Roymond

The East have an easier time with this because they emphasize the Oneness and then speak of the Threeness, whereas the West has generally started with the Threeness and proceeded to the Oneness. They also point out what I heard a talk about recently, that God in the Old Testament is already "multiple", for example when the Lord appeared to Abraham: there God was on the Earth in a specific place and talking with a specific human being, and yet God did not leave Heaven! Ancient rabbis (I don't know about more modern ones) considered Wisdom to be divine, in fact the instrument of Creation, and yet Wisdom is not the Father; they are distinct. BTW, the word "Part" is dangerous ground; God does not have parts: that's the great mystery of the Trinity, that when we look at the Father we see all of God, but when we look at the Son we see all of God, yet when we look at the Spirit we also see all of God. A nice analogy is division and multiplication: begin with 1, and divide it by itself -- the answer is 1, which is three 1s. Then take those three and multiply them together, and you still have 1. But then someone will say, "But if you add them...." Yet this isn't difficult: we know that in various matters sometimes multiplying is the proper thing, and sometimes adding is the proper thing --what mathematicians call "operations". So the proper operation for "God" is multiplication, so (God) x (God) x (God) = God x (1 x 1 x 1) = 1 God, while the suitable operation for "Persons" is addition, so that Person + Person + Person = Person x (1 + 1 + 1) = 3 Persons. So the unity of God is found in taking the cube root of 1 and seeing that 1 x 1 x 1 = 1. I don't recall ever sharing that with a Muslim, but it couldn't hurt because it shows that we already understand how something could be one yet three.

I encountered a tattoo artist who actually told first-timers to try a "paint on" tat that's an ink that only goes into the upper epidermis and so doesn't last more than a week to ten days as we shed skin cells, before they went with the real thing. He told of people who'd jumped into getting a tattoo due to peer pressure or being inebriated and who later wished they hadn't done it, so he told potential customers to be sure.

But that's a very general statement: the desires of Satan are anything that turns us away from God. He said, "I will be like God!", but when he faced the angel whose name means "Who is like God?" -- almost a taunt -- he is cast down. Since that made it plain that he's never going to be like God, then his sole purpose now is to keep anyone else from being like God, preferably in even the slightest way, but he'll settle for making our lives miss the mark. Satan has the "power of death", but that's really the only power left to him. We fear death even if we don't know who it is holding that power, because we fear the unknown (ironically, it is fear of the unknown that keeps many from embracing the Savior). Disobedience is Satan's gig, along with lying (which is really a special form of disobedience). The "sons of disobedience" are all those born into Satan's kingdom, the kingdom of death, who haven't joined the heavenly invasion force that is the church. All Satan can do is to try to make us like him -- disobedient. He can't command us (except perhaps in cases of demon possession, which shouldn't be possible for Christians since there is no room for a malevolent spirit when the Holy Spirit has moved in), he can only entice and try to manipulate. Interestingly what Satan does is play on our innate understanding that God wants good things for us and, as he did in the Garden, persuade us to take shortcuts -- though of course the shortcuts never work! The Deceiver doesn't even have the power to motivate us, he has to use the motivation that God built in and twist it.

