THE TRINITY

Question:
What is true about God is also true about Jesus Christ. They are both of the same nature and form(John1:1).

I believe the Father is only greater than the Son just in role or rank.
What do you guys think?



Answer:
Hello everyone.

I think I'll just hit the high points and if you want further explanation, I'll try to provide it.

In the Bible, God is a Trinity. That is, there are Three Distinct Persons Who are each God in Their Own Right but Who are in such perfect unity that they are One Being in a way that is completely beyond our ability to understand. Their Unity is complete and Perfect. It has always been and it will always be.

These Three Persons are revealed in the Bible as the Father, the Son/the Word and the Holy Spirit.

The Father is usually the One Who is most clearly known as God in the Bible but He is always portrayed as being separate from us. He is the One most clearly seen as exercising the Authority of God in planning, giving commands and ordering awesome judgments. Otherwise, there is a sense of remoteness and awe to Him for us.

The Son is the One we know quite well from all the "contact" that the Godhead has had with humanity. He is the One Who did the act of creating everything which the Father had ordained and planned. He carries out the Will of the Father such as in executing Judgments that He (the Father) has ordered. He it was Who wiped out the elite units of the Egyptian Army that went after the Hebrews under the direct command of the Pharaoh. He it was Who destroyed the Assyrian army besieging Jerusalem. He it was Who flooded the world in Noah's Day. He is the One Who is most well known to us, not least because He is the One Who took on human flesh to fulfill the Father's Plan of Redemption. I'll come back to that in a moment. He can be hard to distinguish from the Father which shouldn't be surprising because they are really One Being. In Is 6 and Eze 1, for example, it is actually the Son Who is seen there on the Throne but in Rev 4, it is the Father. But the two appearances are so similar that it often has to be explained that all theophanies (that is, appearances and manifestations of God in the earth) are really Christophanies (that is, appearances of the Son in the earth). However, the Son's self-selected Role in the God-Head is as the Executor of the Father's Plan.

The Holy Spirit is the One least "seen" or "heard" of the Godhead. The Father is the One we easily recognize as God. The Son confuses a lot of us because of His more obvious involvement with the Creation. But the Holy Spirit is even unknown as a Person to many. Yet, the Holy Spirit is just as much God as the Father and the Son. However, His self-chosen role in the God-Head is as the invisible, unobtrusive "Empowerer" of all that God does. An easy example of His Work is the restraint that He maintains on evil. Without Him, evil would have already spun out of control. He is more easily connected with the Power of God than the Father and Son are, so much so that there is actually a sect (the Jehovah's Witnesses) which teaches that He is not a Person but is just the Power of God. But He is a Person and He is God but He is the One Member of the Godhead Who is more in the background than the others.

Finally, God is not "a" Spirit. God is Spirit. Angels are spirits. One angel is a spirit. But God is Spirit. Another way to appreciate that is this: every creature is a being. We are all beings. But God is not a being. Rather, He is Being. Note that the word being derives from the verb, to be. What we are saying is that God is not "one of the things that exist", we are saying that as far as words can go, God is existence itself. So, it is hard to understand God and the Three Persons of God in the same way that we understand our own existence and realities.

Now, back to the Son.

Something about the Son contributes to the confusion about the Godhead for most people - believing and unbelieving alike. It is that He became Man. And when He did, not a few things that He said and did left the impression that He was God and maybe-not-God. For example, He says "I and the Father are One", a clear claim to Deity. But then He says also, "The Father is greater than the Son", a puzzle to many as this thread shows. And for us weak humans, the difficulty is understanding how both things could be equally true.

There are other examples of such difficult things. One example is when Peter says that our Lord knows all things and the Lord did not correct or contradict Him but yet He also said somewhere else that the Day and the Hour of His Return was unknown to Him. If He was truly God, how come there was something unknown to Him? But if He wasn't, how could Peter and the Bible itself suggest that He knew all things? Which was it?

There is a technical term used to describe this particular "problem" or phenomenon. It is called kenosis.

Kenosis describes the humanity of the Lord Jesus before the Cross and His Ascension to the Father. In His Humanity, His Deity was self-restrained. That is, He separated His Human Nature from His Divine Nature and did not use His Deity to help Himself. So, even though He was truly God, He did not live among us then as God. He was truly human with human weakness and need to rely on God for everything - which was why the Holy Spirit was the Empowerer of all that He did. So, what He knew in His Humanity was what the Father granted Him to know through the Spirit. He did not use His Own Omniscience so His Humanity could be ignorant of things that His Deity was not at all. That is, He, like us, was to depend entirely on God for everything. And He did.

This is the context in which He said, "the Father is greater than the Son". As Phil 2:6-11 and Heb 2:9 make clear, becoming human to die for us was truly a humbling of Himself from Deity to humanity. In the prophets, the Messiah is often called God's Servant in the popular English translations of The Bible. That is, of course, a position of subservience to the Father. So, if the Son accepted (as Phil 2:7says that He did) the role of a servant, then, of course He was right to say in His Humanity (Phil 2:8...) that the Father is greater than the Son.

Finally, the status of the Lord Jesus after His Glorification appears to be confusing to many too. This has also led to difficulty in understanding His Relationship to the Father now and in eternity. In fact, this is probably the Greatest thing about being human for us:

God became Man. That is the story of Creation. That the Lord God demonstrated the depth, height, breadth and length of His Love for us by entering into eternal union with Man. There is no other way that the Scriptures tell us that Man could have been saved after Adam sinned. The solution that God put to work was to ordain that the Second Person of the Trinity would take on genuine human flesh and die for our sins and be raised from the dead to live forever as Man. That is, God The Son is now not only God but Man as well forevermore. This is how human beings will end up greater even than the angels: because of this seamless union with Deity.

By becoming man to die for us, the Lord Jesus brought human nature into seamless union with the divine nature. Once the Cross was finished and our Lord ascended to the Father, kenosis ended and His Deity and His Humanity became One. So, all that He is in His Deity has impressed upon all that He is in His Humanity now. So, right now, as we speak, and since His Glorification, He has known the exact Day and Hour of His Return because He always knew that in His Deity. Right now, however, He is also the Servant of the Father as much as He is God The Son so He can still say that the Father is greater than the Son and that He sits in the Father's Throne. The Eternal Kingdom is both the Father's and His. He won co-rulership of it through His obedience as a Man to the Father and shares that co-rulership with us if we maintain our faith until the end. This is how becoming Man has affected His Relationship with the Father. He is both Deity Who knows everything and Man Who rules over creation as God's Regent.

There is much more to say but it will take a lot more work to say it and perhaps it will be best to say it all elsewhere. Still, if anything I have said is unclear or needs further clarification or defending, I will be happy to oblige.

THE PLAN OF GOD

Question
Jesus: Satan came to steal, kill and destroy.

Really? Let's see what the Bible says.

Kill Count

Satan:

1. Killed 10 of Job's children

2. Killed about 150 of Job's servants (estimated at 1 servant per 100 animals)

Total: 160

God:

1. Killed untold numbers with a flood.

2. Killed untold number of Sodom and Gomorrah inhabitants with fire and brimestone.

3. Killed untold number of Egyptians with plagues.

4. Killed Pharaoh and his army (untold number) by drowning.

5. Killed Israelites with snakes.

6. Killed Israelites with food poisoning.

7. Killed Israelites with sinkholes.

8. Killed off a generation of Israelites by causing them to wander in a small wilderness for 40 years.

9. Killed untold number of Canaanites in battle, way more than the Israelites did by hand.

10. Killed over a 100,000 enemy soldiers, twice.

Total count: Uncountable but definitely more than 200,000.

Who again came to kill and destroy?

Answer
I think that there is really no question that death serves as much as God's agent as everything in creation does. He is God after all. Nothing could do anything without Him. So, even if Satan were responsible for every single death in history, well, he wouldn't exist or cause death unless God created him and provided him with ability, opportunity and enabling to do as he does.

However, this is not the whole story.

Free will is the critical other half.

When God first created the whole universe, He did it out of nothing and it was perfect, without darkness or evil of any sort. Then He made the angels who were the only creatures made to be like Him in possessing a free will. The angels were (and are) spirits with incredible abilities that even we now as humans can little imagine much less comprehend. And they saw God face to face and had perfect fellowship with Him.

Each angel was created in a particular "rank", if you will, possessing distinct personality, ability and duties. And Satan was the very highest ranking of all of them. He, just like the rest, was created holy and perfect, wanting for absolutely nothing. At the time, there was only one guardian cherub, that is, an angel whose job was to sort of symbolically maintain the absolute separation and holiness of God from creation. Satan was also the "high priest", if you will, of the angels. He stood before God to represent the rest. In short, the Bible's description of him in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, especially the latter, leaves the reader with the idea that Satan had everything possible that a creature could possibly desire. He was the preeminent creature in God's universe. He maintained superiority over every single angel. And all the angels ruled the universe of that time.

But God never intended that His creatures would serve Him perforce. He always wanted them to make a conscious choice to be His Family throughout eternity. This is why the angels had free will and why man would later come to have it too. Satan had it.

Now, Satan had no reason, no temptation, no tree of the knowledge of good and evil to show him that things could be any other way than they were. This is very important to note. It shows that God is never the source of temptation to do evil. There was no reason external to Satan that he should rebel against God. He manufactured a reason all by himself because every creature possessing free will is essentially like God in the most important way: they possess the ability to decide what to be.

Satan was the touchstone of perfection in creation. He was also the wisest creature that God made. These things were the very things that he corrupted himself with. He figured that he was perfect and wise enough to become God in his own right. What that means is that Satan actually chose of his own free will to ignore the single important detail that he was a created being, not a self-existing entity. God is of necessity without beginning or end. He was never created and will never go out of existence. This is not true of any created thing. God, of course, created all things to be eternal in essence but each thing was created. Therefore, not one of those things God made can ever under any circumstances become God. It is impossible to become God. You are either God or you are not. But Satan sold that lie to himself and began a process of corruption in himself that soon led to full revolt against the God of Creation.

His revolt involved seducing his fellow angels with promises to get them to join him and increase (in their limited minds) their chances of success in taking rulership of the universe away from God. He did succeed at seducing a third of the angels with promises of obtaining material existence in physical bodies. That led to vile corruption of the pristine Earth of that time both from what they did with the bodies of the animals that they took possession of and from their experimentations to create bodies that fit their lusts.

God allowed it to go on for as long as it was necessary to make sure that all the angels who wanted to rebel did and that all those who didn't want to made it clear that they never would. Then He flooded the entire universe.

That ended Satan's activities at the time. Following that was the judgment of God upon him and his cohorts and the rewarding of the angels who stayed loyal to God. It was at this time that the ranks of the elect angels were reshuffled with four of them becoming the new guardian cherubim associated with God's Throne and other angels variously retaining their starting positions, rising in rank or losing rank depending on their zeal in siding with God.

However, God's Creation was fractured. God is a Unity even though there are Three Divine Persons Who are all God in Their Own Right. Therefore His Creation is destined to be a Unity as well. In fact, this was what Satan counted on to preserve him from God's Anger. He figured that God would rather let him get away with his shenanigans than fracture creation. But that would not happen. God did permit the fracturing of Creation to separate the rebellious from the faithful.

Then He created man to replace the angels who rebelled. But this time, man was closer to the beasts than to the angels in makeup. He was a physical being with a spirit. Therefore, he had severe limitations in ability and intelligence which the angels did not have. However, he was created this way in order to demonstrate to the angels that all the lies that Satan had told about God in his campaign to get them on his side were really lies. First and most important, being physical beings was not really something that God had denied them. Rather, it was something that God had spared them. As spirits, they possess ability, knowledge and intelligence and freedom from material restraints and needs that we lack because of our bodies.

There were other extremely sophisticated lies many of which in fact the Bible was given to us by God to refute. Each human life is an opportunity to demonstrate the faithfulness and love and power and wisdom of God where Satan had questioned each.

But this is really the answer to the question why the execution of Satan's judgment was delayed. Satan possessed a free will and sought and created an opportunity to exercise it against God. Man, however, was not smart enough to be that evil. This was why God created an opportunity for him to go against Him, if he decided that he wanted to and also why Satan was allowed to try and seduce man into rebellion against God. That was why the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was in the restored Garden of Eden. It was the test of man's heart. Satan was there just to provide man with an alternative to God.

Man was also given all he needed to stay true to God if he wanted. The Garden was perfection. Even though he was a physical being, he never lacked for anything. Life could not have been better for him. He had the perfect mate, the perfect job, the perfect entertainment and God's friendship. What's more, God gave him every single thing in sight except the one tree. He did not need to know anything about good and evil. What for? But then Satan had it all and also wanted to be God. Evil is always arrogance. We sin by reaching for what we think that we have been denied.

That is how Eve was seduced. Adam joined her in sin knowing what he was doing simply because he was afraid of losing his wife. But in trying to keep her, he forfeited everything else that God had freely given to him. That was the same exact thing that Satan did.

Now, this is the background of everything you complained about in your post.

God is good and loving and beneficent. But He isn't stupid. He made the universe to be good an perfect, not because it would hurt Him in any way if it wasn't but because He wanted His Family of Angels and Men to be happy. He created all these wonders that once existed, are existing and will yet exist for our enjoyment. Evil corrupts these things and renders them unfit for enjoyment. What loving father would not try to clear a playground of dangerous material and animals so that his little ones can play safely?

Satan's revolt and the activities of his angels ruined the fun for everyone, so God destroyed that universe by flooding it. Then He remade it to create Man. Then, Man in disobedience ruined himself as well. And God had to do the whole cleanup routine again.

The pattern has continued. Had death not existed, that is, if we physical beings had not been subject to decay and expiration, can you imagine what evil we could have done? Imagine serial killers who are immortal. Does that seem like good news at all to you? There were many depraved nations throughout history whose continued existence would have extinguished all the conscience left in humanity. There were powerful nations which made a practice of sacrificing their young in despicable ways and whose brutality made them rich and powerful so that even those with a decent conscience started to waver in being good. Sodom and Gomorrah were a good example of such nations. Had God not wiped them out, they would have either corrupted other nations or wiped those nations out themselves.

This is why God continues to clean the board to allow other people to make their own eternal choices about Him. If we choose to submit to Him, we can look forward to eternity in a United, perfect family with God as our loving Father forever. If we don't, well, we get to be without Him or His Gifts eternally too.

Now, Satan does come to steal, to kill and to destroy.

From what I already said, I think that it is obvious that if Satan had not chosen to oppose God and if no other angel had, there would never have been death. God did create Satan and give him a free will like He did the other angels, but it was all Satan when he decided to oust God. That had nothing to do with God. God would rather that all His Creatures exist from beginning to eternity without any pain or suffering of any kind but He gave us a free will so that we can choose to be family with Him or not. He can't have the family He desires if we cannot choose to be that family. And we can only be able to make a true choice to be that family if we can also choose not to be that family. So, death is really all Satan's doing. But God has not left things that way. He has taken responsibility to fix everything the way He has been, using every single choice made by every single person - angel and human - to bring about this family he wants. So, even though death exists as a direct result of Satan's actions, God does use it to keep things on course to creating that perfect eternal tomorrow that all believers look forward to.

You should be able to see that in this, the goodness and love and faithfulness of God is manifest. The fact that people die is regrettable for the most part but God made that possible so that people can continue to choose who and what they want to be. After all, at the end of all of this, every single person who has died will be brought back to life. Then each person will go where they have chosen to be eternally.

So, I think it is actually something to glorify God for that death exists and that He uses it the way that He does. Had Satan succeeded at wresting control of the universe away from God (an impossibility though), I am very certain that we would be in a miserable state of existence. Whenever people have chosen Satan's way, it has never worked out right. Hearts are broken, lives are destroyed, people are killed. Every. Single. Time. The angels who chose Satan did not get bodies for themselves. Even had God left them to their devices eternally, they would never have succeeded at getting what they wanted. The reason is that wisdom belongs to God. Satan knows only what God makes him able to know. That is true with all of us. We can never become self-sufficient. So, if the angels were ever going to have bodies, God was the only One Who could give it to them.

God's Ways may be mysterious but His Character and Personality is manifest in the world around us and in the believers we meet who have taken following Him seriously. And from what we see, we know that we can trust Him even when what He does is beyond our ken.

I would add that when believers die or suffer, this can be God's Discipline or it can be Satan's attack (governed by God's purposes and loving supervision of their lives).

Question
I'll take my time to read this. I used to enjoy your writing.

Answer
I am happy to hear that you did before. I will pray that you will also find value in it now. And I will wait to see if I can help any further.

SHOULD CHRISTIANS TITHE

Question:

I am new here please. I need explanation concerning tithing. Why do pastors only quote Malachi 3? Whereas there are many verses that talked about tithing, from Old Testament to even Hebrews. Please I need very serious and convincing explanations



Answer:

Hello. My explanation will be serious but you will decide just how convincing you find it.

First of all, I cannot speak for any pastors concerning why they quote only Malachi 3. You will have to ask them. The best I can do is take an educated guess. And that is that it is probably the best way they can try to convince believers who don't know the Bible well to pay them money. Also, there may be the problem of spiritual immaturity on the part of the pastor so that he does not understand the Scriptures in this particular matter.

Second, the tithe was the income tax of the ancient nation of Israel paid in agricultural products (both animals and plants crops or in their monetary equivalent plus 20% of the value). It was necessary to sustain the Temple worship and provide welfare for the indigent in the towns and villages and cities of Israel. Leviticus 27:30-33, Numbers 18:21-32, Deut 14:28-29.

After the Lord Jesus Christ came and paid the Sacrifice in His Blood, the Law of Moses was removed and a new Law in Christ was instituted so that the ritual provisions of the Mosaic Law and the rituals associated with the Temple are no longer in force, certainly not for the Gentiles today. So the tithe is no longer in force. Heb 8:6-13.

