So 2 Timothy 3:16 is false?
Or you believe that, although from your perspective somehow “the Bible is 'God’s word” - so to speak," it is inspired just like the Quran, or the Bagdavedah? Or inspired just like the satanic bible?
So when men were 'moved by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21) concerning Scripture (verse 20), you believe “The Holy Spirit” also inspired and moved others to write the Quran and the satanic bible?
If you believe that the Holy Spirit is God, then, where is that found in the Bible?
But what did Jesus mean when He said “If you do not believe that Ego Eimee (I-I AM)”, you will perish in your sins…" what did Jesus mean here?
Can we assume that Jesus did not say “If you do not believe I am Elvis you will perish in your sins” ?
Then what did He mean by saying Ego Eimee?
Did Jesus ever claim to be God, anywhere in Scripture?
WAIT WHAT? “Writing” and “doing”…as in “doing”. So faith is doing good works?
So, coming to a saving faith before the Father is:
“…Father, I have written your law into my heart, and I am DOING what is right…however I do not TRUST in Jesus as my Savior - but I am writing and doing 
!”
Or is saving faith thus:
“Father, I am a sinner, but I TRUST that Jesus died for my sins, I TRUST Him as my Savior, Lord, forgive me a sinner!” ?
Which of the two?
I am not interested in your attempt at taking the rational high ground here. It’s a mythological narrative that fits in well with countless other creation myths. The many issues I pointed out with the narrative make this painfully obvious. A person might as well defend the historicity of the Lion King. Maybe archaeologists should look for Pride Rock?
C.s. Lewis once wrote: “There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of “Heaven” ridiculous by saying they do not want “to spend eternity playing harps.” The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown - ups , they should not talk about them.”
I’d like to extend his views to the Garden story.
Vinnie
I
Wait, are you saying that Sanctification is what ‘gets us to heaven?’
But you’re not wanting to answer my question. I’ll ask it again:
Did the tax collector view himself as a sinner differently than the Pharisee?
Did the Pharisee view himself as a ‘sufficiently righteous’ person, but not in the same way as the tax collector?
Dude, these are easy to answer. And seriously, humility is always a good thing when giving answers, instead of taking the viewpoint “Well, if I answer a certain way, he may corner me - and of course I cannot let that happen!” If I’m wrong about something, I own up to it - I don’t try to twist and wiggle out of something. If I’m wrong I’m wrong. Read my dialogue with Klax.
But again…
Did the two view themselves differently, OR NOT?
Vin, all you have to do is say, “Oh, okay, yeah, I have no proof…” Are you trying to win for the sake of winning?
If you believe by faith that the 'garden story* is a myth, then this is what you believe. I believe you are wrong. Simple as that.
Have you never prayed for a loved one whom you suspected was lost in their sins, needed to be saved from in their sins?
So when Paul had concern for the lost, and prayed for them, in Romans 10, he was wrong?
If God breathes something it will do what he intended it to do. I don’t assume anything more. Inerrancy is simply not needed for the intended purpose of the Bible. Every singe aspect of it from canonization, to textual corruption, to thousands of different interpretations, to the use of sources by authors, to errors and moral atrocities a good God wouldn’t sanction all tell us he did not require or choose to create inerrant scripture. Christians lived for a century using largely oral tradition. Inerrancy is only needed to placate the doubts of people preoccupied with absolute certainty. No one is saying God couldn’t write inerrant scripture. Only that he allowed the voices, culture, language and temporal situations of the authors to be included in his final product for whatever Good reason he deemed necessary. You may think God should have made an inerrant scripture but his ways are not your ways. The pot can’t question the potter.
Exactly what that term translated “God-breathed” means is also a bit of a mystery and it most certainly didn’t even apply to a lot of or possibly any of the New Testament when it was written.
Vinnie
I know you do. You have no proof of itd historicity . You have faith in the doctrine of inerrancy and faith it must be taken literally. Just say that.
