree that He has given us the ability to choose between good and evil, and from your post I would assume that you believe that it would be evil for us to engage in genocide or public stoning.Let’s now go back to our agreement that we are made in the image of God and what that entails. We live in democracies. From your posts in other threads I gather that you are not a huge fan of Obama, however you would agree that he is the President. You are in the situation that you acknowledge him as President but you don’t support him. However, I think that you would agree that he is sticking reasonably close to his platform. Now let’s say that you had someone running for President whose platform laid down laws for the nations to follow, but says that they don’t apply to him and furthermore they don’t apply to you when he thinks that it is in his best interest. Would you vote for that man? I f he actually was elected would you support him even though you might be asked to do things that you knew to be wrong?If we are made in the image of God then how can we believe that He is a God that has one set of rules for us and another set for Himself? Worse than that however, when He feels it is necessary to engage in something that is normally deemed evil, he doesn’t do it himself but gets the ones that he has entrusted with His message to commit the evil on his behalf. If I had a President or Prime Minister like that I certainly wouldn’t be one of his/her supporters, so why would I support a god like that. Fortunately I don't have to because God as we see Him in Jesus isn't like that.If you believe that God has given us a moral code to live by but doesn’t live by it himself then I don’t see how you can possibly believe that we are made in God’s image.Furthermore we have the ultimate example of what it looks like when God wants to act decisively against evil. We have the cross and then the resurrection. Evil did its worst and then God conclusively demonstrates that evil does not have the last word. There is no need for God to engage in mass slaughter.Human history has got to tell you that when you use evil to fight evil then evil is obviously going to come out the winner and stronger than ever. The God that we see incarnate in Jesus would never use evil to fight evil. The slaughter of the Canaanites is the complete opposite of what we see God the Father doing through the Son.I know that you don’t accept this but there is a choice that we make as Christians. Are we going to believe that God is capable of being a vengeful, non-forgiving tyrant, (even if just occasionally), that we sometimes see in the OT, or are we going to believe in the loving, just God we see in Jesus, but also who can also be found in the OT in many places? No matter what you think, you can’t have it both ways.I assume we both believe that through the ages God has spoken into our hearts and minds. If we also consider that God inspired people to record their thoughts, but however as He seems to have made the decision to work through humans in general, (even when He returned He did it through the man Jesus), we wind up with views that are imperfect images of the truth. However, we can then consider that these writings are God breathed and that He is able to reach out to our hearts, minds and imaginations through what these humans have written.I believe very strongly that God does reach out to us through the Scriptures, but I also believe very strongly that if we consider that those Scriptures are inerrant in reflecting God’s nature and desires for us, we will gain a distorted picture of a God who is loving, just, forgiving and merciful.Edited by GDR, : No reason given.

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PURPLEDAWN:
I addressed all those issues in Message 138, why are you repeating yourself?

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Alter2ego (previous quote):
So not only does the context of John 20:28 clarify that Jesus is the Son of God and the Messiah, meaning he is not Jehovah (John 20:31), but the context further says Jesus Christ died (John 20:1-3 and 9). The trinity dogma says the Son of God, Jesus Christ, is eternal. According to John 20:1-3 and 9, Jesus Christ literally died. So even if one were to argue that Thomas really assumed Jesus was also Jehovah, Thomas was clearly in error and his error was due to his imperfection.

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Deeming Thomas to be in error due to his imperfection is something you can't support. You're just battling fiction with fiction.

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ALTER2EGO -to- PURPLEDAWN:
You are coming back with the same wash, rinse, and repeat. Therefore, I will repeat what I previously told you . After this, you can argue this particular point with someone else as I will not respond.Thomas was imperfect, as are all humans who are offspring of Adam. Your argument is that because Thomas said "My Lord and My God," at John 20:28, the mere fact that his sayings are recorded in the Bible equates to: "Thomas was right."My point is this. The Bible is a historical book, as well as an instruction manual from Almighty God to all humanity. Because it is a historical book, it reports events and conversations of people. For instance, the bad behavior of the Jewish religious leaders and other characters are reported in the Bible. Are you going to argue that their wrongdoing was actually right, simply because it is part of Biblical history?Now apply that to Thomas who was so lacking in faith that he would not even believe the other disciples who told them Jesus had been resurrected from the dead. Even if one were to argue that Thomas really thought Jesus was Jehovah, it does not matter what Thomas thought because the context of John 20:28 tells us Jesus could not be in a trinity with Jehovah and that Jesus is not also Jehovah. John 20:1-3 and 9 says Jesus died, while the Trinity dogma says Jesus the Son is CO-ETERNAL with Jehovah. Christendom's trinity, written in Article I of The Catholic Faith, is defined as follows:
"There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things both visible and indivisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be THREE PERSONS, of ONE substance, power, and ETERNITY; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
http://www.sevenwholedays.org/2011/03/10/article-i/
http://mb-soft.com/believe/txc/thirtyni.htmAn eternal person cannot die. Being dead for just one minute results in an end to someone's claim to eternity. Jesus was dead for three days. DEFINITION OF "ETERNAL": Eternal means not having a beginning or an end.
http://www.yourdictionary.com/eternal