But under the New Covenant in Jesus Christ's Blood, we are now supposed to cheerfully and deliberately take responsibility for one another so that

1. those whom the Lord has tasked with feeding His Children with the Truth (that is, pastor-teachers) are provided with what they need for sustenance (1 Cor 9:4-14, Gal 6:6);

2. indigent believers find material support from fellow believers (2 Cor 8:13-15, 9:11-12);

3. unbelievers are witnessed to by our compassion and generosity toward each other and them as well (2 Cor 9:13).

So, while we must not return to the Old Testament Mosaic Law in any form so that we do not blaspheme against the Lord Jesus Christ (any recourse to the Mosaic Law denies that the Lord Jesus Christ has come in the flesh and died for our sins, Gal 5:4), we are not therefore to become cruel and uncaring toward others. In fact, we are now called to a higher standard of life where we are to be proactive in helping others who are less fortunate in material circumstances than we are, of course prioritizing our pastor-teachers and fellow believers in this as well.


May the Peace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

THE CORRECT WAY TO READ THE BIBLE

Question #1
"When a wise man points at the moon the slowpoke examines the finger. This is what the intellect does with our stories of the sacred and divine. We cannot pin down the transcendent so we use myth and metaphor to allude to it. The rationalist then attacks the myth as fairy tale and claims victory over the divine."

- Author Unknown

Response #1
I think it would be very unfortunate for anyone to dismiss the biblical accounts as allegory and myth. But then, why would anyone take that from a "believer"?

Question #2A
I generally agree with this, except that most devotees to the divine don't have much more understanding of metaphor and allegory, insisting that their myths represent literal truth.

Question #2B
True. They too have the same problem of ignorance as the 'rationalist'.

Response #2
My comment was to say that it is unfortunate that anyone should dismiss the biblical accounts as literal truth because they are. There are metaphors and allegories, yes, but those are immediately clarified as such when they are presented in the Bible. Of course, I didn't always know this. I only learned it within the past twelve months. But when I checked, I found that it was true.

But, as we once argued on Nairaland (and as was argued against us too), once we begin to "explain away" one part of the Bible as allegorical (especially without any clear reason in the text itself to do so), then we must accept that the whole Bible may be allegorical and not at all literal truth. Once the Bible can be argued to be allegorical on a "whim" not justified by the text itself, then anyone can ascribe any meaning they please to what the Bible says.

So, I essentially disagree with the unknown author and with your comment above.

Question #3
I get you but then again there exist certain believers who are hyper-literalists and they are not few. So [my friend] has a point here.

I agree with you that the bible is true but it is not always literal truth and we are able to tell the difference through proper study of the text and not merely decide what is literal on a whim.

Response #3
My particular concern is in what constitutes allegory or myth in the Bible and how it is identified. [My friend], you mentioned the story the Lord Jesus told about Lazarus and the rich man as an example and, if memory serves me right and nothing has changed in this regard, [our mutual friend] does hold the creation account in Genesis as allegorical. These things are why I joined the conversation.

The correct approach to the Bible is to treat everything it says as literal unless the text gives express, incontrovertible reason, to receive the information another way.

This is a test of faith. All of the claims that the Bible makes, it makes as an authority. It does not consider itself questionable and this has always been a problem for all those who have received God's Testimony from Adam and Eve in the Garden to the Israelite and Judahite kings to whom God sent prophets with His Word [and finally] to us today who have the complete Bible. God offers no reason in the Bible for believing what it says other than that the Bible said it.

It is when we have problems with this that the Bible is closed to us.

Regarding the example you gave, I am not a linguist but a brief Google Search and a look at Britannica's website suggested to me that a parable is not necessarily synonymous with an allegory. So, the fact that the story was called a parable does not automatically make it an allegory. I say this because it is the argument that I am familiar with which is presented for rejecting all the stories that Jesus told during His Ministry as literally true stories. All of them were. This one was no different. In fact, it helps us who are Gentile believers who did not have Jewish traditions passed down to understand that there was a time when dead believers could not go to Heaven but were kept in Paradise beneath the Earth waiting for the Perfect Sacrifice that would open the way to the Presence of the Father in the third Heaven. Rejecting that costs us the robust appreciation of the Cross that the Bible offers us.

Likewise, rejecting the literalness of the creation account locks us out of what the Bible actually teaches about why the Cross is so important. And the Cross is the foundation of Creation. We are immediately at risk when we accept any thought or argument that calls the Cross into question. Without an acceptance of the literalness of Genesis, there is a big question what sin is, where it came from, why the Lord Jesus Christ came to die for us and what it is we are looking forward to in hope.

Now, how can we tell when something is allegorical or a myth in the Bible? In all the examples that I can think of right now, the text itself says expressly that it is about to present or has just presented an allegory.

Here are some examples:

Ezekiel 23:4
[4]Their names were Oholah the elder and Oholibah her sister. And they became Mine, and they bore sons and daughters. And as for their names, Samaria is Oholah and Jerusalem is Oholibah.

Revelation 12:1,3
[1]A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars;
[3]Then another sign appeared in heaven: and behold, a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads were seven diadems.

THE SIN NATURE

Question:
While I may not understand what the term "sin nature" denotes, I don't agree with you on the Bolded. But the Bible says that Jesus "partook of flesh and blood with humans", and "was made like us in all things". Heb. 2:14,17.

But that is not the purpose of the thread, so I'll not go into it.


Response:
My thinking was that we could have this conversation elsewhere and link it back here so that anyone who finds themselves wondering about this same thing will be properly educated about it. If that suits you, I would be happy to set it up, but in case you are disinclined to having the conversation, I think I should address the above for the sake of those who may read it.

You are very right, of course, that the Bible teaches that the Lord Jesus shared in all things with us. However, the context of those two verses was addressing the fact of the Lord Jesus Christ's Humanity. As you should see from verse 16, the point was that the Lord Jesus Christ became in every way a genuine human being, not an angel, but a man just like any of us. This does not address anything but the Nature of His Incarnation.

The question of sin in His Incarnation is addressed in Heb 4:15. He had no sin, no matter how much He was tempted. We know this from this part of the Bible. But the question we were really disagreeing on is whether the rest of mankind was similarly free of sin.

For that question we have Rom 3:9-18, 23, 5:19 and 1 Jn 1:8. There are other passages but these will suffice.

The point in them is that every living human being sins. And Rom 5:19 and 1 Jn 1:8 explain why: we all have something the Bible calls "sin". The question I think may be pertinent is whether sin is something you do or something you have.

It could be answered that if you sin, then you have sin. This is true and may just prove my point: that sins, that is, those things we do which are sinful, are proof that we have a condition called sin.

This is why a technical term was invented to explain it. Theologians refer to it as the sin nature. The sin nature is what makes our sinning inevitable.

Once Adam and Eve sinned, something changed about human nature. Every human being since, except the Lord Jesus Christ, has come into the world in a body of sin (see Rom 7, esp vv. 17-18, 23-24). This predisposes every single human being born of male seed to sin. We may be guiltless at birth but from that first breath, we run after sin like it is necessary to our existence. That is what the Lord Jesus had to save us out of.

So, even though the Lord Jesus was as human as it gets - which is the point of Heb 2 -, He was completely without a sin nature unlike us. He had no tendencies at all to sin in any form. But, just like Adam, He was able to sin if He wanted to because He possessed a free will. But He chose instead to submit Himself in every thought, word and deed in every single moment of His Life here on earth to the Father, thus He never sinned.

But we will always sin as long as we have this mortal body because sin lives in our bodies. Our bodies were corrupted when Adam chose in full recognition of the consequences of His Choice to disobey God. This is our burden and it is what the Lord Jesus died to save us from. While our sins have been paid for, His Death also secured for us the hope of Resurrection so that one day our bodies will be changed and we can live in perfect righteousness for all eternity (Rom 8:23).

HOW WE ARE SAVED

Question #1:
we all know what the grace of God is. for those who doesn't, it is the undeserved or undeserving kindness, goodness and mercy of God towards his people. we humans are under his grace due to the finished work of his son, Jesus Christ our saviour on the cross of Calvary. so we being better than others maybe financially, spiritually etc isn't by our power. after all he said in his Word that his gifts are without repentance. Now my question is can this grace take us to the kingdom of God? if yes does it now mean that everyone will inherit his kingdom?

Response #1:
If I have understood your question correctly, you are trying to establish how salvation works.

Yes, God's Grace is really at work for everyone. All human beings benefit from His long-suffering and generosity. Or else we would all be dead and in the Lake of Fire.

But we are saved by grace THROUGH FAITH (Eph 2:8 ). No matter the supply of God's Grace to anyone, without the deliberate choice to believe in the Lord Jesus, that person cannot be saved.

So, the issue is not one of Grace alone but of Faith primarily. God will always provide everything that is needed for anyone who wants to believe to do so and be saved. But the act of Faith is a free will matter. Each person must choose to believe or else they will not be saved.

Question #2:
Except along the line in your life on this earth you decided to be converted from the christian faith to join islam, athiesm, budhaism, judaism, african traditional idol worshipping or any other faith of this world other than christianity.

John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

That simply means, no man cometh to the father except by christianity.
Not by judaism or abraham or any other faith as it applied in the days when scriptures were written.

Today, there are several faiths other than the christian faith but only the christian faith is the recommended faith.

If you are not in christianity you are among the goat.
If you are in christianity you are among the sheep. matt 25:23

Now, do not listen to any pastor telling you that you must be righteous or born again or go to church before you can be saved.

The only criteria for salvation is your faith in christ.

Without faith it is impossible to please God.

Response #2:
You are exactly right that the only criterion for salvation is faith in Jesus Christ. However, it is also true that when one chooses to place their faith in Jesus Christ, they become born again and receive the righteousness of the Lord Jesus so that they become righteous in the eyes of God.

Consequent upon that, the believer must begin to learn to know the Lord so that they can also imitate Him in behavior and attitude. That is sanctification. It is the product of true faith in the Lord.

Question #3:
I believe that a christian would be loyal to the Church because it was founded by Jesus Christ himself who they purport to follow, and he promised to preserve the Church. So when one attacks the Church from outside I can only conclude that they cannot be christian.

Response #3:
According to the Bible, it is faith in Jesus Christ that matters. Possession of such faith makes one a believer. Believers were first called "Chrestians" (in today's parlance, that would mean "goody two-shoes" ) in Antioch and that name was later corrupted to "Christians" (that is, members of the household of Christ). That is why we are so called today. Otherwise, we were variously called "believers", "disciples" and "followers of the Way". None of this had anything to do with the Roman Church or with any visible earthly institution. You are a Christian if you believe in Jesus Christ. You are not if you do not.

THE POWER OF CONFESSION?

Question:
We all know what I am about to unveil. But do we understand it?
I received a major unveiling just today, that God had been leading me into all week.
Let us be careful and cautious of the things we say to our selves and others, the things we listen to and the things we share.
Basically let's be sensitive to what we Confess and what we Receive.

Kindly pray in spirit if you can, to prepare your heart for this.
I am equally fearfully praying for more understanding.
May the Holy Spirit help our infirmities and unbeliefs. God help us all in Jesus name.

The Power Of Our Confessions.

This is too deep for me.
May the LORD who alone gives understanding give us understanding by the Holyspirit in Jesus name.
Amen.

The wisest man who ever lived says.

A man’s stomach shall be satisfied from the fruit of his mouth;
From the produce of his lips he shall be filled.
Death and life are in the power of the tongue,
And those who love it will eat its fruit.
Proverbs 18:20-21

Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour confirms it.

When He had called the multitude to Himself, He said to them, “Hear and understand: Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.”
Matthew 15:10-11

It is curious, we all want positive things but often times we confess negative things with our mouths.
God help us all.

Heavenly father help us not to joke with our destinies. Help us not to make jokes while we curse one another.
Help us not to negate our own prayers by own unbelief.
Help us to only believe your Word and not the World.
In Jesus name. Amen.


Response:
Hello brother.

Very happy to see that you are continuing to be zealous for the Lord. This is a very desirable thing especially in this age of lukewarmness. I keep you in my prayers and continue to pray the Lord to grant you Grace in the pursuit of spiritual growth and production for the One Who bought you with His Blood.

Zeal is very good and desirable if it is for the Truth. There have been many who have been zealous but not according to the Truth. Such people have often done great harm to those who seek and stand for the Truth. You will remember the Pharisees and the Jews of our Lord's day and those who persecuted the Church of whom our brother Paul was once a part.

Romans 10:2
[2]For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge.

For this reason, I implore you to direct your zeal to the pursuit of the Truth so that you will grow in it and become effective in it. As it is right now, without proper teaching in the Truth, you are apt to at least confuse people about the Truth when they listen to you. I know this very well as my own history on this forum will show. There is an even worse risk you run every time that you are eager to share something you have learned with others people: you can completely mislead them and betray them to the Lie. So,

James 3:1
[1]Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.

And if you do possess the gift of teaching, then you must first grow to spiritual maturity before you can use it without risking serious damage to the Church.

Regarding what you have shared here, you are not wrong that what we confess and what we receive are tremendously important. However, this is often very badly misapplied today. The Scriptures do not say that we are so powerful that all of our words can accomplish anything. They say rather:

Matthew 12:36-37
[36]But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment.
[37]For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."

That is, the issue of life is the Truth. Those who submit to it and therefore have their tongues governed by it will be justified by it. Those who do not will be condemned. This is the crux of life. Life and death are in the power of the tongue in the most important way: whether we submit to the Truth or reject it decides whether we gain Eternal Life or lose it. It has almost nothing to do with our material circumstances.

The sense in which it has anything to do with our material circumstances is that those who love the Truth and live by it will often find themselves suffering material difficulty because of it and will also experience miraculous sustenance and sometimes deliverance through their tribulations in this life. Those who don't will not often suffer as much as those who do.

That is, we do not have the power to shape our material reality with our words. We are not gods in that sense. We are only gods in the sense that we have the power to determine our eternal fate. But we can only determine that in the context of the material circumstances to which the Lord God wills to submit us. So, "being positive" in the sense of speaking out loud the wishes we have for comfort and prosperity in this life will not amount to anything of value. It has no power at all to affect our material circumstances but it does possess the power to trap us in a lie. This is also true with "being negative".

The Truth is all that matters and only what God says is true. Our part is to submit to Him and agree with Him. This is what Faith is about. Our material circumstances may be whatever they may be, they are not and never are the issue. The question for us always is: is there anything in this life that is able to make us think that God cannot be trusted? Can poverty or wealth, sickness or good health, popularity or loneliness and any number of other material experiences ever succeed to make us "call God on the carpet"? Or will we trust Him "though He slay me" (Job 13:15)? For us, is He the God Who has power over everything? Or is He the God Who has limits and can fail us in fulfilling all that He has promised? Is He the God Who knows what is best for us? Or is He the God Who needs our advice? Is He the God Whose Love for us is without question given the enormous Price that He paid for our sins in the Lord Jesus Christ? Or is He the God Whose Love for us has limits and we must therefore fend for ourselves sometimes? These questions are what life is about. Our circumstances are our opportunity to answer them in the full view of men and the angels so that our true heart is made manifest to all.

So, again, we should be very careful to receive only the Truth and to align all of our thoughts, words and actions with it so that we will stop being those who being evil cannot say anything good (Mt 12:34). But we are not to assume that in our tongues we possess any power at all to alter any material circumstances of ours or other people's.

May the Lord's Grace continue to help you, brother.

THE REALITY OF THE CHRISTIAN CALLING AND WALK I

Question #1:
I have been an atheist for more than seven years now and looking back, I am yet to see what I have missed not worshiping God.

This is a summary of my life since I became an atheist
- wake up in the morning
- plan my day
- eat, exercise and work toward achieving my goals
- go to work, remember loves ones, check up on them and hangout with friends
- get home sleep.

Life has had its ups and downs, but I have pretty much been a giver than a receiver and got married now with a handsome son (despite somebody's prayers for my marriage to fail).


I still don't understand why anyone should worship any God.

So I ask theist... Tell me just two thing that makes it life as a theists better than mine.

If u can come up with two things that makes worshiping God worth it, I will look into my life evaluate, see if I miss such and maybe give worshiping God a try.


Response #1:
In my opinion, this may only be another bait thread for Christians. It seems to me that you made your choice and lived it for seven years and you like your experience. So I cannot see what you would expect Christians to tell you. I would expect that you would dismiss Christianity as a fool's dream and ignore Christians while carrying on with this wonderful life you have made for yourself without God in it.

But, for what it is worth, I will humor you.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Truth that we Christians follow is not primarily about this life. Not many of us believers will have that easy a life. Many of us suffer broken marriages as a direct result of our Faith. Many of us suffer penury or at least economic "mediocrity" because we prioritize God's Truth. That is not to say that following Christ necessarily leads to misery. In fact, even in our sufferings, those of us who want to follow the Lord and stick to the program do find a joy and peace that cannot be explained by our circumstances. So, it is not about misery although being a Christian guarantees more suffering in this life than being an unbeliever will.

What Christians endure everything we endure for is the hope we have for the world to come. We look forward to a Resurrection whereby we will be rescued permanently from suffering. We look forward to eternal rewards and riches and glory that this world has not even a prayer at equalling. We look forward to a New Earth and New Heavens where everything is perfect and there is no more evil or injustice of any kind. That is what our true gain is.

For us, this life is a war, a labor, a test that we must endure everyday. We accept the gifts of work, family, friends and entertainment as some of the things the Lord gives us to make our journey bearable for us. But these things are not what we are Christians for. As your own experience proves, even a staunch atheist can have them and have them in abundance. Very few of the wealthiest people in the world are Christians after all. But only Christians expect what we have in this life to be made infinitely better in eternity.