It’s not about faith for me. It’s about understanding the literary genre of the work, it’s historical situation and the picture painted by modern science. I can assure you that your position of historical fidelity is one of faith whereas rejecting the historicity of the narrative is one of reason.
Maybe we should start listing all the creation stories you don’t accept the historicity of? I’d guess there are thousands of them.
Vinnie
The man in Matthew 19 walked away disappointed because he was looking for what would be enough to get salvation taken care of, and Jesus wouldn’t give him any such thing because there is no such thing. There is no enough. Salvation is an ongoing work of God to remove our self-destructive habits and a continuing relationship with God for eternity.
No I would not insert such words into the Bible. I would only read what the Bible actually says.
It is not in isolation but only one example of many places where Jesus explains how God judges between people and believing a correct set of doctrines is simply not there.
Contrary to what you said, Jesus most certainly did say in Matthew 7 not to judge. But the context makes it clear that he is talking about judging other people and not about making judgements about what you should or should not do. Your difficulties in understanding the simplest things like this is becoming discouraging.
why? This does not contradict anything I said.
I do not know. But I certainly do not think God is Christian property, or that Christians speak for God to say what He has inspired and what He has not inspired. But I have certainly seen the inspiration of God in many other works of writing and film. So I think the Bible is more than that.
Acts 5:3-4
The doctrine of the Trinity is that the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct persons but only one God. It is not that people have to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity in order to be saved, but only that I judge it to be correct.
He explains what He meant in the context. They even asks what he means and He answered them.
John8:25 They said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “Even what I have told you from the beginning. 26 I have much to say about you and much to judge; but he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.” 27 They did not understand that he spoke to them of the Father.
“If you do not believe I am he…” who they ask? he who God has sent to tell them what He has heard from the Father.
Just because I believe Jesus is God doesn’t mean I have to take this particular passage as meaning that Jesus is claiming to be God in that passage. I see no reason to take every time Jesus uses the words “I am” to be a reference to the tetragrammaton “Yahweh.” It isn’t reasonable. What is reasonable is to look at the context to see what Jesus is saying.
Are you now taking how people interpret every single passage as a reason to judge whether they are going to heaven or hell. That is legalism going totally out of control.
Nope. That is not what I said, and it is not what is explained in the epistle of James, which I suggest you read again.
It is not either or but both. You trust in Jesus as your savior and that is why you do what is right for its own sake without seeking any reward. As it says in James, “faith without works is dead.” Empty words and doctrinal beliefs are not faith.
We are all sinners… we are all lost. All of us need such prayers. The Pharisee and those who think they have salvation taken care of are not justified in their thinking because of this.
Without, it doesn’t matter where you go because you will bring hell with you.
yes yes still doesn’t make that parable mean what you claim. It doesn’t change the fact that Jesus and Paul teach a gospel of salvation by the grace of God and not the Gnostic gospel of salvation by knowledge… whether the knowledge be of a set of dogmas or having a correct “view of oneself.”
This thread began with ChuckM’s question: How did we become sinners that deserve God’s wrath …if we evolved? This is a very good question and one that needs a lot of thought. A lot of the dialogue in this thread seems to be aimed at ChuckM’s motives in asking this question, motives which we may guess, but don’t really know.
If we were created by the means of evolution, as it seems apparent that we were, then matching our history of evolution to the Biblical text requires some serious thinking. We obviously can’t just go ahead with the interpretations that have been handed down. I began thinking about this long ago when someone raised the terms sublapsarian and supralapsarian. Could God NOT have known that Adam would sin? That seems unlikely, since he is God. He would then have created the world/universe to be good not for a perfect, sinless mankind, but for a sinful mankind, a mankind in need of salvation. Thus the objection that evolution brings death before Adam, is no objection. A world where death and destruction are a part of life is a good one for redeeming mankind.
