Summations Only

Didn't I say that besides being about rescinding the food laws it is also about God's acceptance of the Gentiles, who had been kept separate partly due to the food laws, which proves He's no respecter of persons? Did you really need me to spell that out?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, I would never claim to represent anybody's FEELINGS, dwise, which is irrelevant to how religion is defined anyway. I'm claiming to be solidly within the orthodox DOCTRINAL camp, sharing their interpretations of scripture, creeds, statements of faith and so on, and I can even go further and say I don't claim to have a perfect grasp of it all either, only that I'm in their camp, have learned from them and am still learning from them. I arrived in this camp after a tour of lots of other camps so it's not that I just fell into it, I chose it. This is how I can claim to represent them, not perfectly, just by belonging to the same doctrinal tribe. I can address you as Napoleon if you like.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

He explained to Isaac in answer to his question that God would provide the lamb for the sacrifice, and I went on to say this was prophetic and fulfilled in the ram caught in the thicket even though he believed it was Isaac who would be sacrificed -- and raised from the dead. It would really help if you would actually quote me because you have misunderstood something and I have no idea what. Have you read any of the many posts I've written on this subject because I believe I've explained it all very well. Which I've said over and over and over, why are you ignoring this? Nor did I say any such thing. PLEASE QUOTE WHATEVER IT IS I SAID THAT HAS LED YOU TO THIS STRANGE IDEA. According to Hebrews 11, and I believe you agreed with this, Abraham expected God to raise Isaac from the dead, and you can see in the facts of Genesis 22 that he had this expectation. I don't recall saying anything about his telling Isaac this but he certainly had this expectation. He intended to kill Isaac and he completely believed what God had promised about making a great nation through Isaac. What else could this imply but that God would raise Isaac from the dead as Hebrews said he thought?You seem to me to be willfully misreading me and insisting on your willful misreading.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As I was writing out the story for NoNukes, of Abraham's being called to sacrifice Isaac, and spelling out the prophetic elements in it that point to Christ, it seemed to me that this prophetic meaning of the event in itself demonstrates that the Bible is God's own work. Certainly if the events it reports are in themselves prophetic, quite apart from what the human participants in those events understand about them, a greater context, and therefore a greater intelligence, than the mere historical facts and their human participants is implied. So perhaps this should be my main argument for the Bible as God's word.I've already listed some of the prophetic elements in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, but here they are again with a few new ones:

• Isaac is called Abraham's only son --> emblematic or prophetic of God's only Son who would appear almost 2000 years later
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• Abraham's name means father --> emblematic or prophetic of God the Father's sacrifice of His only Son to come almost 2000 years later
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• Jewish commentators put Isaac's age in his thirties --> same age Jesus was when he preached and then died on the cross for us. I saw this when I was reading the commentaries but I'd have to track it down again to quote it. I think it was in David Guzik's commentary.
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• Abraham had every intention of sacrificing Isaac, there is no doubt about that, and would have if God hadn't stopped him --> emblematic or prophetic of God's actually sacrificing His Son almost 2000 years later.
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• Abraham, according to Hebrews 11, believed God would raise Isaac from the dead. This is also implicit in Genesis 22 because he was committed to going through with sacrificing Isaac, and yet he believed God's promise to him that He would bring a great nation out of Isaac. There is no other possible resolution of these two facts except that he must have expected God to resurrect him --> and of course resurrection from the dead is prophetic of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead almost 2000 years later.
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• The cross is a vertical representation of the altars of sacrifice which were used throughout the Old Testament, by which the sacrificial animal was lashed to the four corners. This representation is also seen in the lashing of Isaac to the sacrificial altar. Jesus was nailed but it's the same concept of being affixed to the altar.
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• Abraham was told to perform this sacrifice in the region of Moriah on a particular mountain which God would reveal to him. It was a threshingfloor on Mt. Moriah in what was by then the city of Jerusalem that some nine hundred years later was bought by King David for a place to erect an altar for burnt offerings (2 Samuel 24). Its identity is revealed later, in 2 Chronicles 3:1:
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  Then Solomon began to build the house of the LORD at Jerusalem in mount Moriah, where the LORD appeared unto David his father, in the place that David had prepared in the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite.
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  This site is considered to be the same place where Jesus was crucified:
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  There is some archaeological evidence to suppose that the place of the crucifixion of Jesus was at the summit of Mt. Moriah, probably near the present-day Damascus Gate and the Garden Tomb which would of course be a literal fulfillment of Abraham's offering of Isaac when God said, "On the mount of the Lord it [the final offering for sin] will be provided."
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  At the very least Jesus was crucified in the same general area of Moriah where Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac was to be enacted.
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• When God stops Abraham from killing Isaac, He shows him a ram caught in a thicket which he can use for the sacrifice instead. This is exactly what Abraham himself had prophesied when he told Isaac on the way to Moriah that God would provide Himself a lamb to sacrifice. Which he must have expected to happen since he expected God to raise Isaac from the dead --> This is emblematic or prophetic of the fact that God would Himself provide the Sacrifice that saves the world almost 2000 years later.

