It sounds like the bottom line is that free will is overrated. It’s certainly not anything to get in an indignant huff about and impute malice to anyone who bumps its pedestal.
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(Great answer! 
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I think that will upset many Christians especially those who seem to think Heaven is reserved for them alone
It also attempts to distinguish between human religion and what God is looking for. Human religion has human rules and ideals that make it work and define it or separates it from everyone else. Exclusivity is a very human concept. It also provides a reson-detre fror a religion’s existence.
Christ Hmself warned against complacency involving the belief that someone is “Safe” because they claim a faith.
RIchard
Or like myself, for that matter.
In Luke 10, Jesus contrasted the Levite priest with the Samaritan in answer to who is my neighbor (that one is called to love as yourself)? Is it the religious devotion which matters or the how one cares for those you see in need?
In Matthew 23 Jesus has a long diatribe against the most religious people of His times, the scribes and Pharisees – the people most devoted to the study and teaching of the scriptures.
The point is not to condemn organized religion or religious work but to warn against equating this with loving God with all your heart, mind, and soul. In Matthew 25 Jesus’ explanation is that those who love God most are those who take care of people in need.
Neither is this a call on people to go out and earn their salvation with good works. The common theme here is really the condemnation of any kind of entitlement. We are to do what good we can in good faith, which frankly means doing so for the right reason of authentic compassion for those in need. Again it is all about transformation – being the people who make the world more heavenly.
A Lutheran priest once made the point – to someone who pretty much defined a Christian as being the above – that not even Abraham would make the cut, so who would? In contrast he offered a line from the prophets:
“He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?”
He tied that in with Luther’s concept of vocation, i.e. callings on our lives, which includes every useful human activity, so that being a housewife or coal miner are vocations just as is being a priest.
Resorting to Luther-- He once spoke to the effect that the gardener caring for plants is engaging in a vocation as holy as preaching a sermon, and feeding the hungry as holy as leading the church in prayer.
We’ve somehow forgotten that save for a few individuals the vast, vast, majority of the people of God through the ages have spent most of their time doing ordinary mundane things, and that living doing ordinary things can be as pleasing to God as being a missionary.
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This sort of ties in with a discussion we had in church today. We were talking about Romans 5:13 where it said sin did not count before the law. This bothered me because it is quite clear that murder and theft are bad whether there is a law against it or not. But it soon became clear that the problem is the dynamic nature of the law. It is not about some absolute command from the dawn of time to cover all possibilities, but rather things we learn to be harmful to people and the community as time goes on. The example I thought of was when people first discovered what could be made with the poppy flower. Things cannot be counted as sinful until after we discovered the devastating effect it can have on people, families, and the community.
I think it is an interesting subject that you have brought up. Speculation is just that.The Bible says more about there someday being a judgment than the details of what the judged or saved will experience. But those in Heaven will know God — just as He knows us. And will totally know the answer to the questions you just posed.
Between now and then…The Bible says “the just will live by faith.” Some day we will be like Him–in the new Heaven and Earth, etc— and this presumably entails living as He originally intended for us to live. The Bible never says that God “wished us to do evil”. That is someone else’s department. We just went along with it.
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“Therefore just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned – for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law” --v. 12, 13
Good verses — and you have a good set of thoughts on it. The poppy flower 's product yields several beneficial medications — which, like any medication are a good thing—but can also be abused. I suppose it fits as an example. Even when the “poppy user” did not know the dangers of abuse — the abuse of it still led to addiction and all the consequences of addiction (neglect of work and relationships, theft to finance the next dosage etc).
And biblically, sin leads to death [biblically speaking], even people who may be ignorant of biblical principles die…and they/we die because of the existence – in our lives and everyone else’s And this leads the text into the whole issue of atonement and how that came/comes
sour grapes Dale…you have sour grapes nothing more. None of what you referenced in any way supports the claim i am being dishonest…those are simply words formed from your own construct. So long as you choose to read into what others say, id say it is you who is intentionally choosing your pathway here…not me! Rarely do i find approproiate (if any) biblical support for any of the statements you make and that is the problem…you simply make stuff up without biblical support claioming it to be honest truth and anyone who counters your statements with Biblical referencing is dishonest.
I will address one of the references where you claim i apparently switched…i have not once said water was ejected into space…that claim is about as realistic as the claim that the sack of gunpowder from the magazine store in a battleship found itself embedded into the hull of another ship 10-20km away alongside the projectile…its ridiculous. What in fact one would expect is for a very small amount of residue to be found at the target…nothing more. Water is no different when it is the propellant in a steam explosion! (to be honest, i dont even know why one has to explain something so simple to a scientific mind…obviously scientific knowledge has its limitations when it comes to the practical application of that knowledge)
Your analogy fails: comparing a gun firing a projectile that could be carried in a truck, and firing it within the atmosphere, to a projectile that weighs millions of times more and is being launch beyond orbit, is invalid.
