Good and Evil, Towb and Ra

Faith & Science Conversation
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Besides that, the “either” above is a false dichotomy based on linear, binary thinking. Which relates to:

And so–

God is speaking in that present to someone in that present, not from His eternal perspective in which what Israel would do was something He was also observing in that present.

The opening of Isaiah 5 is a parable’ the vineyard imagery is a common parable item. Yet even the parable doesn’t say God planted this vineyard, it says, “My beloved”, which in Old Testament imagery can be Israel but it can also be David, though it is also a way to refer to the coming Messiah in his pre-incarnate form. Given that God is addressing Jerusalem and Judah, “My beloved” quite likely refers to David, who in establishing the kingdom of Israel “planted a vineyard” for the Lord.

God’s argument there would be strange if He said, “I saw that she did not return, but she did not return”. Without diving into analyzing the text, I’m seeing this as an instance of God speaking in anthropomorphic terms.

The language used when it says He “knows the end from the beginning” is inclusive; it is a use of “from” as in “I know that trail from beginning to end”, meaning the speaker knows every detail of the trail all along the way.
The problem here is separating “bobbing and weaving” from an alternative as though the only alternative is force.

It comes from the first Creation story, where God creates time along with everything else.
The only things constrained by time are those who are completely within Creation. For this to apply to God would mean that He didn’t create as the writers say, commanding things that didn’t exist into being, but that time is not a created thing dependent on God. If Gd is, as the scripture tells us, Creator of all, then He is outside time because He is its creator.

It’s math, actually; “omnipresent” is an inherently geometrical statement.
My older brother the mathematician had a geometrical explanation of omnipresence, though I’ll skip going into it here.

On a root level, the error is geometric, as I’ve explained above; on a theological level, it’s a failure to grasp either (1) that God created time or (2) that having created time, God is not constrained by it (indeed cannot be and remain God).

Good point. “Foreknowledge” is a word useful only to those stuck with no freedom to relocate in time, and so is ultimately inapplicable to God since he is greater than time: He acts within it but cannot be bound by it.

You “compelled” you, and God observes it. I deliberately use the present tense because He is even now observing all our free choices in both past and future as being made “right now” because He is present in all moments, i.e. all moments are present moments to Him.
He is Alpha and Omega not because He was at the start of time and will be at the end of it, He is Alpha and Omega because He is equally present at that start, at that end, and at every moment in between, all at once.

This is where your geometry goes wrong: God knows what choice you made because He is observing it as you made it, and He knows what choices you will make because He is observing them as you make them. God does not look into the future, He is already there, observing the free choices being made in all future moments just as in all past moments.

Genesis 1: the phrase “the Heavens and the Earth” is an idiom meaning “everything that is”, and “everything” includes time. Just as the potter is external to the pot, so also God is external to all that He has made. Also the places where Paul calls the Father the maker of all things and refers to Jesus as the instrument of creation of all things.
The only way for God to not be external to time is if He is not actually the Creator but is just one being in a universe where time exists independently of/from Him.

Exactly.

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Who are all the "I"s in this section? I’m thinking God. Who is speaking in verse 4? Clearly it it is God and He said He looked for good grapes but got bad ones. In verse 7 God looked for judgment but got oppression, for righteousness but got cries. Why would He have looked for something He know wasn’t there?

I don’t think David is the subject of verse 5. As good as David was, he, because he was human nonetheless missed the mark by committed adultery and murder. Who knows where else he may have stumbled and in the process playing a part in producing the wild grapes.

His Beloved was God’s agent in carrying out the task, but it was God’s vineyard which He had hoped would be fruitful. In the ANE an agent is as good as the one who sent them. There are several instances where a messenger would speak as though he himself were the king, using the first person pronoun, etc. I believe that is how an Israelite would have understood this section.

Ultimately I’d say that His Beloved was a reference to the coming Messiah, Jesus. I believe all of this fits with the near and far context of the actual text as well as the culture.

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I guess you are saying God does not have foreknowledge? If so, I’ve misunderstood you. Sorry about that!

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First of all, I think you are very wise not to put all your chickens in one basket, namely in Strong’s Concordance. However there are many other source texts that help us see what they meant by the logos. Here’s a Wiki that lays it out pretty good: Logos

Remember, it’s more relevant to understand the meaning of words as they were understood when God gave us the scriptures. Language and the meaning of words, as well as concepts, change over time. Two thousand years have passed since john was written. It would be unreasonable to think that John used the word “logos” the way we think of it. No, he used to communicate a truth to people in terms they understood.