Question #2:
I could but I have to practically shut my ears to Christian rantings... If only Christians practice the live and let live they preach. Recall this tread was create based on real life experience. People disturb me a lot with nonsense.

Cool

In order words the worship of God is useless to life on earth... Only necessary for the hope of after life?

Awww... Whats the difference between hoping for after life and not caring about after life?

Thanks... So far, I see no reason why I should fast, vigil, pray, .... For me one thing I miss about Christianity is worship... I love singing and enjoying my own praise songs like I am the God I am singing to.
I still do it sometimes... Otherwise, I don't miss the guilt, need to please, feeling like I owe my life to anything, feeling like I am being watched, need to pretend, fasting, staying up all night, time wasted in praying...

I think being a atheist rocks.


Response #2:
I can sympathize with you on that. But it is my policy to ignore things that I have decided have no value in my life. Perhaps you should do the same. It does make for something of a quieter, more focused life.

That would be the wrong way to read what I said. Life in this world for us Christians is a fight. It is a fight for everyone really but only Christians are actually taking on the enemy here. For that reason, following God is enormously important to us. In following Christ, we gain not only the resources but the training and company we need to get from here to the Goal that God set for all human beings.

Being a Christian, for example, gives me a different perspective on work, family/friends and entertainment - if I am doing a good job of being a Christian, that is - than you as an unbeliever possess.

I'm afraid I don't understand your question.

Rock on then, friend.

I do admit that while there is a great deal of value in fasting, it is something that I find very imprudent to do in my own life. And I neither attend nor particularly recommend vigils to anyone. I think it would take special circumstances for me to do so. As for prayer, what could a believer do without it? In an earthly army, supply lines are everything. Being able to put in a request and have it met is a huge morale booster for any army. How much more for believers fighting through this world?

But I think the real problem here may be a poor understanding of Christianity on your part. I don't say that to insult you. It is entirely possible that you were a Christian for several years before you decided to become an atheist. But not everything that wears a label is true to its name. Christianity, first and foremost, is about faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's it: just believing in the Lord Jesus Christ Who was God but also took on humanity so that He could die for our sins and rescue us from certain eternal condemnation.

Then after that is a diligent commitment to learning the Truth of the Bible and adapting to it through the help of the Holy Spirit. And this is something you do not only in the Power of God but with responsibility to God alone so that the pressure of "appearing holy" to other people really has no place in true Christianity. Anyone who is diligent in the Truth eventually finds themselves changing in the best and most authentic way so that they know for sure that God is pleased with them and man cannot really and honestly find fault with them. But this is not to say that we can be perfect, no. Our bodies are corrupted with sin so perfection will remain out of reach until the Resurrection. But we will certainly find that in all the ways that it truly matters, we are becoming better people.

So, it's not about a mechanical system of praying, fasting, going to vigils, attending church every Sunday and not doing this or making sure to do that. If anything is a good thing to do or a bad thing that we should abstain from, as we continue to learn the Truth and believe it, we soon find inside of ourselves both the desire and the strength to do it or abstain from it as the case may be. How it happens is nothing short of miraculous in my experience. I had quite given up on myself before I learned this. And I am sharing it with you in case you might be willing to consider it.


Question #3:
unfortunately u really cannot advise me on how i react to things i see in life.

i simply challenged u to tell me just tow things u enjoy in THIS life as a christian that i dont enjoy as an atheist. if there is none, tell me there is non. your answer above has nothing to do with my question.

you are doing a good job being a christian and i am also doing a good job being a atheist. pls what two things about life as a christian makes you better than me, an atheist.

you live ur life hoping for a better after life, i live my life not caring one bit after after life... what's the difference between me and u

thanks

since u fast and pray, tell me two things about ur life that are better than mine.

Christianity is all about Faith in Christ, and this is what you think i dont understand about Christianity? what else should i think Christianity is? what has this got to do with my question?

ok... so what two things do you have as a christian that i dont have as an atheist.

pls answer my question... thanks


Response #3:
It's your life. I don't presume to know how to live it better than you. I was only saying that there may be an alternative to starting threads like this one when Christians make a point of troubling you because of your choices.

I already answered that.

It is for the Lord to decide whether or not I am doing a good job as a Christian.
What we call hope is confidence concerning something we cannot see yet. Just thought to explain that a little more.

My confusion is that you just stated the difference between you and me so I am not sure what you expect me to say in answer to your question.

As I said, fasting is imprudent and impractical for me although it is a very valuable exercise but, yes, I do pray.

I was only explaining that Christianity is not a checklist of activities as you seemed to me to think it is.

My answer was in my first post.


Question #4:
This is not what the thread is all about.

No u haven't. Ur response actually suggested God is useless to this life but Christian only hold unto him for hope of internal life... U are here to believe and suffer for Christ while hoping for a better after life. U have said nothing to show ur life as a christian will be better than mine as an atheist.
In fact, I challenge you to name one thing (instead of 2) that makes ur life on earth better as a christian than mine as an atheist.

OK... So back to my question.

Oga how does ur hoping in after life and me not caring about after life make u a better human than me.

Errrr... Still waiting for my answer
I know what Christianity is

No u havent


Response #4:
I have no concept what you mean here.

I refer you again to my first post. I made no claims regarding having a better life here on earth. In fact, I told you that if you have such a wonderful life here on earth without God and like it too, then it makes no sense to be so troubled about what Christians believe and try to push on you. Your whole concern is what you can get in this life and you have got it and are getting it. You should be happy and unconcerned about whatever it is we Christians are so gung-ho about. That was what I told you.

Then I told you explicitly that this life is a war for Christians, a test and a labor so we have a harder time of it than unbelievers do. So, it is not about this life for us but about the world to come. But you interpreted that to mean that God is useless for this life and I told you that that was the wrong way to read what I said. Clearly, Christians would not survive this war without God's Help. Some, like yourself for example, have given up and just deserted Christ's Army and joined up with the Enemy to actively attack and damage the Church now. Many more are just avoiding the fight but refusing to fully desert themselves, that is, they are incredibly lukewarm. The very few who take it seriously enough to really push hard for progress are not having anything like an easy time in this life. They wouldn't last a moment without God's Help. And God helps them in a vast number of ways with jobs or economic support in one form or another, family and friends, sometimes devoted spouses and whatnot. God gives them just the right sort of help they need to keep marching forward. So, of course, God is critical to them in this life. They don't think the world is all that even if you do. But they are not irresponsible Luddites either. They live life in this world like responsible people and try to get what good gifts God gives to soothe the pain of this world but more than that they fight for a far better world than this one can ever be.

I'm not sure then how else I can answer you.

About the following:

"I know what Christianity is"

Your words seemed to me to suggest otherwise.


Question #5:
Here lies my answer. So worshiping is just usless to humans while on earth. Except the hope u have for heaven l, which makes not difference to our life in the long run while on earth.

We have been over this and I believe I have given u the response that best fits this... U are not in the position to tell me how I react to christian behavior towards me.

Off point

Is a life of war supposed to prove that u live a better life as a christian than an atheist? So the reason why Christian preach to non believers is to invite them to a life of war, test labour and harder times while u wait for a world to come? What kind of life is that?

In other words an atheist can live same life u live as a Christian even without Gods help. However a christian lives a live of hardship , labour , war and test but God gives him a help to go through the test... (He he, god tests u and helps u go through the test) and also help them to live the same life an atheists lives without God... Christianity sounds like a bad option here don't u think?

I know what Christianity is


Response #5:
I am human incidentally. And so are all the Christians I spoke of. And I described how believing in Jesus Christ makes a difference to our lives. I don't see the connection between that and what you say here.

The fact that I point out an inconsistency in your actions and words us not the same as telling you what to do.

How so?

I would have to make an argument that we live a better life in order to be proving it, would I not? Have I made such an argument so far?

We call unbelievers to escape the sure Anger of God that is coming. That is what leads to the whole war. But the war is necessary to separate those who really want to be with God from those who don't.

The life a believer lives and the one that an atheist lives are different. The principles governing them are diametrically opposed to each other.

Perhaps. I just didn't see that you did from what you said.


Question #6:
Your answer in the post did not Christianity is a better life that than atheism... The reason why Christians need God (according to ur post) is to help them through a life of war, test, and hardship... Something an atheist does not have to go through to live same fulfilled life every Christian crave for


Response #6:
The majority of Christians do indeed crave the sweet things of this life even to the point of going AWOL in the army. But the craving is not itself consistent with the Faith. So, it is not actually right to think that we become Christians because we crave this "fulfilled life" you refer to. Rather, Christians drop out of the fight mostly because they crave this "fulfilled life".


Question #7:
What difference does believing in Jesus Christ make that makes ur life better as a Christian than mine as an atheist.

I am reacting Christian preaching all around me all day... Let it go... This has nothing to do with the op.

So what's ur argument? That u live better or not?

Anger of God that is coming... In another news Christians will b like 'god does not put anyone in hell people chose to go there' what's he going to be angy for exactly?
All these are not what I am asking u sha... It seems there is nothing,not even one thing Christians enjoy on earth as Christians that atheists don't.

I know, that's why I am asking u the benefit of one over the other. Me think there is not difference hence I am wondering why anyone would bother about a seemingly useless God.


Response #7:
Believers aren't the only ones in this war. It's an all-encompassing war.

On one side is God Whose Will is being carried out by the elect angels and by faithful human beings. On the other is Satan and the rebellious angels aided very often by faithless human beings to oppose God's Will.

For now, because of a kind of truce that has persisted for a while, there is a large middle ground where many of God's human troops are avoiding battle and many humans while technically on Satan's side are largely useless to him. In the Tribulation which is coming very soon indeed, this middle ground will be all but wiped out and nearly everyone will be forced to pick a side.

For Satan, the objective is to prevent human beings from actually giving their allegiance to God or sustaining that allegiance until the end of their lives. This is because human beings were created to replace him and the rebel angels after they rebelled. If he cannot prevent either of those things from occurring, he tries to prevent those who choose for God from actually being useful to Him by helping others either to make the same choice or to sustain it. That is his play. This is why the world's good things were made so enticing by him. They exist to a large extent to distract human beings who would otherwise follow God faithfully and be useful in doing so.

So, while we believers in Jesus Christ do desire and ask from God and receive from Him much that you unbelievers value such as work, family, friends and entertainment, the ones among us who take the Faith seriously understand that these things can easily be turned against us by our Enemy so while we work to get them and ask and receive them from God, we prioritize them below our Faith and its constraints upon us. That is what it means to "take up your cross daily and follow [Christ]".

Those who live life like that are living it right and will therefore not only escape the Coming Wrath and Judgment of God but will in fact receive unimaginable rewards for it along with Eternal Life.

So, as I said before, even though you have dropped out of the fight and Satan rewarded you for doing so with trinkets and very little overt aggression anymore (he does not love you any more now though. He hates every last human being because each one is a potential replacement for him and thus a guarantee of sorts for his eternal destruction) so that, like most unbelievers, you have possibly better external circumstances than most believers, especially serious believers, if we factor in what is coming for every human being and the comfort that God gives believers as we continually engage with the battles each day brings, then you may be having less than you think.

My answer then would be - as you will also find in my first post - that as far as your definition of "the good life" goes per your opening post, Christianity does not offer you anything that unbelief cannot get you in this life. In fact, Christianity makes you possibly a worse offer - as far as this life is concerned: real action in a real war against an incredibly agile and particularly hateful enemy but with all of God's Comfort and Help to bring you all the way through to the other side safely.

Whether you decide to fight or not fight for or against God or Satan though, I must repeat, every human being is involved in this business one way or another and everyone has the same concern: God is coming back to judge the world. How we choose to deal with that is up to us and is not devoid of its consequences.

THE REALITY OF THE CHRISTIAN CALLING AND WALK II

Question #1:
You said, "But only Christians expect what we have in this life to be made infinitely better in eternity."

This is a lie!


Response #1:
Not necessarily. There may be an argument over what "better" objectively means but no other religion or philosophy out there thinks of Eternity as a perfection of what life ought to be. All the others have some notion that either describes Eternity in terms of this world, for example, Islam is concerned with sex and food and water, or presents Eternity as some ethereal existence completely divorced from what we know about life through our experience in this world, for example, becoming or returning to being part of the Brahmin as Hinduism holds.

But Christianity teaches that this world is damaged because of a war that intimately involves human beings. When that war is over, everything will be fixed and for those who have been faithful to God, life will finally be everything it was meant to be from the beginning.


Question #2:
Na wa o...
Is this sophistry or what
See how you just turn this matter upside down now now.

Okay, just so I am not the one getting things wrong. What exactly is the Christian idea of the afterlife?
What do you mean by "perfection of what life ought to be?"


Response #2:
Why do you think it may be sophistry?

To your first question, I have already answered it to some extent in my response to a similar question. I will add a little more to fully answer your question.

The Bible teaches that God made man and gave him rulership of the earth. Man lived in a paradise at the time. He had access to the Tree of Life which kept him revitalized all the time. But when he disobeyed God, there was a break in his otherwise perfect existence. He lost access to paradise and also to the Tree of Life and was forced to work for his food and get little in return for his hard work. Also, for the first time, man became exposed to death. He was condemned to steadily lose vitality until he dies and returns to the dust from which he was made.

Clearly, if man had never committed treason against his King, he would never have experienced death and the earth would not have become what it is today.

But, by choosing to rebel against his Overlord in agreement with the first rebel, man lost favor with God and became Satan's vassal instead. Satan, by that maneuver of deceiving man, forcibly took back control of the earth from man (he was once God's Regent over the Earth before he rebelled). Consequently, man became an agent of limited authority over the Earth and also lost all that he may have had if he had stayed true to his Sovereign.

Man is a spirit that lives in a body. So, death is not really an end to his existence. When God decreed death for him, it was to make sure that evil had an end and that man could still be saved. Otherwise, man would be hopeless in his failure against God. Death then is what happens when our bodies wear out and our spirits are released from them. When that happens, every human being receives a temporary body and is then taken to a place in keeping with their choices in life. Those who choose to return to God in repentance through faith in Jesus Christ are today taken to God's temporary Headquarters in the Third Heaven where they rest from the war on earth waiting for the Return of God's King to the earth and their own Resurrection. Those who choose to persist in rebellion against God also receive their temporary bodies but are taken to Torments in Sheol which is under the Earth. There they must suffer until the Last Resurrection when they will be consigned to the Lake of Fire after their own Judgment for eternity.

This is the first part of "after-life" in biblical cosmology. No dead person is unconscious, they are only absent from life on earth.

The second part is that after circa 6000 years of human history counting from Adam and Eve, the number required to replace the angels who rebelled against God will be reached in human believers who together are called the Church. At that time, God will begin to warn the world of the Return of His King who would be bringing God's Vengeance against rebellion against His Authority. This is what we call the Tribulation. It will be open warfare finally between God's Side and Satan's side. At that time, Satan will appoint a special man to lead the earth side of his campaign with the view to destroying the Church and the nation Israel and thus make it impossible for the King to return. God will warn the unbelieving world at that time of the serious implications of continuing to rebel against Him then with terrible judgments such as this world has not seen or heard in thousands of years. But wickedness will only increase until the Lord Jesus returns and the Church is resurrected. That is, all dead believers from Adam and Eve to the last one to die or be killed during the Great Tribulation return to life on Earth in new bodies which cannot be harmed or destroyed ever again and all living believers at the time also have their bodies changed to become these new bodies too. Then, they gather and enter final battle against Satan and his angelic and human forces. That is what we call Armageddon.

When the earth has been cleared of all the aggressive enemies both angelic and human, then the Lord Jesus will renew the Earth changing it back into the perfect state it was in before Adam sinned, only better.

But there will still be unbelievers in the world who just never chose to join Satan and his armies in aggressive rebellion against God. And there will also be new believers who only come to believe because they have finally seen Jesus Christ return to the world. These latter will mostly be Jews. These two populations will exist side by side until the thousand years is done.

That thousand years or the Millennium will be a time when Christians who stayed faithful to the end of their earthly lives or the return of the King will rule the world with Jesus Christ. So, this again is part of the "after-life" in Christian cosmology because a large population of believers will now be living on Earth again but in eternal bodies completely freed from the constraints and troubles of life in this world but they will be the rulers of this world with the Lord Jesus Christ.

After the Millennium, the unbelieving population will begin a new rebellion to try to oust the worldwide Government of Jesus Christ. The rebellion will be tolerated for a short time before it will be summarily squashed and the entire material Universe finally destroyed.

Then, the whole population of, first, believers who chose loyalty to God in Jesus Christ, and, second, unbelievers who decided to remain in rebellion against God, both from the Millennium, will be raised from the dead in Resurrection bodies each suited to their status as believers or unbelievers. Then there will be the Last Judgment after which all rebels will be consigned to the Lake of Fire for eternity and a new Universe will be created by the Lord Jesus Christ to which God the Father will return to spend eternity with His Children for all eternity in the New Earth that will be made.

Both this new Universe and the Resurrection bodies will still be material things but not in the way these current ones are because they will be perfectly suited to spiritual existence and thus will be eternal in nature incapable of ever wearing out or being destroyed. Also, unlike these current ones, they will be perfect with no trace of evil or wickedness in any form.

The Bible does not say very much about what Eternity will be like. But it does talk about beautiful forests of trees on the new earth which produce delightful foliage and fruits which the inhabitants will eat in enjoyment and large rivers of the water of life that they will probably drink and swim in. But none of these things is presented as needful at all, that is, as necessary to survival. They are just more delights that God's children will enjoy in eternity. But with bodies as powerful as the Resurrection Body is, it only stands to reason that something like sex, for example, will hold little interest to us at that time given all that we would be able and also free to do with it. We certainly won't need food or water, as I said, but we would certainly be able to enjoy both if we wished for them. But the greatest pleasure would be to finally be able to see God face to face and live with Him, never leaving His Presence for all eternity.