To get a steam explosion potent enough to launch large chunks of rock beyond orbit is likely to send a portion of that steam into space because the explosion has to keep pushing the rock out past the atmosphere.
you are playing the scaling game…if we scale one way or the other, the seemingly impossible becomes possible (or vice versa).
The point is, the scale is irrelevant…its the ratio of the size of the earth itself to its atmosphere that you must consider. You are looking up into the sky from down here thinking its a long way, however, if you take a look at one of NASA’s images of the earth from afar, you quickly realise that the atmosphere is minuscule in comparison to the size of the earth itself. It would take very little by comparison to eject something into space.
One the object is no longer influenced by friction in the atmosphere, the equation changes dramatically in favour of the object proceeding out into space…and in a general sense, the bigger the chunk of rock, the better.
BTW, remind me what the problem was if a little water was ejected out into space? The testing of orbiting objects such as these has shown that some do contain evidence of water.
Actually, it takes a lot of energy due to gravity, not the atmospheric drag. The main problem with shooting a rock or anything up space is gravity, but the atmospheric problem would be the compression wave that creates a huge amount of heat. But, we covered that elsewhere so let us not go there. As for water in space, as it first was exposed to the vacuum of space it would boil, and the energy it lost in the process would cool it until it would turn into ice, something you can actually recreate in a lab with a bell jar and a strong vacuum pump, then the ice would slowly sublimate and eventually disappear, much like the ice cubes shrink in a frostfree freezer.
Now, how that applies to free will in the restored heaven and earth, I am not sure, but it does bring up that we are now subject to the forces of nature that we write about as the laws of physics, but perhaps in the new heaven and new earth, those forces may be different.
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No, I’m not “looking” anywhere, I’m doing rough calculations for which the atmosphere is barely relevant.
Except it doesn’t. An object launched fast enough to escape the Earth’s gravity well and head into a solar orbit isn’t going to be in the atmosphere long enough to even bother with taking it into consideration.
That’s like saying the heavier the bullet the better, or the heavier the missile payload or the heavier the rocket payload. The only sense in which bigger might be better is that a rock that’s a thousand kilometers across will have steam actually propelling it for a few seconds longer than one only hundreds of kilometers across.
You don’t seem to understand the concept of work in physics. To launch a mass into orbit takes a minimum amount of work which has to do with its mass and that of the Earth. What everyone has been calculating here is that minimum amount of work, and since work requires energy, the minimum amount of energy. And just that minimum amount of energy to launch just the asteroids we know off the Earth and into solar orbits is enough to vaporize the crust and everything else down to the center.
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I am going to respond to this with a simple image and again remind you that i did not once make the claim that it was a single explosive event that ejected matter into space. I do not understand why you continue on down that ridiculous pathway…and that is the entire problem here…you are following an assumption that is not only ridiculous, but its also false. The Bible says the it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and that the flood lasted a year…it was not a single explosiion and then voila, its done and dusted? You are following secular assumpitions that are completely ignorant of Biblal narrative about the flood (and that is typical off secularism…its pulls little snippets out of context and runs off wildly waving those snippets for all to see)
Look closely at the image and, if you are good with Adobe Illustrator, load this image into that software and use its measuring tools to work out the scale of the atmosphere to the top of even just this image ( not even 1/4 of the earths diameter is visible)…heck you could even use your ruler on the computer screen if you want.
BTW, I am certain that some of the objects ejected did come back into earth’s atmosphere…we have evidence of this all around the globe…this supports the biblical narrative, it does not detract from it!
I have to laugh at Dales response…my intuition is based only on pictures…that is ignoring reality Dale and i suggest you take a really good look at the image above and below…
Again, the mathematical assumptions used to support the claim that it would vaporize the earth are ignorant of the Bible narrative that it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and the flood lasted a year…this assumption is basing its premise on a single explosive event. Within the Biblical narrative context, it also ignores the ability of water to change state in order to deal with heat over time.
finally, I also have no issue with the gravity problem…that is simply not an argument as its easily overcome with acceleration and momentum. I remind you again to research the German Heavy Gustav.
The barrel of the Gustav barrel was 32m in length and it could fire a 7.7 ton pojectile almost 50km or a ratio of 1562 to 1.
