Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured Faith

In my view anyone perceiving commands from a God is far more likely to be suffering some form of psychosis than actually receiving commands from god.But the likes of Faith and Phat etc. Seem to think that they do have subjective experiences of God and that people have communed with God and received instructions from him, so I wondered what they’d make of God apparently instructing them to kill people.Faiths answer seems to be that God used to do that in Old Testament times but doesn’t since the New Testament came into being (the exact cutover date for God’s change of tack is unclear to me) so she’d ignore it as psychosis. Which I find slightly ironic but reassuring that some sort of sanity has prevailed despite the rather tortured justification for it.

Of course there was no explicit lie. The "lie" would appear to be more along the lines of a broken promise. They had agreed to give everything and they had reneged on that agreement. Broken promise, breach of contract, lie....

God gave commands to His selected spokesmen in the OT, such as Abraham, Moses, various of the Prophets. To the Prophets he mostly gave revelation, though, not commands. HOW these messages from God came to these people is not at all clear. They may have received them silently in their spirit rather than audibly. This would require a thorough study of all such instances. Samuel seems to have actually heard God's voice as a child though, since he thought it was the priest Eli calling him. Inany case, after the Old Testament canon was closed god's communications seem to have been through the human spirit, which is more like an impression that is felt than a voice that is heard. But you have made me curious to find out more about this if I can. Just to state it again, we can be very sure God would never command anyone to kill anybody after Christ has come. Sometimes Christians think God has told them to do something sinful, like get a divorce, and while I believe they must have received some kind of communication that convinced them of this we can know for sure that was not God who communicated to them since He would not contradict scripture. the Early Church received all kinds of prophecies from God, although some people were identified as hearing from Satan instead. That's the quandary for people who have had our spirits regenerated: we are now open to receiving demonic communications and in some cases we have to know the Bible well to reject them. I think we all do hear from God in our consciences though, making us aware of our sins and that sort of thing, and sometimes impressions about our calling. He is understood, however, to communicate with us most reliably through the Word itself as we recognize passages at a given time as speaking directly to us. The Old Testament was closed at the end of the book of Malachi, and then there were four hundred years before Christ came. Pretty clear cutoff point I'd say. Actually I believe that people do hear from spiritual beings, i.e. demons, even unbelievers do. They do speak audibly to the person's mind, and they may give commands to do evil or dangerous things. These are people who don't know or believe the Bible and truly ARE psychotic, mentally deranged, but they are open to real voices as a result of their mental state. Demons may also try to mislead Christians as I say above but solid grounding in the Word is a protection against them. Anything that contradicts the Word is not of God. The Charismatic Movement, unfortunately, has confused these things so that they accept all kinds of "spiritual" communications as from God when they are not.Of course all this is completely crazy to you. Oh well. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

People who think the Bible is fictional have no sense whatever of what it takes to write fiction, no sense of the different qualities of fiction versus reportage etc.

Yes. I am afraid so. Your post has left me in a state of open mouthed bewilderment as to how people can believe that stuff in this day and age.

Thinking the Bible inerrant shows an inability to distinguish fact from fantasy.The point we were discussing, the one you're ignoring, is that you cannot quote any Biblical passage where Ananias lies. All you can do is make up things that aren't there. Your reasoning is, "The Bible is inerrant, this passage would make no sense unless Ananias lied, so therefore he must have lied but Like chose not to mention it." But we know the Bible we have is not inerrant, and there is no evidence that the originals were free of error, either (and in any case they are not available) - that's just something you believe, or in the case of the Chicago Statement, something they affirm without evidence. Your fantasy that there's such a thing as inerrancy causes you to ignore other possibilities, such as that Ananias didn't lie and Peter was wrong to say he did, or that the author erred, or that the account is a work of fiction.The story itself gives a horrible impression of the early church, where breaking a promise to the church community is punishable by death carried out personally by God himself. These are two reasons for not believing it: it's obviously made up to scare church members, and if there were such a thing as a loving God he wouldn't murder people, and especially not for minor transgressions. He set a pretty low bar - if the penalty for breaking a promise is death, then what greater penalty could he find for major transgressions like murder?--Percy