This is the final part of "after-life" in Christian cosmology.

I believe that in all the foregoing, your second question has been answered. Man was created to be with God eternally and enjoy the beautiful universe that God made for him and the angels. Today though, things are not so. Much is wrong with man and with the universe itself. This is because of the war I spoke of. Many things that man takes pleasure in are injurious to him, for an obvious example, you could consider heroin or meth. There are more subtle things than those but they all harm the user. In eternity, our desires will finally be purified so that we want things that are actually good for us and we will also finally possess an uninhibited ability to actually enjoy these things and in doing so please the God Who loved us so much that He paid a Sacrifice beyond our ability to fully understand in order to save us from our own selves.


Question #3:
You said, "Not necessarily. There may be an argument over what "better" objectively means but no other religion or philosophy out there thinks of Eternity as a perfection of what life ought to be. All the others have some notion that either describes Eternity in terms of this world, for example, Islam is concerned with sex and food and water, or presents Eternity as some ethereal existence completely divorced from what we know about life through our experience in this world, for example, becoming or returning to being part of the Brahmin as Hinduism holds.

But Christianity teaches that this world is damaged because of a war that intimately involves human beings. When that war is over, everything will be fixed and for those who have been faithful to God, life will finally be everything it was meant to be from the beginning."

Does Christianity not have sects that believe eternity to be in terms of "this world" like jehovahs witnesses?


Response #3:
There are many tribes, languages and skin colors in Nigeria. There are even natural-born Nigerians and naturalized Nigerians. But there is really only one thing which is called Nigeria and which each of these categories claim to possess in order to be Nigerian. This is true of all things.

In Christianity, there is one core idea that is what Christianity is. Sects, religions and denominations may claim rightly or wrongly to be associated with that core idea but it is that core idea to which one must address oneself if one wants to deal with Christianity, not with sects, religions, denominations etc.

The Bible defines what Christianity is. It is Faith in Jesus Christ, God Who also assumed humanity for Himself in order to die for human beings and thus save us from our sins and the just condemnation awaiting every sinner. This is what you should address yourself to. If any sect misrepresents this, then regardless what claims it may make for its identity, it is not Christian. If it does represent this accurately, it should still proceed to line up with the Bible's position on everything else in order to be a good exemplar for examining Christian claims.

The Bible does not say what you have here quoted the Jehovah's Witnesses as saying. It does not hold that eternity will be in terms of "this world".

But it is true that the Bible teaches that the Lord Jesus Christ will return to rule this world for a thousand years. And after that thousand years and another worldwide rebellion against His Government at the end of it, the entire universe will be destroyed and then the Last Judgment will occur at the end of which a new Universe will be created with a perfect Earth where God the Father will come down to in order to live with His Children for eternity.

That Eternity will be spent in a material reality just like this one except only Perfect is true but even the Millennium will be in a world very different than this one because of how this planet will be changed by the Second Advent. Not only will physical conditions be much different than they are now, the very principles that govern human existence now will be replaced with new and perfect ones. It is common knowledge (you find it even boldly written on the walls of the UN), for example, that during the Millennium of the Reign of Christ, there will be no war. Still, that is not eternity. It is still time in this physical earth with sinful human beings and a corrupted universe. In eternity, things will be completely different.

In the Eternal Earth that will be created after the Last Judgment, for example, there will be no oceans. Also, the Capital City of that Earth, the New Jerusalem, will be a perfect Cube and a perfectly beautiful place where all the Church will have their lodgings. But while there will be amazing trees whose fruit will be a great delight and rivers of the water of life, these things will only be delights not necessities. Food and water would no longer be necessary at that point to sustain human existence since we will be immortal at that point. Sex would be hardly important because of the far more amazing pleasures of eternity that would take up our time and thought. When you consider how powerful the Resurrection Body is and how vast the present universe is and therefore how much better the coming one will be, the pleasures of this life that exercise our imagination so much will lose at least some of their appeal.

This is what the Bible teaches irrespective of what any "Christian" sect may believe or teach.

JJOF:
This is good work bro. Thumbs up.

ATMC:
Ihe darling

Keep it up.

IF NO MAN CAN PAY FOR ANOTHER'S SIN, HOW DOES THE LORD JESUS'S DEATH SAVE US?

Question:
Hello,

I just came across [this] yesterday and I'm still finding difficulties to comprehend the two sections:

A. Jesus died for our sins: Romans 4:25; 1 Peter 3:18; 1 Corinthians 15:3; 1 John 2:2.

B. No Man can die for the sins of another: Ezekiel 18:1-30; Deuteronomy 24:16; Psalm 49:7; Jeremiah 31:30.

I need a clear explanation cos its a challenging topic.


Response:
Hello.

I am a Christian, a committed follower of the Lord Jesus Christ according to the Bible, so I will be answering you from that position.

To begin, the very foundation of the Christian Faith is that the Lord Jesus Christ is God Who became Man to die for all human beings as payment for their sins against God.

Your question is a very good one because those who do not believe the above have no way of understanding how we are saved at all.

No man can pay for the sins of another because no man can afford to pay for the sins of another. We are all in debt to God and each sin is worth an eternity of suffering at least because every sin is an act of cosmic treason against God. Now, even if we found one righteous man who has never sinned at all against God, he would still be unable to expiate even one single sin because he does not possess eternal life in himself (Ezekiel 14:14, 20).

But God possesses eternal life in Himself (John 5:26, 1:4). Therefore only God can pay the price of our sins. This was why the only way that man could be saved was that God had to become human and take all of human debt against Himself and cancel it with His Own enormous wealth of Life.

That is, only God could die in place of human beings to pay for human sins. But God cannot die. That is why He had to take on human flesh and suffer death, and not just physical death but spiritual death. Our Lord Jesus Christ died the worst death anybody could die for sin. If any human being spent an infinite amount of eternities in the Lake of Fire, it still would not measure up to what the Lord Jesus Christ did for us when He submitted His perfect, sinless human soul to the spiritual death in the three hours of gross darkness on the Cross of Calvary before He gave up His human spirit.

In short, we will never fully comprehend the Sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ even in eternity. But we can be sure that it wasn't just another human being dying for any of us. It was most definitely God Himself paying the dread coin that all of us put together could never muster.

theoriginalgood:
How can we know when Christ is coming back? Isn’t there any who is contact with him?

https://www.nairaland.com/4897960/christ-jesus-returning-2019

theoriginalgood:
How can we know when Christ is coming back?
Isn’t there any who is contact with him?

Ihedinobi3:
Your link appears to be making a prophecy and also teaching a doctrine.
I generally don't concern myself with either (that is, I don't comment on prophecy and I avoid telling people what to teach
- although I must warn you to be careful what you teach
because the Lord Jesus does not take kindly to those who mislead or attempt to mislead His People)
so I'm afraid I cannot respond to the link.

As to your questions here, we can have some idea of when the Lord will return from diligently studying the Bible.
There is considerable information in the Bible
that can help any believer work out an approximate period when the Lord may be expected.
Of course, as the Lord told us, the exact Day and Hour of His return has not been told to anyone.
Only God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) know when that will be.
But year and time of year may be worked out from the information in the Bible.
As for making contact with the Lord, that is what we have the Holy Spirit, prayer and the Bible for.
He is always with us. So we are in constant touch with Him.

MuttleyLaff:


"No one knows about that day or hour,
not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,
but only the Father."
- Matthew 24:36

"Jesus replied,
“It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority."
- Acts 1:7

Befitting response post and I completely concur with it.

ENCOURAGEMENT IN TRIALS

Question:
I had to ask this question because it seems God doesn't care at all... I have so many problems that I won't wish my worst enemy and they have affected me academically.

I'm so depressed that I wish myself death at times. I always think about any little/unnecessary things, I lack confidence.

This started about 10 years ago when I realized that I had a mother tongue (which is not supposed to be a problem actually) and this made me too shy to talk in public especially.

The mother tongue is: using L and N interchangeably sometimes, but later on I was able to rectify it( that is,being able to differentiate them)....Actually I don't know how this developed into a big problem... it may sound funny but it has caused me much depression,thinking it might not just be a mother tongue.

The worst is that I [have a sinful habit] and my heart is always beating fast(I think I'm sick ). I have [had the habit] for about 10 years as well.My life is far from being okay.Depression is killing me and I always think that God will not help me because I'm not righteous.

And other problems!!!


Response:
Hi. I'm a Christian, a committed follower of the Lord Jesus Christ according to the Bible.

I assume that you are a Christian too, but it is possible that you are not so please correct me if I am wrong.

Life is hard for everyone no matter who they are but it is particularly hard for Christians and generally hardest for those who are committed to the Truth of Jesus Christ. I say this to help you come to appreciate that you are not alone in pain. Everyone hurts. It may not be very comforting to realize that but at least it helps you know that yours is not a unique case and if others are coping somehow, then perhaps you can too.

If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus, then you have access to the greatest and most effective comfort a human being could hope to have in the pains and travails of this life and that is God's Own Peace, the Peace that the Lord Jesus Christ gave to everyone who chooses to follow Him (John 14:27).

All you need to do to take advantage of that Peace is this:

Philippians 4:6-7 NASB
[6]Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
[7]And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

When we pray, we hand over to the Lord the things that trouble us and trust Him to handle them in the perfect way. We are never certain what He may do about them but we KNOW that He loves us more than we can comprehend love and He is greater than the whole universe. That means that if anything is good for us, He will not withhold it from us and there is nothing that can stop Him from giving it to us.

But we do not often see what He sees or know what He knows. In fact, we almost never do. But His goodness to us in times past should always tell us that we can trust Him completely no matter what. So, we should never assume that He is failing us or loving us less when things don't go as we want them to. He is working ALL THINGS together for good to those who love Him (Romans 8:28). That means that even unpleasant things are worked into His Perfect Plan for us.

Please be encouraged by this. Know that the God Who loved you so much that He gave His One and Only Son to a Spiritual Death beyond human comprehension in order to pardon us and save us from Eternal Condemnation cannot now just ignore you and cease to care for you. He cares more deeply for you than anyone knows how to care for anything.

As for your struggle with sin, we all do (James 3:2). Not that it is how we should be, no. We ought to continue to resist sin even if we have to do so "unto blood" (Hebrews 12:4). But we are clothed with sinful flesh for now (Romans 7:17), so we all sin sometimes. In order to increasingly cease from sin, we must not only be doing our best to oppose our own sinful flesh by actively breaking sinful patterns (e.g., one may stop watching music videos if they start one thinking about sex and eventually ending up committing more overt sins) but we must also make it a strong priority to commit ourselves to the Truth, that is, to reading our Bibles and diligently following correct and in-depth Bible teaching that helps us transform the way we think in our hearts and thus change our attitudes and actions more permanently to be more pleasing to the Lord. We are only truly changed from the inside out, not from the outside in. So, while it is a good thing that you are zealous to please God in your sexual behavior, know that you can only do so by learning to think like He does about it and you can only do so by diligently studying Bible teaching that is actually true to what the Bible says, not teachings that distort the Bible for self-aggrandizing purposes.

I suggest https://ichthys.com as a source for such teachings. You may also look up www.bibleacademyonline.com as an alternative. And here on Nairaland, on my profile, you will find two threads where I try to provide some Bible teaching to help other believers like yourself so that they too can grow to become able to control their bodies in a manner that pleases the Lord in addition to fulfilling their own ministries to the Lord.

As for the embarrassing aspect of speech that you contended with and any other such concerns you may have, please remember that

1 Corinthians 1:26-31 NASB
[26]For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble;
[27]but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,
[28]and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are,
[29]so that no man may boast before God.
[30]But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption,
[31]so that, just as it is written, "Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord."

And

Philippians 3:4-7 NASB
[4]although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more:
[5]circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee;
[6]as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless.
[7]But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

And

Exodus 4:10 NASB
[10]Then Moses said to the Lord, "Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue."

As well as

Numbers 12:3 NASB
[3](Now the man Moses was very humble, more than any man who was on the face of the earth.)

You have nothing to worry about if the Lord is pleased with you. Many things that embarrass us in this life are passing away. We have such a short time here on earth to fight for the greatest rewards of eternity. After that, all the sorrows and tears of this life will pass away and joy and peace and perfection will be ours for all eternity. Whatever seems like such a big deal to you right now is really not that important. What really matters is that the Lord God knows you to be one of His. Rejoice in that (Luke 10:20). It is an enormous blessing that God rejoices in you. This world's jeers and sneers will all amount to nothing in the end so don't let such things as you spoke of tell you how to define yourself. One really is only whatever God says that they are.

Please be at peace, friend. God loves you far more than you can begin to imagine. And He has promised to never leave you or forsake you. I will say a prayer for you over here.

The Peace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

ON GOD’S RESPONSIBILITY FOR EVIL

Question #1:
After creating the beautiful garden of eden God still made an evil forbidden fruit inside.

Since we say God is good then Why not make everything good

Please i just seek reasonable answers and comments.
Thanks

Response #1:
Hello.

I am not sure what your own attitude to these matters is but I will try to answer without prejudice.

Because of your allusion to the Garden of Eden and to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, I assume that you are interrogating the Bible on this. I am a Christian, a committed follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, so I will answer you as one who believes the Bible in toto.

First of all, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not evil at all. God never creates evil. He always creates perfection. And the tree was also good. The only evil was man's disobedience in eating it contrary to God's explicit command that he shouldn't.

That tree is why the human race still exists today in spite of the corruption of our bodies with sin. It provided the human race with an expanded conscience which is an ability to identify good and evil in Satan's very complex system of moral pitfalls that he wove to ensnare as many of Adam's descendants as possible.

While Adam and Eve lived in the Garden, they did not need an expanded conscience because they were created holy like the angels earlier. But possession of a free will always means that the possessor can change their moral leaning. And man changed from being holy to being sinful when he decided to disobey God and eat the fruit. But, as I said, eating the fruit still provided us with a conscience that has helped the human race survive without destroying itself in thousands of years now.

Why did God create the tree at all? Because God wanted man to make a choice about Him. He did not want man to serve Him by force or default. That is, man had to both be free to choose whether to love God and submit to Him or not and to have the opportunity to choose not to love Him and submit to Him if he decided that he didn't want to. Without the tree in the Garden, man may have had free will but no opportunity to exercise it. But we had the tree and Adam made the choice.

So, God did not do anything wrong to us in that instance.

Since Adam made that choice, God sent the Lord Jesus Christ to give all of humanity a way back to Him. That is consistent with all His earlier good acts of mercy and love toward us. If anyone believes in the Lord Jesus, then their sins are no longer counted against them and they are saved and if they continue to believe until they leave this world, they will spend eternity with the Lord God and all of His Family.

That, to me, is the best news ever. I hope you find it to be the same for you as well.

Question #2:
Isiah45:7 I form the light,and create darkness:I make peace,amd create evil:I the LORD do all these things.

Response #2:
Is it not interesting that opposite to light is darkness but opposite to peace is evil in this translation? If "evil" here is moral as in unrighteousness or wickedness, shouldn't the opposite be "holiness" or "righteousness" so that that should read:

"I form the light, and create darkness: I make righteousness, and create evil: I the Lord do these things"?


Evil there means "calamity" or "unpleasantness" or "disaster".

This is a better translation:

Isaiah 45:7 NASB
[7]The One forming light and creating darkness, Causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these.

Question #3:
Calamity also means ,disaster,catastrophe,mishap,misfortune,tragedy,blow e.t.c.
(Encarta English Thesaurus).

Response #3:
Very correct. It means all that. What it does not mean is "moral badness". So, God does not ever create evil by which we mean "moral badness" but He does cause all manner of calamity/disaster/catastrophe/mishap/misfortune/tragedy/blows with His judgments upon evil, that is, creature moral badness. That is why He is worthy to be feared.

Question #4:
why should you fear what is good? it makes no sense

Response #4:
Justice is good, isn't it? Who wouldn't like to know that if someone treated them unfairly that that person would suffer the wrath of Justice?

It is precisely because Justice is to be feared that it is good. Justice is meaningless if the criminal can get away with his crime. In the same way, the fact that no evil will go unpunished by God is a good thing since it teaches the wicked man to restrain himself and protects the weak and the innocent from such people.

ABOUT FAITH AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD OVER TIME

Question #1:
Has anyone ever wondered if, when Time stops, would God stop?

Response #1:
To be clear, God created time, matter and energy. None of these things existed before He created them ex nihilo. So He existed before Time existed. That means that His Existence is completely undefinable in terms of time.

This universe was created for us creatures. Eternity too will be created for us too. These things make our existence possible and comprehensible to us. But God doesn't need them Himself. It is in order to make some sense of Him that we use words about Him the way we do.

For example, when we say "before Time was created", we are saying something rather meaningless because if time didn't exist, what does "before" mean? But how else can we express the otherwise inexpressible?

Then again, where did God exist if there was no space before He created space? But again we are thinking of God like He isn't God. God is Spirit. Not a spirit, Spirit. That means that He is something very different from and not like the universe at all. So, it's impossible to explain Him in terms of the universe.

When then we talk about God, it is important to keep in mind that we are going to be speaking logical absurdities although they will be truths as far as human language can go. The reason is, as I have said, that God is not like the universe so that our ideas about Him will always be difficult to comprehend even where they are accurate and even more difficult to communicate meaningfully. And without Faith it is completely impossible either to understand Him or to even explain Him to anybody else.

