₦airaland Forum

Of course the bible was written by men who were inspired by God.
For instance, David wrote:

"As the deer panteth for the waters, so my soul longeth after thee"

David wrote this because he loved God so much and had to write this from the wells of his heart to express himself.

This is what inspiration of God means in my understanding, it doesn't mean that God himself is the author of that psalm of David, but that David longed for God's experience and due to this longing he wrote it down.

Sometimes when they also have some spiritual experiences, they write it down the way they understand it.

Even the bible says if you don't love humans whom you see, how can you love God whom you do not see?

l keep telling people, the religion of jesus is not mainly about dogma or doctrines, it is about active service that may even require your life, that is what even the cross is mainly about.

ln ancient Rome during the 3rd and 4th Century just before Constantine made christianity the official religion of the empire, there were two great plagues in the empire that was estimated to have killed 5000 people per day, the plague was contagious and of course for fear of this, people separated from one another.
Historian Rodney Stark, tells us that many died in the Empire from that plague, but the Christians did not fear death, they became nurses and offered help to the weak in society not just the wealthy. They offered treatment and took on themselves the diseases of both fellow Christians and pagans, and many Christians gave up their lives for these in the process, but the care and support they showed also ensured that many people survived, so that the number of people who died where Christians lived, were significantly less than at the rest of the Roman Empire. Also at this time, there was mass conversion to christianity because of this, soon the Empire became a Christian state after Constantine's supposed vision, and we have christianity till this day.

This is why jesus said..
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love for one another ( not specifically by your dogmas and doctrines).
The commandment is a new one because this love requires the giving up of all, the denial of oneself, and even death.

Christianity is not as easy as we have made it to become, especially after Rome adopted it as the political and state religion.

MuttleyLaff:
Ihedinobi3, your posts sometimes are verbose, you often sometimes, write continuingly at tedious lengths. Tbh, if you arent aware, you would lose someone like Daejoyoung in the thick of your write-up because it all becomes and/or turns into information overload. Besides, lengthy post sets off the antispam bot and the result is like your post getting hidden, just as in above. Talking of Daejoyoung, he too is guilty of this too. you look at his posts, you wonder where should I jump in, which part should I respond or not respond, which one should I let pass, which one should I leave as hmm, lol

l have stopped responding o, if both you and maximus, or any other, have questions on the things l wrote, you can ask and l'll expound on them in a more precise way than l normally do. Cheers.

MuttleyLaff:
"¹These are the commandments and statutes and ordinances that the LORD your God has instructed me to teach you to follow in the land that you are about to enter and possess,
²so that you and your children and grandchildren may fear the LORD your God all the days of your lives by keeping all His statutes and commandments that I give you, and so that your days may be prolonged."
- Deuteronomy 6:1-2

"²¹If you walk in hostility toward Me and refuse to obey Me, I will multiply your plagues seven times, according to your sins.
²²I will send wild animals against you to rob you of your children, destroy your livestock, and reduce your numbers, until your roads lie desolate."
- Leviticus 26:21-22

"They will be wasted from hunger and ravaged by pestilence and bitter plague;
I will send the fangs of wild beasts against them, with the venom of vipers that slither in the dust."
- Deuteronomy 32:24

Please leave richard in peace Daejoyoung ooo. I previously have said there was a there was a covenant between them and God at Mount Horeb.. It was this that Elisha activated, because these young men trainnee prophets from the traditional home where God "lives", Bethel, rejected God and disgracefully sent his prophet away

Now, if Muhammed wont go to the mountain, the mountain will be brought to Muhammed. If you wont go read about the covenant's terms and conditions, I will bring excerpts of them here for you to read, if reading the whole of Deuteronomy 5:1-33 and Deuteronomy 6:1-25, at one go was the problem, lol to know more about the covenant made between them and God at Mount Horeb.

Give it a rest Daejoyoung, because they agreed to the terms and conditions of that contract, lol

ok sir, l would give it a rest. Thanks for giving us your understanding of these passages, and they are quite reasonable.

Ihedinobi3:
You make my point. You have established yourself as the authority that must be satisfied. You decide what is right and what is wrong all by yourself. You have set standards that God Himself must submit to in order for you to accept Him as God, which is a most ludicrous notion, since if God must bow to you, then He cannot be your God.

Let me see if I can show you what I mean. I think that the first Bible that I ever read was the KJV. I know that my childhood Bible-reading experience was framed by the KJV and the RSV, the latter especially because it was what was demanded in primary and secondary school, I believe. I only discovered the NIV and other versions as I grew into adolescence. So, I grew up understanding the 42 individuals that the bears mauled as little children like myself. I did not understand them as being adolescent, still I never thought "God could never do such a thing, He can't be so cruel." The reason? How on earth am I supposed to know what God can and cannot do without reference to the Bible? The only way that I can get a hint of God's Character outside the Bible is by looking at creation around me, and when I do, I see people of all ages die in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. If God made the world and rules over it as it is, then the Bible must know what it is talking about in this instance. That is the attitude of faith. I don't dictate to God how He must be. He is God. I am the creature, the one who must bow and worship. The same applies to your other objections.

This is how faith is born in the hearts of men. First, we awaken to the witness of Creation around and within themselves about the Greatness of the God Who must have made it all, to our obvious responsibility to such a Mighty God, to our utter failure in meeting that responsibility, and finally to our inescapable return to answer to Him through death (Psalm 19; Romans 1-2). When we face these very obvious truths, the next question that arises in the human heart is "how can we make peace with such a God?" As both Psalm 19 and Romans 1-2 demonstrate, that question immediately leads one to the Bible where we find what this God demands of us in order for us to escape His Condemnation. We have absolutely no other way to get to God. We can certainly pretend anything we want, so all kinds of people create all kinds of religions and philosophies in answer to the witness of Creation. The vast majority of us pretend that God is something completely different than He has shown Himself to be through Creation and the Bible. They are doing just like you are here, pretending that God cannot be what He is, assuming some ability to dictate righteousness to God. So, for example, you find fault with Him if He did indeed send bears to maul adolescents (or even pre-pubescent children, if you insist) for mouthing off to His Own Emissary. And you take issue with Him for calling faith righteousness. All of this as if you yourself had any true ability to tell the Lord God what is right and what is wrong.

The Bible does say that no one can dictate to God (Isaiah 40:13-14; Romans 11:33-36; 1 Corinthians 2:16), but if it did not say it, it is still a very natural assumption to make, since God made all things. If He did, how on earth could He ever require advice from the things that He Himself invented? Yet, here you are pretending to some ability to tell God what is righteous for Him to do and what isn't.

The point is simple: unless God Himself tells you about Himself, it is incredibly foolish to make assumptions about Him. The Bible is how He has told us about Himself through the Revelation of Jesus Christ. The Bible explains the witness of Creation to us and expands upon it to tell us of things we have absolutely no way of knowing except through its own testimony.

You complain about textual variants and interpolations in the Bible, but are you not ignoring how education and academics works? Who will reject the authority of Isaac Newton on the basis of corruptions of his actual writings and research by later hands? Not a single scientist worth his salt would do that. What every academic worth the cost of their education does in cases like that is that they apply a skill called "textual criticism" to arrive at what the authority in question actually said. That is how ancient manuscripts are reconstructed today and preserved. If science, history, and literature warrant such careful scholarship, how much more the Bible that holds our eternal fate in its pages? Who would be so foolish as to dismiss its authority on the basis of its corruptibility? What's more, if Satan is invested in our eternal condemnation, does it not stand to reason that he will instigate willing human beings to try to corrupt the original writings of the Bible? Does it not also stand to reason that God will permit it to a limited extent in order to separate those who value His Truth from those who don't? Those who value His Truth will refuse to alter it no matter what the incentive, and they will also be the ones to investigate the texts that they inherit to make sure that what they are reading is what was really written under the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit, while those who don't value that Truth will seek to adjust it to suit their own selves and they will also be the ones who insist on reading the errors without any correction and who insist on rejecting the Bible entirely because they either don't want to do the work involved in discovering what is truly written under the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit and what isn't or only want an excuse to dismiss the Truth in preference of the lies that they prefer.

You argue that different people and different groups of people do not submit to the Authority of the Bible, choosing either to ignore parts of it or to ignore all of it, but what does that have to do with me? Are they going to judge me after I die? Am I responsible to them? Why should I care what they do with the Bible if the Person that I will answer to is God Himself? My business is to learn God's Truth and make sure to align myself with it, so that when I see Him I won't be condemned by Him. Nowhere in the Bible am I required to agree with others in any fictions that they prefer. The unity that believers must have is in the Truth (Ephesians 4:3-6,13), not in some crazy idea that anyone chooses to have. So, the Lord is not going to say to me, "why did you not have a unified understanding of the Bible with so-and-so?" He is going to ask me, "why did you not believe the Bible and those who explained it to you when they spoke in agreement with the Bible?"

As for the unproven claims that you have been making, I really hate having to make a list of such things with people like you, because you make so many and then you have a problem owning up to them. So what I will do is point out that you have made new ones here and give you examples to illustrate my point. What you do with that is likely not going to interest me enough to respond any further on them:

Claim #1: I cannot for instance accept the old testament stories that Elijah was angry and asked God to kill young boys and a wild beast mauled 42 of them simply because they mocked his bald head, that is not the god of jesus in the new testament.

Note: the prophet was Elisha, not Elijah (you make mistakes like that a lot, and that suggests to me that you are not as familiar with the Bible as one who is questioning its authority ought to be), but the claim here is that the God of Elisha in 2 Kings 2:23-25 is not the God of Jesus in the New Testament. Says who? You? Why? Because you cannot accept that God could do what He is recorded to have done there? Why could He not have? Because you cannot permit such a thing?

Claims #2 and #3: ln the first 3 centuries, there were many books and there was no canon of the new testament, and the books you read depended on the church you attended...

Note: Who says that there was no canon in the early church? Or that the books you read then depended on what church you attended? You? Somebody else you will quote whom we must believe because...why exactly?

