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Bible Questions and Spiritual Discussion
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Ray
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07/01/2011 13:34 |
Nothing sinister here, TR, unless it is sinister to want to bring glory to Jesus. As I said weeks ago, this is all very good and we can all learn from digging into the religions people practice. It is a good way to make our faith in Jesus stronger.
I love the reference here, "If a man love me, he will keep my words." So, that's what you do, keep all his words? How does this differ from Israel keeping the law of Moses?
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Ray
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07/01/2011 16:02 |
sin·is·ter –adjective"threatening or portending evil
The irony is thick, but that's not why I bring it up. I want to tell you where I'm coming from. You jumped in a few peoples faces here. I don't mind that, but there are at least three problems, maybe more.
1. Your attitude is not very loving.
2. You ignore people when they ask you questions.
3. Your teachings are "new age" sounding and you are not very forthcoming with the origins.
It's our job to test the spirit of things, 1 John 4:1. If that makes you feel like others are "evil," then explore with others. Start with Ted's questions. I want to explore Jesus. He is my all in all. I don't think you have a personal relationship with Him and I want that for you more than I can express. It's not my job to judge whether you do or do not. It is my job to try to understand and explore with others.
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Ray
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07/02/2011 14:33 |
Craig from Illinois posted in the love wins saga about this groups work:
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5093 I can relate to this view of evil:
The first step in answering the problem of evil is this: We've got to get clear on what this thing "evil" actually is. It does seem to follow that if God created all things, and evil is a thing, then God created evil. This is a valid syllogism. If the premises are true, then the conclusion would be true as well.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that the second premise is not true. Evil is not a thing. The person who probably explained it best was St. Augustine, and then Thomas Aquinas picked up on his solution. Others since them have argued that evil has no ontological status in itself.
The word ontology deals with the nature of existence. When I say that evil has no ontological status, I mean that evil, as a thing in itself, does not exist.
Let me give you an illustration to make this more clear. We talk about things being cold or warm. But coldness is not a thing that exists in itself; it has no ontological status. Coldness is the absence of heat. When we remove heat energy from a system, we say it gets colder.
"Cold" isn't a thing. It's a way of describing the reduction of molecular activity resulting in the sensation of heat. So the more heat we pull out of a system, the colder it gets. Cold itself isn't being "created." Cold is a description of a circumstance in which heat is missing. Heat is energy which can be measured. When you remove heat, the temperature goes down. We call that condition "cold," but there is no cold "stuff" that causes that condition.
Here's another way of looking at it. Did you ever eat a donut hole? I don't mean those little round sugar-coated lumps you buy at the donut shop. I mean the hole itself. Donut holes are actually what's left when the middle is cut out of a donut. There's a space called a hole, a "nothing," the condition that exists when something is taken away. Same thing with a shadow. Shadows don't exist as things in themselves; they're just the absence of light.
Evil is like that. Evil isn't like some black, gooey stuff floating around the universe that gloms onto people and causes them to do awful things. Evil is the absence of good, a privation of good, not a thing in itself.
When God created the universe, he created everything good. He made a universe that was perfectly good. Everything was as it should be. After God was completely done with creating everything, something happened that reduced the good in the world. That loss of good is called evil.
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TRWord
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07/02/2011 16:15 |
Thomas Merton in his book “The Ascent to Truth” said:
“The faithlessness that is so prevalent in a country like America is not formal unbelief but crass ignorance. It is the confusion of well-meaning people who are lost in a fog, who do not know their left hand from their right. The agnosticism and atheism which benight the spirits of men in the world spring less from a formal, deliberate and studied rejection of revealed truth than from an inability to think. It is because men are not able to think for themselves that they are so often incapable either of belief or of unbelief.”
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I continue to be amazed that many persons who profess to be Christians are unconscious of, if not totally rebellious to the teaching of Jesus Christ.
Ray wrote:
“I love the reference here, "If a man love me, he will keep my words." So, that's what you do, keep all his words? How does this differ from Israel keeping the law of Moses?”
Ray disregards the word of the Lord even though later he says he wants to bring glory to Jesus, and he sees no difference or do not know the difference between the law of Moses and the sayings of Jesus Christ.
How could this be?
Ray believes that “ultimately” Jesus taught us nothing.
Many Christians have been convinced that they must surrender their God given ability to reason because God demands it.
This is absolutely false.
Is. 1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
Ray wrote:
“It is not our knowledge that will bring us home. It is the mighty Three. They are the only way it will happen. Apart from Him we can do nothing, higher knowledge or not. All we have to do is ask, humbly.”