"Behold: the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world!" That's the standard translation, but it misses something. The Greek for "Who takes away the sin" (ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν) uses the present tense, so this should really read "Who is [right now, already] taking away the sin". Think about that: Jesus, before He's even picked any disciples, is described by John as the One Who is right then already taking away the sin "of the world"! Jesus has done no "mighty works", and may not have even gone into the desert to face down the Deceiver yet, but He is already taking away the sin of the world. We can even think of it as not just an adjective, but a declaration of the very identity of Jesus, i.e. that this doesn't just pertain to that moment -- we know it doesn't because the Cross is still ahead -- but to Who He is in His very nature, that wherever and whenever He may be encountered, from the moment of His conception and until the Parousia, the second coming, is always in the process of taking away the sin of the world. So right at the moment when John said that, was anyone therefore made to be without sin? No: this is something Jesus is doing all the time. The world has sin, the Lamb is taking it away, but He has to keep taking it away because the world continues to have sin. Thus this taking away the sin of the world does not make anyone without sin. Paul may have been thinking along those lines when he talked about our flesh which is by nature sinful, about the "old man" who cannot be made to walk in God's ways; no, the old man has to die. And John tells us that if we walk in the light, then the blood of Jesus is continually cleansing us from "all sin" -- and he adds that if we say that we are not having sin we are causing ourselves to wander. That's usually translated "deceive ourselves", but the root meaning is "wander" -- it's the word we get "planet" from, a label given because the planets wander in the night sky -- and the present tense is again important: if at any moment we say we are without sin, we cause ourselves to wander... and wandering is used throughout scripture to refer to moving away from God, i.e. sinning. The problem is that in the modern world we have downplayed sin, taking it as deliberate violation of God's rules. But the scriptures have a different definition: sin is anything that does not conform to the image of the Son of God, and is also described as being anything that is not done from faith. Martin Luther understood this painfully clearly, recognizing every little failure to completely love God and act that way plus every little failure to love our neighbor -- who according to the parable is anyone we meet who is in need! -- is sin. As a result when he went to confess weekly, his confessor nearly despaired because Luther would spend hours confessing! And as a later evangelical catholic theologian would note, since Luther was not omniscient even of himself, the sins he confessed were certainly only a fraction of the total. Paul addresses this from another angle when he writes that just because he isn't conscious of anything against himself that doesn't mean he's guilt free! That pretty much tells us that even at the moment when we can't see any sin in ourselves there's still sin. Ah, the Catholic approach. But the Catholics acknowledge that we can only repent of the sins we know, which is never all of them. I heard a Foursquare pastor once say that as we live in this dark world God gives us a miner's-style headlamp, but one of limited range, because if He gave us one that showed us everything wrong with us -- all our sins -- we would die from the horror of it, thus making the same point the Catholics do but with vivid imagery. Here's a way of looking at it that comes from at least three centuries ago: A man clears brush from a field in order to plant crops, but he finds stones sticking up all over. So he collects them and stacks them to the side of the field. Satisfied, he goes to plow it, and keeps running into more stones. Every one he finds he takes to the edge of the field and tosses it out. His crop grows, he harvests it, then winter comes and the field freezes. When spring arrives, he goes to prepare the field again, and to his annoyance there are stones that have popped up due to frozen ground pushing them to the surface. So he removes the stones, and begins plowing... and runs into more stones, which he dutifully takes to the side of the field and stacks them out of the way. Every year this repeats until he is totally fed up and decides to get rid of the rocks completely, so he hires a rig to drag away soil and rocks together. He's about halfway done when the blade that has been clearing material steadily catches on something hard, so he stops and grabs a shovel: he hits bedrock, and clears an area only to find that his whole field sits on top of rock that is slowly cracking and splitting and effectively spawning rocks into that field. The point is that sin in us goes deeper than we imagine. We can remove sins as we encounter them, but our old man is like how James describes the tongue: who can tame it? One of the holiest men I've ever known said every time in his life he thought he'd made a big change it wasn't long until he came up against something else in himself that needed an even bigger change. He eventually realized that worrying about it wasn't helpful because that just focused him on himself. So he handed over changing himself to the Spirit and aimed at rejoicing in Jesus and sharing that joy with others. The point of running the race is that it doesn't matter how far from the finish line we end at because Jesus crossed that line for us. And as one of the church Fathers put it, we should rejoice when we find another sin in ourselves because every sin no matter how great is just a signpost pointing to an even greater Savior -- and as a later theologian commented, when we rejoice in our great Savior the Tempter is driven to frustration. Most of the church for most of history has believed this! But there's a scene in an old movie that pertains to it: the movie is Meatballs and the scene is where Bill Murray has the whole gang chanting "It just doesn't matter!" Yes, we can't escape from sinning -- but it just doesn't matter! What matters is that we have a Savior who has taken care of that, so when we catch ourselves in some sin it just doesn't matter! What matters is keeping our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer of the Way we follow, who will get us to the end of the race even if we die before finishing it.

I considered this at one point: τε†έλεσται [Once again I find myself missing the word processor I had on my old Leading Edge computer: it could "double bold" -- bold something, then hold <shift> + bold and it would make it even more bold. The † symbol is supposed to be very bolded compared to the rest of the word.] For those who don't read Greek, that's τετέλεσται (te-TEH-les-tie), the one-word sentence Jesus proclaims from the Cross that means "It is (totally and completely now and in eternity) finished!" Note that there are three taus -- τ -- in the word, so it displays the Crucifixion: a center τ (cross) for Jesus, one closer to the center that stands for the thief who repented, and one far from the center for the thief who only cursed Jesus.