The earths mantle is close to 3000km thick
mutiply that by 1562
The Gustav, when the barrel length is scaled up to the thickness of the earth’s mantle, could fire a 1249m diameter (1.2km diameter) projectile weighing 12027.4 tons a distance of 4,687,500km. (yes that is 4.6 million km)
the moon is only 384,000 km from earth.
Now i accept that the earth is not a Gustav gun. However, as a bible believing Christian, I am also faced with a significant theological issue that i cannot ignore:
the idea that God created “killer asteroids” just in case he might want to throw one of them at the earth in the event that man sinned millions/billions of years down the track in order to destroy Sodom and Gomorah, or fulfill the visions of the prophet Daniel (Nebuchadnezzars dream -Daniel Ch 2) and the Apostle John (“I saw a new heavens and new earth for the former things had passed away” - Revelation 21)
I find it far more difficult to reconcile with the theological problem, that God creates killer asteroids to hurl at sinners millions of years into the future, than whether or not a scaled Gustav firing rocks into space, via nuclear steam explosions from within the earth, is a scientific possibility!
But can’t it be argued that if you are a Bible believing Christian, just like most of us, then you have to consider the genre and literary techniques being used?
In genesis 1-11 we see a thousand years and several key events happening and then no where else in the Bible do we see that. The next closest spot is revelation which is also not taken literally.
In five days God created the entire cosmos and earth and all life and on the sixth day he creates a golem from mud and determines that it’s alone and so it’s put to sleep and cut in half after naming all animals and the other half becomes a woman and they are inside this special garden with trees that had magical fruit including one that keeps you alive forever. The woman is tricked by a talking snake that has wings/arms convincing it to eat of a magical fruit. They get banished and have kids and one kid kills the other and their blood screams out from the ground wanting justice and so the murder is marked with a magical mark to deter those wanting to harm him as he is also banished to wander about and he forms villages. During this time invisible flying beings above the dome covered flat earth begins to take woman and thei give birth to giants. As the world descends into chaos the god opens up the earth and windows of the dome and floods it all. Even the tips of mountains are covered up. All life is preserved through ambassadors of their species brought into the ark 2 at a time and some up to 7 of their kind. Sometime within a year or so the waters draw back revealing land.
Then after this it drops down to 5 books that span like a century. So those few pages covers roughly 1,000 years and the rest of the Bible covers snippets of the next 3.000 years. It’s just obviously not written as a historical or biographical narrative. It seems to by a myth which is why it’s not remotely found within what is discovered in science just like science don’t discover the story of the never ending story in earths history.
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No, you’re responding with an error that has been corrected repeatedly, which means that by this point it is a lie.
Excrementum tauri.
The period of time required for the Earth to be able to remain solid just from the launch of Ceres into solar orbit is on the order of thousands of years. The only person talking about “a single explosion” is YOU.
Stop lying. There’s nothing “secular” about math.
And if you aren’t capable of doing the math, you should just shut up and stop making Christians look like complete and utter ignorant idiots.
Your subjective feelings about the atmosphere are not relevant. That you do not grasp that the minimal amount of atmosphere makes your position worse and not better tells us that you have no grasp of the science at all.
Your intuition isn’t entirely based on pictures, it’s based on ignorance – and not merely ignorance, but ignorance that you refuse to correct despite all the help offered.
Again, stop lying!
And learn some actual science. If you knew any you would recognize that even if the launching of the asteroids we know about were spread over the YEC claim about the age of the Earth – which would be one asteroid every other day – you still end up with a vaporized planet.
So now your claim is that God miraculously made cannon barrels to launch the asteroids?
Sorry, but it still doesn’t work, because the calculations people are making assume an even more efficient launch system than a cannon.
That issue is of your own invention. God made and keeps making “killer volcanoes” and “killer storms” and “killer earthquakes” and “killer floods” and more – what difference does an instrument of death being in space make?
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If someone doesn’t consider the genre and the literary techniques and the writer’s worldview, that someone isn’t actually reading the Bible in the first place.
You are asking the wrong question. It’s not about our imagined “free will”. Free will is one of those “said no verse ever” comments. It is about submission to God’s severity, both seen and unseen. In his 6 day creation we see God’s power. He is sovereign over all things. Even the clown world culture we now have to endure thanks in large part to monkeys to man indoctrination in the culture, God is sovereign. The question to ask is, has God given me over to the Son? Have I repented from sin and believed? Does the Holy Spirit within me cause me to desire righteousness? If none of these things are happening, a person is not saved and might as well play in the street instead of wondering about free will. Ultimately the question is about why is there evil in the world. Just re-examine your own thought processes here. Genesis 1-11 explains in in plain easy to see text. And if God has regenerated our hearts, we can see it and have 100% confidence in the beginning, middle, and end. Apologetics | NavigatorsWay