As for your argument about Martin Luther, even in the Bible, Peter, later a great believer and one of the Eternal Twelve, did not believe what Isaiah taught about Jesus Christ and kept resisting the Cross. Shall I do the same because he did it too? In fact, the Lord showed Himself to Mary Magdalene first upon His Resurrection, because she was the one to believe in His Resurrection ahead of the others. In other words, she believed what He said more firmly and enthusiastically than the others. We will all be rewarded according to our individual choices, not according to how we follow other people's mistakes. You claim that without Martin Luther I would be a Roman Catholic today? Says who? Was he the first person to reject the Roman ways? There have always been those who believed the Bible independent of the wickedness of the Roman Catholic Church. How do you know that I wouldn't have been one of them? Nonetheless, where one person fails to do what they should, God is never short of options. As the Lord said to the teachers of the Law, if the crowds stop shouting, the very stones will cry out in praise. So, you have too small a God in your thoughts to compare with the One Who made the Universe and Whom I worship.

Finally, as I said, you are blaspheming, so this is not a conversation that is guaranteed to last with me in it. This is a token response, still giving you the benefit of the doubt. There is no guarantee that I will respond further. I just thought to warn you of that.

yeah lhedinobi3 l am not doing it for you to necessarily respond, l am doing it for those who read and others who may respond to the points without dismissing me or using words like heretics, blasphemy, etc people like Richard. So yes this is not a token response to you but for others and of course myself. That is why l put these things out, let others do their research and truth would always prevail. And it may just happen to be your truth that is prevailing here, who knows? l am interested in truth not in the person speaking whether he be blasphemer, heretic, satan, etc.


So as to your first point, Can humans be more just than God? no.
lf God created us and we tell atheists that all humans must base their morality on who God is and what God commands, then when we go to the bible to see who God is, shouldn't we see a compass for morality that is objective and not subjective? you don't need to answer, others can answer me, l am tired of your pride as though l am forcing you to discuss with me.

You wrote..<The only way that I can get a hint of God's Character outside the Bible is by looking at creation around me, and when I do, I see people of all ages die in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. If God made the world and rules over it as it is, then the Bible must know what it is talking about in this instance>

Fair enough, but thesame bible also tells you that it is a fallen world and the world is not a perfect place and there would be a new age where there would be no more death, sin, suffering, pain, sickness, etc. or am l making this up? do you reject this and are you saying God is responsible for killing all these people you see dying for no reason?
When l look at the world l see an imperfect world which we are going through as a kind of test to make our spirit man come alive, and to Learn the principles of the kingdom of God. Even the animal kingdom, innocent animals are killed everytime and we eat chicken for Christmas but the question is.. ls this the final will of God? what does lsaiah say about how animals would live and relate to us in the new age.

ln jesus teachings he says we should love our enemies, but this is almost impossible in our world today, because we need armies in many nations and we have to kill our enemies sometimes else we get killed, but it was worse in time past, does that mean it is the will of God that we continue to have armies and fight wars? no, but the world is against the Father and the Father is against the world, the world does not know the Father, only the Son knows him, and we have the gospels that teach us about the son and indirectly the Father and his ways.

You wrote...<And you take issue with Him for calling faith righteousness. All of this as if you yourself had any true ability to tell the Lord God what is right and what is wrong>

No, you don't even read what l say to understand because you are dismissive of heretics, l take issues with many Christians for how they understand faith. The faith that produces righteousness can only be seen in our works not blind belief. Did l make this up also? or doesn't the bible teach that?



Thesame bible said Wouldn't the judge of all the earth do right?Abraham asked if there are 10 righteous people in Sodom and Gommorah, would you destroy them and the lord said no.Yet thesame bible turns around to say that God flooded the entire world ( which may have included babies) and even moreso it states directly that God commanded the killing of Amalekite babies. So l am not rejecting the bible, l am using one scripture to interpret another as impossible, so l have backing not only from my conscience on what is right and wrong but also from thesame bible as well, so it is 2 against 1. lf your conscience tells you that there is nothing wrong with killing babies or burning promiscuous daughters of priests alive then for you it is the other way round of course.

ln the bible St Paul says in Romans that even those without the law have innate conscience, so even those who were without the old testament in the time of Moses could possibly keep the ten commandments, because in addition to scripture God has given us conscience to judge what is right as well as logic. This is part of the reasons you reject the pagan gods who accept human sacrifices and do all sort of terrible things.
This is why we would reject a pope who would want to tell us to carry out crusades today, and not only kill the men but also kill babies and take only virgin women for ourselves in certain circumstances. lf we do not use one scripture to override another and then measure with our conscience, how would we stand a chance to oppose these things or tell the pope that he is wrong?

You Wrote...<You complain about textual variants and interpolations in the Bible, but are you not ignoring how education and academics works? Who will reject the authority of Isaac Newton on the basis of corruptions of his actual writings and research by later hands?

Except that isaac newton 's writings are not taken as the word of God, they can be challenged and yes he was wrong about certain things, and now we know because his writings though important to us did not become everlasting dogma, but we understand the spirit and principles behind his writings and they have changed our worldview of things, and it is also by that yardstick that we challenge some of his writings as well that seem wrong.
You are actually making my point for me.
Also l take it to mean that you reject Mark 16v9-20 as possible corruptions of satan right? as well as 1 john 5v7, or maybe l am not understanding you clearly. lnterestingly l don't think they are corruptions of satan, l think they are both inspired. lf you think they are not inspired and should be out of our bible, l disagree with you but would not call you an heretic for what you choose or don't choose in the bible as long as you don't reject the gospel of the kingdom of God taught by jesus and his cross.



To your other points, do you agree that women should not speak in church then?
Do you agree that we shouldn't keep the laws of Moses today except the law of love( which covers everything) , if you believe this then both you and paul are not different from me and jesus, you are using one part of scripture to interpret another, you are extracting principles from scripture and not necessarily the letter, it doesn't mean that you reject scripture.
Even so those who allow their women to speak in church would argue about context, and also that women were important to jesus. You may disagree with them, but a Christian who wants to keep the old testament laws may disagree with you because those laws are in the bible. You would say they are no longer important because paul taught you they aren't, but why? are they not in thesame word of God? your answer would be that there is a new covenant and jesus fulfilled the law, then this would mean that you do not adhere to every letter of the bible as your authority because you can't, the bible itself does not permit you to do that.

You Wrote....Claim #1: [i]I cannot for instance accept the old testament stories that Elijah was angry and asked God to kill young boys.

l cannot accept it because jesus said in Luke 9v55-56, ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of, the son of man did not come to destroy men's lives but to save. Jesus also said turn the other cheek in Matthew 5. This is not made up by me alone, l also get this from the bible.

You Wrote...Note: the prophet was Elisha, not Elijah (you make mistakes like that a lot, and that suggests to me that you are not as familiar with the Bible as one who is questioning its authority ought to be),

Ok, so because l was not in a condition to cross check and give you direct names and quotes, then l don't know the story or bible, lol. That's a common fallacy my man, you can do better than that. lf l made a mistake in the telling of the story itself, then that make sense, not on issues like names, or are you now like strict muslims who claim that every word of the Quran must be recited as it is? come on now.

Also Read Luke 9v55-56, jesus doesn't permit such, so l am not the one saying it, jesus whom you claim he is the word of God, he is the one saying it, even if he didn't say it, l know that it contradicts a God of love and wisdom. Except God is not love, and those parts of the bible that says he is, are contradictory.

This also is not justice, insulting a man for bald head as teenage children, and then they dying for that, how is that just to you? when in thesame bible jesus healed the ear of the captain who wanted to arrest him.

You Wrote...<Note: Who says that there was no canon in the early church?

Anyone can do their research on this, so I leave this for others to judge. The Ebionites for instance, we know had only parts of Matthew. Before the gospels were written, the message of the kingdom was spread only by oral traditions. Others can investigate these things easily.



Also you are making my point for me about Peter not believing everything. So would that mean Peter wasn't a Christian then because he didn't believe that, even after that, paul had a disagreement with him on the matters of keeping the law, did they go ahead calling each other heretics. That is my point, from the very beginning, the bible has been understood differently, and this is why paul says we know in part and we prophesy in part, but let us continue to love one another. We can correct each other, but love should make us humble enough to listen to each other and not seclude each other as long as we all are willing to obey the teachings of christ, then we are brothers, because we want to do the things jesus commanded us.

RandomGuy48:
A few notes:
First, you say that Elijah asked God to kill them. That is not what the text says, he simply called down a curse on them. Nor does it say any of them were killed. Yes, it says 42 were mauled--but mauled means injured, not killed (it is not impossible some died, but it isn't stated as such). As for the claim that it was only for making fun of his head, that is unlikely. People hold up the fact 42 were listed as being mauled as bad because of how many it was--but that cuts around the other way, meaning there were at least 42 of them who were jeering at him. Do you think 42+ people came out of the city just to make fun of a guy for being bald? That seems highly unlikely. The far more likely situation is that they were actually planning to attack him, which makes his calling out of the bears a matter of defense.

Some other points are raised here.


I assume this refers to David's taking of the census. The problem, however, is that as is stated in 2 Samuel 24:1, God was angry at Israel before David did anything. The reason for the anger is not stated--presumably it was Israel turning from God again--but to say it was "simply" for a sin committed by David is inaccurate; David's sin may have simply been the straw that broke the camel's back. (if anyone is wondering why it was portrayed as wrong for David to take the census, it was likely not the census itself that was the problem, but David doing it without the accompanying tax that was kind of the point of the census--see Exodus 30:11, which states that the tax should be levied when the census is conducted)

None of the textual variants threaten any major doctrine. It doesn't matter if you take out Mark 16:9-20, because the important information is found in the other Gospels. And while some have claimed that 1 John 5:7 is critical to the doctrine of the Trinity, it really isn't--people believed in it on the basis of other verses before 1 John 5:7 was ever in any manuscript.

Martin Luther did not reject the Book of James. He expressed some reservations about it but nevertheless accepted it.

Hmm hi Richard thanks for your answers

You Wrote....First, you say that Elijah asked God to kill them. That is not what the text says, he simply called down a curse on them. Nor does it say any of them were killed. Yes, it says 42 were mauled--but mauled means injured, not killed (it is not impossible some died, but it isn't stated as such). As for the claim that it was only for making fun of his head, that is unlikely. People hold up the fact 42 were listed as being mauled as bad because of how many it was--but that cuts around the other way, meaning there were at least 42 of them who were jeering at him. Do you think 42+ people came out of the city just to make fun of a guy for being bald? That seems highly unlikely. The far more likely situation is that they were actually planning to attack him, which makes his calling out of the bears a matter of defense.