Also beyond God having known that Adam would sin, perhaps Adam had already sinned before the world was created. Genesis 1, though poetic in feel, is generally a historical narrative and tells us how the universe was created in a way that is remarkably close to the scientific discoveries of these events (time is not actually a problem, since time is relative). Some don’t see this, but it is obvious enough to me. As for Genesis 2-3, we are in another genre altogether. A mysterious place, Eden, God walking with man, a beast that talks, magical trees; we are clearly not in a historical narrative anymore. But we’re not in fairy tales either. God is still talking to us. God is spirit (according to Jesus); and if God is spirit and Adam walked with God, he must have been spirit also, and living with him in the invisible realm. As for the Tree of Knowledge – if the garden were a physical garden on earth and God did not want the Tree of Knowledge to be disturbed, he would most likely have put it in an out of the way place, not in the middle of the garden soon to be filled with little humans. It was in the middle of the garden because the ability to choose was part of our character when we walked with God. As for the sin that Adam committed – certainly the maker of the universe would not be infuriated by the tasting of a piece of fruit that was left unguarded. The tree and the fruit are clearly symbols for something else entirely. It seems to me that the story of the Garden of Eden is meant to tell us that when we were still in communion with God, living as spirit beings, we betrayed God in a serious way. Whatever the eating of the fruit symbolizes, it is something that we humans did, all of us, joined under the name of Adam, that caused us to be ejected from the invisible realm into this physical one. That is what caused us suddenly to want clothing, to be ashamed of our bodies. That thing that we did is the thing that makes us sinners deserving God’s wrath. Because of the extreme pain caused by this act, God is kind enough not to tell us in open detail how this event occurred, but told us in symbols, so that we would know why we’re here, but not have to see it’s entire horrific nature until we are able to endure it.
To transfer a group of spirits in the invisible realm into the bodies of hominids living in the physical realm would be no problem for God. And though there could not have been a first couple such as Adam and Eve, there are telling details about our history that point to these two chapters of Genesis. All of us descend from one human male; all of us descend from one human female; snakes once had legs; there is a particular point at which humans began wearing clothes, a habit no animals share; if a man is to live and especially if he is to have descendants he must work or engage in warfare, either of which can be lethal; if a woman is to have descendants, she must suffer the consequences of childbirth, which has long been and is sometimes still lethal; and despite this fact women want to have babies, want to have sex with men, and if they don’t want to, men can force them to do so. The consequences of the fall are obvious and inescapable. Genesis 2-3 tells us why.
This understanding of Genesis 1-3 accounts for why we are sinners deserving God’s wrath (even if our own particular sins are mild and few) and are still the product of evolution—or at least our bodies are. We are now human beings, a combination of bodies that descended from apes and souls that suffer for our sin; but one day we will leave this physical world and once again walk with God our father. Thanks be to the sacrifice of his son.
At least this is what has come to me over the years.
Hi Chuck - Hope you had a great Easter! Christ has risen. That’s at least one thing we can agreed upon.
I don’t think God expects humans to be perfect. I don’t think my Christian identity is as a sinner that needs to be punished. We are made in God’s image and children of God. That is our identities as Christians. We are made to be in relationship with God. We have the choice to live with God’s Will or live in are own selfishness. The first choice leads to long-term happiness. The second choice leads to long-term misery. We do this to ourselves. God doesn’t have to do anything to us. Hell is separation from God. We put ourselves there. God doesn’t have to do it by exercising Wrath. God did not have to take out his wrath on Jesus to somehow protect us from ourselves. Jesus protects us from our own sin through his one teaching represented in Matthew 22: 37-40.
Being enamored with violent retribution and punishment seems to be a strong human desire. We love to see others get what we think they deserve. What we must not do is obscure the primary invitation and promise of the mercy and forgiveness Jesus demonstrated throughout his life, teachings, and death. Jesus brings Justice through healing, reconciliation, and restoration. Everyone is mediated through the power of reconciliation through Jesus. Grace ultimately triumphs.
Spiritual understanding is achieved on a higher plane requiring thought and contemplation while threats like the Wrath of God are clear to everyone. But the problem with threatening statements is that any call to change is aimed at the lowest level of motivation which is fear. This does not create loving people, but fearful people; which is entirely outside God’s plan through Jesus.
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