Well, I’m not an expert in Greek either. I took it for 2 years at Emory University, which hardly qualifies as an expert. But I can tell you that translating “pros” as with in John is misleading. Almost always it is used as making a reference to something, or pointing to something. In the vast majority of its usages in the KJV it is translated, “to” or “unto.” There are much better Greek words for “with” than “pros.”

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No, that is not what I’m saying and I’m afraid you are still misunderstanding. Please look at the comment again…

The essence of what I’m saying is that the word is invalid and not applicable when used to refer to God’s knowledge. He has all the knowledge of the past, the present and the future ‘instantaneously’. He is omniscient. Right now. Jesus said “Before Abraham was born, I AM.”

Notice the italicized ‘fore’ above in the word foreknowledge. That is time-dependent language (as all our language is) and time-dependent language does not apply to God because he.is.independent.of.time.

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That’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is after that:

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My older brother the mathematician would say that if you apply n-dimensional geometry there’s no difficulty with God being timeless and acting within time even simultaneously. Arguing against God’s timelessness is not necessary to assert that He indeed acts within time.

My brother applied mathematics to all sorts of things that philosophers wrestle with and over and says if you know higher math many, maybe most issues go away. They’re only issues to us because we are stuck in time and that skews our perspective.

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I think that was the toughest thing about learning ancient Hebrew! My first Hebrew professor said that when he really immersed himself in the text sometimes the way he saw the world would flip and he would be seeing things the way the Israelites would have, but it never lasted.
I almost met his mentor once, who my professor said was the only man he knew who could think like a Hebrew because he could think in Hebrew – he actually wrote love poems in Hebrew to his wife-to-be and continued after they were married. When he got his doctorate in ancient Hebrew, he answered all the questions from the panel of professors in Hebrew, only using English when someone not on the examination panel asked a question.

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Knowing another language does give you a window into a different way of thinking, true. But I think it’s important to remember your understanding will always be linked to your starting place, which is your own language and culture. People a few generations ago believed you could actually perfectly acquire other languages and cultures from study. It’s not true. All the grammars and lexicons your professor used to learn ancient Hebrew (a dead language and culture) were written by white men and reflect to some degree their biases and worldviews. I have no doubt he loved the language and the Bible and was very proficient in what he had studied, but he it’s impossible that he “thought like a Hebrew.”

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Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

Translated with the force of the tenses and sense of the structure, this reads, “In the beginning the Logos was being, and the Logos was being face-to-face with God, and GOD is what the Logos was being.”

This is one of those cases where a noun lacks the definite article but is more definite than it would be with it; the traditional translation is, “And the Logos was God”, but that fails to catch the emphatic nature of the relationship being specified.

The idea that the Logos was not just the principle behind the functioning of all Creation was already present in one or two branches/parties of Judaism in the first century B.C. as well as the first century A.D. It’s commonly noted that in Greek philosophy the organizing principle of existence was labeled the logos and the assertion is made that this is what John was linking to, but more has been learned about various branches of Jewish philosophy and that was probably primary in John’s mind.

This is an artificial distinction that has no basis in the text, either Old or New Covenant writings.

I occasionally encounter the claim that the words for “Holy Spirit” in the Greek are neuter and thus the Spirit is a force, not a person, but John 14:26 knocks that idea down–

ὁ δὲ παράκλητος, τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit”

“Helper” (or “Advocate”, “Counselor”, or just “Paraclete” (the Greek word used) is a masculine, and since “the Holy Spirit” is a subordinate phrase the neuter is irrelevant. It’s also worth noting that an Advocate is a person. Given that this is Jesus telling us about the Advocate Who is the Holy Spirit, this is definitive for the New Testament.

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Jesus declared Himself to be God so many times that there’s no doubt He believed Himself to be God. Just because John chooses a particular phraseology here doesn’t exclude the rest.

All that John 1:1 does is tell us that the Son of God actually is God – which the Jews already knew (and objected to Jesus referring to Himself as the Son of God for that reason).

This is a fallacious form of argument that is a common mistake, one we were warned against in grad school: you cannot define a word as used by a certain author by limiting the options to what is in a dictionary. As I’ve noted, the Logos was regarded as divine starting about two centuries before John wrote, so when he identifies the Logos as God it comes as no great shock (especially in light of what Dr. Heiser expounds on regarding two powers in heaven in Judaism). Philo of Alexandria writes of the Logos as a divine being who is the mediator between God and humans, and other Jewish thinkers in the first century followed the same theme – in fact Philo calls the Logos “second God” and “God’s firstborn son” (naming him both priest and king at different times). Further, Wisdom from the Old Testament is portrayed as a person in Proverbs and many strains of Judaism equated Wisdom with the Logos (or Memra, the Aramaic equivalent), also regarding the Logos as a person.
Other Jewish writers identified the Logos as the instrument through whom God did the work of Creation, plus identifying the appearances of God in human form in the Old Testament as being the Logos taking a physical aspect.