Your interpretation is that this was probably in self defense, but that is my point, the text doesn't make it clear, not many Christians would come away with this interpretation from a plain reading of the text, and there are many who can use this passage to say do not mock or blaspheme the anointed of God.
My point is that you had to do exegiesis for this difficult passage, you had to use your logic at this point, to say it isn't possible that it was 2 bears killing 42 children just because they mocked him.
So the bible usually is all about interpretation, and other Christians disagree with you and l, we have no right to call them heretics or blasphemers because the text is not clear in the first place.
This is the problem for people who give a book the authority it should not have, it may have been perfect when written but now it has been translated and the cultures and way of doing things are far removed from us, all we have to do is extract God's everlasting principles from it only like jesus did, because the letter kills( as you have proven) but the spirit gives life.

You Wrote...<I assume this refers to David's taking of the census. The problem, however, is that as is stated in 2 Samuel 24:1, God was angry at Israel before David did anything. The reason for the anger is not stated--presumably it was Israel turning from God again--but to say it was "simply" for a sin committed by David is inaccurate; David's sin may have simply been the straw that broke the camel's back. (if anyone is wondering why it was portrayed as wrong for David to take the census, it was likely not the census itself that was the problem, but David doing it without the accompanying tax that was kind of the point of the census--see Exodus 30:11, which states that the tax should be levied when the census is conducted)>

Yahweh is always angry in the bible for things you don't even expect, this is why this event is not surprising given the character of yahweh ( a merciful but tough God of war) which is nice. So your interpretation again is logical, but for those who worship the bible as a book and take it at face value, why would you blame them?
l never gave this passage much thought until a particular pastor used it for his sermon, he didn't understand it like you, and l don't blame him because the jews attributed to Yahweh( God) every single thing that happened, God creates both light and darkness, the idea of satan as a main opposer to God was not fully developed then, in the old testament God gives command to:
1) Kill babies and horses( 1 Samuel 15v3)
2) To burn promiscuous daughters of priests alive ( somewhere in Deuteronomy)
3) To stone a man to death who picked stones on the sabbath( this may have been understandable at the time but would God do this today?)
My point is this.. Why don't you take Hebrews 1v1 seriously, that in the past God spoke to us through his prophets but now he speaks to us through his son.
ln Luke 9v55-56 the disciples were asking that fire be called down like Elijah did, but jesus said ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of, the son of man did not come to destroy men's life but to save.

As literature to me, the old testament is more interesting than the new testament, l am not rejecting the old testament but l just take it as an interesting read, when l was a child, proverbs guided me all through. There is gold in Ecclesiastes and the Author was wonderful, in thesame way l love Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and the stoic writings, as well as the Buddha and the Tao, and even gems from some of our Nigerian old literature but l cannot except any of all these as the word of God, l consider them useful for my learning and part of all our spiritual fossil records.

l also admire the Yahweh character to an extent but l am free to criticize the character and any other character from the books using my brain in thesame way you used your brain to interprete these texts and l appreciate your interpretations.
l can even accept them as valid interpretations but l know the text itself does not make it clear because it is simply a human book.


You wrote....<None of the textual variants threaten any major doctrine. It doesn't matter if you take out Mark 16:9-20, because the important information is found in the other Gospels. And while some have claimed that 1 John 5:7 is critical to the doctrine of the Trinity, it really isn't--people believed in it on the basis of other verses before 1 John 5:7 was ever in any manuscript>



But Mark 16v9-20 is still in our bible today, and Christians even pastors take it as the literal word of God written by Mark. Now you know these, but christians generally don't know these including pastors, but that is not even my problem.


l have no problem with the text itself and l believe in the text, my point is that it wasn't written by Mark, so the unknown scribe who put it there should also be taken as inspired by the Holyspirit, same with 1 john 5v7, some people quote this till date as major proof of the trinity, this is good and l have no problem with that, but given their view of scripture, would they quote it if they knew it was added one thousand years later by the catholic church and wasn't written by john? for me l have no problem quoting it, because in my view of the bible God inspired that person to put it there and God has been inspiring many books, God also inspires me in many ways l don't know, when l write some things l write, it doesn't make all of these the word of God nor does it make the writings particularly false or true, it only means they are useful for learning.
See l have one major problem with the Islamic religion, and that is the belief that the Quran is the verbatim word of God, when people begin to say a book is the verbatim word of God( quran or bible) they can't question it or see any wrong in it by default.


You Wrote...Martin Luther did not reject the Book of James. He expressed some reservations about it but nevertheless accepted it.

Good, it means unlike many others here Martin luther revered some parts of the bible more than others, if he believed the bible to be the verbatim word of God, then why have reservations about some part of it?

Maximus69:
I love this question Sir!

It's thought provoking and challenging.

I accept the challenge!

But i'll wait for all these credulous churchgoers to exhibit their ignorance on this thread!

Let them defend the book they're trying to impose on others as "GOD'S WORD!

I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses, i accepted this as a challenge to prove with convincing facts that the Bible is truthfully God's word

ok, most respected maximus. When you are ready for me, you can start by answering my quote to lhedinobi3, those are the major reasons l do not consider that the bible as a whole is dictated verbatim word of God.

MuttleyLaff:
[img]https://s5/images/MuttleyLaffsmhNFL.gif[/img]

lol baba why do you consider the entire bible as the word of God?

Ihedinobi3:
I think that you are missing the point. I said earlier that I have no problem with being questioned or challenged. It is not only my job as a pastor-teacher to explain what I believe as clearly as I can and demonstrate its trustworthiness from the Bible, but it is also my duty as a believer to give a good answer for the Hope that I have (1 Peter 3:15). So, the issue is not about me being willing to be questioned or challenged.

The problem is the authority on which anyone may challenge anything that they are told by anyone. Consider, for example, that if a student in a secondary school were to demand to see how something a physics teacher tells them is true, all the teacher needs to do is use a typical experiment designed in accordance with certain accepted laws and assumptions fo demonstrate the veracity of what he teaches them. If the student dismisses the laws and assumptions in question, then it is impossible to satisfy him.

Likewise, I cannot answer any questions and challenges that dispense with the authority of the Bible. If I try to do it, the result will merely be frustration on my part because I am assuming certain fundamental principles that the questioner or challenger does not accept. We would essentially be speaking different languages.

Let me attempt to give another example. The litmus test is a famous test for acidity or alkalinity. The test works on the principle that when a mix of natural dyes from lichens is exposed to alkaline or acidic liquids, it changes color from red to blue and from blue to red respectively. Now, if I tell a student that a certain liquid is alkaline and they don't believe me, I just get a litmus paper and put a drop of the liquid on it. If the paper is red and stays red, then that is almost perfect proof. It is imperfect proof because distilled water would not change the color of any litmus paper, so if it colorless and odorless, it could be distilled water. But if I get blue litmus paper and put a drop of the liquid on it and it turns red, then that is conclusive proof that the liquid is alkaline. If the student does not accept the basic principle of litmus testing and questions it, then there is no possibility of proving to them that any liquid at all is alkaline or acidic using litmus paper. I will have to find a test that they accept in order to be able to make such a proof.

The Bible is like the litmus test here. If you dismiss its authority or doubt its veracity, then there really is nothing more to say.

You claim that the Bible basically attacks itself. That is a common argument that many people make against the authority of the Bible. In fact, upon my return to Nairaland late last year, I cut my ministering teeth on such arguments here. I have no real difficulty demonstrating over and over again that the Scriptures cannot be broken (and the Lord Jesus Himself said that, see John 10:35), but I have consistently found the effort to be a waste of time and energy. That is, even if I were to show you how the Lord Jesus was absolutely not using any Scripture to override the other, the time and energy spent on that endeavor would be completely wasted, because if you reject the litmus paper as a reliable standard for establishing the alkalinity or acidity of a liquid, how on Earth can anyone persuade you that it is a reliable standard by going on to show you how the test works?

As your response shows, you have a clearly defined position on all things. You make matter-of-fact statements that you offer no proof for. That is precisely what we are going to keep having problems with. If I ask for proof, you will pull something out of your proverbial hat that is hinged on nothing at all but your own personal preferences. If I offer proof from the Bible, you will dismiss it. How then can we reach any kind of compromise or agreement?

It is impossible in this life to reach perfect agreement with even mature believers if you are a mature believer yourself, yet all believers take for granted that the Bible is the authority, so each wise believer attempts to make sure that what they believe and what they tell others is something that is really in the Bible, not something that they made up. Of course, there are many foolish believers who are digging their own proverbial grave by ignoring this principle, but it is a good rule of thumb, nonetheless. That is to say, although there is no perfect agreement in doctrine here on Earth in this mortal body, there is plenty of agreement for mature believers because they are all reading and learning the same Bible. Still, if there is imperfect agreement, how can any kind of agreement be possible with anyone who dispenses entirely with the authority of the Bible?

Again, I'll tell you. It is not impossible to show you how you are utterly wrong about the Bible. But it is a waste of time to do so with someone who has taken the position that you have. Before I even got to see how the Bible is one unified system of Truth, I had to take for granted that where I saw contradictions and difficulties, the problem was not with the Bible but with me myself. Giving the Bible the benefit of the doubt is what made it possible for me to hear its arguments and see the whole picture that it paints. That is the experience that every other believer who chooses spiritual growth and progress has.

ok let me cut to the chase. I cannot for instance accept the old testament stories that Elijah was angry and asked God to kill young boys and a wild beast mauled 42 of them simply because they mocked his bald head, that is not the god of jesus in the new testament.
l cannot accept that thesame God who killed 70,000 people simply for a sin committed by David is thesame God of a man like jesus whom l respect so much.
So l have come to see the old testament as a collection of different ideas of Yahweh( God) unless you can prove otherwise, if you or anyone can do that, then l would begin take you guys seriously when you claim that the entire bible is your authority.

When we come to the new testament, then we begin to accept that women should not teach in church or that women should be in obedience simply because Adam was not tempted but Eve.Does your church prevent women from preaching in church today? many churches that claim to accept the authority of the entire bible, do not obey this command and they have interpretations for it too, and yet we all claim to follow thesame bible. So no one can truly have a unified understanding of the bible, that's why there were various sects in Judaism from of old and there have been many sects in christianity. Do not make a book ( which is a library) your authority, rather let the principles that can be compared with one another in the book, be extracted from it. lf you assume from the start that a book is your authority, then you cannot question it for it must by default be perfect.