Question #2:
Whether time is fundamental or emergent is still a serious topic of debate in scientific circles. But somehow you know for sure that time is emergent.
How?
Faith?

Response #2:
Lots of things are debates in scientific circles including the patently ridiculous.

Yes, I do know for sure that time was created as does every human being until they choose to ignore the truth and replace it with a lie of their own choosing.

Yes, Faith.

Question #3:
If it's faith then you don't know for sure, you must choose one.

Response #3:
Why do you say that what is known by Faith is not known for sure?

Question #4:
Because the Bible describes faith as "...evidence of things NOT SEEN".

You know FOR SURE that the sun is responsible for the light outside. You do not need faith.

They are mutually exclusive.

Response #4:
Shall we say then that the blind do not know anything for sure?

Question #5:
They have other senses. You know honey is sweet, a plane in flight makes a loud noise, a Rose smells nice. You do not need faith for any of these. Did you observe the emergence of time with your senses?

Response #5:
Why did you not then assume that Faith is another sense rather than that nothing can be known for sure through Faith?

Question #6:
Why should I assume when faith has already been defined?

"The substance of things hoped for, evidence of things not seen"

Would it be proper to assume when I've already been told what it is?

Response #6:
You understand "substance of things hoped for" and "evidence of things not seen" as meaning what exactly?

In more modern English, the verse may be rendered thus as well:

Hebrews 11:1 NASB
[1]Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Can you explain why you do not see this in the same way as you would see the work of, say, the hearing of a blind man?

When a blind man cannot see the sun, how is he assured of its existence? When he cannot see the one he loves, how can he be convinced of their love for him? Why does his ability to perceive these things not resonate with Hebrews 11:1?

Question #7:
We know everything about. We know how fast it travels, we also know we can measure its intensity in decibels.
Another thing everyone knows for sure is that the eyes are absolutely unneeded to perceive sound. Thus, there is no rationale for anyone to dispute the possibility that a blind man can hear sound.
A blind man can also feel the heat of the sun on a scorching afternoon.

About love, even people who have eyes sometimes struggle to be convinced that they are loved much less a blind man so what's the point here?
Anyway, a blind man can become convinced of the love of people in his life by their actions towards him.
This isn't blind faith.
Why are you sure that time is emergent. On what is this conviction based?
Faith comes by hearing; so says the Bible. How did your belief that time is emergent come about. What did you hear?

Response #7:
You are very correct, of course. The eyes are not needed to perceive sound or heat or vibration or any number of other stimuli that the physical body can experience apart from sight.

I would add that we don't even need to know all that stuff about sound as you know quite well. Well before we had technology to measure sound in decibels, blind men navigated the world by hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting and other means as well.

All you have said here only goes to show that we have different senses for perceiving different realities. In the absence of one or more, there are others which may compensate.

Faith is a spiritual sense. It is the means by which we perceive spiritual realities which are utterly inaccessible to our other senses. In the same way that your eyes cannot perceive sound, none of your physical senses can perceive spiritual realities. This is what "things not seen" means. What it does not mean though is that we cannot know [this or that] for sure any more than a blind man cannot know [this or that] for sure just because he cannot see. In the same way that a blind man can perceive the world around him through other senses, we can perceive the spiritual realities around us through Faith. And as you have said, Faith is a response to hearing God's Testimony. If you reject God's Testimony, it is similar to essentially systematically destroying all of your physical senses so that you can no longer perceive physical realities. Like being physically dead.

That is why there is such a notion as being spiritually dead. It means that your ability to perceive spiritual realities has been summarily discarded by you. Therefore, anything that may be said about the spiritual is nonsense to you since it is utterly imperceptible to you in every way. It may also compare to insanity where even though a person is physically alive, they lack the ability to correctly perceive and interpret the world around them.

As to what I heard, in Genesis 1:1, we learn that "to begin [everything], God created the heavens and the earth". That is, He created time, space and energy because He created a beginning and heavens and earth which together form the totality of the universe.

Question #8:
Faith is a spiritual sense. Every sense as I know is connected to an organ. What organ is this sense you call faith connected to?
Perhaps I can attempt to revive mine.

Response #9:
As I said, it is a spiritual sense.

Question #10:
An imaginary sense?

Response #10:
Are the two words synonyms in your dictionary?

Question #11:
There's no spiritual in my dictionary.
Help me with some synonyms if you will.

Response #11:
I'm afraid I can't. It would just be an exercise in futility. You could get a better dictionary or you could just move on to more interesting, comprehensible things.

ON THE QUESTION OF HELL

Question:
The topic of hell baffles me. Hell is said to be an eternal place for sinners. But i find it quite vague

For e.g someone dies at the age of 30, and the person died in sin and then goes to hell to spend an eternity


Dont we think the punishment is not proportionate to the offence?

Response:
The main problem with understanding Eternal Condemnation is that the meaning of sin is not commonly taught even in churches.

Sin is rebellion against God. In other words, sin is cosmic treason.

What that means is that even a little white lie is a deliberate effort to dethrone God and even kill Him if one could manage it.

No human government on earth or in history (at least, none that I know of, and if there is any which is different, they would be very weird indeed) punishes treason with anything less than summary execution.

Treason compromises the security of a nation and the government that rules it. So every ruler is extremely aggressive toward it.

Therefore, the Second Death is just for everyone who rebels against God.

Now, it may be argued that human governments kill you for treason and that is that so why doesn't God kill you and that would be that?

The answer there is that human governments and nations die just like traitors. But God is eternal. Rebellion against God then is not an effort to kill God (although the attack on the Lord Jesus Christ to kill Him is obvious proof that if the rebellious angels and men could, they would definitely kill God and take over His Creation) but one invariably to rob Him of all that He takes pleasure in and isolate Him if possible. It is actually impossible to properly define what treason against an eternal God really is because God Himself is impossible to fully define. But it is obvious that such treason is an eternal offense, not a temporal one. So the idea that the lie took a second to tell misses the point. The lie was an attack on God's Eternal Sovereignty over Creation and it is therefore an eternal offense.

For this reason at least, eternity in the Lake of Fire is just punishment for anyone who sins against God.

However, not one human being will be in the Lake of Fire because they sinned. By that I do not mean that it is not because of sin that the Lake of Fire exists. It very much is. But every sin ever committed by human beings or which is being committed this very moment or will be has been completely paid for by the Sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ when He gave Himself up to a spiritual Death that we simply cannot fully understand on the Cross of Calvary.

Because every sin has been paid for, all human beings are automatically saved until they reject the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ or refuse to accept it when they are told of it. So, being born in sin does not condemn anyone to the Lake of Fire.

Those who will be in the Lake of Fire, therefore, will be there because they rejected God's Offer of Reconciliation through Jesus Christ completely.

As to what the Lake of Fire is, it is a literal Lake of Fire full of Darkness and Misery and Pain and Regret. It is truly an absence of all of God's Blessings. But even more than that, it is the Presence of all His Curses. And it is a just punishment against rebellion against Him. As long as anyone persists in rebellion, that is where they are sure to go and God will be completely justified in sending them there for all Eternity.

ON THE SALVATION OF CHILDREN AND THE INSANE


Question #1:
Please help to elaborate on the final destination of mad people when they die. since they are pretty unconscious about themselves, can they even repent? because repentance is a conscious thing. Now, since they are not conscious, when they die, what is their fate?


Response #1:
Hello. I'm a Christian who believes completely in the witness of the Bible.

I have answered this question multiple times already.

Every child who does not attain the age of accountability before death and every human being who is mentally disabled is automatically saved because the Lord Jesus died for everyone. Only those who actively reject Him or refuse to accept the Gospel are those who are condemned.


Question #2:
You are wrong on mental people making heaven.

Mental people will be judged based on their last state of health. If they were unbelievers before they ran mad, then hell fire is truly theirs. As for if they were believers, I strongly believe a Christian cannot run mad. Madness has to do with a demon or demons possessing someone. But Christians have been bought by God and his spirit lives inside them. A demon cannot enter the house where the Holy Spirit resides. Any person who claims to be a Christian but ran mad was never a Christian. Such a person was rejecting Jesus while holding on to the idea that he could save himself by believing in works based salvation.


Response #2:
To begin with, the Scriptures are clear that Jesus Christ died for everyone (John 3:16, 1 John 2:2). There is no question about this.

There is also no doubt that only those who refuse to believe in Him will be condemned (John 3:18).

Babies cannot make a decision to reject faith in the Lord Jesus or not to accept it. This is another fact.

It is also a fact that there are people who are born mentally deficient, that is, people who have never had a good, working brain. So, they have never been able to make a decision to reject the Sacrifice that the Lord Jesus made for everyone.

Therefore, babies and mentally deficient people are saved because they did not refuse to believe in the Lord Jesus.

Now, you were concerned about people who previously had working brains but went insane at some point. I believe that it is sensible to believe that if they rejected or failed to accept the Sacrifice of Christ while they were able to, then they will not be saved just because they went insane. The criterion for Salvation for those who possess the ability and opportunity to make choices is faith in the Lord Jesus, not insanity. So, going insane after one has been steadfast in rejecting Christ will not automatically save them.

Christians do go insane. To claim that insanity has to do with demons is really to claim that all deaf people and all mutes are possessed with demons too since the Lord Jesus cast out demons in order to heal such people sometimes. But the Bible immediately proves that false. Demons can certainly drive people they possess insane but there is no reason to believe that they necessarily do so. Nor is there reason to believe that all cases of insanity are demon possession.

So, yes, Christians can go insane. Our bodies are weak and things happen to them. Damaged genes can result in Alzheimer's among other things. That does not mean that the person was never a Christian and became possessed with demons or that demons can possess Christians. It only means that our bodies are weak.

ANGELS AND GENESIS SIX I

Question #1:
Virus and a plethora of micro organisms are invisible to the Unclad eye. So also are entities we find in religious scriptures such as Gods, angels, demons and other creature, ghost et cetera. This entities are reffered to as spirit because they cannot be seen by the biological eyes so to speak.


Response #1:
The Bible does not call anything spirit merely because it is invisible to humans. It calls it spirit if it is spirit. God is Spirit and "hides Himself" so that He is not seen by humans or any creature by whom He may not wish to be seen. Angels are spirits because they were created to be spirits not possessing material bodies.


Question #2:
However this spirit beings are made of "substance" are they not? After all, the creeds of Christianity have argued that
the Godhead are of the same substance or essence.. Wether spirits or not, angel are made up of something. How this something is able to make itself visible to humans is still up for arguments.


Response #2:
Created spirits are substances. They are just not material substances.


Question #3:
Since a virus requires the aid of an electron microscope to be seen and studied, could we then assume that with the right equipment we should also be able to gaze upon the magnificence of the spirit entities?


Response #3:
What the Bible calls spirit cannot be observed by any material means. It will only become discernible to humans as God Himself wills that it should be.


Question #4:
once upon a time, there lived an euglena that was invisible to the Unclad eye. Give science time.


Response #4:
First, are you then saying that you believe that spirits exist but we don't have the technology to discern them?

Second, science could never have enough time to become able to discern or measure the spiritual.


Question #5:
Lets entertain ourselves with a biblical story, a very popular one.

In the bible, lot was visited by two angels whom looked humanoid. Not only where they visible to Lot but to the other people in the society who were aroused by the beauty of this angels and under spell of lust threatened to destroy lot to get a taste of the ecstasy that the anus of this male entities would provide. Lol



Response #5:
The following is the Bible passage with that story. I find no suggestions in it of any beauty or arousal to make this a special case. Sodom was a depraved civilization where strangers were simply not safe because of the wickedness of the people who lived there.

[1]Now the two angels came to Sodom in the evening as Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground.
[2]And he said, "Now behold, my lords, please turn aside into your servant's house, and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you may rise early and go on your way." They said however, "No, but we shall spend the night in the square."
[3]Yet he urged them strongly, so they turned aside to him and entered his house; and he prepared a feast for them, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.
[4]Before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, surrounded the house, both young and old, all the people from every quarter;
[5]and they called to Lot and said to him, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may have relations with them."
[6]But Lot went out to them at the doorway, and shut the door behind him,
[7]and said, "Please, my brothers, do not act wickedly.
[8]Now behold, I have two daughters who have not had relations with man; please let me bring them out to you, and do to them whatever you like; only do nothing to these men, inasmuch as they have come under the shelter of my roof."
[9]But they said, "Stand aside." Furthermore, they said, "This one came in as an alien, and already he is acting like a judge; now we will treat you worse than them." So they pressed hard against Lot and came near to break the door.
[10]But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door.
[11]They struck the men who were at the doorway of the house with blindness, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves trying to find the doorway.
Genesis 19:1-11 NASB


Question #6:
the angels were sexualy irresistible. Period.


Response #6:
I'm not taking your word for it. Period.


Question #7:
My point is, this entities were very much visible to the Unclad eye. Could they posses some feature that enables them to reconfigure molecular structure that prevented light from been reflected by their bodies to conceal their identity?
If this entities could become visible, that means that they also most be made of a certain kind of matter. Christians never seem to trouble their brains to ask vital questions. Since they are too lazy to do so, i would take it upon myself to help question the Book of God.


Response #7:
Angels are part of God's creation. Their spirituality belongs to this Universe in terms of type. We don't really know how their spirituality works but what we do know is that it is not the same as materiality. It is a different kind of "matter", if we must call it that, from what is common in our experience. The Bible tells us only that and warns us to add nothing to it. When the Day comes that the Church is resurrected, we will understand and learn far more than human beings ever imagined possible.


Question #8:
take a look at our friend who has been adding "stuff" from only jehova knows where. The bible also told us that people who convulsed vigorously were demon possessed. Am i right?.


Response #8:
You're wrong. It only said that someone had a demon cast out of him who suffered convulsions because of the demon's possession of his body. It does not say that wherever people are convulsing, it is because they are possessed by demons. They may or may not be. Demons drive some people mad. They give others symptoms of epilepsy. They make yet others deaf mutes. They make some diviners, that is, people who can tell you things they couldn't have known naturally. They are not the exclusive causes of most of these things.


Question #9:
When this angels take human form, are they subject to the forces of nature? In human form can an angel feel anger, pain, lust, depression etc? Can hot water burn their skin?

Does an angel in human form get the urge to urinate? Where does the matter upon which they take form originate from? Are they changing their own substance to that of a human? Are spirits made of substance at all?
Can we call this substance atoms? What type of cells make up the body of an angel?


Response #9:
What we do know is that they never take on true materiality. They do make themselves visible in a form similar to the human one but even then they do not become material. Their only way of experiencing material existence is by taking possession of material bodies owned by other spirits including man himself. But that act is highly prohibited by God and can result in an angel's getting thrown into the abyss.


Question #10:
is that so?? Kindly provide biblical evidence that angels need to possess an animal or human to manifest on the earthly plane.


Response #10:
Since you claim to have a degree from a university (as I imagine a biologist such as yourself must have), I expect that you would be better at reading and understanding what you read. I said that the only way that an angel can experience material existence, NOT manifest on the material plane, is to possess the material body of another spirit. Spirits can manifest if they want and are permitted or are willing to risk the punishment involved but to experience material reality requires a material body. They do not possess one by nature. So, they can only experience materiality by taking possession of another spirit's material body.

To experience material existence would include enjoying material sensations like eating or having relations with other material bodies. When spirits manifest, what they do when they eat, for example, is not at all the same thing that we do when we eat.

ANGELS AND GENESIS SIX cont'd


Question #11:
In the book of genesis, we are told that angels descended from heaven to impregnate human babes who produce viable offspring and even bore humanoid kids. Let stop here and ask some more questions.

What made angels of the most high God think of sex in the first place.?

The angels in their true form could feel sexualy aroused? Let's not forget that they are spirits.
To feel aroused you most have sexual cravings which are produced by intristic factors such as hormones, and of cause the presence of a functioning reproductive organ. Since they were able to fuuuck women they definitely had a reproductive organ that looked like a peniis or transformed to a peniis..

Worthy of mention is the fact that the slay queen's produced babies that retained some characteristics of their angelic Bleep boy of a father. More questions arise here.

The angels took human forms but it would seem their genes didn't. For the women to be impregnated, it meant that this angels climaxed and poured forth sperm. Let stop again for some analysis.


A lion cannot impregnated a tiger. Not because the lions diick cannot fit into the tiger's vagina but because of a biological process(post zygotic isolation whereby the species may mate but gametes may not fuse, offspring is not viable or infertile) that prevents different species from interbreeding. The sperm of the lion and the egg of the tigress are not compatible..
you've probably heard of the "liger",which is the hybrid of a lion nd tiger. Do note that this is does have some scientific influence and will not- again- will not occur in nature.

Lets come back to the angels.

Since the copulation led to fertilisation and to production of viable offsprings( I say the offsprings are viable because they were stronger and better than the homo sapien specie. If they were not, the homo sapiens wouldn't have cried to God for intervention as said according to book of enoch) then we must
conclude that the sperm of an angel was genetically similar to that of the human male.
simply put, the
the angelic specie and homo sapien are far more closely related than we thought. Dare I say it, that angels are infact the advanced Homo specie or Humans.

No wonder Christians aspire to venture unto heaven and live- live like angels of the lord. Are Christians trying to evolve into a more complicated specie?

You might defend thus; that the angel took human forms hence had human sperm and dna, but from biblical accounts we are told that the offspring were nothing like the human civilisation of noah. We are also told that the offspring called nephilim where hybrid angels and human. So the angel dna was not that of a man. An angelic sperm with angelic dna fertilised the ovum of the human babes.
That leads us to the million dollar question,

As a Biologist I am suffered to ask certain questions, and to put the biblical account under heavy scrutiny. I must also try to explain how an angelic race(which we assume are a different species) could successfully have sexual intercourse with a human dame, and produce a viable hybrid offspring.
since the "keep the population in check" biological process to prevent breeding amongst species failed we must rule out the fact that angels are different from humans.