Given how the term was used in Judaism as referring to a divine Person, using Strong’s to try to say the Logos can’t be a person is just disingenuous.

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When the parable ends, God speaks in judgment and in doing so employs the first person singular. But He is still speaking in terms of the parable, shifting to anthropomorphic language.
Saying He looked for the vineyard to yield grapes and not wild grapes is a statement of what was supposed to happen but did not. That doesn’t require “[looking] for something He know (sic) wasn’t there” since it is speaking of Himself on our level.

The parable is over before verse 5, besides which verse 5 doesn’t mention the Beloved. But from the identification of the vineyard with Israel in verse 7, David is the only candidate for the Beloved in this text.

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I thought you had mentioned “pros” in another post. Must have been someone else.

In any case, this is getting way off the original post and as I understand it, it doesn’t fit with the rules of the forum itself. As much as I’d like to continue the discussion, it’s probably we let it go.

Thanks!

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It seems to me that it’s much easier just to take it for what it says without introducing extraneous ideas. I mean, that God looked for one thing and found something else seems pretty straight forward to me.

Are you saying that verses through 4 must be about David, that they couldn’t possibly be about someone else? If so, I wonder why. Also are you saying that the "I’ in verse 4 is not the same “I” in verse 5. I must be misunderstanding you because that makes no grammatical sense.

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I think we are getting way off topic as well as the intent of the forum itself. Better move on to something else. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I see where he explicitly declared himself to be the son of God, about 35 times as I recall. Nowhere does he explicitly declare himself to be anything other than God’s son. A son can in nowise be also his own father. The idea is the epitome of ludicrous. Hard to believe it’s been going on for 2,000+ years now. Oh well, once we convince someone about something being a “mystery” anything goes I guess. No need for minding the meaning of simple words and logic flies out the window.

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There are scholars, many Trinitarian included, that would disagree. Why would John say Jesus is God in one place and then say in another place that he wrote to show Jesus is the son of God (John 20:31)? There is a huge difference between a son and a Father. Jesus called God his father many times. I think both Jesus and God understood the difference. I’ll also point out that Jesus said on more than one occasion that he had a God. If Jesus was God, Who in world would God’s God be?

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That article is seriously deficient. I’m going to have to find references for when Philo calls the Logos a person, a “second God” and “the mediator” between God and humans.
Philo is interesting on the topic because he sometimes treats the Logos as a ‘part’ of God, other times as a messenger of God, and sometimes as God – which I suppose shouldn’t be surprising because the Old Testament does the same thing with the “physical YHWH”.

When used of two people. and sometimes of a person and an animal, πρὸς carries the meaning of being in someone’s presence and can be considered as meaning “facing”, so “the Logos was facing God” – a usage that already hints that the Logos is a person.
Using πρὸς that way is also somewhat more common among Jewish writers than Greeks or Romans (I don’t know if this is a Jewish thing or an Aramaic-speaking thing or broader east Mediterranean, not that it really matters).

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If He’d said it explicitly His ministry would have been over. Instead He used a teaching technique beloved by rabbis down through the centuries: set out certain statements and expect the hearer to draw the conclusion. He did come out and say it directly when the final trajectory of His mission was happening; “Before Abraham was, I AM” is a grammatical mess that can only have one meaning: that Jesus is YHWH.

Indirectly, my favorite instance is when He told the Pharisees, “One greater than the Temple is here”, referring to himself. In second temple Judaism the only one that could be greater than the temple was the God whose house it was.

Logic, in the form of the rules of grammar, tells us that Jesus is the Logos and the Logos is God. Logic also tells us that calling Himself “Son of God” is a claim to be God, as the Pharisees knew when Jesus called God His Father. They also recognized His claim to be God when He forgave sins, when He said He was Lord of the Sabbath, and other instances.

“A son can in nowise be also his own father. The idea is the epitome of ludicrous.”
What’s ludicrous is claiming that anyone is saying this! That’s the same childish ‘reasoning’ that atheists use, and it’s either deliberately misleading or thoroughly unaware of what the scriptures say.

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Wiki is not the only source for info on the logos. I just threw it out there for starters.

Philo’s life mission was to harmonize Greek philosophy with the scriptures. Does that sound like a reliable source for truth? Not to me!