It says God abandoned us and let evil reign.
In Paul’s perspective that means God is the reason why evil is rife. We are just pawns in a bigger battle. Yes, we could have been better, but God gave up on us.
Richard
Edit
Since when did people know what is good for them, or want it?
That’s what God’s wrath is: letting go and stop interfering. We do the evil.
When they have been in a good place and turned bad, and refuse change, there’s no point doing any more for them – grace in that situation just encourages evil.
You see that’s the trouble with taking passages away from the whole.
Why would God give us this perfect understanding of Love and then not comply with it. If God is Love, as we claim then there can be no wrath. And as for Genesis 3!
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs
Never mind, I guess the Holy Spirit got it wrong then.
Ouch.
Richard
So again you think that most of the writers in the Bible got things wrong.
There is no question that there not only can be but is wrath; the only question is what does that look like? Given that Christ in cleansing the Temple didn’t harm anyone, just overturned tables and such, that wrath can’t look like violence against people.
Scripture is not there for us to chop into pieces to fit our personal views.
Well one of the has to be.You cannot deny 1 Cor 13, or can you?
Seeing as the Old Testament is the human perception and understanding there is certainly room for human interpretation and error. What they took as wrath or anger might not be so. Do any of the prophets reciting precisely God’s words to them talk about His anger? They say that the people are not doing what God wants, but they do not say He is angry. Even Genesis 3 does not say God got angry, although the response is a little over the top.(and it does remember a wrong)
You will have to work it out for yourself, if you can be bothered. Probably easier just to carry on and ignore such contradictions and claim they are not there.
Richard
Edit.
It would appear that Ahijah and Jeremiah both claimed God’s anger in prophecy. Not to mention the words of the decologue as written by God.
Unfortunately that doesn’t help you. It still contradicts the properties of Love as decreed in 1 Cor 13.
Perhaps “slow to anger” is allowed?
Your problem, not mine.
No, they are both true. You just have to think it through.
Here are some answers:
Adulterous women (Proverbs 22:14)
Fainting (Isaiah 51:20)
Exile (Deuteronomy 29:28)
Gales (Jeremiah 30:23; Ezekiel 13:13)
Destruction of strongholds (Lamentations 2:2)
Earthquakes (Ezekiel 38:19)
Plague (Number 16:47; Revelation 15:1)
Mauling by bears (2 Kings 2:23-24)
Piercing arrow, fire and flash flood (Job 20:24-28)
Burning with sulphur (Revelation 14:10)
Destroying angels (Psalm 78:49)
Impaling on swords, famine and plague (Ezekiel 7:15; Ezekiel 14:21)
Death (1 Chronicles 13:10)
Inferno (Psalm 21:9; Isaiah 9:19; Jeremiah 7:20; Ezekiel 22:21)
Impalement, plague, mauling, burning and death look like violence against people to me.
(speak nothing unless it conforms)
Richard
Firstly,
if Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden and the Fall, Noah and the Global Flood…if these things are symbolic, then the Second Coming of Christ becomes symbolic.
A Symbolic theological model is a catastrophe for the entirety of the Christian Faith!
Why did God not communicate with Homonids and Neanderthals?
Well who says He didnt?
Theologically, if a loving God is not racist, then he absolutely did communicate with Hominids and Neanderthals.
The bible uses all of the above…why try to limit it to just one? This point seems to not be a reasonable claim to make there and it stems from a refusal to use literary skills to determine which one is being used in what passage/book of the bible. Its pretty explanatory on this point actually…we can easily determine which one is relevant to passages of scripture…I mean its easy to tell the difference between a literal event and poetry for example. Even in the book of revelation, the apostle John tells us quite clearly He is being shown a window into the future…we see his use of metaphor…that is no different throughout the Bible. These writers were all capable of communicating these things and they did exactly that. The writings of Moses are largely an historical account…he clearly names times, dates, places, people, ages…these are not allegorical habits in common language when used in the way they are recorded in the Bible by Moses
That’s a line from a guy that God later said was all wrong.
Revelation is apocalyptic literature and thus not to be taken literally.
Given that the introduction of the Psalm says it is using parable, and given Hebrew parallelism, this is to be taken figuratively; the “burning anger, wrath, indignation, and distress” are the “angles”.
There is no “inferno” there, it is a reference to how hot the anger of Yahweh will be.
Is clearly figurative language, given the repeated use of “as”.
The rest of the list except one are all things that can happen naturally, and are thus best interpreted according to the Cross: God does nothing but withdraw protection, i.e. He forsakes them and the regular (and demonic) posers of the world go to work.
The interesting one is the Chronicles passage with Uzziah and the Ark. It is the only one that can’t be explained as what I noted above.
No, it doesn’t. And thinking so is rather childish.
Why?