Lets dive into the pool of molecular Biology.
All living creatures posses genetic material, which comprises units of DeoxyriboNucliec Acid, DNA. The DNA is the blueprint of Life. It is the program code of biological existence. The DNA is the responsible directly or indirectly for all your anatomical features.

The dna which bears the genetic code is coiled up into thicker folds that end up in a form and size we call the chromosomes. Each human cell contains 23 pairs of chromosome. For healthy reproduction to take place in all organisms without scientific intervention, the number of chromosomes of the paternal gamete must be equal to that of the maternal gamete. Your mama produced 23 and your papa produced 23 to produce you. If there is a single addition or subtraction from this number, 23, it would inevitably lead to devastating consequences. For example down syndrome, kleiniphelter syndrome and lots more.

Where am I getting at?
Since the angels had successfully shot a load of cum into the puna of a female human and also successful fertilised the ovum sitting calmy in the ovary. The egg must have been surprised to see strange looking sperm cell swimming with its wings instead of tail. The chromosomal number of the angelic dna must have been very much equivalent or close to that of human females. That would be the only plausible explanation for the hybrid - nephilim to be born and grow old enough to bear its own offspring. fascinating isn't it.
Do note that there is such a term as polypoidy, whereby the offspring inherits excess number of chromosomes. However this is utterly rare in animals, and even if it occurred would have many deleterious effects on the offspring.

DO ANGELS HAVE THE ABILITY TO TRANSFER THEIR DNA THROUGH SEXUAL INTERCOURSE??
obviously the answer is YES.

DO THEY ENJOY SEX?
YES,

DID THEY EXPERIENCE ORGANMS?
YES. It's the only way they would have shot their angelic cum deep into the abyss of the vagina.

ARE ANGELS STILL CRAVING FOR SEX?
Who knows, after their rebellion driven by pusssy, its probably God castrated the rest of them. If not, it means angel Micheal might be having erections as girls are going crazy of the #1mill twerk competition davido is organising.

IS THE CHRISTIAN GOD CRUEL?
oh yeah, why would you give an angel a dick with serious libido but he won't be able to use it.? That's only something the devil can do.

Why would they fill sexual urges if they were built to serve God as their sole purpose of existence?

this is left for the Christians to answer. What are the implications of the answer to this question i threw at you?


Response #11:
There is a mess of questions in here that need answering. To begin, let us see the passage in question:

[1]Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them,
[2]that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.
[4]The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6:1-2,4 NASB

Also, consider the following passages...

[6]And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day,
[7]just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.
Jude 1:6-7 NASB


[4]For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment...
2 Peter 2:4 NASB


Yes, these angels went after "strange flesh" like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah later did. Since too, angels are obviously not God, the mechanism by which they produced the Nephilim through their human wives may very well have been sexual in nature.

But does this translate to a libido among angels? It might or it might not. That is of no consequence. But even if it does, there are both male and female angels (Zechariah 5:9) so that there is no lack of provision for satisfying such desires if they do exist. This is the single important issue you have raised in this matter and it is because you refuse to believe in God that you do not recognize that there is no cruelty in Him.

Note that it is the angels that give you your excuse here although you yourself are alive and well enough to complain and you do have a skill too and possibly a job and friends and a life of some consequence. None of these blessings are enough to make you think that God is good. It is just the notion that angels are sexually frustrated that exercises your anger against God.

Why did the angels which did go after human women in Genesis 6 do so? First of all, they were rebel angels who had already rebelled against God before Man was created. They desired physical bodies like the animals in the first universe that God created had. So they began to take possession of those animals and to try to create physical bodies of their own with which to experience physical life. Their activity is where the fossils that many scientists are so crazy about come from.

Living in physical bodies became an addiction for them just like hard drugs are for some of us. It destroyed them and kept them bent on a path of more self-destruction. When all the angels who wanted to toe that path had made their choice to do so and all angels who insisted on remaining loyal to God had made their choice, God summarily destroyed that first Universe with a flood that covered all of it in deep, dark ice.

That wiped out all the monstrosities that they had made in their lust. Today we find their bones and some preserved forms deep in the earth and exposed in some places too.

Although, God ended that rebellion, He did not stop their activities forever. He left them and their leader Satan in order to use them to test Man whom He later created to replace them among the angels. So, yes again, you are right that Man is not totally different from the angels. But man was made in a physical body and thus limited in power and knowledge unlike the angels who were created to be purely spirit without physical bodies. All believers will in the end come to possess and live in bodies so powerful that we will be greater than the angels themselves though. That is what we have been promised in the Resurrection to which we look forward.

Moving on though, we know how that test went and has gone, however. Satan has continually been working to persuade human beings to join him in rebellion. When Adam and Eve consented to, all of us automatically acquired a rebellious bent to our natures, something theologically called the sin nature. We have by nature a rebellious attitude toward God from birth although we all still possess the same ability that angels had to choose not to rebel against God if we so please.

Because Satan and his angels were left to remain in the scheme of things, they were still able to carry on with their old activities when God re-created the Universe and the earth. In fact, the very first time we encounter Satan himself after that re-creation, he was already possessing an animal: the snake in the Garden.

So, it is not strange at all that the other rebel angels would want to experience sex with human women and contrive some way to do so. This is not a problem that the elect angels have at all. Not only have their choices to be loyal to God been sealed so that they can no longer sin against God, there is also the fact that in so far as sex may be part of God's Eternal Gift or Plan for the angels, both male and female angels exist so that there is no reason that they cannot enjoy such a Gift, that is, as I said, if it has been given to them.

The rebel angels, on the other hand, have from the beginning been looking to step down from the spiritual plane into the base physical. So, of course, they sought after such a thing as we saw in Genesis 6 but at terrible cost to themselves. All the angels who were involved in that debacle at the time were thrown into the Abyss in deep, palpable darkness and bound in chains until now. They will only be released during the Tribulation after which time they and all rebel angels including their leader Satan will be thrown back in there to wait for the end of the Millennium of the Lord Jesus's Reign over the world. After that, they will be deposited in the Lake of Fire for eternity.

So, it was not a good idea at all for the rebels to mess with the perfect order of things that God had made.

As for whether angels can transfer their DNA, that assumes that they have a DNA. They are spirits. As such, what they transfer is not known to us. We don't even know how they were able to generate progeny with human beings. Clearly, they could do such a thing (in fact, the Antichrist is quite literally the devil's son), but by transferring DNA? We have no reason to think that it is necessarily so. This is not strictly biology since there is a fundamental difference of type involving one spirit partner with far greater knowledge and power than you might be able to imagine and another with a physical body, the Nephilim children notwithstanding. Biology works for physical sexual partners generating physical progeny. But when one partner is a spirit and the progeny have supernatural characteristics, then there is a true question how far biological principles can go in explaining the process.


Question #12:
you should address this berse to our friend. It clearly states that these angels chose to materialise and live like men. It didnt mention them possessing humans. If they possessed humans then they wouldn't have fathered nephilims. Ask me y?


Response #12:
I'm addressing it to you. You needed to hear it. And I am not interested in hearing your theories at this point.


Question #13:
then why would a casterated dog still chase a biiitch?


Response #13:
I am not sure what your question has to do with my comment.


Question #14:
what does this have to do with the argument. What about those children in somalia, syria, yemen, iraq, iran, maiduguri, etc.. Should they have the right to riducule God?


Response #14:
What it has to do with the argument is that many antichristians attack the Bible and Christians ostensibly because this or that does not make sense and reasonable people should not believe it. But it always is some excuse that is covered with a veneer of intellectuality. What relationship does the sexuality of angels have to do with your own need for Salvation?.

And what are you talking about the children in Islamic regions and war-torn areas now? Are you throwing up yet another excuse?


Question #15:
thats why i like Christians, they know how to feel in the gaps..
let God speak for himself..


Response #15:
I can only imagine how you must feel at scientific conferences when someone is answering questions about discoveries they have made, especially questions that you feel they would never be able to answer. That you didn't know that certain things are in the Bible does not mean that they are not there.

The demon-possession rife in the Gospels and which were a major focus of the Ministry of the Lord Jesus were themselves a teaching about how much rebel angels love to live in material bodies and how much risk they are willing to take to have one to live in and how stubborn they can be about leaving it. The teaching in Jude about their taste for strange flesh too was a pointer to the same thing.


Question #16:
more fill in the blanks. Where is biblical evidence. Even the book of enoch doesn't make such claims.


Response #16:
See above. See also Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28 and Genesis 1. I don't do anything outside the Bible so I don't care what the Book of Enoch says.


Question #17:
evidence please...


Response #17:
The Flood of Noah's Day was only the Universal Deluge in miniature.


Question #18:
@bolded, let me get this straight, so God empowered the devil whom was bold enough to challenge his creator, to torment his less advanced creature-humans. ... God must hate humanity.


Response #18:
In which thesaurus is "torment" a synonym for "test"? Satan and his angels were left behind to see if Man would want to join their madness. That is all I said.


Question #19:
but it wasnt given to them. Jesus clarified that. Why doesn't god also seal the fate of humanity to b loyal to him, he want to burn billions in hell isnt it? Do note that you sir, are also a prospective victim of hell to another Christian sect. Who hell is real and whose is a fantasy..


Response #19:
The Lord Jesus said that angels neither marry nor give in marriage. He never said that they are not allowed to have sexual relations with each other. The Bible is completely silent about that.

The angels have been tested. They were tested before Man was created and after all of them had chosen their allegiances, their choices were sealed. Man has 7000 years for his own testing. As each person dies, their own choice is sealed. At the end of 7000 years all mankind will have been tested and every choice will be sealed for all eternity.

It matters nothing to me who believes what. It is not my responsibility what other people want to believe. My responsibility is to find the Truth and believe it. And I did. If every religion and philosophy believes that I am going to Hell because I believe in the Lord Jesus and accept His Sacrifice for me, that is entirely their problem, not mine.


Question #20:
if they are still lovked, then who were the 72 demons that king solomon summoned in the "keys of solomon" also do notice that both in the book of enoch and keys of solomon, the legion leader was azazel or bezelbulb respectively..


Response #20:
I used to be nuts about supernatural and epic fantasies. I am not so hot for them anymore. I like the Bible far more than I care for the feverish imaginations of human beings.


Question #21:
here you are contradicting yourself. If angels can pass down their dna which blended with human dna, doesn't that give you an idea that angels like our friend has confessed to-are humanoid. Not just humanoid but made up of the same or closely related genetic sequence.
As i explained earlier that, if the genes are dissimilar there would be no fertilization. A sheep cannot impregnate cow...
This also proves that the angel dna is composed of molecular material that is exactly the same as that of humans.
However, like i mentioned earlier also, because the angels are a better or specie they sired a more advanced offspring, the nephilim, which overpowered humanity. This is called hybrid vigour. We have seen cases like this uncountable times.... So i advice you rethink your assertions on the nature of this angels..


Response #21:
Just in case you didn't see it clearly the first time, I said that WE CANNOT ASSUME THAT ANGELS HAVE DNA BECAUSE THEY ARE SPIRITS AND THUS TRANSFER SOMETHING UNKNOWN TO US IN COPULATION. Hopefully, you'll see it more clearly now.

You are the one laboring in a contradiction. You suppose that spirits are merely invisible material beings. That is your own fiction. The Bible holds that spirits are not material at all. So, what you are talking about is not at all the same thing as what the Bible talks about. This is why you can talk about angel DNA. Such a thing is no different than saying "hot ice".


Question #22:
Angels could not have possessed humans and still produced nephilims.. After all, they possess the mind or consciousness but they of course wouldnt have altered the genetic sequence of the victim... Thank you for responding to muttley, be advise that MuttleyLaff can be aggressive, but i assure you he means no harm. He is metatron the first. If not metatron himself, who else would have know that the genesis passage referred to something other than angels. Lol.


Response #22:
I have no arguments including such a proposition.

ANGELS AND GENESIS 6 cont'd

Question #23:
Angels do not have sexual needs. Those angels in Genesis 6 were fallen angels whose true aim was to stop the promise of God. Those fallen angels (demons) probably materialized or they simply possessed the body of selected humans to pollute the world of men.

Response #23:
I would advise that we stay with what the Bible itself says even if we don't feel comfortable with it. As the Bible says, the actions of the rebel angels were closely connected to the beauty of the human women and their actions were similar to the actions of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah as well. So, it is hard to separate sexual desire from their actions even if they did (and they truly did) have other motives.

Question #24:
those angels had those desires because they were already fallen because the bible plainly stated that angels do not marry. The nature of fallen angels has ready been corrupted due to their rejection of God.
Angels do not have sexual desires does not mean they can't develop it if they are fallen.

Response #24:
"Do not marry" is not the same as "do not possess sexual desire" or "do not have sex". I am not willing to argue that the elect angels do possess sexual libido or have sex since the Bible does not say explicitly that they do. But it does not explicitly say that they don't either so I wouldn't argue as you do here. That is what I mean by staying with what the Bible actually says.

Question #25:
alright bro. Nice work

Answer #25:
Thank you for your kind words.

Question #26:
Dont you realise that, angels will first, have to be born, just like Jesus was, either as male or female, in order for them to have any chance to have sex with humans? That hasnt happened yet, has never happened, is yet to happen, so your bizarre, far-fetched theory gets shot down in flames. This applies to others like another discussant and even Ihedinobi3, whom, I am surprised he too bought into this angels having sex bullshit


Response #26:
As I often say, I try to stay with what the Bible actually says. I try to do that even when it is uncomfortable or unpopular. Because the Bible is always true even when men's ideas and idiosyncrasies, however vehement, are false.

The Bible seems clear and undeniable to me in saying that sexual desire and sexual intercourse did in fact happen between the angels and the human women in Genesis 6. It is something I didn't like to think either but it doesn't seem arguable to me in the end.

And I see no reason to believe that angels need to be born in order for them to be able to have sexual intercourse with human beings. If the Bible says that they did without suggesting any kind of human birth (something I wonder at), then I certainly believe that they did without being born.


Question #27:
Ihedinobi3, you've probably times without number, heard me say, I dont do arguments. Arguments or arguing over a matter, 110% stems from ignorance and opinions, it always is bereft of facts or factual information because of conjectures and subjectivity. This is why I dont arguments, like you are doing here exchanging ignorance for another ignorance, mainly I havent got an ignorance to trade with. If I am not sure of a subject matter, I will remain and keep mum, as opposed to exhibiting and looking to trade with my ignorance


Response #27:
First, just for the record, the above is what I mean by your presenting "questions" or even "comments" in an antagonistic way. It is hard to respond to the above in a friendly manner because it is overtly insulting. Perhaps I really am exchanging ignorance for ignorance but why would I accept your judgment on that? I am presenting matters as I see them in the Bible and as I have learned from someone that is gifted and prepared as a Bible teacher too. You are not presenting matters at all, on the other hand. What you merely did is arrogate to yourself the right to call a judgment on what I have said. If you had bothered to show some Bible passage that indicates that my knowledge of this matter is either nonexistent or incomplete, that would be different. But rather you consider yourself a sufficient judge to make pronouncements to which you seem to me to think that I am responsible to yield for some reason. If I refuse to yield, you would only heap more abuse on top of the above. And how can I bear such a thing for too long without wanting to fight back?

That is why I may seem not to want to engage with you. It is only the Lord God Who knows the heart but I accepted you as a brother believer in Jesus Christ, so I would always seek peace with you even when we don't agree on some things. After all, we only know and see in part for now because of the bodies of sin that we must endure for now. If we maintain peace in love with each other, in time, the Lord will make everything plain and reconcile the incoherence in our differing understandings of all matters.

Now, I say that only because I believe that we share a fundamental belief that the Lord Jesus is God Who became Man to die for all of our sins on the Cross so that we can be saved. There are people who claim to be Christians who do not believe that at all. I do not feel any need to be at peace with them especially when they deliberately spread their lies where I have spiritual responsibility or when they feel the need to seek me out and talk to me. I avoid them unless I absolutely need to call them out to protect other believers. Then there are antichristians too who are not shy to present themselves as such. I do not treat them as brothers either.

So, consider that your attitude may be in some need of adjustment. As much as I seek peace with you as a brother in the Faith, I am not under any law to either obey you or to respond to you when you act in such a manner as you do with comments like the above. I am willing to be corrected wherever I need it although I am not willing to be dictated to. Feel free to call my attention to anything you think I am getting wrong but only on the authority of the Bible not merely on your strong feelings about anything. I am not responsible to you after all, only to the Lord, in fact.


Question #28:
Well you are NOT adhering to this rule of yours about staying with what the bible actually says because there is no where in the bible where it states that angels have sexual appetite or sexual libido. Also no where in the bible, is it stated that angels have sexual desire. The notion hat sexual intercourse did in fact happen between the angels and the human women is completely and utterly wrong, il-informed and a total fallacy. How you misconstrued the nephilims in Genesis 6 and extrapolated Genesis 6:2-4 to be angels is outrageously baffling and scandalous


Response #28:
In Genesis 6, the sons of God are said to have found the daughters of men so beautiful that they took wives from among them and "went in to them" so that they had children for them who were the Nephilim. This is what the Bible says. Now, we may have some mild debate about who the "sons of God" are here but not about why they took wives from among human women or whether they "went in to them" or had children by them. The language concerning those latter things is unmistakable. Those sons of God were interested in the beauty of the human women. Their choosing wives from among them had to do with sexual desire as much as with any other motive they may have had and going in to them most definitely involved relations which produced children.