Of course I think these are marvelous "coincidences" that span almost 2000 years of history, that could only have been engineered by God since the human participants had no way of doing it or even recognizing it at the time. This being the case I think this makes good evidence for the Bible as God's word and what we mean by its inerrancy.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I did get confused about what the lamb remark meant, except that it was prophetic of the ram in the thicket which is right. Isaac asked where the sacrifice was and Abraham said God would provide it. At first I thought it was a way of protecting Isaac from the truth, although it WAS prophetic of the ram God DID provide, but as I thought it through in the light of his expectation that God would raise Isaac from the dead I realized that he had to be expecting that God would provide a sacrifice in the place of Isaac after he was brought back to life. So are you agreeing with my first thought that he was lying to keep the truth from Isaac? This would also fit with my original thought that he was lying to Isaac, but after thinking it through I came to understand that he probably wasn't lying because he expected God to raise Isaac from the dead, and would then provide a lamb in his place. Otherwise I don't know what to make of it. But I don't see any big problem with it in any case and don't know why you do.

Clearly nobody here read or thought about my Message 1502 since nothing anyone said is the slightest bit relevant to it. The facts are in the text, nothing I could have made up myself, or "quote mined" out of context. But such kneejerk unthinking debunkery is typical here.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I offer Message 1502 again, for anyone who will actually THINK about it, since nobody who has responded so far has done so.

I'm afraid I still do not understand your point.

There is absolutely no similarity between Abraham's offering of Isaac and the tragic mistake a man made in making a rash promise.abe: I didn't consult a single "apologist" in writing that post, by the way, it was all from my own reading of Genesis 22 and a couple of other related scriptures, which an HONEST person would have to agree demonstrate an uncanny series of "coincidences" that do indeed show that an overarching intelligence is at work arranging the events described. . Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

God CALLED Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Jepthah simply made a rash vow to God that he then felt obligated to perform. There is no similarity at all. Also, I read the passage and it is clear Jepthah had an animal in mind, not a person, which would of course be against God's condemnation of human sacrifice. At least one commentator says that since it would be such a violation it was wrong of Jepthah to sacrifice his daughter if he did so, and some think he didn't. In any case the idea is that applying the vow to his daughter was overzealousness and he was not obligated to perform it since it would have been a terrible sin to do so.Also, the upshot of God's stopping the sacrifice of Isaac included the lesson that there is only one human sacrifice that God would ever allow and that is the sacrifice of Jesus to pay for our sins. Human sacrifice was performed in the nations around Abraham at the time so this would be a condemnation of those practices.By the way I realized there is another part of the story that is emblematic or prophetic and that is the fact that a threshingfloor was on Mt. Moriah when David bought it from the Jebusite. A threshingfloor is often a symbol in scripture of God's separating the HUMAN wheat from the chaff in the final harvest, which looks forward to the second coming of Christ.

O hivvenstobitsy far be it from me to expect anyone here to think, that's why I appealed to some who haven't responded. No you didn't really consider the evidence-- well, you personally at least took a little time before you responded so irrelevantly and without any discussion whatever -- but everybody else tossed off their "answer" within moments, not bothering to try to show how they arrived at their conclusion or any such logical thing, obviously having taken no time to think about the post.Gosh I don't know how that tactic would work on or off the internet since I haven't tried it in either place.

When something is actually IN the text, how can you accuse me of "making it up?"Sorry, you are WAY off base in ALL this stuff you've been saying.

As I said, Isaac is CALLED (by God in Genesis 22) Abraham's only son.A slab with four corners to which the sacrifice was lashed is the model for the cross.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Perhaps because he was sent away but certainly because Isaac was the son God promised him, and calling him his only son is what makes the parallel with Christ.And you make a lot of other silly remarks. The sacrifice is the atonement, Isaac represented the atonement, then the ram took his place.And I see NN is continuing to say a bunch of weird unrecognizable things about what I said about the lamb, but perhaps I'll be better able to think about all this later.

The point, Arach, is that God called Isaac Abraham's only son. There is no other point. Jesus was God's only Son, "only-begotten Son," you know, as scripture says. Mary had other sons but God had only one. So to say that Isaac was Abraham's only son is to make a parallel with God's only Son. It's not rocket science.Genesis 22:2: Edited by Faith, : No reason given.