Also l cannot shut down my brain to what l know about textual variants in the new testament, and how writings like Mark 16v9-20 do not belong to the original, or 1 john 5v7 which was added to your kjv bible but was never in any earlier manuscript prior to the 10th century.
How can you know all these things and claim that the bible is an authority?

You ask me what authority l base my arguments on if not the bible, and l would ask you on what authority did the disciples as well as paul and Christians of the first 100 years after jesus base their arguments on without the new testament?
ln the first 3 centuries, there were many books and there was no canon of the new testament, and the books you read depended on the church you attended, are you saying those were not Christians simply because they had no canon as authority?
lf anyone can explain these points to me , then l would reconsider my view of the bible.

For the records however, l respect the bible and the core of my theology and spirituality is based on the bible, but that doesn't mean l cannot question it. Martin Luther for instance, rejected the book of james, that doesn't make him a non Christian, but for you he is not a Christian because he doesn't accept all scriptures, but he kickstarted the reformation and this is most likely why you are not a catholic today.

Finally you said l make lots of claims without offering proof, can you give me examples of these claims? l have backed up most of my theological claims with the bible, if there is any l didn't back up with scripture, please bring it to my notice.

Maximus69:
Hmmmmmmmmm

So your own God will roast good people who did fine works that's my own God promised in his words! This your God must be hopeless indeed

My friend, wake up from this spiritual slumber!

A real spiritual slumber.

einsteine:
She was like 12 years old then bro

How do you know this?

Ihedinobi3:
I think that I have understood you now. I have not yet seen you taking pains to mislead other believers, although I have not made it that high a priority to investigate you, so you may have been doing it and I just haven't seen you do it, so I won't call you a false teacher yet.


However, you do not respect the Bible as God's Own Authoritative Testimony. Therefore, you do not accept what it says as final. You are your own authority. You pick and choose what you will believe with reference to nothing but a standard of your own making.

Let me explain to you what Titus 3:9-11 means:

9 But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the Law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. 10  Reject a factious man after a first and second warning, 11 knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned.
Titus 3:9-11 NASB

People who are factious or heretics, as the KJV puts it, are people who are always looking to be divisive. The word "heretic" is often used in a way that has little to do with what the Bible actually says, but what Titus 3:9-11 means is that such people do not accept Scriptural authority. They pretend to be able to determine the Truth for themselves independent of the proper channels of authority that the Lord Himself has given. In other words, they are their own authority. They have no interest in any standard that is independent of them.

Such people inevitably end up in blasphemy and cultlike behavior. That is how many of the "churches" and "religious movements" of this world, including the Jehovah's Witnesses, Roman Catholic Church, Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, Seventh Day Adventists, and the myriad pentecostal and Word of Faith churches today became and are becoming what they are now. The instant that some charismatic person dispenses with the Truth and sets themselves up as the standard of truth, the natural thing that follows is a twisting and corrupting of the Truth in very terrible ways to draw disciples after themselves. That is, they become blasphemers and false teachers.

Let me explain blasphemers to you too. A blasphemer is a person that essentially defames God's Character and attributes things to Him that are not true of Him. That is, they are people who lie against God, whether by claiming something about Him that is untrue or by claiming that He said or says things that He did not say at all. Basically, blasphemy is slander against God.

You should be able to see the progression here. Once a person dismisses the Bible as the authority on what is true and what isn't, then they must decide how to know the Truth independent of the Bible. Unfailingly, such a person decides that it is only their own selves that they can trust. When they make that decision, they then begin to amass information from all kinds of sources and set themselves up as the umpire or arbiter that decides what is true and what isn't. Of course, they will only believe whatever they like and reject what they don't like. In the end, these people will believe many things that are completely untrue of God. And they will communicate it to others! Once they start doing that, they have become blasphemers and false teachers.

Now, since you do not accept the Bible to be the very Word of God, that is, His Very Own Testimony, His Own Declaration of What is True, and therefore, as the True Standard by which to measure every claim and every information to tell what is true and what isn't, you are a heretic. You may not know it or accept it, but neither is necessary for you to actually be a heretic in much the same way that it is not necessary for a child to accept that they are a child for them to be a child. Things are what they are independent of what opinion they might have of themselves.

I had already warned you that you have been talking and acting like a heretic and a blasphemer. Now I am telling you that you are actually these things. If you do not accept the authority of the Bible, you are in very dire straits indeed. I urge you to rethink that decision to reject the authority of the Bible. Until you do, you and I cannot discuss. I am a believer in Jesus Christ, the God and Man Whom the Bible reveals. So, it is not possible for you and I to discuss meaningfully if you do not subscribe to the authority of the Bible. You will be providing yourself as an authority in our discussions and I will be depending entirely on the Bible. Such a situation will only lead to quarrels.

So, as you said before, we must leave things at this point. We cannot discuss. But I do urge you to repent and believe the Gospel before it is too late for you.

you wrote.....I think that I have understood you now. I have not yet seen you taking pains to mislead other believers, although I have not made it that high a priority to investigate you, so you may have been doing it and I just haven't seen you do it, so I won't call you a false teacher yet.
lol ok, fair enough.

you wrote...However, you do not respect the Bible as God's Own Authoritative Testimony. Therefore, you do not accept what it says as final. You are your own authority. You pick and choose what you will believe with reference to nothing but a standard of your own making.

We all pick and choose what we believe.Even jesus was quoted as saying in john 5v46:
You search the scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life, but it is they which testify of me. The scripture is pointing to the kingdom of God preached by jesus and also demonstrated through the cross.
Even jesus didn't accept all scriptures at face value, he used scripture to compare scripture and then finally made a logical arguement from there, on the issue of divorce he said... Moses gave you this law because your hearts were hard, but in Genesis 1, God made them both Male and Female (paraphrased). You can see that he uses one scripture to override the other, this is because jesus deals on principles across scriptures not necessarily the letter. l can also prove to you that you pick and choose, and everyone does it, if you really want to know how, just ask me.

You wrote...People who are factious or heretics, as the KJV puts it, are people who are always looking to be divisive. The word "heretic" is often used in a way that has little to do with what the Bible actually says, but what Titus 3:9-11 means is that such people do not accept Scriptural authority. They pretend to be able to determine the Truth for themselves independent of the proper channels of authority that the Lord Himself has given. In other words, they are their own authority. They have no interest in any standard that is independent of them.

The bible should be questioned and our faith should be put to the test and that has nothing to do with being divisive, because as a rational person l believe you question most things in life you come across, else how do you differentiate between the right spirit and the wrong if you don't test the spirit. The passage only tells you to avoid endless geneologies and things that don't really matter and are just purely religious stuff, it is not against asking questions about basic spiritual truths, because even paul reasoned with people both from scriptures and their own philosophy.
Questioning is not a bad thing, it is the culture that gave rise to science, philosophy and even religion in some ways. When your children ask you questions as a pastor-teacher and they are not satisfied with your answers and then you call them divisive or heretics they eventually become atheists and this is why atheism is on the rise, because parents and pastors are not interested in sound scholarship of the bible and they present a Christianity that is against questioning and so people no longer see the power of christianity because they don't understand it's context and pastor-teachers are not helping matters.

You wrote...Let me explain blasphemers to you too. A blasphemer is a person that essentially defames God's Character and attributes things to Him that are not true of Him. That is, they are people who lie against God, whether by claiming something about Him that is untrue or by claiming that He said or says things that He did not say at all. Basically, blasphemy is slander against God.

A person presenting how he understands scripture or asking questions is not a blasphemer, however those who blaspheme against the Holyspirit cannot be forgiven because they are those who deny the power of God within to save and heal even when the power and miracles are evident to all, because only the power of God within us can save us.

You Wrote....You should be able to see the progression here. Once a person dismisses the Bible as the authority on what is true and what isn't, then they must decide how to know the Truth independent of the Bible. Unfailingly, such a person decides that it is only their own selves that they can trust. When they make that decision, they then begin to amass information from all kinds of sources and set themselves up as the umpire or arbiter that decides what is true and what isn't. Of course, they will only believe whatever they like and reject what they don't like. In the end, these people will believe many things that are completely untrue of God. And they will communicate it to others! Once they start doing that, they have become blasphemers and false teachers.

When you were looking for your truth, you admitted that you had to remove some things and add some things, why did you do all these if you think you didn't have to use your own reasoning and teachings from others to understand scripture. What you believe about scripture is not in a vacuum and mostly comes from yourself and how you see things. Not everyone understands a text thesame way, not every culture is alike and we have many influences and most of all we have our brain and our innate conscience which Holyspirit wants to work upon. Even if we don't agree with each other on everything, we can love each other, only through that would the world distinguish us as disciples.

You Wrote...Now, since you do not accept the Bible to be the very Word of God, that is, His Very Own Testimony, His Own Declaration of What is True, and therefore, as the True Standard by which to measure every claim and every information to tell what is true and what isn't, you are a heretic. You may not know it or accept it, but neither is necessary for you to actually be a heretic in much the same way that it is not necessary for a child to accept that they are a child for them to be a child. Things are what they are independent of what opinion they might have of themselves.


What is the bible? ln the bible we have the words of Angel's, demons, prophets, satan, heck even animals. So how can it all be the word of God except you say it is a spiritual fossil record given to us by God to lead us to him, in that sense only the bible can be said to be the word of God.

Take Ecclesiastes for instance, if you study that book as the word of God teaching you theology you miss some things about its importance and power, but when you read it as the quest of the author to understand life, then you appreciate it for what it is, also songs of Solomon and even the psalms that sometimes question God. This is why l say the bible as a whole is a spiritual fossil Record, it is a flawed book like every other book, but it's strength is that it contains spiritual truth here and there which we must discern. But we cannot discern these spiritual truths if we deceive ourselves that it is the verbatim word of God.Also the bible has contradictions, and of course such is expected, the way one author sees things may not be the way the others see things, of course they are humans and that is the strength of the bible and this is how God have decided to speak to us through the bible. lf the bible is all we need then why do we even need the spirit of truth? We read the bible and then confirm with the spirit of truth within, but we also must listen to our fellow man to understand how he understands the spirit in him.