Additionally, the verses from Jude clearly parallel the actions of some angels with the sexual depravity of Sodom and Gomorrah making it further impossible to debate that not only is this a sexual event but that the sons of God were unquestionably angels, rebellious ones albeit.

This is what we actually read in the Bible. The only way we can escape what is otherwise so clear is to divorce the witness of Jude and Peter from Genesis and that would leave us completely adrift with no clear understanding what the latter are referring to or to what the Flood was about. In fact, it is impossible to separate Jude from Peter or Peter from Genesis. The three are obviously the same picture.

This is not merely Ihedinobi3's feverish imagination or some concoction of ignorance meant to offend anybody's sensibilities. It is what the Bible actually says.

For what it is worth, I have on this very forum argued against what I have said here too before. It did offend my sensibilities to imagine that angels had relations with human women. It continued to for a long time. Even now I am simply refusing to listen to my emotions about it since the Bible is unquestionably clear to me here. I would rather it say something different but it does not and I am insisting on believing the actual witness it makes rather than what I rather wish that it said.

As for the Nephilim, there is no question that they were important here. The Nephilim are the true backstory from which the human race developed the concept of "supermen", human beings with extraordinary abilities that astounded the world. The very teaching about the Antichrist and the witness in Genesis 3 that he will be Satan's literal seed even buttresses the fact that such people are possible. These are not mere human inventions but biblical teachings. In other words, if I just listed passages, I wouldn't need to say a single word of my own to make it clear that this is what the Bible is saying. What I do say is to help those who are untrained to see the connections which are ordinarily unmistakable but which would be hidden to those who are still learning to trust the Bible.


Question #29:
Sometimes, we give Satan and especially, like in this case, his angels (i.e. demons), way too much credit. Imagine fallen angels having sex with human beings. Who dash angels monkey banana? I am sorry that is a bad pun so excuse it Ihedinobi3


Response #29:
That is not altogether false. It is true that very many of us give Satan and his cohorts too much credit. But it is not impossible to give him too little credit. And we are warned against both extremes in the Bible. Insisting on either will lead us to dispensing with the Bible and falling into Satan's trap in the end.

ANGELS AND GENESIS 6 cont'd

Question #30:
To start with, after their rebellion, Satan & his fallen angels, lost whatever abilities they might have had, to appear in physical human forms period.


Response #30:
I know of no place in the Bible that teaches this. Perhaps you can show me if you do know such a place and we can begin to reconcile our views from there.


Question #31:
Angels can ONLY appear in physical human forms and perform all permissible fleshly activities, if and/or when representing God. Anything less than being in that official capacity, automatically renders such beings, ineligible from having rights to appear as a human being to perform whatever permissible fleshly activities allowed. It just for such beings, wont happen

Response #31:
I do agree that it does appear that angels in general are not allowed to make themselves visible to us. The reason seems obvious judging from how such great believers as Daniel and John could not resist worshiping them when they showed themselves to them. Their power and glory is hard to ignore for us. If the rebel angels were not under a similar embargo, doubtless many believers would have been seduced away from the Faith just by seeing them.

But I think it is stretching it to say that angels ONLY appear physically when/if they are representing God. Obviously, the rebel angels can and have violated other ground rules - and undoubtedly suffered severe punishment for it - so it is not impossible for them to violate this one too even if it would be at such great risk to themselves.


Question #32:
Also whats important to know, is that, angels, never had, havent any mandate to procreate, that mandate was given to human beings, not and never to angels

Response #32:
I think that it is obvious that angels were not designed to procreate among themselves. Their number has always been fixed since they were all created at once. But the fact that angels cannot produce new generations of angels does not really have anything to do with the creation of Nephilim which while clearly different from normal human beings in important respects are truly physical half-humans at least. We don't know how the angels were able to do what they did but it is not inconceivable since angels are far more knowledgeable and far more powerful than normal human beings. Our inability to understand these things is neither a mistake on God's part nor an excuse to reject what is clearly said: namely, that angels went in to human women and produced Nephilim as a result.


Question #33:
Ihedinobi3 and others, you've all learned something completely worthless from whoever taught you all that nonsense, especially, in the case of the fact and truth, that they are no celestial beings (i.e. angels) involved anywhere in Genesis 6:2-4

Response #33:
As I have said, I have done my best to follow the Bible here. I always do that because of what I anticipate before the Judgment Seat of Christ. As much as I would rather that you and I agreed on this, I would sooner agree with the Word of Truth and be rewarded by the Lord Jesus for doing so than agree with you and be shamed and rebuked by Him for failing in Faith.

So, if you feel persuaded that the Bible says something different, I respect your feeling about it and will not debate it with you. It is between you and the Lord. But if you mean to discuss it, I would encourage you to seek out and confirm biblical reasons for holding the view that you do as I have done and endeavor to keep doing with all things.


Question #34:
If there are daughters of men, have you ever asked the questions:
1/ Who are the equivalent sons of men, as there are sons of God?
2/ What's the difference between the daughters of men and the daughters of God?
3/ Where the nephilims already on earth or not before the sons of God started going into the daughters of men?


Response #34:
1. I'm not sure why you expect an equivalent "sons of men" but it does occur to me that the language in that passage was deliberately forcing a contrast between the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men". That is to say that the point was that it was "sons of God" that were in view rather than "sons of men" as might have been expected.

2. Again, I don't see why you expect a "daughters of God" here. The use of "daughters of men" coupled with the extra emphasis on increased population and human birth of these daughters appears to have been to make it unmistakable that the story was about human women rather than any other kind of female.

3. The connection of the Nephilim to the production of children from the union of the sons of God and the daughters of men seems to me to be unmistakable. It can hardly be explained why they were put together if the Nephilim were not these children themselves as you yourself went on to admit later in your post even if you still insisted that the sons of God were only male believers.


Question #35:
"Don't pay any attention to any of those senseless Jewish stories"
- Titus 1:14a

You are conflating multiple separate incidents here Ihedinobi3, as what happened in Genesis 4:2-6 is quite different to what happened with Sodom and Gomorrah's Genesis attempted rape. It is also different to where Peter and Jude were talking about the same myth being discussed and argued upon on this thread. It is not only Peter and Jude warning against Jewish myths about angels having sex with human beings, even Paul too, warned Titus in Titus 1:14a above earlier reproduced, not to believe in them

I am so sorry to be the one saying to you that you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick here. You completely got wrong what Peter and Jude were messaging in their chapters. Peter and Jude wrote their letters combating heresies and talking exactly against the same myth being discussed and argued upon on this thread.


Response #35:
There are all kinds of myths, some of which truly are addressed by the Bible. But there is nothing that I see to suggest that Paul was referring to the Genesis 6 story. Nor do I see any reason to believe that Peter and Jude were speaking of anything different. How would anyone know that? Is there some other incident in the Bible that we can point to which they explain besides the Genesis Flood?


Question #36:
What may I ask, is it that the bible actually says? Produce what it is the bible is appeared to have said and let's with great care, thoroughness and in all its entirety examine it together.


Response #36:
I already did in the comments that you referred to in your response to the OP. Genesis 6:1-2, 4; 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 1:6-7.


Question #37:
Simply put, the nephilims are the product of when the righteous men (i.e. sons of God) had sex with daughters of the unrighteous men (i.e. daughters of men). The rest of the gist is beyond the scope of this thread


Response #37:
If the Nephilim are the products of human parents albeit of differing attitudes to God, why were they important to mention in that chapter?


Question #38:
Have you ever read of a physical appearance of satan and/or a demon to anyone in the bible ever?


Response #38:
I have not. Nor have I read anywhere in the Bible that they cannot physically appear to anyone since they do not represent God. [Compilation edit: The language of Matthew 4 suggests that Satan may have appeared to the Lord Jesus to tempt Him.] Do you know of any such place or might you have interpreted a silence?


Question #39:
Now its you learning to stretch the truth here. The bible never says the number of angels are fixed. What bible says about angels, is that they are innumerable, as in meaning, they cant be counted.


Response #39:
[4]He counts the number of the stars; He gives names to all of them.
Psalms 147:4 NASB

[14]"You were the anointed cherub who covers, And I placed you there. You were on the holy mountain of God; You walked in the midst of the stones of fire.
Ezekiel 28:14 NASB

In the first passage, clearly there is a fixed number of the angels.

In the second, the stones of fire were based on the same principle as Exodus 28:9-12, 17-21 and Revelation 2:17. The stones of fire were individual memorials of each angel before God. They were finite in number and they were all there at the same time that Satan was still the covering cherub.

No stretch of truth at all.


Question #40:
You dont know with this emboldened comment, how so close to the truth you are


Response #40:
What is the truth you speak of?


Question #41:
Angels did nothing, angels did no such thing. This is what Peter, Jude and Paul were warning against, the belief in the ridiculous, belief in myths. This is not true, and so is slander. This is slandering angels.


Response #41:
I expect that you will explain this in your answers to my comments and questions above.


Question #42:
"... Bold and self-willed, these men are unafraid to slander angelic majesties."
- 2 Peter 2:10b

I am sorry Ihedinobi3, it is with a heavy heart that I posted 2 Peter 2:10b up there for you to see and it hurts me more than it will ever hurt you

Ihedinobi3, I've been here, sold it, done it and have the "angels have sexual feelings" souvenir t-shirt I bought. There are quite a few many so-called truths we were raised with and forced to believe, that are not truths at all, so, yeah, I am willing to discuss, up to certain points, everything. You will have to be prepared to go the distance, because they are a lot of rot, that as we go along, needs being cleaned out. Ask me any questions or clarification on any part of this subject matter, and God help me, as I truthfully respond

Believe me Ihedinobi3, I know with God's help, what I bring to the table, and trust me when I say, if need be, I am not afraid to eat alone


Response #42:
I asked you enough already and explained what my position is in the post you responded to and you still haven't answered. That Peter and Jude and Paul were referring to some unnamed myth is no answer. That the Nephilim are pure human children only raises another big question. That angels never did what I believe the Bible said that they did is still no clarification of the issue.

But I trust that you will clear things up now.

ANGELS AND GENESIS SIX cont'd

Question #43:
First thing on the list, that needs to be unlearned is thinking that the sons of God is an exclusive title reserved only for angels and further that the same sons of God in Genesis 6:2 that went into the daughters of man are not angels but are righteous men of God, in the same and similar league, just as will, Job and his sons were. Related bible verses about Job and Job's sons being called "son" and "sons of God" will be provided on request


Response #43:
I don't believe or teach that "sons of God" is an exclusive title for angels. The Lord Jesus Himself is titled the Son of God. Adam was called in Luke son of God. Believers are also later called sons of God by John. So, it is not at all my thinking that it is an exclusive title for the angels. So there is no unlearning necessary here if you meant that comment for me.

Further, my stated reason for saying that the sons of God in Genesis 6 are angels is obviously not because the title is in any way exclusive to them. It would be quite wrong of you to suggest that it is.

As for the sons of God being righteous men of God, I can only see you saying that that is the case with only the reason that "sons of God" has more than one meaning. But the fact that it does means that it is no more necessarily "righteous men of God" than it is necessarily "angels". You are only rejecting one possibility in favor of one you prefer for no stated reason yet.


Question #44:
Oh, to the untrained and unsuspecting eye, that is what would appear to be the case

Most importantly, I dont know why and how you cant see the disparity in the phrase "sons of God" and "daughters of man"
In Genesis 6:1, you see it stated that "daughters" were born to human beings when same human beings began to multiply. Fast forward a bit, there suddenly is a departure from using the former "daughters" phrase, switching to using a different "daughters of man" phrase that enhanced the previously used "daughters" phrase.

Now, if there were "sons of God", there equally will be "daughters of God", just as, if there were "daughters of man", there equally also will be "sons of man". Obviously, the bible is clearly separating "daughters of man" from daughters" and making different "daughters of man" from daughters"

Afterall, the bible, in John 1:12, says:
"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God,
(i.e. she, daughters of God, as well) even to them that believe on his name"

Aside John 1:12 above, now the question is, what is it about being "the sons/daughters of God"?
The major & key thing in the "the sons/daughters of God" expresssion, really, is about dependence
Dependence upon what? Dependence upon who? you'll ask
Well, whoever or whatever your dependence is upon, gives away, whether you're part of, or not part of "the sons/daughters of God"

As, any, whether angels or human beings, living in full dependence on God, are called "the sons/daughters of God"
Any, whether angel or human being, fully relying upon God, of own free will and so in glad submission, is called a "son/daughter of God"

Now, looking at Genesis 6:2, the bible made a statement of fact and reference to when sons of God saw the daughters of man that they were fair and they took them wives of all which they chose

Genesis 6:2, retold, in a simplified way, says, some sons of God, saw the daughters of God that they might be fair like the daughters of man are; but these sons of God, didnt take to, these daughters of God, as wives material, to chose from, rather these other sons of God, preferred the daughters of man, as wife material

When one, fast forwards to Genesis 6:8-9, moving on, away from Genesis 6:2, then a proper understanding of the situation in Genesis 6:2, unravels. Noah, as a son of God, had grace and with this grace/favour, he had the sense, to avoid "daughters of man" & stick to a "daughter of God" is what Genesis 6:8 is saying.

Genesis 6:9 corroboates Genesis 6:8, saying, Noah did the right thing (i.e. he was righteous) and that among the people of his time, he had sound, unblemished & without defect judgement (i.e. he was blameless). Also, that he didnt depart from walking habitually with God

Noah, was the only one, found in his generation, who was not keeping company with, not socialising with, getting into the pants of "daughters of man" As a son of God, he was the only one found not mixing with "unbelievers"


You do notice in the bible passage, that nephilims were already in the land, before the sons of God stating going into the daughters of man, hence increasing the numbers of Nephilim, dont you?

You also do realise Ihedinobi3, that even after the flood, the Nephilim gene did survive, dont you?


Response #45:
I think that it is a weird type of eye that would actually see things any different than that. This is the passage in question:

[1]Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them,
[2]that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.
Genesis 6:1-2 NASB

It is not possible to make that statement any clearer than it is. Men began to multiply and daughters were born to them and these daughters were found to be beautiful by "the sons of God".

As to a disparity between sons of God and daughters of men, in my previous post, I pointed out that this was an important thing to notice in the passage because of how weird it was that "sons of God" is used in a context where human beings were being talked about. The sons of God would need to be qualified in order for the passage to make sense if they were also human beings. Otherwise, its use only surprises the reader and confuses him.

It seems obvious to me that any distinctions of daughters of MEN (the word was "men" too, not "man" from daughters of God is really forced. The passage does not offer any real reason to infer such distinctions here. All it says is that men multiplied and had daughters born to them who were beautiful. There was no switching around of terms. Men had daughters. Those daughters were later referred to as "daughters of men". That is very natural language. They could hardly be called anything else. The only weird thing here is "sons of God". The term would ordinarily surprise a reader because we were talking about human beings until now. Why suddenly say "sons of God" when the passage had been speaking of human beings multiplying and having female children? Such a question would be legitimate. And that is why I said in the beginning that a mild debate about the term is not unreasonable. It is queer language to use there.

Regarding that, I said above that the term is clearly not exclusive to angels. But it does, in fact, apply to angels sometimes. Therefore, it is not reasonable to rule them out just because of the term itself. Perhaps the term refers to righteous men, or perhaps it refers to angels. Either is a possibility if the term is the only consideration. Thankfully, it isn't. If it was, it would be impossible to understand this part of the Bible.

As to what the term means, the definition you gave is quite obviously uncredited. Adam was also a son of God but he sinned. We believers today are sons of God but we all sin and the vast majority of us are lukewarm in the Faith. By your definition of full dependence on God, however, neither Adam nor we are sons of God since sin is necessarily a failure to depend fully on God. There is another definition that may be gleaned from the Bible. "Sons of God" would be "deputies" of God, that is, agents of God's Authority in His Creation. Clearly, Adam was one. Clearly, we are too by our position in THE Son of God Jesus Christ Who is God's Chosen Ruler over all Creation and we will become actualized in that position in the Resurrection. Angels too are God's Agents today. That was what they were created to be and they still function that way. Even the rebels among them necessarily answer to God for the domains that they usurp. This is seen in Satan's role in the assembly in Job 1, 2. Even though he did not show up as a friendly, he did have to tell God what he had been up to on earth which he usurped from Adam. So, when the Bible uses the term, it is not wrong to expect that it may be referring to even rebel angels.

As to "daughters of God", while the term is not theologically wrong since, at least, all female believers are in the same position as male ones, it is not warranted in this passage. That there are daughters of God as counterparts to sons of God and sons of men as counterparts to daughters of men is neither here nor there. It has no place in the passage.

Thus your "simple" and self-admitted retelling of that part of the Bible is neither warranted nor accurate. The distinctions on which it is based are foreign to the passage and the definition you worked with is foreign to the Bible itself.

Two words about the Nephilim and Noah whom you also talked about:

1. About Noah, this is what the Bible says:

[8]But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.
[9]These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.
Genesis 6:8-9 KJV

I see nothing in there about marrying a daughter of God as opposed to marrying a daughter of man. But I do see that his "generations", that is, his biological pedigree appears to matter here. In fact, this is connected to the issue of the Nephilim. Noah was a pure blood, a full human. He was not a Nephilim at all. Nor was his wife, nor were their children. They were the only humans left alive who still insisted on following God. In fact, they may have been the only fully human creatures still alive at the time [compilation edit: Methuselah died in the year of the Flood so there is some indication that there were other human beings alive at the time]. The craze to have children like the Nephilim as great as they were had led the vast majority to breed with them and fatally contaminate the human species with an evil bent of nature. The Nephilim were exactly like the rebel angels in character. They were unrepentantly evil but physically powerful, able to do things that were humanly impossible and very very resilient. These things were what occasioned the Flood. They weren't easy to kill and they could not be converted. See below.

