The answer to this is actually really really simple and has been explained in depth a number of times even on this thread.
Lucifers’ rebellion in heaven was a literal physical event.
Lucifer cast to the earth, literally… a physical event.
Adam and Eve Sin… a real physical event.
God is left with two choices under his pre-existing law (the wages of sin is death). Either wipe out creation and start again (thus proving Lucifer’s reason for rebellion), or to offer a plan of salvation by instead dying on behalf of his own creation in order to fulfill his own law! This is a physical event (ie the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross)
The second coming of Christ and the raising of the dead in Christ to meet those who are alive in him in the air…a physical event
The brightness of Jesus second coming killing the wicked who are alive on the earth…a physical event
the creation of a new earth in Revelation 21, a literal physical event
Even in spite of the overwhelming evidence above that the entire Bible story is enacted because of literal physical events pertaining to the wages of sin also being real literal physical consequences, theistic evolution claims that we evolved, for some reason need salvation (although from what exactly they cannot say), and that none of this need for salvation came about due to literal, real, physical events!
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
62
The answer to this is actually really really simple and has been explained in depth a number of times even on this thread.
Lucifers’ rebellion in heaven was a literal physical event.
Lucifer cast to the earth, literally… a physical event.
Adam and Eve Sin… a real physical event.
God is left with two choices under his pre-existing law (the wages of sin is death). Either wipe out creation and start again (thus proving Lucifer’s reason for rebellion), or to offer a plan of salvation by instead dying on behalf of his own creation in order to fulfill his own law! This is a physical event (ie the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross)
The second coming of Christ and the raising of the dead in Christ to meet those who are alive in him in the air…a physical event
The brightness of Jesus second coming killing the wicked who are alive on the earth…a physical event
the creation of a new earth in Revelation 21, a literal physical event
Even in spite of the overwhelming evidence above that the entire Bible story is enacted because of literal physical events pertaining to the wages of sin also being real literal physical consequences, theistic evolution claims that we evolved, for some reason need salvation (although from what exactly they cannot say), and that none of this need for salvation came about due to literal, real, physical events!
You mean because some physical events have occurred if we string together tenuous relationships we can then assume these other events you believe are physical must be physical? This is simply fallacious reasoning. The old switcharoo.
I’m not buying that.
Negative on that.
Not even remotely historical. You get the Genre of Genesis completely wrong.
That is quite the interesting story you are telling that appears to border on dualism. I don’t see any of it as being true or relevant to anything, however.
No it won’t. Revelation was not about putative events thousands of years into the future. It concerned itself with things happening very much in the now at that time. It’s prophecies about Rome have failed. Concordant readings don’t work. Find spiritual truth in the material falsehood.
Good gosh! Lucifer is a spiritual being, not a physical person. How was it a “physical rebellion” when he isn’t physical, and how was his being cast from heaven a physical reality? Is heaven a physical location we can plot on a map of the universe? This is just nonsense.
You understand that “demise” means death, right? Lucifer didn’t die and his name wasn’t changed to Satan, whose name doesn’t appear in the garden narrative. I don’t know why anyone would listen to you, let alone why I’m responding.
Really? God was faced with a dilemma, like he didn’t anticipate any of this?
Okay, you cite an obviously metaphorical passage, and on that basis claim that the first part of the Bible can’t be metaphorical. Bizarre. This is the size of the literal New Jerusalem:
Adam, “fitting science around the Bible” means this:
¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lᴏʀᴅ your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lᴏʀᴅ your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly. – Deuteronomy 25:13-16
Starting from a conclusion that the earth is six thousand years old and twisting evidence and fudging measurements to try and make it say that, when quite clearly it does not, is NOT “fitting science around the Bible.” It is lying.
The age of the earth is not determined by “secular science.” It is determined by measuring things. Measurement works exactly the same way for Christians as it does for atheists. Secularism has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Which brings me back to Deuteronomy 25:13-16 again. Theistic evolution (and, for what it’s worth, old-earth progressive creation) obey these verses. Young earth creationism most decidedly does not.
It’s not “theistic evolution” you are “ear-bashing,” Adam. It is facts. It is hard, objective reality. It is hard, objective reality in the same way that gravity or electromagnetism are hard, objective reality. It is the clear, unambiguous and forceful conclusion writ large by God Himself into every rock, every fossil, every strata, every distant star and galaxy, every physical process, the very fabric of creation itself. The earth is 4.5 billion years old and not six thousand. The universe is 13.8 billion years old and not six thousand. As Christians, we need to be honest about that.
By “ear-bashing” rock-solid indisputable facts as if they were some sort of “theistic evolutionist” compromise or other, and by flinging Bible verses and accusations of “atheism” and “heresy” and “false teaching” around to try and justify it, what you are doing is inventing your own alternative reality and weaponising the Bible to try and bully Christians into going along with it. And as I’ve said, there’s a word for people who do things like that. The word in question is “cult.”