You Wrote...l had already warned you that you have been talking and acting like a heretic and a blasphemer. Now I am telling you that you are actually these things. If you do not accept the authority of the Bible, you are in very dire straits indeed. I urge you to rethink that decision to reject the authority of the Bible. Until you do, you and I cannot discuss. I am a believer in Jesus Christ, the God and Man Whom the Bible reveals. So, it is not possible for you and I to discuss meaningfully if you do not subscribe to the authority of the Bible. You will be providing yourself as an authority in our discussions and I will be depending entirely on the Bible. Such a situation will only lead to quarrels

lol what if you also sound like an heretic to me, although l don't like using the term heretic but people who make God look like a pagan god by saying he needed a kind of sacrifice with blood to forgive sins without thoroughly explaining what this means in context, or when they do so only by attributing it to some kind of spiritual reason, sound like heretics to me. Moreso people who say that all you have to do to become a Christian is to just believe in this sacrifice(as described above) and you are a follower of jesus ( even though jesus never taught these), these ones are not just heretics but blasphemers of God in my eyes, because they then deceive themselves that they are to do nothing to be known as Christians, only believe.
They say things like.. (jesus teachings in the gospels were for those under the law but we are not under the law). As far as l am concerned nothing else could be more heretical than these.

Ihedinobi3 as to your last point which was about the bible, my answer to that is that the bible is not the word of God, rather it contains the word, or wasn't the bible written by men?
Finally l am here to learn, not for any agenda.

Ihedinobi3:
I think that you just made my point. In so far as you are like me, there is little chance of your changing in the things that you believe. However, this conversation has gone on because you have continued to answer me in a way that suggests some possibility of a real exchange rather than yet another shouting match on Nairaland. What I have been doing is alerting you to what my interest in a conversation like this is. As I said, I don't enter them because I have any doubts about what I believe or because I want to discover the errors in my belief system. I have the Bible and my pastor-teacher for that. So, if you want to discuss things with the Bible as an umpire, that's fine by me. If you don't, then there is no possibility of any discussion.

Next, I have not yet called you a heretic or blasphemer. I have warned you instead that you are behaving like them. Believe me, if I was convinced that you were either, that is what I would actually call you. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt before labeling them here.

Next, if you consider it arrogant that I am refusing to yield my position, that is more telling about you than about me. As I said, I offered an answer to a difficulty that you raised. I often leave things at that. I only go on to discuss my answer further if there seems to be a reasonable occasion for me to do so. That is what I do on Nairaland. If anyone knows the Truth, then they ought to hold on to it and not play fast and loose with it.

As for your position on the Cross, I think that that is already evident. But if you don't think that your comments so far are not representative of your position on it, then you should explain further. You should also note that, as I said before, I have seen other things that you have said about the Cross in other discussions than this one.

I have also seen what you think of the Bible in a comment that you made today. So, I already have a thought on you, but I am not yet making a judgment call, because I don't know yet whether you are here to sell a dangerous lie or if you are here to examine things that you believe.

Finally, have a merry Christmas too.

you said...<I think that you just made my point. In so far as you are like me, there is little chance of your changing in the things that you believe. However, this conversation has gone on because you have continued to answer me in a way that suggests some possibility of a real exchange rather than yet another shouting match on Nairaland. What I have been doing is alerting you to what my interest in a conversation like this is. As I said, I don't enter them because I have any doubts about what I believe or because I want to discover the errors in my belief system. I have the Bible and my pastor-teacher for that. So, if you want to discuss things with the Bible as an umpire, that's fine by me. If you don't, then there is no possibility of any discussion.>

ok then so we are not here to change each other's views only explain our side of things. However if you say something that is reasonable and also convincing to me, l would learn from you, l am not limited to just my bible and pastor-teachers. l can learn new things from anyone after weighing their arguement on a scale usually for logic, consistency, and scripture in that order.

you said...<Next, I have not yet called you a heretic or blasphemer. I have warned you instead that you are behaving like them. Believe me, if I was convinced that you were either, that is what I would actually call you. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt before labeling them here.>

Fair enough, but heretic is in the eye of the beholder, your heretic is another man's saint.

you said....<Next, if you consider it arrogant that I am refusing to yield my position, that is more telling about you than about me. As I said, I offered an answer to a difficulty that you raised. I often leave things at that. I only go on to discuss my answer further if there seems to be a reasonable occasion for me to do so. That is what I do on Nairaland. If anyone knows the Truth, then they ought to hold on to it and not play fast and loose with it.>

ok then, it's great that you know the truth already, all l am doing is examining this truth, not necessarily for you but for the audience and myself.

You said < As for your position on the Cross, I think that that is already evident. But if you don't think that your comments so far are not representative of your position on it, then you should explain further. You should also note that, as I said before, I have seen other things that you have said about the Cross in other discussions than this one>.

ok my position on the cross is that jesus died for two things as explained by himself in the gospels:
1) Mark 10v45, the son of man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
2) And he took the cup and gave thanks and said drink, this is my blood of the new covenant for the forgiveness of sins.

1)Jesus ransom was for the new Israel, the remnant of his nation Israel that would listen to his teachings, live by it and survive. Caiphas stated in the gospel of john, that it is better for one man to die for the nation than for the entire nation to be destroyed, this high priest unknowingly was making a true prophecy here.
The fear was that the Romans would come to destroy the Jewish nation after the triumphant entry and the cleansing of the temple. The problem was that if the Romans take action, many would die in lsrael for the sake of jesus and both he and his followers would be wiped out. Part of the fear of jesus at the garden of gethsemane seem to be that his disciples would be taken as well, and so he told them to even buy two swords in the gospel of luke.
To show that this fear was real, in the gospel of john( john 18v8-9), he came forward to present himself saying if you seek me let this men go.

Also notice that in Mark 10v45, jesus says true glory is not like the world think it is, but it is that of service. So in that world, the heroes were the Caesars, so when the disciples saw jesus naked on the cross, presenting himself to be taken and to die in their place, so as not to lose any of them( john 18v8-9), it changed their perception of what it means to be hero. So the cross is foolishness to the world, because a hero is not supposed to be on the cross, but to us, it is the power and wisdom of God says saint paul.

2) His blood for the forgiveness of sins is to show the fulfillment of the passover celebration. lt represents freedom from exile to all held bound in slavery due to sins of mankind towards one another. lt all goes back to Abraham, when God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, that command didn't make any sense, because isaac was the promised one through whom the world be blessed, and Abraham knew that God's promises are irrevocable, but Abraham obeyed because he reasoned that God is able to raise him from the dead. This is why Abraham became righteous in God's sight because he did works of faith still in hope of that promise, so also God was showing that even if lsrael is destroyed(all her firstborn sons as in Egypt)and go on exile, God is able to bring the nation back to life again to fulfill the promises. Even if jesus, the promised one and son of God gets killed in obedience to God, God is able to raise him from the dead. So death is not a barrier to the promise of a better world through the seed of Abraham, even death of the messaiah because God would also give us power over death because we would come back alive.

Also a passover was sacrificed as a sign but the passover lamb itself is just to bring this to remembrance just like Abel sacrificed an animal to the lord, but Abel( the first blameless man)became a sacrifice himself for obeying God, he paid the price for his faith, so that his blood still cries out to God for vengeance just like all the righteous blood shed on the earth due to oppression and sins or wickedness of their killers, while jesus cries out for forgiveness in contrast because of his love asking God for reconciliation of the world( even the worst of the world) to God. lt is in this way that the sacrifice of jesus moves God on his throne because it is in tune with the will of God, for while it is true that God wants to punish these evil doers like cain and the Romans, he wants to punish them for correction not their total destruction because God loves the world.
The Israelites also sacrificed a lamb to avert the angel of death, the lamb saved them from becoming extinct as a nation, so the lamb was a hero, the killing of the lamb was to remind themselves that a lamb took their place and they continued to do this for the forgiveness of sins(meaning release from exile or slavery).The lamb was the sacrifice that saved the nation from being extinct to slavery. The lamb represents jesus who saves his people from slavery due to sin, but the death of a lamb only averted slavery, exile and death and in practice doesn't take away sin by itself.
But with jesus, first obeying his teachings by faith through his spirit takes away sins, secondly his blood crying out to God for forgiveness of sins saves the world because he died loving even his enemies to the end. This is not substitutionary atonement, this is a demonstration of the teaching that says love your enemies which we are called to live by even unto the death.

So in summary, we are to take up our own cross and follow jesus not believing that jesus was a human sacrifice to appease God in our place, but rather that he not only showed us an example but that his blood still speaks unto this day.
The authors in the new testament only stress on antonement to show the jews that they no longer needed the passover lamb which marked freedom from slavery, but that that passover lamb that saved the nation then from dying at the hands of pharaoh and the angel of death is actually jesus the hero that dies as a ransom to the Romans to eventually set up the era of the kingdom of God through his disciples(the new Israel) who would carry out the promises of Abraham and the hope of the world by spreading the legacy of jesus(his spirit) to the world.

koyyess:
No.

Joseph's $perm would have ruined everything.

For a perfect soul to be born, no presence of a male's $perm must be present in Mary.

God forbid that it who even be a negroe's $perm. It would have driven God crazy.

lolz

lhedinobi3 when l say l want to refine the truth l think l have found, it doesn't mean that if l find out that it can't be refined and it is false, l wouldn't drop it, l think you have misunderstood me. lt is not different from what you said when you said you found the truth and you no longer want to add or remove from it, infact you are more convinced of your truth than l am, and as a pastor-teacher it seems you can only preach to so called heretics not try to understand what they are saying, yet this is what you are accusing me of, interesting.

The point is you are the one using the word heretic and blasphemer for people, l never used it for you or anyone. So you are the one arrogant and fixed about your views and l respect your decision to have it your way.

As for the cross, you don't understand my position on the cross and how l understand your substitutionary atonement, and you seem not to be willing to listen probably because you are a pastor-teacher, and since l am not, then l alone should be willing to learn from you and not you from me.

As for the bible, again l fear to state my view on the bible lest you call me a heretic trying to convince you, even though l do not accuse you of such when you describe your views in lengthy paragraphs.

Anyway Merry Christmas to you.

parksg:
The Bible was not written on hearsay

Some of it were. Even Luke would agree with me here. Luke was not a witness to what he wrote, he had to interview people and gather materials.
Also it is believed that Mark was a secretary of peter and his content was mainly written based on Peter's testimony.