No, because we are still stuck with sinful flesh, as Paul says, and we cannot be without sin, as John wrote. Yes, what were called "hedges": barriers to keep them from even getting close to breaking the actual laws. But that was totally a project of the flesh and as we see in the Gospels it just made them proud. Everyone knows that they're broken, bent, not what they're supposed to be! That's one of the reasons the church grew in the beginning: Romans had all those gods plus mystery religions and more but they knew they were "losers", and when Paul and others came saying there was a Deliverer, a Savior, they didn't have to hear any of the Law, they already knew this law in their hearts: that they were broken, distant from God, in need. The hardest part for a Gentile in the early centuries was handling the idea that God cared about them at all: "God loved the world" was a massive and radical shift from every idea of deity they had!

The clergy/laity divide is man-made, but that doesn't mean that the status of clergy is man-made: the picture in scripture is that everyone is the laity, which just means the people of God, and the clergy are drawn from the people without leaving them. Paul even speaks of ordination, which involved both setting someone apart for ministry and passing on authority to do that ministry. The problem is that over the centuries what began as a ministry with many parts: a roll of those supported by the church in a major Roman city in the fifth century lists over a half-dozen types of ministries that were all clergy [notably including "exorcist"], but by the time two more centuries has passed the list was down to three: liturgist/celebrant, who led the people in the liturgy; preacher/teacher; and 'visitor', someone who visited the sick and feeble (what we might call "shut-ins") and others in distress and did what we would call pastoral counseling -- and by the end of the ninth century it was just deacons, priests, and bishops. If we take that one list and add to to the offices/ministries in the church that Paul lists, it's easy to picture a congregation back in the fifth century with half the men and possibly as many women being "clergy". The "boiled down" position of priest came to be called "the Office of Christ in the Church", a designation that should terrify any would-be pastor since who can do all the ministries that Christ did and do even a quarter of them well?! We need to start "unpacking" that Office the way the one congregation I wrote about did, stripping away everything from the pastor/priest except the ministry of Word and Sacrament.... and then begin dividing that, since we know from both the scriptures and church history that there wasn't just one pastor or priest per church, there were several. There's no reason that elders who are willing can't be ordained for specific parts of the ministry in their location -- especially if there are good speakers with a good grasp of the essentials (starting with the Nicene Creed), and churning out a new sermon every week can really wear a pastor down (it's a significant contributor to burn-out).

The Law hadn't been given, so why should Moses have had to follow it? I don't recall Moses ever saying anything about death being taken away. I already dealt with this: according to Paul sin reigned once the Law was in place. Death got "demoted".

The thing is, tattoos aren't mentioned in Acts 15 where the Holy Spirit reduces the entire Mosaic Law down to four items: That leaves the New Testament admonitions about adorning one's self.

Which has no bearing on the fact that there are people who ended up becoming Christians because their study of evolution led them to conclude there is a Designer. What it does say is that Augustine was right, and Christians shouldn't be making statements about science based on the scriptures because it will make Christians look foolish.

On the basis of the Hebrew text, we don't really know how old the universe or the Earth are, though according to ancient scholars the first Genesis Creation account tells us that the universe is unimaginably ancient and the Earth is uncountably ancient. What I'm arguing against is the long-discredited Gap Theory that goes against the Hebrew in both grammar and word meaning. From the material evidence God has left for us, the Earth is at the very least hundreds of millions of years old just judging by physical geology, and the universe is several times as old as measured in different ways. How old are humans? You mean how long have humans been around? I don't know, except that it's a lot longer than six thousand years; we know of human-built structures that are at least twelve thousand years old -- just as an example, people were living at Jericho about 9,000 B.C. and there are towers in the Middle East that date back a thousand years before that.

But Jesus didn't say that I don't see any point here -- are you saying Moses didn't ever die because he got to be near the bush?

It doesn't say they do what Satan wants, unless you want to define "what Satan wants" broadly as "disobedience". In bondage to sin, not to Satan -- again, unless you define bondage to Satan broadly as "not following God".

