The Days of Noah and Lot

[Jayne]

16 hours ago, Endtime_Survivors said:

Neither the scripture nor the video suggests this.  (a condemnation of daily living - Jayne's words)
 

Yes it does.  In your description on Youtube of the video, you say this:

" Jesus described the last days as being like the days of Noah and Lot, but contrary to popular belief, his beef was NOT so much with the sexual sins that Sodom and Gomorrah were infamous for, but with simple things like buying and selling, planting and building. Why? "

You claim Jesus had a "beef" with these people.  That means he condemns their actions.  You little Jesus cartoon character said, "Wait, these (daily living) can be sins, too!"

Your words.

 I'm trying to tell you as clearly as I can, but I fear it's to no avail, that the Luke 17 passage is NOT about condemnation of any sin, but explaining that people will NOT be prepared for the revelation of Jesus Christ.  Just as the Bible tells, the Flood and the fire/brimstone was unbeknownst to those it destroyed.

Yes, Noah knew about the Ark, but no one else did.  And yes, Abraham and God has a conversation about Sodom and if there could be even 10 righteous people, but no one in Sodom knew of that conversation not even Lot who was spared.

For those destroyed - the lost, the Flood and the fire/brimstone were upon them before they could see it coming.

THAT's what this scripture is about - not individual sins and which ones Jesus has "beefs" with and which ones he ignores or puts on the back burner - because he doesn't do that.

 

 

[Endtime_Survivors]

4 minutes ago, Jayne said:

You claim Jesus had a "beef" with these people.  That means he condemns their actions.  You little Jesus cartoon character said, "Wait, these (daily living) can be sins, too!"

Yeah, they can be sins.  If someone treats food, family, jobs, or hobbies as more important than God, are they sinning?

[Jayne]

22 minutes ago, Endtime_Survivors said:

Yeah, they can be sins.  If someone treats food, family, jobs, or hobbies as more important than God, are they sinning?

Putting something ahead of the Lord is called idolatry.  And idol can be anything - literally. 

But the idol itself is not the sin.  Green pieces of paper with dead presidents' pictures on them are not sins.  But the love of money and greed are sins however.

Having a husband, a wife, or a child is not a sin.  It never will be.  But exalting a family member or yourself above the Lord is a sin.

Your video makes the husband, the wife, the child, the job, the money, the life ...... the sin.

Sin is not in things.  Sin is in the heart.

Jesus isn't talking in Luke 17 about heart issues or idolatry.

 

[Endtime_Survivors]

2 minutes ago, Jayne said:

Having a husband, a wife, or a child is not a sin.  It never will be.  But exalting a family member or yourself above the Lord is a sin.

Yeah so, the video is addressing the second sentence, as well as exalting business, chores, hobbies, friendships, food, or anything else above God.  I really don't understand where our disagreement is. 

[Jayne]

1 minute ago, Endtime_Survivors said:

Yeah so, the video is addressing the second sentence, as well as exalting business, chores, hobbies, friendships, food, or anything else above God.  I really don't understand where our disagreement is. 

I can't do this anymore.  You have your mind made up.  C'est la vie.

Our disagreement lies in the fact that you claim with your video that Luke 17 is about idolatry and putting things before the Lord, and your video heavily implies as two people have told you that homosexuality and atheism are relatively benign and it's the Christians who are the bad guys with their daily living.  Two people have now told you that.

Luke 17 is not about sin, idolatry, a "beef" Jesus has, nor any wrongdoing.  It's about a timeline and a prophecy Jesus makes that the humanity will be taken by surprise as the inhabitants of the earth were and the citizens of Sodom were.

You've taken it to mean a comparison of the sins of the lost and the sins of the Christians. 

If I haven't made that clear now - I never will.  God bless.

 

 

 

[Endtime_Survivors]

2 minutes ago, Jayne said:

Our disagreement lies in the fact that you claim with your video that Luke 17 is about idolatry and putting things before the Lord

In the parable, the King says, "come now" and the people respond that they are too busy with their various worldly cares.  I don't understand how you don't see the lesson there about treating the "cares of this world" as more important than God.

But then, that is the nature of normalcy.  People who are caught in it see their behavior as normal.  It sounds strange to them when someone else comes along questioning that normalcy.  I think that is where our disagreement lies.  We view "normal" and "strange" as very different in this context.   My interpretation of our discussion so far is that all that indignation about atheism and sexual sin is just a distraction; a smokescreen.  The reason I think this is because I've quite clearly acknowledged that those things are definitely wrong, but that hasn't affected your responses to me. 

The video quite clearly says that things like marriage, buying/selling, eating/drinking, playing and building are not wrong.  Neither does the video justify/condone atheism or sexual sin.  Those things are also labeled as sins in the video.

So, it seems like what you guy are really upset with is the idea that you could be challenged on the normalcy of life.  It's one of those infuriating things about Jesus that made people so angry with him back in his day; he challenged their respectability, their familial relationships, their morality and their greed.  He questioned them. He rebuked them. He was relentless in speaking uncomfortable truths, and in the end the people hated him for it.

The radical teachings of Jesus have been glossed over with a few hundred feet of system respectability, to the point that a parable about ignoring God for the sake of the "cares of this world" instead becomes a parable about getting a better deal on the cares of this world.  Remember when you posted that yesterday?  That the people were at fault because they bought something without seeing it and therefore made a bad business deal and had nothing to do with them being too busy for God?