GrayBeard:
The word translated as virgin is Almah. This is a mistranslation as Almah simply means "Young Woman."

Almah (עַלְמָה ‘almāh, plural: עֲלָמוֹת ‘ălāmōṯ), from a root implying the vigour of puberty,[1] is a Hebrew word for a young woman of childbearing age.[2] Despite its importance to the Christian tradition of the virgin birth of Jesus, scholars agree that it has nothing to do with virginity.[2] It occurs nine times in the Hebrew Bible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almah

Yeah so Matthew was reading from the septuagint. ln my belief ( and l might be wrong) no one truly knew much about the birth of jesus as at the time the gospels were written probably because Mary must have died when they were writing, as well as the siblings of jesus and as at then there were probably different traditions on the birth narrative. Mark doesn't even bother about the birth of jesus, and for john, jesus already existed from the beginning. Matthew and Luke were trying to write an all round biography, and could only write down what they have heard and what was popular in their own community.

Some people argue though that the translation of the word almah in Isaiah 7v14 is not virgin but maiden. The translation of the Hebrew bible to Greek about 200 years before christ may have translated it as virgin. That is their arguement, and l don't know enough yet to refute it, but someone here who is familiar with this arguement should bring in his/her own perspective.

Either way Merry Christmas to you all.

lf you are correct, then why did God choose Israel to bear his covenant promises? what did lsrael do to deserve God's favour. Why did God choose Jacob from the womb, even before the boys did anything?

Ihedinobi3:
I have never in my life been an easy person for others to teach, not unless I trust the teacher. So, I have no problems with challenges and arguments when people don't want to take my word for the things I say. I don't demand that you simply believe me yourself. My problem with you is that you couch your interactions in language that is suggestive of strife. You do say that you are willing to learn, but then you end up producing challenges that completely ignore everything that you are told. That is something I have no time for. If you actually have objections to things I say - and that means that you actually read them and understand them - I would be very happy to hear them and attempt to solve them for you. But if you wish to teach me what to believe, that would be wasting each other's time, because I spent much of my life (all but the last couple of years) looking for the Truth, breaking things, throwing things away, before I found it. Now that I have, I will never give it up. So, if you wish to teach me something, I would encourage you not to waste your time. If you wish to query what I have learned and am still learning on the other hand, I would be happy to answer your questions.

As for what you say you believe, I'm afraid I don't believe you now any more than I did before. I don't mean that it is not true, I mean only that I cannot see how it can be. The Cross, after all, is the Gospel. If you believe even that it is a major part of the Gospel, then you would have no trouble at all with substitutionary atonement.

As for your claims about Thomas Aquinas, I know a little bit about him, but I don't quote him in any of my arguments. I have no difficulty at all discussing the whole Bible without reference to him at all and I will still demonstrate repeatedly that every part of the Bible teaches that the Lord Jesus died on the Cross for all of our sin so that we can be reconciled to God and preserved in His Kingdom eternally when He returns to His Creation to rule over it.

In other words, as long as you are persuaded that the Lord Jesus, God Who became Man to die for us, did not actually die on the Cross to save us from our sins, not only have we nothing at all to talk about, we also have absolutely no kinship at all. You see, every true Christian is defined by this belief. That is what a Christian is.

You said.....My problem with you is that you couch your interactions in language that is suggestive of strife. You do say that you are willing to learn, but then you end up producing challenges that completely ignore everything that you are told. That is something I have no time for. If you actually have objections to things I say - and that means that you actually read them and understand them - I would be very happy to hear them and attempt to solve them for you.

lol, it is not my intention to ignore challenges, l have queries for the things you say, but you always interprete it as me trying to bend you to my will. Also when l don't ask questions and l present my point of view, l am presenting them so they can be challenged not because l think l have found the whole truth and you must bend. But like l said if you don't want to challenge your beliefs anymore, then that is fine.

You said....But if you wish to teach me what to believe, that would be wasting each other's time, because I spent much of my life (all but the last couple of years) looking for the Truth, breaking things, throwing things away, before I found it. Now that I have, I will never give it up. So, if you wish to teach me something, I would encourage you not to waste your time. If you wish to query what I have learned and am still learning on the other hand, I would be happy to answer your questions.

Now this is interesting, so you found the truth and you are settled, then that is great. Maybe all l have to do when discussing these things with you, is just ask questions and not present my side of things. l also think l have found truth, but l am willing to challenge it everytime in order to possibly refine it and learn more truth.

You said....As for what you say you believe, I'm afraid I don't believe you now any more than I did before. I don't mean that it is not true, I mean only that I cannot see how it can be. The Cross, after all, is the Gospel. If you believe even that it is a major part of the Gospel, then you would have no trouble at all with substitutionary atonement.

Of course the cross is the gospel. Substitutionary antonement( a view that God was looking for a blood sacrifice to forgive our sins, and so he put jesus in our place and if we just believe in that we become righteous).This is an interpretation of the cross by church fathers like Thomas Aquinas. l have problems believing in this particular interpretation as the major purpose of the cross, if you want to know why l have problems with this view l am willing to tell you. Also if you want to know my views from scripture and my interpretation, l am willing to put it out to be challenged, but if you are satisfied with this belief in substitutionary atonement and would not entertain other views, then of course there is no problem, l don't think it affects your salvation in the end.

You said....As for your claims about Thomas Aquinas, I know a little bit about him, but I don't quote him in any of my arguments. I have no difficulty at all discussing the whole Bible without reference to him at all and I will still demonstrate repeatedly that every part of the Bible teaches that the Lord Jesus died on the Cross for all of our sin so that we can be reconciled to God and preserved in His Kingdom eternally when He returns to His Creation to rule over it.

Of course l believe that about the cross and l know you can demonstrate that, the only problem discussing with you is that when l challenge some views( like say substitutionary atonement), you interpret it as me trying to bend you to my will. The bible does not have one solidified interpretation, of course it is not a single book, it is a library of books and authors. We must be willing to listen to and learn from one another, not necessarily to agree but to be well grounded, perhaps considering things we may not have considered before. Also you misunderstand the argument, the arguement is not whether or not jesus died on the cross to reconcile us to God, the arguement is against him being a substitute as a blood sacrifice, such that believing in him as a substitute on the cross for our punishment automatically makes us righteous or saved, that is where l have problems.

You said.....ln other words, as long as you are persuaded that the Lord Jesus, God Who became Man to die for us, did not actually die on the Cross to save us from our sins, not only have we nothing at all to talk about, we also have absolutely no kinship at all. You see, every true Christian is defined by this belief. That is what a Christian is.

Can you show me where l said jesus did not die to save us from our sins. You don't know my view on the cross and you are not interested because you think l am trying to convince you and make you reject your views, so of course you would say this.
l agree every true Christian is defined by belief on the cross and the principles of the kingdom of God on earth but not substitutionary atonement.

Ihedinobi3:
You may call it "discussion" and another would call it some other name, but if it is no more than a struggle to bend other people to your own way of thinking, then it is what it is, not whatever you wish to call it.

This is not the product of mere "research," I learned from and am still guided by a pastor-teacher as I train to become a fully prepared pastor-teacher myself. This is what I learned from him and what I confirmed is true by reading the Bible.

As for what your intention is, you may not be fully aware of it, but you have just contradicted yourself. Clearly, if the man (there was only one man reported by the disciples to be carrying out exorcisms in Mark 9 and Luke 9) did not believe in Jesus enough to follow Him, then your teaching here is that no one should be excluded from being recognized as a disciple if they are "calling Jesus Lord." It's hard to see what you are saying any other way.

The Bible only actually says that this man was said by the disciples to be casting out evil spirits in the Lord's Name. We can certainly infer that he was unknown to the disciples, but there is no reason at all to infer that he did not believe fully in the Lord Jesus. Many people were secret disciples of the Lord, including Nicodemus who was part of the Sanhedrin. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were also believers in the Lord Jesus, but of them only Mary is known to go around with Him sometimes. The Lord visited them at their home in Bethany for the most part. There was also Zacchaeus whom we only see being visited at his home by the Lord, but we do not see him going everywhere with the Lord. There were also the two men whom the Lord exorcised of evil spirits in the Gadarenes who begged Him to let them follow Him, but whom He sent back to evangelize their hometown. In other words, there is plenty reason to believe that this man whom John was speaking of was also a believer, but he wasn't one of the Twelve who went everywhere with the Lord.

We also know that only anyone who truly believed and to whom the Lord gave that special ability at that time could ever get evil spirits to leave a human body. Not even the Twelve could exorcise demons without the Lord's special provision of power (Mark 9:14-18,28-29). So, if the man was really doing what John reported, then he was most certainly a believer working under the Lord's Authority.

The lesson in that passage was that we were not to exclude others simply because we don't know them. If anyone is doing what the Lord calls us to do, they are brothers and sisters with us. The Lord calls us to believe in Him and grow in the Truth (that is, to learn everything that He teaches through the Bible and believe it) and help others to do the same (John 6:29; 15:1-8 ). If anyone is doing that, the fact that they are not part of our normal physical gathering does not mean that they are not believers too like us. So, for example, the fact that some other believer that I meet on here who may be very zealous about teaching the Bible is not a student of the Ichthys Ministry as I am ought not to mean for me that he is not a believer or a true servant of Christ. It would be wrong for me to reject such a person just because I don't know them. If what they teach is in agreement with the Bible, then I should extend a hand of fellowship to them as well. That is what our Lord was teaching here. He was not saying that if someone is not a believer, but if they can do some miraculous stuff, we are in any way obliged to consider them to be brethren too.

As for your claims about what the Lord Jesus taught, I see no reason that anyone should say what you said. It's quite preposterous. No one could possibly read Matthew to John and make such a statement, unless they just don't want to believe what they read.

20 But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.”
Matthew 1:20-21 NASB

14 Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
Mark 1:14-15 NASB

20 And He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered and said, “The Christ of God.” 21 But He warned them and instructed them not to tell this to anyone, 22 saying, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and be raised up on the third day.” 23 And He was saying to them all, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. 24 For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it. 25 For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world, and loses or forfeits himself?
Luke 9:20-25 NASB

14 As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; 15 so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. 18 He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
John 3:14-18 NASB

All of the Gospels run to the Cross. In fact, all of the Bible runs to the Cross and then the epistles and Revelation and all the prophecies of the Old Testament open out from it. The Cross is the foundation of all Creation. You say that an understanding of it is vital to salvation but you doubt "substitutionary atonement," but that is a contradiction. You have said elsewhere that the Cross was something that the Lord Jesus accepted to protect His disciples from the Romans, but I cannot for the life of me see how that computes from anything anyone can actually read in the Bible.