Having surrendered their ability to reason many Christians are unable to distinguish between worldly knowledge and the knowledge of God resulting in the total misunderstanding of verses like the one below.
1 Cor. 1:19 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.
Recently theoretical physicist and cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking questioned the existence of heaven. Now this a case where Professor Hawking’s knowledge of physics has misled him unto unbelief. This is the wisdom of the wise that Paul was speaking about, knowledge that elevates man’s ego above God.
Our relationship with our Father does not require that we moth ball our God given intelligence. It requires that we trust His word. But doctrine is more powerful that the scripture itself and consequently the word of God is hidden from the indoctrinated.
This explains why many who profess to be Christians totally reject what He said.
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Calico
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07/02/2011 16:42 |
Hi Ray, and all,
Ray, please see my posts on the "An Act Of God?" thread (http://www.dailyaudiobible.com/Forums/Messages.aspx?ThreadID=1000028339&page=2), specifically my posts of 05/02/2011 12:32 and 05/02/2011 13:56. Those previously written posts match up well with the STR article.
Praying with you,
Tom
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Ray
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07/02/2011 17:38 |
Will do, Tom. Our new exchange student is coming in from China in an hour or so, so we are trying to get ready. I get so excited to meet new people and get to learn things from afar. I just wish I got to go to China in return.
Chris, we are having communication problems. Forgive me if I have written things that are offensive. I was trying to explore your religion and probably said something out of the bounds of courtesy. I get so excited when I think Jesus is going to do something grand and then I get in the way. I'll try again and see if I can do better. Until then,
Jude 1:2 Mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance.
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Ray
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07/02/2011 21:16 |
Thank you, Lord! Our new student's name is Rae. Our last one was named Khatijatusshalihah which was a challenge to say thee times real fast.
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Ray
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07/02/2011 21:42 |
Tom, thanks for pointing back to the "Act of God" thread. You are so helpful. I love the Tozer, "Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is."
Expose us, Lord.
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Ray
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07/03/2011 07:12 |
RZIM on the New Age and Christian mystics:
While New Age seekers may not share a cohesive focus or an organizational center, there are certainly consistent and underlying tenets of thought among them. The movement is syncretistic, in that it incorporates any number of spiritual and religious ideologies at one time, but it is consistently monistic and pantheistic. New Age seekers are informed by the belief that all of reality is essentially one. Thus, everything is divine, including themselves; for if all is one, and there are no distinctions, then all is God. Or, in the words of Shirley Maclaine, "I am God, because all energy is plugged in to the same source.... We are individualized reflections of the God source. God is us and we are God."(1)
Seven hundred years earlier, medieval Christian mystic Julian of Norwich spoke in what some may consider a similar tone: "[O]ur substance is our Father, God almighty... [O]ur substance is whole in each person of the Trinity, who is one God."(1) Early Christian mystics are known for their fervent seeking and spiritual awareness of the oneness of life. Thus, there are certainly similar melodies to be found within the songs of Christian mysticism and the growing chorus of New Age spirituality. But so there are marked differences among them.
Within its historical context, mysticism, like many other Christian movements, was an expression of faith in response to faithless times. In this regard, New Age seekers are not entirely different. Some New Age seeking is, I think, a legitimate reaction to the comfortable and shallow religious life we find within our society. But as New Age seekers long for the depth and freedom to believe in everything, the result is contrary to what they seek. Their theology and spirituality are entirely segregated. The quest for illumination is a quest that can begin and end anywhere; thus, they find neither depth, nor freedom. On the contrary, Julian of Norwich and other early Christian mystics sought an authentic experience of faith as a result of an already dynamic understanding of that faith. Their theology in and of itself is what led them to spirituality.
For the Christian today, illumination still begins with Light itself, God unobscured, though incomprehensible, revealed through the glory of the Son. Starting with light and standing upon truth, the Christian begins his journey as a seeker knowing there is one who hears his prayers. There is a source for all illumination, and He is light of the world.
New Age seekers would perhaps be helped to know there is a great tradition of seeking within Christianity, a tradition that began with the recognition that we could not fix what is wrong, and a tradition that continues because there is one who can.
http://www.rzim.org/resources/read/asliceofinfinity/todaysslice.aspx?aid=9744
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John T
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07/03/2011 12:30 |
This post is very confusing.
TR you said "You believe that we are separated from God because of our iniquities or because of our sin." in argument to Jonathan. You are arguing against this when this is exactly what the Bible teaches us - our sins have separated us from God. The wages of sin are death. This is the reason Christ came! If you deny that we were separated then where is the need for a savior? What is the gospel then? This is a very key point you are denying.
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