Today really is like the days of Noah and Lot.  They weren't without warning.  Not at all.  God isn't unfair.  He won't just destroy people with no warning.  Quite the contrary is true.  He often gives people years of warning, but rarely do we listen to those warnings.  When the consequences finally come and take us by surprise, it FEELS like we had no warning, but that's only because we didn't listen. 

The question is, what do the warnings look like?  When someone comes along saying, "hey, there's a problem with your involvement in the cares of this world" isn't that a warning?  Isn't that what Jesus taught in the parable of the husbandmen and the vinyard, how the owner sent servant after servant to warn the husbandmen, but they only abused and mistreated them?

If you think a warning should, or can be, only something which you are prepared to recognize, then you will, of course, miss any warnings which you are not prepared to recognize, which puts you in a dangerous catch-22.  I believe this is why Jesus' teachings are the way out of such a difficult predicament; he is the cornerstone; the tool by which we measure all truth and in those teachings there is a clear (at least to me) warning about becoming distracted by the normal, everyday cares of this world.

God told us to listen to Jesus. He is the warning. His teachings.  Look again at the parable. "Come now".  "Too busy".  It may be, and in fact is highly likely, that the teachings of Jesus is the only warning we'll ever get.

[OakWood]

8 hours ago, Endtime_Survivors said:

Probably. But Jesus had a problem with people getting self righteous about the rather obvious sins (like sexual sins or atheism) while ignoring their own sins (like being too busy for God).  This is the kind of luke-warmness that Jesus said makes God sick; people who say they believe in God, but who are too busy to listen to him.   When the atheists look at that kind of example, what reason do they have to think this God is worth believing in when his own followers are too busy to care?   What's more, why should the atheist take a Christian seriously about genuine problems like sexual fornication or atheism when the Christian himself is lost in the cares of this world, like materialism and greed?

Sexual sin is a genuine problem, but consider the example of the pharisees who brought the adulterous woman to him.  The woman was plainly guilty. There was no doubt or dispute about that.  And yet, Jesus instead rebuked the pharisees.   Why? Wasn't it because they were being self-righteous toward the woman?  They were quite ready to see her die for her sin, but they had little or no regard for their own sins, and that's because they had come to see their own sins as normal while finding it easy to jump on the obvious sins like fornication. 

We need to be able to recognize genuine sins like fornication and atheism, but all our efforts to do so will only come across as hollow, shallow, and self righteous until we Christians can sort out our own problems regarding the "cares of this world".   Even in your response you talk about "sins of the world" as though putting a business, relationship, or even food and clothing before God is not a "sin of the world". 

If those things are not sins of the world, then what kind of sins are they?

Now I can agree with you there.

[OakWood]

I think the problem here is not the message but the interpretation of it. The video wasn't clear (in my opinion). It really did appear to me to have a somewhat different message to the one that I saw.

[Endtime_Survivors]

5 hours ago, OakWood said:

I think the problem here is not the message but the interpretation of it. The video wasn't clear (in my opinion). It really did appear to me to have a somewhat different message to the one that I saw.

Hi Oakwood.  Thanks for saying this.  I'm  happy to see you talking about interpretations because that's pretty much all any of us really has. Even guidance from the Holy Spirit, or direct Revelation from God himself must still be filtered through the sieve of our interpretation.  We must still process the information and decide how we want to respond to it or how it should fit into our understanding of reality around us.

When I look at the teachings of Jesus, I see a lot of teaching about our relationship to the world around us, in practical ways.  I see a lot of teaching about the physical verses the spiritual and how easily the physical can distract us away from the spiritual.  That's what I see in his reference to the days of Noah and Lot; a people who became distracted by the cares of this world (i.e. the physical) and stopped caring about what God wanted (i.e. the spiritual).

An interesting element to this scenario is that Abraham was convinced he could find even 5 or 10 righteous people.  There must have been something in Sodom which caused Abraham to have this belief so strongly that he would argue with his own God about it.  I believe Abraham was fooled by good intentions and flowery, beautiful, poetic, religious jargon.  God knew better, which is why, in the end, he allowed Abraham to make the effort to find these righteous people.  It must have been a rather eye opening experience for him when he couldn't find even one (aside from Lot).

It's similar to what Jesus said about people who would come to the gates of the city, believing that Jesus would recognize them, but that he would instead say he never knew them. These aren't atheist.  Something caused these people to think Jesus would know them.   These are religious people who thought they had it all figured out, but instead had substituted God's will for their own, much like the husbandmen who wanted to take the vinyard and operate it based on their own rules.

This is why the people of Noah's day were destroyed.  Instead of going to Noah and begging for his help, guidance, answers, explanations etc, they were eating, drinking, building, planting, buying, selling, and developing romantic relationships when the flood came.   They probably thought Noah was crazy, judgmental, mistaken, misguided, or any number of other reactions people have when the righteousness of their personal will is questioned.

When it comes to our relationship with God, nothing should be beyond question, especially the most normal, ordinary, assumed activities.

[FresnoJoe]

On 9/2/2016 at 1:51 AM, Endtime_Survivors said:

in your response you talk about "sins of the world"....
as though putting a business, relationship....
or even food and clothing before God....
is not a "sin of the world"....

If those things are not sins of the world....
then what kind of sins are they....

The Sin Of The World

Of sin, because they believe not on me; John 16:9

It'll Bit Any Who Refuse

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Hebrews 11:6

To Believe

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. John 5:24