Your view, explanation, and theology is not Christianity. We are not required to have your view, explain things your way, or accept your theology in order to be Christian. World Christianity is a wide spectrum of views, explanations and theologies. You do not speak for God! And you certainly haven’t been given any authority over Christianity.
I certainly do believe Adam and Eve were real people whom God made human (His children) and they fell into sin. God had many options and His plans changed many times according to what we did. Blood sacrifices were the practice of people all over the world and were believed to propitiate the gods and were very much like an insurance policy to protect your family and business ventures. Of course this was all nonsense. So for the Israelites, God turned this practice to something a bit more meaningful, to get people to repent of their sins and seek to change themselves for the better. Doesn’t mean blood sacrifices actually have any magical power (or that God needs them) any more than the reforms of slavery God demanded in Israel means that God approves of slavery. Unfortunately, the practice of temple sacrifices turned into a practice of indulgences, where you would buy a lamb for sacrifice if you planned on sinning. And now it seems many so called Christians do the same thing with the gospel looking for entitlements and indulgences so they can do as they please also.
In response to the OP…
How can creationists call themselves Christian?
They refuse see, hear, or understand anything God is telling us in all that God sends us from the earth and sky.
And these things you complain about???
So you don’t think Christianity is about the cross? God didn’t so love the world that He gave His only son that we should not perish but have eternal life?
So when people do God’s will, like you say Judas did, then God says it is better that they had never been born? I don’t think so. That was will of devil and Jesus made this perfectly clear.
So when Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven,” you are calling Jesus a liar? And I guess you think all these Old Testament scriptures are lies also: Leviticus 16:30, Numbers 14:19-21, Psalm 103:8-12, Isaiah 38:17, Isaiah 43:25, Isaiah 44:22, Jeremiah 33, Ezekiel 36, Micah 7:18-19, Zechariah 3:4
And you think these are the basis for saying someone is not Christian? Just because they don’t fit with your personal explanation of Christianity does mean any such thing.
It is not what we have done which is important but what we do. God has forgiven sin many times throughout the Bible (OT and NT), but the point is for us to change and stop doing these self-destructive things we are doing. If we do not stop there is no point to it because God is not offering indulgences for our sin, never has, and never will. The reason for the scriptures is because God speaks to us and would do so whether we sinned or not. Jesus was murdered. His cup was the cup of Socrates giving His life rather than backing down from what He taught. And yes He gave his life for our salvation from sin just as our soldiers give their lives for our freedom. However, this is not blood sacrifice black magic and indulgences, whatever you say. I think only the devil would teach such a thing.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
71
Which, of course, does not require an intentional tuner.
c does not contain vacuum permittivity - epsilon zero - electro- and vacuum permeability - mu zero - magnetic, unless you’re making the connection with light’s electromagnetic properties; it all gets rather circular.
Oh wow…I’m deeply disturbed by what I read in some of these responses. These are essentially in complete denial of the entire plan of salvation.
I had no idea that there were those in this camp who deny the rebellion of Lucifer in heaven and are intent on completely denying the overwhelming biblical theology surrounding this.
I now understand completely why this movement is rejected so quickly by both sides…it appears to produce the hope of sanity and then responses like some of those above appear.
It’s even worse when short phrase quotes to my responses are intentionally used such that even I haven’t a clue what those quotes even refer to in my own writings? Thanks for that quoting clarity…really smart stuff to ensure context also follows the quotation. I may as well poke a small part of my butt cheek out and call it my foot
The term Lucifer, itself, unlike Michael and Gabriel didn’t come from the Bible. It came from Vulgate i.e., quomodo cecidisti de caeloluciferqui maneoriebariscorruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes.
In standard Bible translation, it is often translated as Morning Star.
I do not deny that there are mentions of rebellion in Heaven.
Since you seem not to have grasped my reply earlier, I going to repeat myself, while YOU set YOURSELF in a position to declare anathama on professing Christians:
All Christians are Christians by the same means, by faith in our Savior, the Lord Jesus, who died for our sins, was buried, rose on the third day and is now seated at the right hand of the Father. By the Holy Spirit we confess, “Jesus is Lord,” to the glory of the Father. And there’s an end to it.
I will refer you to Romans 8 for instruction. In the meantime, I will remind you (and anyone feeling beaten down by your accusations) of the encouragement Christians receive from our Lord from parts of that chapter:
8:10-12 “But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your motal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”
8:14-17: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness to our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”
8:28-30: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, in order that he might be the firstborn among any brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”
Who are YOU to judge someone else’s servant?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
75
Excellent. Who’s plan? What plan? You see Adam, that’s the problem. Fundamentalists, literalists, textists, grammatico-historical hermeneuticists, damnationists, conservatives, Augustine, Luther, Calvin all start with PSA, although their liberal adherents don’t like the Pee.