In the Old Testament, beginning from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Lord God Himself has always taught that a payment of blood, that is, life, must be made in order for the sins of the human race to be expunged. The very first mention of this is in Genesis 3:15. Following upon this was the bloody sacrifice that the Lord carried out to give Adam and Eve coats of skin to wear as they left the Garden. The couple's acceptance of those coats was their acceptance of the Sacrifice of a Substitute in their behalf for their sin. That is, the Lord had commanded death if they ever sinned against Him. When they did, in order to spare their lives, He killed something else in their behalf. That something else was not really the animal from which He obtained the coats of skin for them. The animal was only a symbol. It was the Seed of the Woman Who would come much later in history that the animal represented. Theologically, that act of the Lord's in the Garden is called the protoevangelium or first gospel.

Every animal sacrifice after that that followed the Lord's Teaching to the couple in Eden was a deliberate identification of the offerer with the Sacrifice of the Substitute Whom the Lord would send later in history. So, Abel's sacrifice, for example, was his deliberate declaration of his faith in the Coming Savior. Cain's, of course, was not, since Cain offered vegetables, not blood. This went on until the Lord gave the Law through Israel in order to further explain to anyone interested just how necessary the Sacrifice of the Messiah would be. In fact, the whole relationship of Man to God is described in the Law to be built around the Sacrifice of the Bronze Altar, which was a type of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

So, when you say that the Lord Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God and not primarily about His Sacrifice, you demonstrate a desperate ignorance of the Bible. The Kingdom of God is only accessible through Faith in Jesus Christ and acceptance of His Sacrifice in our behalf. Man lost the Kingdom that God gave to him in Genesis 1:28 by his rebellion. He has been an outcast from God's Kingdom since then, an active rebel condemned to die. The only way back into that Kingdom is through the Cross of Jesus Christ. Rejection of that Sacrifice only confirms the one who rejects it in their condemnation. That is what the whole Bible teaches.

The Kingdom of God is not political at all. In fact, it is entirely spiritual. Also, it is not yet here in full. It is only here in the form of a seed through all those who believe in the Truth. That was what the Lord Jesus meant in Luke 17:21. He said, "the Kingdom of God is among you (or in your midst)." All those who believe in Jesus Christ are subjects of that Kingdom. Their presence here on Earth is like an invading force on Earth. Satan knows that, that is why he persecutes believers and tries to kill them. In fact, if not for very important checks that the Lord has placed upon Satan's kingdom here, all believers would already be dead (and then all humans would be too to make sure that no human being would ever believe).

The Kingdom will gain ascendancy at the Second Advent when the Lord returns to destroy Satan's kingdom. Then it will physically rule over the Earth until the end of the 7000 years of human history, at which time a final rebellion against its authority will be allowed. After that rebellion has been crushed, and the universe has been destroyed, and the Last Judgment has been carried out, the Kingdom of God will finally come back in full to the New Earth that the Lord Jesus will create. The Trinity will then take back unrivaled rule over all Creation again at that time.

All of this is only possible because of the Cross that reconciles believing humanity to the King that humanity rebelled (and persists in rebellion) against. So, if the Lord Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God and taught it even exclusively, He was still teaching about the Cross. As you will see from the Mark reference that I offered above, His teaching was that because the Kingdom was so near to its return, sinners needed to repent and believe the Gospel (and what is the Gospel, if not that God had given a Savior to die in the place of the rebels?). Clearly, if they did not, the return of the Kingdom was going to be a most regrettable experience for them. At the Second Advent, everyone who will have taken the mark of the Antichrist to seal their allegiance to him will be burned to a crisp with fire and they will still be thrown into Torments to await the Final Judgment. After that Judgment, they will be thrown into the Lake of Fire for all eternity. This is what the Return of the Kingdom promises all rebels. Thus the "substitutionary atonement" that you "have doubt about" is everything to those who believe. It is the only escape anyone has from the Anger of the King Who is returning.

As I said before, my answers are given only because I consider them necessary for teachings in the Bible that people sometimes struggle with. You are not obliged to believe me, if you don't want to. My effort is not to dictate to you what you will believe. I will only tell the Truth, and those who have ears will hear it.

ok sir, let's not push it further so you wouldn't think l am trying to bend you to my will.
For the records, l believe the cross is a major part of the gospel of the kingdom of God, l was only speaking against substitutionary antonement( preached mainly by Thomas Aquinas) and common in evangelical understanding of the cross today.

Ihedinobi3:
Hello.

Feel free to disregard my response. I am only making it because you raised a common difficulty in the Bible, so I wish to provide a witness for anyone who cares to know the Truth on the matter. As I told you in another conversation, I'm not much for debates these days. I am happy to defend and explain anything I say within reason, but I don't debate for the sake of debating, so if you disagree with my answer, that is fine by me, and I will not pursue the matter further with you.

This is what I believe that you refer to:

13 All your children will be taught by the Lord,
and great will be their peace.
Isaiah 54:13 NIV2011

"The time is coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them," declares the LORD.
"This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.
No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, `Know the LORD,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the LORD. "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more."
Jeremiah 31:31-34 NIV1984

In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.
Many peoples will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
Isaiah 2:2-3 NIV1984

In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and peoples will stream to it.
Many nations will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
Micah 4:1-2 NIV1984

In Joel, you may be referring to 2:28-29, but it doesn't quite say the same things as the above. I'm not sure what part of Malachi you meant.

It is true that the New Testament refers to the times after the Cross as the last days too, so it can be understood why many who interpret the above passages to mean that we don't need pastor-teachers make such an interpretation. But they dispense with what else is said in the context of these passages and with what the rest of the Bible teaches in their interpretation, so they are quite wrong.

Ephesians 4:11-16 are rather unequivocal about how the Church works after the Cross. You find the same teaching in 1 Corinthians 12 too. Because of His Magnificent Victory through the Cross, our Lord gave the Church many spiritual gifts, notable among which are the apostle, the prophet, the pastor-teacher, and the evangelist, in that order (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:28), for the growth or building up of the Church. The apostles and the prophets completed the Revelation of Jesus Christ through their writings that became the New Testament. They are the complements of the prophets of old who also provided part of that Revelation through their own inspired writings. The pastor-teacher is given to the Church to interpret those writings so that those who believe can grow in their faith and become ever more confident in the Lord. The evangelist is given to teach the basic truth of the Gospel to unbelievers and thus bring those who are willing into the Lord's fold. In this way, the Church grows in number and each individual believer who obeys the Lord in this grows to spiritual maturity.

In other words, although we are truly in the last days, there is a bit of a difference between these last days and the last days that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah were talking about, since obviously rather than having pastor-teachers teach anybody anything in those other last days, we see the Lord Himself doing the teaching.

To explain, there are seven millennial days of human history symbolized by and corresponding to the seven actual days of re-creation in Genesis 1. Please understand that those seven days of re-creation did, in fact, happen. That is actually how we can be sure that they were a teaching tool the Lord used to demonstrate His Plan for human history to us. So, the teaching that they are a symbol of the seven thousand years of human history does not at all mean that the Lord did not reconstruct the Universe in seven actual days. He most certainly did.

The Cross occurred at the end of the fourth millennial day and opened the Age of the Church, that is, the time of the rapid expansion of the Church among the Gentiles. Until then, the majority of believers had been Jewish, although there have always been Gentile believers including those from the first two millennia of human history, that is, the Gentile Age, before Israel was created as a nation. With the Cross, however, things sped up significantly and a flood of Gentiles filled the Church. That is why the two thousand years that followed the Cross is called the Church Age. These two millennia of the Church Age are part of the last three millennial days of human history, so they are called the last days too. But they are also called the last days because they will terminate with the Return of the King, the Lord God Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, Who will return to take His Rightful Place as King over the whole Earth. In other words, the Church Age is the last two days of Satan's rule over the Earth.

But after this Church Age, there will be the Millennium. That is the seventh millennial day of human history. It follows the Resurrection of the Church and the Return of the Head of the Church to complete the Church. When these things happen, Satan's kingdom will be destroyed at Armageddon, and the Reign of the Kingdom of Heaven over the Earth will commence. The Lord and the Resurrected Church will at that time rule over the whole world. It is during this time that the Lord Himself will be teaching the Truth directly to the unresurrected human beings that will live on earth. They will not have the spiritual gifts that the Church was given. They will have the Lord Himself to teach them the Truth.

It is not an error that the prophets lumped the Millennium together with the Church Age. For one thing, the division of the Lord's Advent into two: first as a suffering Servant and later as a conquering King was not clearly shown to them by the Holy Spirit (cf. Luke 10:23-24; 1 Peter 1:10-12). So, even the Church Age and the Millennium are not clearly separated in the Old Testament, at least not without the benefit of the New Testament to show us that there were going to be two Advents of the Lord. For another, the Cross is truly how both the Church (including all believers from Adam and Eve to the last person to believe in Jesus Christ during the Tribulation) and Millennial Believers (also called the Friends of the Bride - and the Bride is the Church) are saved. That is, although the Church is different from Millennial Believers in that she comprises all those who believe before the Second Advent, she is of the same family as Millennial Believers still, so the last three millennial days run together in that way. The main difference is that Millennial Believers will enjoy a world free of Satan's influence and one that is perfectly suited to mortal life, while the Church has to deal with Satan's increasing opposition right up to the moment that her Bridegroom returns to resurrect her and bring her into His Eternal Victory over all of Satan's power in an actualized way.

This difference is why although some of these prophecies are fulfilled to a limited extent with the Ascension and Session of our Lord (for example, the pouring out of the Spirit in Joel 2 and the supernatural things that resulted from that), they will be fully brought to fruition with the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth at the Return of the Lord Jesus.

So, there is really no confusion. For now and until the Lord returns, those who believe can only learn the Truth by listening to pastor-teachers who have been properly trained in the Truth and who have also prepared themselves through studies in the original languages (ancient Greek, ancient Hebrew, and Aramaic), textual criticism, ancient history, and church history. With these tools, they can help other believers to become able to properly understand what the Bible teaches as a unified system of Truth and arm them against the lies that Satan uses to stunt the growth of believers and stultify their spiritual production for the Lord as well as even cause some to apostatize. When the Lord returns, believers of the Millennial Age will have Him to teach them directly what the Truth is, and without the interference of Satan's activities. This is a product of the Cross too, just as the Church herself is.