Right. The Law on the face of it only covers outward activities; It founders on the two "Great Commandments": we cannot love the Lord with all our hearts and strength and we cannot love our neighbors as ourselves. Those two govern the whole Law; if we fail (and we cannot do otherwise) in either (though really it's both) of these then none of the rest of obedience to Law matters because we're in reality acting for ourselves at all times, and that taints all other obedience. The New Testament Pharisees illustrate this: they had rules to keep themselves from getting even close to breaking the rules of the Law, and yet Jesus told them they had failed. In fact some of the great Old Testament saints show the right course by acting not on law but on mercy -- which is really what the Law was meant to do; it showed us that we cannot keep the Law, which should inform us that others can't keep it, either, which should take us to the Golden Rule and thus to mercy. That's why through the prophets God tells Israel that He despises things He commanded them to do: they put themselves at the center in the belief that they could keep the law, and thus missed its most important lesson, that we all need mercy. Right: in order for it to achieve that effect the person had to recognize that it couldn't actually be kept. All the little ceremonial type items like tithes and such could be kept but when it came to commanding the heart, well, we know what Jesus said about the heart! Every person who is saved and honest about it will admit that the Ten are impossible to keep -- especially when what Jesus said is taken into consideration. According to Jesus, if I've ever been angry with an acquaintance or friend enough I feel like hitting them, I'm guilty of "Don't kill!"

According to the Old Testament the physical body is one element of the soul; without a body there is no soul. The idea of a soul apart from the body actually comes from Greek philosophy, specifically Plato, and Plato's idea has so permeated our thinking it's extremely difficult to get past it back to what the Old Testament meant by "soul". In fact it's hard to tell if Paul had been influenced by Plato; sometimes it seems he has while other times it seems he hasn't, and yet determining that is difficult for the very reason that our thinking about the soul is warped. I was actually thinking about this last night when I came across the old bedtime prayer: The first two lines aren't really a problem, but if we keep the Old Testament meaning in mind then "I pray the Lord my soul to take" would mean our bodies would vanish from the bed if we died in our sleep.

Paul explicitly says that death reigned from Adam to Moses, so death most certainly reigned for Abraham and the rest. OTOH there's Jesus statement that God is not God of the dead but of the living. I think this is one of those things our four-dimensional minds just can't wrap around.

Francis Collins is the most obvious. Sy Garte is another. And the list of Christian biologists who have no problem with evolution would run into the hundreds just from the ones I know of. Theodosius Dobzhansky comes to mind, and Graham Clarke, Denis Alexander, Darrel Falk, Brian Heap, Robert Bakker, John Gurdon, Juan Martin Maldecena ,Noella Marcellino (a nun scientist, which is pretty awesome), and William Newsome. Then there were the ones I knew in university in our informal intelligent design club before the YECists hijacked that term to try to deceive the courts. No, I'm explaining what they did -- there's a difference. You're the one telling me I don't believe in an ancient Earth, just like you keep making up other things. No -- the gap never happened. No one found "gap" in Genesis until 1814, and it wasn't found, it was purely made up by a guy named Thomas Chalmers who wanted to make the Biblical history fit into the vast ages claimed by uniformitarian geologists. There were similar proposals off and on through the centuries, but the one thing they had in common was that they were trying to make the Bible fit their personal theories instead of the other way around. And no, what you've done is push a flight of fancy that does not have the support of the grammar -- period. You've shown no indication of a willingness to learn, but just in case, here are some things to read: https://www.gaptheory.net/history-of-the-gap-theory/ https://www.gaptheory.net/the-gap-principle-and-kabbalah-connection/ Also, did you know that some key figures in developing gap theory were racist? It allowed them to assign creation of all non-whites to before the gap so they could justify considering them less than fully human. Check out A. J. Ferris's The Conflict of Science and Religion.

That's not at all what I've said. No, it makes me a better scholar than those without such education. Already answered. Since you're clearly into twisting what I've said and aren't even paying attention to the discussion, I see no point in pursuing this.

I wanted to get emerald ear studs for several years, but I never found an emerald worthy of my ears.

Hey, I didn't get asked! Like I need to be... sometimes I'm more than a little OCD about Christian forums.