If Jesus was God incarnate, then God is the ground of being, all infinity is in God, from eternity. Existence has meaning.
Jesus is the only possible warrant for God, for transcendence, purpose.
How do we know about Him? From the documents of the Apostolic Church. The oldest, purest (the Gospels and Acts come decades later) being the seven consensus letters of Paul. Which reasonably testify to the Church up and running historically immediately on the death of its founder.
Jesus. A pre-modern country carpenter. Born in to a raging storm of cross enculturation going back five hundred years in final edits of documents from four times that in earlier Bronze Age sources which we still have (2000 BCE) and therefore thousands of years prior to that to the Copper Age Ghassulian culture (4500 BCE).
The evolution of the Israelite (Canaanite branch) God from the Midianite Yahweh conflated with ancestral Canaanite El emerged 1200 BCE. It took another six hundred years for strict monotheism and Messianism to emerge from the Babylonian Exile.
Jesus was born fully human on top of all that. All the stories made up in all that cultural story. Due to His mother’s story, He saw Himself in it and convinced His followers to this day.
His story and theirs of the meaning of His life and how transcendence works is just that. It couldn’t have been any different.
And that is no less faithful than the most narrow, wooden, literal interpretation of the stories in His culture, which He concurred with. How could He not? And dispensed with.
Nobody needs the Father to murder His Son instead of them, because a character in a fairie tale ate some magic fruit, or any other reason.
Everyone needs to realise that Love just might be the ground of being.
It certainly is a cult. Would another expression for that be “false teaching”, the very accusation they throw at those who will not be cowed into accepting their simple minded, fear driven reading of the Bible?
That’s not quite right. A literal interpretation of those genealogies does not reconcile with mountains of evidence. At some point, you will have to address the real physical facts instead of attacking some evolution boogeyman.
Science doesn’t start with the conclusion. It follows the evidence.
We can demonstrate that the YEC interpretation is false.
Science isn’t atheism. Again, you will need to address facts, not an invented boogeyman.
A theology would seem to have a rather massive hole when it can be disproven by mountains of evidence. That’s the problem facing YEC.
Heresy detectives abound: in the Abrahamic religions and among mainstream sciences. I remember the years leading up to the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. Anitrelativist “cranks” crawled out of the woodwork everywhere on the internet, seeking room on the World Wide Stage; some posing their own alternate ideas, and some–like me–who started out just looking for someone to 'splain rudiments of the theory of special relativity to me. Discussions often deteriorated into name-calling and then, to silence the clamor of “noobie” and veteran cranks, established forums resorted to quick banning of dissidents.
Ahhh!, … those were the days of fervent word-battles, the likes of which America is best known for. Personally, I don’t miss them, but … it never ceased to amuse me when the cocky groupies of Einstein stepped onto a forum bumper-car court, lance at the ready, helmet in place, and seatbelt strapped, to put a crank in place and found himself chastised by the rare “truly knowledgeable” among Relativist ranks.
Having proceeded as far as I can go in my own research into the current “pathogenesis” of anti-creationism, I found myself troubled by the discovery of “Martyred Intellectuals Day” in Bangladesh. Sinclair Lewis’ book, It Can’t Happen Here, came to mind, and I shuddered.
Believe it or not, this is one of the very important theological details creation.com clarifies with their new and improved “functional maturity” theory (not to be confused with “appearance of age argument,” which is out.)
But one striking feature, distinguishing them from all their descendants, would be the absence of navels, since the navel (umbilicus or belly button) is the scar where the umbilical cord attached us to our mothers via the placenta. There is also a thinning of the abdominal muscles, which is a potential vulnerability to hernias. Adam and Eve were direct creations of God, so had no navel. A navel in either of them would seem to have no function apart from looking like a history that never happened.
Some have fallaciously claimed that Adam and Eve had navels, because they would have had genes for them to pass on to their offspring. However, it’s not just a matter of having genes for a navel. Genes are also switched on and off in precise sequence during embryonic development. Any genes controlling the navel are expressed during embryo development as tissues accommodate the umbilical cord. So today, our tissues are arranged in this way because of developmental sequence more than genetic coding per se. So since Adam and Eve had no mothers, there would have been no development of the navel.
Such arguments also overlook that Adam and Eve also had genes for embryonic and fetal hemoglobin, deciduous teeth, growth hormone, and controlling the changes in puberty, since these were also passed on to their descendants. But in this founding couple created as fully grown adults, these genes were never expressed either.
It all makes sense because (hand wave, hand wave) genes and science stuff.