There is no logic to that statement. You would also claim that the resurrection was symbolic? All of Scripture is symbolic?
Richard
Many of the passages describe God’s wrath as something active, rather than as protection being withdrawn:
“‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: My anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place—on man and beast, on the trees of the field and on the crops of your land—and it will burn and not be quenched."
That doesn’t read like a withdrawal of protection.
I’m having problems explaining several of them as protection being withdrawn. Would everyone be fainting, dying of plague, flattened by hailstorms and getting mauled by bears if God wasn’t constantly protecting us?
But even if God’s wrath is only protection being withdrawn, rather than active harm, if the result of God’s wrath is war, plague, famine and destruction, that looks like violence against people.
I certainly believe we’re all descended from a single human pair. The story of Adam and Eve and the serpent (certainly not literal or historical) was an attempt to explain the fact of sin and suffering in the world.
You raise the interesting point about why God didn’t communicate with humanity until 4,000 years ago. But perhaps he did, and all trace of it has been lost. I think it’s perfectly possible that there was a pre-Abrahamic story, maybe but not necessarily similar to the post-Abrahamic one which we know. That’s pure speculation I know, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out.
Adding to my speculation about God communicating with our distant ancestors in a way that is now lost to us, there’s a classic science fiction novel on this theme, A Canticle For Leibovitz by Walter Miller. That speculates on a nuclear war obliterating most of humanity, and a small surviving group whose descendents continue for centuries into the future with a relic of the war which they regard as a sacred object. Miller was a Catholic, and his book was greatly admired by the writer Walker Percy, another Catholic, who saw it as a very Christian story.
Christ claimed that he came to this world to “save His people from their sins” Matthew1:21
He explained exactly how he would do this…in fulfillment of the Old Testament Sanctuary Service narrated by Moses to the Israelites more than 1000 years earlier…by dying on a cross!
In A.D 31/33, Jesus Christ of Nazareth was led to Golgotha, and nailed to a stake/cross (whichever doesn’t matter) and died physically on the cross…real blood came out of the hole that Roman soldiers’ spear pierced in Christ’s side
in naively sticking to your above line of thinking, you are promoting the UNBLIBLICAL belief that Christ “physically died” for a “symbolic” fall of mankind? You are joking, right? That’s inconsistent with the foundational theme of the very narrative Christ inserts himself into!
The overwhelming theme of the Bible is “that the wages of sin is death”
we know that this is a physical death because Christ died physically on the Cross to make Atonement for the wages of sin!!!
We know that the Bible theme regarding salvation isnt symbolic because the Angels who appeared next to the disciples watching him ascend into the sky clearly state
“this same Jesus will come again in exactly the same way you have seen him go up into the sky” Acts 1:11
there is nothing symoblic about the fall of mankind and or the plan or salvation or the Second Coming…these are biblically described as Literal Events!
Christ himself clearly states in Matt 24 "
37As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. 39And they were oblivious until the flood came and swept them all away. So will it be at the coming of the Son of Man."
You cannot be Christian and continue to claim that the narrative of Noah (a real man) and his family who enterred the ark is symoblic…100% Christ is referencing what he claimed was a real event.
That leaves you with only a single argument…the flood must be real but it was only local.
Trouble is, if the flood is local, then again, Christ died only for the local population…not the wider world wide community (because evil cannot have existed outside of the area where God decided it was and determined to wipe out) Now you have an irreconcilable academic and theogical dilemma…God saves only those descended from Noah…Hominids, Neandethals, anyone outside of the Garden of Eden…salvation is not offered to those individuals!
the doctrine that comes as a result of the above dilemma is falsified by the command to take the gospel to the Gentiles! (this wasnt a new thing, the gospel was always supposed to go to the gentiles, the Jews merely decided to use it to create for themselves an exclusive race…Christ trashed that idea and was killed as a consequence)
This came up in my Bible study group tonight, and it turns out that there is a natural explanation for it. The Ark was made of wood that was gold plated on both the inside and outside. It acts like a capacitor with the wood being an insulator that stores a charge. So the whole time they were walking around in the desert and no one would ever touch the Ark, it was building up a charge. Uzziah was grounded and so got electrocuted to death.
Sure, the text as written sounds active. But it doesn’t say what pouring out wrath means, and it doesn’t say anything will actually be harmed by God, it only says His anger and wrath will “burn”, an idiom we still use somewhat – burning anger means really angry; “hot under the collar” is a similar idiom with the same concept.
And in its context, God having active measures in anger is what would be expected; back then they still saw Yahweh as a god of war – which regardless of other attributes was the core of all ANE deities. But reading it through the lens of the Cross, we have to ask what God’s wrath on the Cross looked like – and it was nothing more than the Father withdrawing His protection so that Jesus experienced all the worst that the Romans could do, and all the assaults of the dark realm, and all the sin of the world, directly. Give that the Cross is the defining feature of Christ’s mission and identity, it has to be the model for the rest.