Finally, regarding the text that you put in bold, I see nothing in the Bible that suggests that the person whom the Lord told the disciples not to rebuke was only experimenting with His Name. In fact, all that we read is that the disciples reported that they saw a man exorcising evil spirits in the Lord's Name and they told him to stop. We see nothing suggestive of experimenting there. We further read that the Lord tells the disciples that they are not to oppose anyone who is doing anything in His Name. The expression "in His Name" is not often understood today in the same way that it was understood in the days of the New Testament. What it meant to them then and what it means in the Bible is "in [accordance with] His Person." That is, if something is done in anybody's name, it is understood to be done with their approval and by their authority. In other words, the thing is associated with the Person himself or herself. So, how anyone gives a cup of cold water to a believer in the Lord's Name is by giving that believer a cup of cold water because that person belongs to the Lord, that is, the gift is given in recognition of the Lord Who owns that believer. So, it does not mean that whenever someone slaps the label "Jesus" or "Jesus Christ" on anything, it is automatically approved by the Lord, no. What it means is that if anything is done in keeping with Who the Lord is and His Sacrifice for us, then that thing has His Approval. If an evil thing is done with the Lord's Name attached to it, it will not have His Approval. It will have His Wrath instead:

"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.
By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?
Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.
A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.
Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.
"Not everyone who says to me, `Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
Many will say to me on that day, `Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?'
Then I will tell them plainly, `I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'
Matthew 7:15-23 NIV1984

ok l agree with much of what you said and l am not here to argue too, just to discuss.

l am not going to speak much about your detailed descriptive theology around those verses and l must commend you on your research on the Joel and Jeremiah verses.

However concerning the verse where jesus said whosoever is not against us is for us, it wasn't my intention to say that anybody who doesn't obey the teachings of christ but call him lord, has become a disciple, no far from it.
My point however was that from the context of that verse, the disciples were trying to exclude those guys simply because they were not part of the team, certainly those guys didn't believe jesus enough to even be part of the seventy disciples at least. But jesus was inclusive here.

Read the gospels, jesus rarely taught people to believe in his so called sacrifice as a sacrifice of substitution appeasing God's wrath as many Christians understand it today, but his major message was the coming of the kingdom of God, which was both political and spiritual and is here with us, not marked by human observation nor is it a physical place but in our midst.

An understanding of the cross is of course vital for salvation but substitutionary atonement is what l have doubt about.
But l digress, perhaps that's a topic for another day.

Anyway thanks for the response and clarification.

Maximus69:
The blue colour!

I don't get your point there,please are you saying God will select some people and infuse his words in their brains to make them BELIEVE him or each individual will have EQUAL chances to listen, meditate and decide what to do?

l don't know how God would do it, but the old testament scriptures in Joel and Jeremiah and Malachi seem to indicate that everyone would be taught of God in the last days and they shall all know me from the smallest to the greatest.

jesus seem to agree with this perspective in John 6v44 that everyone who learns from the father and seeks to do his will, would know if his teachings are true or not.
Also jesus says elsewhere to his disciples that they that are not against us are on our side. This is remarkable, because he was referring to people who were only experimenting with his name to cast out demons, they may not have believed every single doctrine about jesus. Yet jesus said they are on his side because they were not against his ministry and were open minded enough to even try some things out

l myself l'm confused and cannot give a direct answer to your question, l'm just stating scriptures that are usually ignored by all forms of mainstream christianity, but puzzling verses nonetheless. What are your interpretation of these verses?

Maximus69:
Hmmmmmmmmm!

Please, allow God's holy spirit to open your spiritual eyes on this matter Sir!

First of all i want you to know that Jesus is God's ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, nobody can gain salvation except through him! John 14:6

Secondly God spoke directly from heaven saying "this is my beloved son LISTEN TO HIM" Matthew 17:5

Do you think any of Adam's descendants who are sinners {Romans 3:23,5:12,6:23} can do the will of God without agreeing completely with Jesus on all sacred matters?

Remember that we are all sinners, so according to what is on ground now we are all doomed if not for the intervention of Jesus who paid for our sins! Psalms 49:7-9

Jesus is now the one and only person who can connect us back to God for us to live FOREVER {John 3:16} and to do this each so called believer NEED to follow Jesus' footsteps as CLOSELY as possible { 1Peter 2:21} for us to gain salvation we MUST try all our best to copy him in thoughts, words and actions, only those who are able to master all these are Christians (little Jesus) in God's sight and only such ones will be granted the permission to LIVE FOREVER!

Well that is what it means to DO THE WILL OF JESUS' FATHER! John 3:17-19

lt is not about agreeing on sacred matters, how do we get all Christians to agree on all sacred matters? we are different, and everyone sees differently, but there are royal laws in our hearts that we can all agree to.
Jesus also said that no one can come unto him except God draws him near, and remember that jesus died for the world not just christians, this therefore means that for us who are at the father's side, we can only state what we believe, but it is God who would teach every man and they would all know the lord because he would eventually pour out his spirit upon all flesh, and everyone that is taught of God would come to jesus.
We definitely cannot convince every Christian to believe everything we believe but that doesn't stop us from working together in love when we can.

Loving each other is the only mark of discipleship as evidence to the world given by jesus not necessarily beliefs in sacred doctrines.

l agree that beliefs are important to hold the community but love is a greater mark of brotherhood and community than beliefs or sacred doctrines. lt is a stronger force and it abides forever for even beliefs or so called sacred doctrines do change sometimes.

Maximus69:
This isn't about what i want Sir, it's what Jesus taught!

If you are his mother, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, nephew, niece, father or grandfather, as long as you disagree with him on sacred matters Jesus quantify you as his NEIGHBOUR!

Why?

Because you're in the same neighborhood where he resides.

But no matter where you come from as long as you're ready to accept his teachings Jesus said you automatically become his family!

So if you disagree with that concept it's OK but i agree with him 100%, hence you can't be my brother if you don't share the same mindset with me on sacred matters, that's all!

He didn't say as long as you disagree with him on sacred matters, he said as long as you don't do the will of my father in heaven.

Maximus69:
It's Jesus who called his friends (those sharing his thoughts) "BROTHERS" whereas he publicly declared that his mother and brothers are less important when talking about his REAL family (fellow believers)

So if you don't understand what the prophets were inspired to pen down in the old Testament { Proverbs 18:24} just watch how Jesus(God's only begotten son) applied it! Matthew 12:46-50

Only Jehovah's Witnesses applied it correctly!

l think the major thing here is what it takes to be a brother, if anyone does the will of God by faith hoping for the coming of the kingdom (salvation of mankind and removal of wickedness and suffering on earth) then automatically we are brothers.

achorladey:
Muttleylaff: Every human being on earth first is your neighbour , before they get upgraded into the family of God, as brother/sister


Achorladey: Reality up there. Then I ponder sometimes over the second commandment.......

Love your NEIGHBOUR as YOURSELF so says the scriptures. One can only wonder where the LINE is DRAWN between LOVE of NEIGHBOUR and love of BROTHER.

Perhaps we can DIE for a BROTHER and there is SOMEONE who DIED for his NEIGHBOURS that are SINNERS against GOD due to LOVE for them.

There was no distinction between love for neighbour and love for brothers in the teachings of jesus. The good samaritan may be of a different race and religion but he is the prime example of a neighbour. Brothers are those who do the will of the father in heaven, but jesus did not teach that we must love brothers specially or show favouritism, only that brothers should be one just as he and the father are one, so that we may do the will of God on earth together the way we should as brothers.
Even then there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.

Maximus69:
God's will is for true believers to have the same line of thought on sacred matters, that's why God's only begotten son prayed fervently for this! John 17:20-23

So if you and i aren't having the same line of thought regarding divine judgment, that means our God differs!

I'm OK if you claim that yours is the true God and that mine is fake, what i'll never agree is that you (a none JW) worships the same God as mine, neither are you my brother in FAITH!

Thanks for your time Sir!

Actually jesus in that gospel prayed that we may be one in loving one another, he wasn't necessarily saying we should have thesame line of thought in my understanding.


Paul even agrees in 1 Corinthians 13, that we know in part but love is the most important.

Leonardemma1:
i am still yet to understand how the death of Jesus can actually be called a sacrifice when he knew he was going to resurrect after three days. to my understanding sacrificing means doing away with something valuable often with no expectation of getting it back

The sacrifice in the death of jesus is simply that he gave himself as a ransom to the Romans in order not to loose his followers to them(the Romans) so that the disciples in turn would carry his message to the rest of the world.

Jesus answered, “I have told you that I am He. Therefore, if you seek Me, let these go their way,” that the saying might be fulfilled which He spoke, “Of those whom You gave Me I have lost none.”

john 18v8-9

Vortex369:
Jehovah is a god, not God.

Jehovah is one of the Rulers of one of the cities at Astral Plane of Existence,

Exactly, yahweh or jehovah is just one of the representations of the God concept like the many gods of old. ln the old testament, the jews could only conceive of the father of creation as jehovah, and many cultures conceived of this supreme being in different ways. God allowed this but now in jesus he has fully presented himself to us. Jehovah is just a shadow of who the father is, and jesus alone knew the father and has declared him to us.

jesus knew who he was and was connected to the father dwelling within and so the father could fully reveal himself the way he wants to through jesus in a better way than with moses and the prophets.

The problem with us is that unlike jesus, we don't know who we are and the spirit we are of. ( luke 9v55-56).

Jewessgratitude:
Who can search out the deep secret things of God? You can't understand the ways of God because he works in mysterious ways. If you try to search out the ways of God with your physical senses, youll get confused and lost.

Yours is to believe, that is your part in the salvation process. Its based on your believe (whether you understand how it works or not) that you'll actually be saved otherwise you might just be operating outside Grace.


Was the hymn written by Jesus? Was it not written by men?
Prolly someone who has same perception as you.

so to you blind belief is the main thing? jesus did not teach blind belief. Faith is proven by actions not blind belief in doctrines.
The cross is a call for us to take up our own cross and follow jesus, that is the faith jesus in the gospels requires from us.