[4]The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
[5]Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Genesis 6:4-5 NASB

2. About the Nephilim, yes, you are right that the Nephilim had been in the earth for some time but not that the marriage of the sons of God only added to them or that they survived the Flood. Regarding the last, Goliath and the descendants of Anak were no Nephilim. It was the fear of unbelieving Israelites that made them qualify them that way to justify their cowardice. They were only abnormally sized humans. The Nephilim were not giants. They were "men of renown" or "great men". That is, they did things that made them greatly admired among men. The Rephaim too were not Nephilim. They were also men of great stature and number, but still ordinary humans (Deuteronomy 2:20; 3:11). The Nephilim were normal-sized but exceptionally strong and very resilient physically but also they were abnormally intelligent (compare the passages about Antichrist who is himself prophesied to be Nephilim: Genesis 3:15). But let us see the passage again before we continue.

[4]The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6:4 NASB

To begin, this verse is actually addressing the timeline. The genealogy in the previous chapter ended with Noah and later in this chapter we see that the story picks up with Noah again. What Moses did here was explain that this situation pre-existed the current point at which the story was (at the beginning of the 120 years of grace before the Flood: see verse 3). The marriage [compilation edit: the Hebrew does not call it a marriage, so "cohabitation" is a better word here] of the sons of God to daughters of men occurred before this time and thus the Nephilim had already been around for a while by the time Noah was born. And they remained until the Flood. That was the gist.

That is, it is error to say that the Nephilim existed prior to those marriages or after the Flood since that is not what that verse says. What it does say is that the Nephilim were already existing from when the human women bore them until after this point in the story when God set about bringing on the Flood to destroy them and end their activities on the earth.


Question #46:
1When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them,
2the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.
3Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide ina man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
4The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
- Genesis 6:1-4

Please carefully watch Genesis 6:4 closely to notice that the Nephilim, who happened to be giants, were already on earth before the sons of God started mingling with the daughters of man. The Nephilim, were on earth before and continued to be after, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man


Response #46:
Please see above.


Question #47:
I am sorry Ihedinobi3, there is too much knowledge gap to patch or fill in here for you, so I am going to attempt to gauge the extent of what you know by asking a few questions, like:
1/ What do you know about the source(s) of Paul, Peter and Jude letters that got them concerned to write about myths and heresies?
2/ Do you know that Jude references and quotes from Peter when he writes?
3/ Do you know that Peter and Jude make references to or should I say quoted from non apocrypha and/or pseudepigrapha books, that rightfully are rejected to be in the bible?
4/ Do you know that what Peter and Jude quoted in that book is exactly what is being discussed and argued on this thread?
5/ How many apocrypha, non apocrypha and/or pseudepigrapha books have you so far read, that you are cocksure Paul wasnt referring to the Genesis 6 story and the heresies surrounding it?
6/ Can you give me a list and names of such books in #5 above that you've so far read, would you?


Response #47:
To begin with, I am quite confident that what I have said about everything here is what the Bible actually teaches. Your attribution of ignorance to me is your business. I know what I know.

1. Jude was the same as John concerned about Gnostic heresies. Peter also addressed them. Paul was not as concerned with them as far as I know [compilation edit: Paul was at least as concerned judging by the attention he gave to angelic matters in Ephesians and Colossians]. But if you mean something else by "sources", I don't know what you are asking.

2. Jude wrote under the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit same as Peter did.

3. I am confident that they made no such references. The Book of Enoch to which I think you refer is a recent hoax.

4. I said in both my response to the thread and to you that the identity of the sons of God as angels was confirmed by Jude and Peter. You insisted that they were speaking of myths.

5. Have you yourself read all the books in the world that you should be sure of anything at all?

6. If you have, produce the list of all the books in the world as well.


Question #48:
With this forthcoming comment, you have confirmed you have misunderstood what is going on with Genesis 6:1-2 and the heresy about it, that Peter had to comment on. Also Jude is parroting Peter and continuing on from it. Did you notice what Jude said at Jude 1:8? After Jude 1:6-7? Do you see his writing similarities with Peter? Or you never took any notice of his similarities with Peter?


Response #48:
Please see above.


Question #49:
Brawn and brains. Nephilim represents brawn, sons of God represent brains. The Nephilim's physical strength in contrast to intelligence was important to mention and as them being well known for some bad quality or deed. Case in point Goliath etcetera.


Response #49:
Please see above.


Question #50:
I haven't yet read anywhere in the bible of a celestial popping out and physically appearing looking like a human being on its own accord and without been sent on an errand by God or not in an official capacity. Celestial beings are law abiding, bad celestial know their limits


Response #50:
So you interpreted a silence. That is always bad theology.

ANGELS AND GENESIS SIX cont'd


Question #51:
"But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,"
- Hebrews 12:22

"And I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, and of the living creatures, and of the elders;
and their number was myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands,"
- Revelation 5:11

I'll let you have it though the bible says, angels are myriads, countless or innumerable just as seen above


Response #51:
The Greek word translated "myriad" is an actual number.


Question #52:
The fact that you spoke off, that angels cannot produce new generations of angels and that the creation of Nephilim which while clearly different from normal human beings in important respects are truly physical half-humans at least is the truth. Or are you now going to withdraw, retract and distance yourself from the statement because I interjected a remark that it is the truth?


Response #52:
You said that I was close to the truth, not that I had spoken the truth.


Question #53:
Read both Peter and Jude, you will see, they both were talking about those slandering celestial beings. Peter, even using a hypothetical "if" in his letter, should have made you realise this


Response #53:
I see now what you meant. Well, I would only be slandering angels if I was accusing them of doing something that the Bible did not say that they did. So far, I see no reason to believe that I am. So I don't believe either that I am slandering them.


Question #54:
Why you are hellbent on believing what the bible never said or never intended to say, is anyone's guess. I have said just about enough for you to give yourself permission to have a reset and rethink. Again, I offer, ask me any questions or clarification on any part of this subject matter, and God help me, as I truthfully respond


Response #54:
As I said before, your feelings about this are of no consequence to me. I seek to follow the Bible. That means that I do my best to read it and interpret it as it is without adding a thing or taking a thing away from it. That is what I strive to do. That you feel strongly that I am misrepresenting the Bible does not mean that I am. I am certain that you are but it is something that I would leave you to figure out as you strive to follow God since I am equally certain that you will not listen to me.


Question #55:
I wish I was as sanguine as you are because you make it sound, like it is that easy to put right 16 years of PDP misrule within less than 4 years of APC governance. You seem to have forgotten, I said: "there are a lot of rot, that as we go along, needs being cleaned out."


Response #55:
Anyone who wishes to know the Truth will yield to it when they hear it. It all depends on how much they want it. Some want it bad enough to take it faster than others. As for me, I keep pushing forward as the Lord helps me to learn what He teaches me and apply it to my life and help others as He strengthens me to. It is a duty that I owe to Him, my friend, not to you.


Question #56:
Please, without erroneouly giving me Genesis 6:2, 6:4, Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7 and Luke 20:36, state your reason(s) for saying that the sons of God in Genesis 6 are angels


Response #56:
If you believe that those are the wrong passages for proving that, then I have nothing more to add.


Question #57:
I was just being civil and unnecesarily generous because actually there is nowhere angels are in a clear and detailed manner, leaving no room for confusion or doubt called sons of God. If you know of any verse that in a clear and detailed manner, leaving no room for confusion or doubt, calls angels sons of God, please as soon as possible, share this with me

Without erroneouly giving me Genesis 6:2, 6:4, Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7 and Luke 20:36, please show me where in the bible, angels are called the "sons of God"? None. Nowhere.


Response #57:
I neither asked for nor care for your generosity, _______. Civility was all I asked for. As for the passages, you obviously know them already. You only appear to have a completely different take on them than one would warrant.



Question #58:
It is uplifting and heart-warming to see that you underlined men and daughters to show the contrast in the storyline's change in tone and it switching to using sons of God and daughters of men instead of the previous ordinary men and daughters


Response #58:
Suffice to say that I have no clue what you mean here.


Question #59:
Read further on, to see where I've dealt with this remark

It doesnt surprises the reader and confuses the reader, if the reader is conversant with the theme of the story and reading with the eyes peeled
If I havent already asked you, please can I ask you then, what is the theme of Genesis chapter 6 Ihedinobi3?


Response #59:
I have to say that while I was never particularly enthusiastic about this conversation, I am rapidly losing all interest in it. You keep suggesting that you possess some great exclusive knowledge here that you wish to be begged for. I already told you that I know what I know and have already willingly shared it elsewhere and in this conversation with you too. If you have something that you wish to say, feel free to say it. If you have no wish to say it, please let me be. You were the one who seemed to want to talk. I did not seek you out here.


Question #60:
Please ignore wherever I've typed "daughters of man" instead of typing "daughters of men" I actually meant in the first place intended typing "daughters of men"


Response #60:
Okay.


Question #61:
A smart man only believes half of what he reads, a wise man know which half to believe, so I am pleased that you are up for discussing this

Now, when you say: "The passage does not offer any real reason to infer such distinctions here.", can I ask you, what is the theme of Genesis chapter 6 Ihedinobi3?
If you answer that question correctly enough, it becomes easier to see the build up, the switching terms making distinctions between men generally and a certain set or different types of men, referred to as "the sons of God". See the switching terms making distinctions between the general women and a different or certain set of the womenfolk, referred to as "daughters of men" It will be inconsistent of the bible not to stick with it's original style but it changed the style because it is making distinctions has the theme of the narrative unfolds


Dont be so quick to be thankful, remember, I asked you above, that without erroneouly giving me Genesis 6:2, 6:4, Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7 and Luke 20:36, please show me where in the bible, angels, in a clear and detailed manner, leaving no room for confusion or doubt, are called the "sons of God" Have you been able to oblige me?

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:"
- John 1:12

I gave you John 1:12, as a bible guide about what sons of God is before mentioning dependence, now tell me if dependence is uncredited in being called a son of God

I already said, I was just being civil and unnecesarily generous when playing along and permitting you ascribing "sons of God" to angels. I am sorry, but that it the only means, I could think of to try to understand you, to know where and what position you are coming from

My question if yet not answered, still stands Ihedinobi3. So again and without erroneouly giving me Genesis 6:2, 6:4, Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7 and Luke 20:36, please show me where in the bible, angels, in a clear and detailed manner, leaving no room for confusion or doubt, are called the "sons of God"?


Response #61:
Unless you actually wish to say something, as I said above, I am not interested in answering any more questions. This conversation is happening because of your choice to mention me in your comment on the thread. I am not your student and do not consider your position here to be biblically correct. So, if you actually want to demonstrate its correctness, by all means, do so. If you do not, then let me move on to other conversations.


Question #62:
You are absolutely right, it has no place in the passage. In fact, the "daughters of God" phrase is not warranted in the narrative because it is not party to the theme of discussion in Genesis Chapter 6 Ihedinob3. The existing and unfolding problem, got exacerbated when the "sons of God" went into "daughters of men" The bible is always careful and deliberate with its choice of words and wordings, hence the conscious switch of tone from using the word "daughters" to moving on to the more distinctive "daughters of men" The "daughters of men" are complicit, even if by accident or as willing partners, they are and so the reason why the "daughters of men" are mentioned and the "daughters of God" are not


Response #62:
You're exactly right that what the Bible says is very deliberately said. That is why I reject speculations about what it does not say. I cannot credit your "daughters of God" teaching because I see nothing in the passage itself - or, in fact, anywhere in the Bible - to suggest that it is right.


Question #63:
The most perplexing and head scratching situations usually have simple retelling answers. If you can't explain it simply, it means you don't understand it well enough then.


Response #63:
I did not say that simplicity was a problem. I said that your retelling was not biblically accurate. In fact, it was false.


Question #64:
You say you see nothing in there about marrying a daughter of God as opposed to marrying a daughter of men, but then go on to say, but you do see that it was his "generations", that is, his biological pedigree that appears to matter here. I hope you see how you've contradicted yourself there.


Response #64:
There was no contradiction since his biological pedigree had to do with his parentage, not with his marriage. That is what pedigree means.

Also note that I edited that part of my post for greater accuracy.


Question #65:
Anway, we know why in Genesis 6, God was planning to wipe the whole earth of human beings, however, God finds something in Noah, that is exemplanary. It said, Noah is "perfect in his generations", and that is exactly how you too put it, when you said "he was not a Nephilim at all. Nor was his wife, nor were their children" and that him his wife and children were the only full human beings left about on earth


Response #65:
First, I apologize for the earlier mistakes but I edited that part of my post before you responded. I believe that the Bible does not teach that they were the only full humans left but the human race was truly getting wiped out and replaced by the Nephilim strain.

Still, I am at a loss what you are saying here. Are you then admitting that the Nephilim were not fully human? Wasn't that what you were arguing against? Or is it your position that a marriage of righteous men to unrighteous women would produce half-humans?


Question #66:
The evidence is there, black and white in the bible, look at Genesis 6:4a, saying "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward,". They already existed but incresingly became more with the interest of the "sons of God" bar Noah, going into "daughters of men"


Response #66:
I don't think I have a better answer to this than what I said before.


Question #67:
"We even saw the Nephilim there—the descendants of Anak that come from the Nephilim!
We seemed like grasshoppers in our own sight, and we must have seemed the same to them!"
- Numbers 13:33

Goliath, the giant killed by David, wasnt the only descendant of the Nephilim. Giants, when man fell, originally came about from the Nephilim. Giants population increased and got aggravated to becoming a menace to society when the sons of God suddenly found the daughters of men's beauty powerfully and mysteriously attractive to.


Response #67:
The KJV translated wrong in Genesis 6:4 [compilation edit: the translation was not wrong, only misleading for contemporary times]. The Nephilim were not giants.


Question #68:
This entire remark is laughable and if I should comment on it, _____ and others will say I am doing a metatron again.


Response #68:
Okay.


Question #69:
Ihedinobi3, did you just type that the Nephilim were not giants? kkins25, come see, see me, see confusion and wahala ooo

Ihedinobi3, the word Nephilim in Hebrew means giants. If you want me to elaborate, and go into the etymology details and literal meaning of Nephilim, I will, but only if you ask me to, so suffice to say, the Nephilim were giants, human beings initially with incredible stature and strength before brains met brawn. The beauty of the "daughters of men" was the catalyst.


Response #69:
I am not asking you a thing, _____. I did not come to you for a conversation. You, on the other hand, thought to scold me for holding a point of view that you disagree with and I simply explained to you that I was duty-bound to be true to the Bible even if you didn't agree with me. If you feel the need to correct me, then do so. Or else leave well enough alone.

As for the Nephilim, as I said, the KJV translated wrong [compilation edit: the translation was not wrong, just misleading for contemporary times]. They were not giants. And even if they were, why would a marriage of righteous men to unrighteous women produce giants? And why would it be considered in any way related to the disparate spiritual loyalties of the spouses? Or, as it seems to me that you might be suggesting, why would there be a connection between a race of giants and human sons of God in the latter's marrying unrighteous women?


Question #70:
"18After this, there was another battle against the Philistines at Gob. As they fought, Sibbecai from Hushah killed Saph, another descendant of the giants.
19During another battle at Gob, Elhanan son of Jairf from Bethlehem killed the brother of Goliath of Gath. The handle of his spear was as thick as a weaver’s beam!
20In another battle with the Philistines at Gath, they encountered a huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in all, who was also a descendant of the giants.
21But when he defied and taunted Israel, he was killed by Jonathan, the son of David’s brother Shimea
22These four Philistines were descendants of the giants of Gath, but David and his warriors killed them"
- 2 Samuel 21:18-22

Ihedinobi3, I repeat, brawn and brains. Nephilim represents brawn, sons of God represent brains. The Nephilim were able to be "men of renown" or "great men" and did things that made them greatly admired among men, not just only because of their stature and physical strength but importantly because they became endowed with intelligence from the association of the "sons of God" going into the "daughters of men" Beauty, Brawn and Brains. Bullies will always be a bully, no matter how much brains they have, that is why the giants in the bible were well known for some bad quality or deed. Case in point Goliath etcetera.


Response #70:
The word Nephilim is not in that passage you posted. If you reread my post, you will see that in my edit, I explained how the Nephilim were not Rephaim and certainly not the same as any giants that followed.


Question #71:
I am sure of the bible verse you are referring the Antichrist to being prophesied to be Nephilim but would like you to post here your reference that the Antichrist himself is prophesied to be Nephilim please.


Response #71:
It was in my edit. The post has the reference.


Question #72:
Being a bully that Nephilims are, is it surprising, that the physical strength and intelligience qualities be found in the Antichrist?


Response #72:
I don't see anything in the Bible to suggest that they were bullies. They may have been or they may not have been. But the whole idea of "bullying" is extrabiblical.


Question #73:
See my comment below

To an ill-informed and unprejudiced mind, the words, as they stand in Genesis 6:4, states, as clear as day, that the Nephilim, who were on the earth in those days, as existing, before the sons of God began to go into the daughters of men. It didnt even say marry or know them, as Adam and others knew their wives, but says: "the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men" Bluntly put, the "sons of God" fairked the "daughters of men" literally.


Response #73:
You have suggested that you know the Hebrew here. What does the Hebrew original of that verse say?


Question #74:
Where, what is there above for me to see?
Are you saying the Nephilim werent already existing before the sons of God started fairking the daughters of men?
Is that your position and how you understand Genesis 6:4?


Response #74:
I made one single post but it was too long so I had to break it at that point. That was why I said "see above". My answer was in the preceding post.

As I said in that post, yes, that is how I understand Genesis 6. The Nephilim were the product of the union of the angels and the human women.

solite3:
what does christianity offers that other religion can not give?