It’s worth asking at the same time what things in this world would be like if God wasn’t restraining evil. We get a hint in Revelation and it isn’t pretty! The rebel elohim and their ilk hate humanity for our status of bearing the image of Yahweh, and without God’s constant restraining hand they would inflict all the horror and pain they could manage, so “withdrawal of protection” isn’t anything mild, it’s harsh.
But God isn’t committing the violence. Think of it in terms of Jesus cleansing the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple: people almost certainly got hurt, but He didn’t do any of it, He was attacking the merchandise and coin that didn’t belong in that house of prayer; any injuries were sustained because of how people reacted.
And sure, the Cross looks like violence against the Son, but it isn’t God doing the violence, He’s just letting things proceed as they would without His constant limiting power. Everything that happened to Christ on the Cross was the result of sin, not of God! It wasn’t just humanity’s sin but also the sin of the dark forces plus their direct efforts, of course, but God didn’t have to exert any effort to get Jesus crucified (except to keep the Enemy in the dark as to the actual plan).
We think of victory in terms of stomping the enemy, so we think of wrath as active effort, but Jesus showed that both of those are wrong: victory looks like surrender, and wrath looks like the consequences of evil in the world. We take sin seriously, but not as seriously as the scriptures, and especially second-Temple Judaism; literature from the latter portrayed the Creation as a battle field where everything would be destroyed if it weren’t for YHWH-Elohim declaring, “This much, and no more!” as He did with Job’s persecution by the Accuser, such that if God’s restraint were withdrawn things would collapse into horrific chaos. It is only by God’s grace that the world itself even holds together!
It’s not unfounded speculation. Just because God “divorced” the rest of humanity and started His own new people via Abraham doesn’t mean He wasn’t working to set things up elsewhere to make conditions ready for the Gospel as much as possible. Indeed it would seem strange to me if He hadn’t done so, given that He doesn’t want anyone to be lost!
Christ never said a word about any such thing – He said all the scriptures speak of Him, not just one narrow set. Imposing the sanctuary service as a necessary framework puts the cart before the horse: the Temple and Tabernacle and altars and everything conform to Jesus, not the other way around!
Besides which the sanctuary service doesn’t point to a cross anyway; to get that the prophets are necessary.
Who said the Fall was symbolic? You’re the only one here mentioning such an idea! Just because a set of literature may be symbolic doesn’t mean that the things it speaks of are symbolic. This is especially true since in ancient terms a symbol was a thing that conveyed what it portrayed, so if the story of the Fall is symbolic of a Fall then the Fall is real; the story is conveying a truth, not just suggesting it.
Christ didn’t insert Himself into anything; that narrative was built around Him. You consistently get this backwards, which is bad Christology.
Sure I can – many of the church Fathers did the same. Some of them treated it as allegory (already recognizing that there is no evidence at all of a global flood). Symbols, especially in the ancient sense, aren’t empty, they aren’t just games, they point to something true. You seem to have this notion that if the Holy Spirit let His selected writers use symbols then He was lying
Nope – ordinary use of language, from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English says otherwise. You love to talk about the ordinary use of language, but you ignore it any time that becomes inconvenient!
No, the Flood being “local” comes from the ordinary use of language and the application of the historical-grammatical method: the account says that the known world was wiped out – which happens to be essentially the same concept that Peter uses, his term indicating the civilized world. And the Flood being real comes from taking the text seriously since the literature used is almost certainly mythologized/theologized history, i.e. a core event that is explained in a memorable and poetic way (it’s been called “poetic prose” due to the poetic aspects, but that’s a modern category).
Nope. That’s like saying that if a defect is only found in a few cars in a certain, then the recall that prompts the company to issue is only for local cars. You’re ignoring both logic and the ordinary use of language to reach your conclusion.
Only if just cars in one city needed a recall.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
That’s a popular idea but not a single electrical engineer I’ve known thinks it is remotely plausible. The problem is that when the scripture say the Ark was covered “inside and out” with gold it almost certainly meant a continuous sheet which means it couldn’t function as a Leyden jar; in fact even if the inside gold and outside weren’t continuous, both would have contacted the gold-plated lid. Actually that’s just the first problem; the second is the hefty unlikelihood that merely being carried around would build up sufficient charge to do more than jolt someone, or possibly knock someone out.
A useful article on this can be found here: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47627/could-the-ark-of-the-covenant-have-killed-by-acting-as-a-capacitor
Further, there could have been no charge from the “walking around in the desert” because the Philistines had already captured the Ark and the odds of them handling it rightly to keep a charge maintained are effectively zero (at least until Dagon fell on his face).
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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