I might as well add my two cents worth. Firstly I suggest we have to read it in the context of the whole New Testament and it just doesn’t fit with what Jesus taught and how He lived. Nor is it consistent with the message in the Epistles. What would Jesus Do?My first thought would be that they are talking about them being dead to the church or dead to God. However it does talk about burying them so as that it is pretty clea, and although I still see that as a possibility I think it is unlikely.
As we all agree, the writer of Acts also compiled the Gospel of Luke. He is using written documents or material from the oral tradition in order to provide an accurate account. He says this:

quote:

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1 Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

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He is compiling things several years later, and we know that the Jews of the day used hyperbole to make a point. The Jews at the time were clear, as some cultures still are today, that blaspheme is punishable by death. We can see that in Saul’s part in the stoning to death of Stephen. It is also the main charge against Jesus that resulted in His crucifixion.This would have been considered as a very serious charge against Ananias and Sapphira, which deserved death. These people still saw themselves as Jewish, as we know this was the group that still believed that followers of the Jesus that were not Jewish should be circumcised. They hadn’t given up on the Jewish laws at this point. They would have believed that they deserved death and so they carried out the execution believing that this was God’s will. This would likely quickly have become an act of God that killed them, and that is how it wound up being recorded in Acts.

The fact that Luke the writer of Acts says Ananias lied and that Peter is quoted saying he lied are the evidence.Lying to the Holy Spirit is no minor offense.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I understand. I used to have the same view (although I was more curious about what led people to claim such things than accusatory of them). Sometime in the seventies I ran across an essay in a literary journal about a German writer that mentioned demon possession as once believed to be the cause of mental disorders, and I was as startled as you are -- "state of open mouthed bewilderment" might say it for me -- when the essayist said he thought there might be some truth to that old idea. I think I actually sort of jumped when I read that it was so startling. A literary critic "in this day and age" saying demonic possession might be real?Then somewhere around that time I was having anxiety attacks and decided to check out Transcendental Meditation which was getting big in those days and promised a "scientific" way to relieve stress and find peace. To believe that you have to ignore the fact that you are asked to bring an "offering" to Maharishi and lay it in front of his portrait, but anyway I was desperate enough to see if they had something to offer. They gave me a mantra and told me how to practice it. It was on one of my first uses of it that I had this experience of something like curtains parting before my eyes behind which was a vast landscape with a city in the far distance. it was as real as being transported into that landscape. And it scared me to death. I jumped up and never practiced TM again. My response might have been unusual, I suppose many would have been intrigued and wanted to have more of such experiences. I didn't think of it in any relation to demons until a decade or so later when I became a Christian and ran across the explanation that mantras are the names of Hindu "gods" (demons) -- they have millions of them -- which you summon by using the name as a mantra. Science indeed.So there are two pre-Christian experiences I had that startled me with the suggestion of another reality that was completely foreign to my thinking at the time.So after i became a Christian I did a lot of reading up on these things and became convinced that demons are indeed real invisible beings that really can communicate with human beings,* but aren't very interested in doing so when it serves their purposes better to have everybody convinced they don't exist. But they seem to be more and more willing to be exposed in the last few decades, though there are still a lot of people who treat people who have such experiences as crazy. I do think, however, that demon possession may very well explain some kinds of mental illness, especially where voices are heard giving commands.But when God communicates with us it is usually subtle impressions in our spirit and not audible, even the kind of voice that is heard only inside one's head, and since I have heard such a voice I know the difference.abe: *I should add that they need "permission" of some sort to communicate with us, which sin can offer them: enough unrepented sin can invite them to harass a person or even possess the person, and they may become the cause of criminal behavior too. Meditation practices in various religions can bring a person into contact with the spiritual realms of the demons too and some of the practices actually invite them to teach and guide the person. The Charismatic Movement in Christianity also invites such demonic influences without being aware this is what is happening. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The Bible accounts present themselves as simple factual accounts of real events. "Bible believers" simply believe those accounts as written, trusting the writers' honesty and trusting the Church's teaching that the Bible is God's word. We want as much background information as we can get about all of it, but only in order to put the accounts into historical context, not to question those accounts. Where there are seeming discrepancies we either see how they can be reconciled or we leave them to be resolved at some later time.This is the way the Bible should be read, and this is the only way anyone can get out of it what is there to get. If you keep second-guessing it, finding metaphors instead of the factual reality the writers obviously intended, or questioning the thinking of the writers to suggest that what they thought they were saying isn't really what they were saying, questioning their very existence too, and so on and so forth, you invent your own religion and will never understand the God-given message it contains for us.There is no need to explain away the Ananias and Sapphira account. Luke says they lied about how much of their proceeds they were giving to the church, and reports that Peter said the same thing and emphasized the severity of the offense of lying to the Holy Spirit, which explains why they both suddenly died. No other explanations are needed, it's all there and you just fool yourself by refusing to accept it as written.