This brings to mind the pastor at a Foursquare Gospel church I attended for a while when all the liturgical churches in the town where I was were unacceptable for various reasons (liberal theology, legalism, KJV-only....). Almost the moment I walked into the open room that served as the sanctuary I knew who the pastor was; as a friend who had the same experience a few weeks later put it, "He just oozed 'pastorness'". Several times we saw newcomers have the same reaction, able to tell without asking anyone who the pastor was in a room full of people milling around. Sadly they got an assistant pastor who was a Puritan type if I ever met one, and when the head pastor retired and the assistant became head the place started going downhill, turning judgmental and legalistic and drifting towards Dominionism. I stayed long enough to help turn the old YMCA building they'd acquired into a new church, and that was it.

I don't know if you have lousy reading comprehension or are just deliberately making up falsehoods. I only "defend a young Earth" if you consider 4.54 billion years to be "young". I stated that prominent scientists have become Christians due to their study of evolution, which proves that it is not what you claim. Because δέ is at most "a weak adversative particle", which can be translated as "and, but, now, on the one hand (usually with μέν). The Hebrew is a continuative but there is some contrast between the verses so they chose a weak contrast. That's more eisegesis. The gap theory that you're pushing was a desperate attempt to get an ancient Earth. It's been debunked by some of the top people in ancient Hebrew and Greek and isn't held to by any these days. The grammar is just against it. You're trying to force an Aristotelian concept onto material from an ANE worldview. Just as they would have no problem talking about material existing before creation, they have no trouble with "formless". A premier example, according to Mainmoindes IIRC, is water: it only has a form when it is frozen or when it is in a container. Another is fire, which has no form at all since it can't be cut off from its fuel and put in a container. To the ancients, wind had no form, nor did a smell. All of this is because their definition of "form" indicated a recognizable shape that was maintained. Thus most of the Sahara would be to them "formless" from one perspective because the wind is constantly changing the shapes of dunes, but "formed" from another because the dunes change shape slowly enough that it's possible to walk on them. Although my ANE studies were hardly exhaustive, I can't think of any culture that had a different idea of form before Aristotle, which is where we get it though he meant it more in a metaphysical sense (and Plato after him definitely meant it in a metaphysical sense). So in Aristotle's meaning of "form", even wind and flame had a "form", it just wasn't a physical one that stayed constant. Anyway, "formless" is an acceptable translation because despite a heck of a lot of scholarship the best we can do is inference from the use of תֹּהוּ elsewhere. Its companion בֹּהוּ is even worse, and putting them together makes a single concept the meaning of which isn't clear in large part because it's a Hebrew play on words, using two words that sound alike -- something that usually lets the second word's meaning fade but also modify the first word -- and the meaning of the second one we're only guessing at because of its association with the first word.

No, you study a translation. If you can't pick up those authors I mentioned and read the Greek, then you aren't capable of serious study of the New Testament -- you're dabbling in Greek... and making typical dabbler mistakes. My point is you don't know what you're talking about and you claim I don't know Hebrew.

That's a child's understanding of Greek. καί is far more than just "and", and δέ is far more than "but". Even Strong's gets this much right; they call it "a weak adversative particle", meaning a very slight contrast. You don't read well, do you? I already told y0u I have six years of Hebrew in university and graduate school. Evolution is a "religion" only in the minds of people who don't understand it. I've never met an "evolutionist" -- that's a word that's made up by people who don't understand evolution and usually don't understand scripture either. Your crystal ball is broken. You read a translation. I read the Greek and the Hebrew and the Aramaic. You're playing at knowing about Greek and Hebrew when you can't read either one. You just demonstrated again that you have no grasp of what another language is. You show no ability to grasp that a word in another language has a core concept and the English words used to translate those are poorly-fitting because so many words in another language just don't have a match in English. The Bible does not say "They MEND them", it says καταρτίζοντας τὰ δίκτυα αὐτῶν The core meaning of καταρτίζω is "(to) complete". So for damaged nets, completing them in English becomes "mending". The same holds for all the other uses. More making things up about people. I already hinted at what that is according to the Bible, but I'll say it straight this time: it's called "bearing false witness". And since you've done it three times now, you stand condemned by your own actions.

XX is a typo. X in general is any institution with official statements about things. In specific it;s the Roman Catholic Church. It could be the Audubon Society or the Future Farmers of America: if you want to know what they believe, they're the ones to ask.