You say we should simply read the Bible as written but when we do that and find contradictions we should not read it as written but leave them unresolved. May I humbly suggest that your way of understanding scripture prevents you from getting out of it what we should. You wind up with a god that is capable of tremendous evil and of tremendous good. You are able to create any kind of god that you like. Again, it is Christianity and not Bibleianity. When we use Jesus, the Word incarnate as a guide you get a very different model of the nature and purpose of God than if you worship an inerrant Bible.

It is only when you leave it to speak for itself and don't impose your own opinions on it that you have any chance of understanding it. It tells you who God is instead of you telling it the kind of God you want, which is what you do. God is love, there is no deviation from that fact about God, therefore what you see as evil in descriptions of God is not evil, it's love because it's justice and you are totally blind to it. You impose your own crabbed fleshly idea of "love" on the Bible. Worse than that you do what so many here do, and so many others in the world these days, you make evil good when you call justice evil, as so many do who make the death penalty evil, and people who define "love" in terms that justify sin.And of course we are to leave some discrepancies unresolved. This is what faith has to do if we regard the Bible as God's word. We simply know that there is a resolution and we would be in the wrong to accuse God of contradicting Himself. That's the humble position, GDR, to refrain from imposing our own judgments on God's word.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I know you can't see this Faith, but you are imposing your opinions on the Bible. It is your opinion that the Bible is inerrant and you use that opinion to understand scripture. It is you who are doing what you accuse me of doing.I understand scripture based on the opinion that the Bible is correct when it says that it is Jesus that is the Word of God. The bible says that the Word was made flesh not a book. Therefore I understand scripture by reading it through the lens of the teachings of Jesus.

I agree except about Luke producing an accurate account. They is no way to confirm almost anything he says, and parts of his theology are at odds with Paul's. Even if the story of Ananias and Sapphira were true, they didn't commit blasphemy. But Stephen was charged with blasphemy. Ananias and Sapphira were not. But Jesus was charged with blasphemy. Ananias and Sapphira were not. Ananias and Sapphira were not charged with blasphemy. I really enjoyed this broken English explanation of why Ananias and Sapphira did not commit blasphemy. Your use of pronouns makes it unclear who you're talking about. Is "they" Ananias and Sapphira, or is it Paul and the other apostles? Do the two they's refer to the same people, or different people? So I feel that part of my interpretation of what you mean is guesswork, but you seem to be saying that someone killed Ananias and Sapphira, and that the story evolved over time to become that God had killed them.Naturally I believe you're overthinking this. In my view the story is apocryphal rather than relating an actual event.--Percy

Luke's claim was that he was writing an accurate or orderly account. Whether it is accurate or not is a separate issue. It said they lied to the Holy Spirit which would be considered blasphemy. The apostles You could be right about it being apocryphal. I'm inclined to think that it happened. My thought isn't that they were executed and the story evolved from there, but that the apostles claimed it to be God's will that they be executed, and so it isn't that great a stretch to see it evolving to the idea that God killed them.