And @maggie777, welcome. I also enjoy speaking with the likes of @MarkD and have frankly learned a lot from him from his witty interaction and intellectual background. His gentlemanly and kindly interaction have also been enjoyable. I myself am only a family physician who struggled a long time before leaving YEC, and found that this is a helpful site for learning without fear of recrimination. I’m a Christian, but find my background, while in the health sciences, doesn’t really make me a practicing scientist. I’m amazed at the poets, English majors, Christians and skeptics who participate. Based on what I’ve seen so far, your contribution will only make it richer. Thank you for your input.
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Haha. I am such a legalist. 
Are you adopted? I hope so. (That’s a fairly major concept in the NT – you really should not have so much difficulty with it.)
Thank you. What is a YEC? I have encountered a great number of new acronyms here, but this one really stumps me.
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YEC- young earth creationist. There are several flavors with the most tart being the Answers in Genesis and Institute of Creation Research varieties.
That is a very gracious characterization.
Why are you still beating that drum? Neither Maggie nor I believe any such thing. Could you not read?:
Dale, you stated “This idea that faith means God giving us the power to save ourselves” in response to my quoting John 1:12 " as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the children of God". Why did you misstate what I said? I said nothing by which we can save ourselves; I said the power God gives us when we have faith in Jesus Christ, is the Holy Spirit. He enables us to understand how to yield to the Lord’s will for us. How could you possibly interpret “the power of the Holy Spirit” as “the power to save ourselves”?
Then concerning the blood sacrifice of the Torah you said “Now that is an example of some stuff in the Christian spectrum which I do not believe in. There is no magical power in blood.” As far as God having created the concepts of what does and does not have (spiritual) power, you are not contesting either against me or Christians when you say you do not believe “there is … magical power in blood”. You might as well say you don’t believe in the power of the moon to affect Earth’s tides. Don’t accost the astronomers; take it up with God. He made up the rule.
If you are going to make inquiry into how and why God does things, you can’t edit out of his book everything you don’t like before class. Christians did not make up the rule; “… under the Law almost everything is cleansed with blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness [neither release from sin and its guilt, nor cancellation of the merited punishment].” (Hebrews 9: 22) [Paul added the word “almost”, because according to the Law (the Torah) certain objects, but not sin, could be cleansed by water)]. I don’t have a choice about depending on the blood of Jesus for salvation, nor does any other Christian, nor do you, nor does God. God bound himself by his word. Because God demanded the shedding of blood for the forgiveness of sin in the Old Testament, he had to keep his own command in the New. In the OT, the blood from the sacrifice had to be poured on the altar every year. In the NT, when God’s own Son became the sacrifice for the blood, it only had to be done once, for eternity. Either way, you don’t have an option to remake God and his demand for life to be given, in keeping with 20th century American morals; God set the rules five thousand years ago when sacrifices were a given way of life. God does not ask YOU to shed blood; Jesus shed His 2,000 years ago. It is finished. God would not ask anyone to do so today. Accept that 2,000 years ago, God fulfilled what had been custom 1,500 years earlier, and move on. The first time God gave the rule that blood must be shed for the forgiveness of sin (upon repentance), he gave it to Aaron, Moses’ brother, the first priest. These are some of the scriptures showing how and why God established spiritual power in the blood:
(Leviticus 17:11) 'For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your sins; (Exodus 30:10) “Aaron shall make atonement on the altar with the blood of the sin offering of atonement once a year”; (Leviticus 23:27-28) Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement [Yom Kippur].
The premise that sacrificial blood poured on the altar before God in conjunction with repentance, signified God’s forgiveness of the sin, saturated Jewish thinking. As God clarified Messiah’s first coming was to cancel sin for all repentant men, the importance of His blood was emphasized by the the NT writers, and correlated with the miracle working power the sacrificial blood had at the Exodus, in “saving” God’s people at the “Passover”. Remember, Passover and Yom Kippur are the two most important days of the Jewish calendar, and both are based on the power of blood as instituted by God.
If you recall the story, Moses had repeatedly pleaded with Pharoah “let my people go” into the wilderness to worship God. Every time Pharoah refused, a new plague was released on Egypt. The worst one was “the death of the first born”. God said if Pharoah would not let the children of Israel go, he would cause the death of the first born male of every household in Egypt. He said to Moses however, that his people would be :saved. Each family was to sacrifice a lamb, get ready to leave in a hurry, even eating the bread before it was leavened; they were to take blood from the lamb and put it over the doors of every house of the people of God, and when the death angel came to slay the first-born, he would “Pass-over” the houses wherever he saw the “blood of the Lamb”. This is what Passover means. The blood from the sacrifice had the power to save God’s people from death in the O.T. . The concept of there being “power in the blood” is not from Christianity", it predated Christianity by at least 1,500 years at the command of God. Today Christians refer to the blood of the Lamb, as the blood of Jesus which both cancels the penalty of sin, but also saves us from the power of the “death angel”, Satan, whose goal is to take us to eternal death. If we remain in faith and obedience to Jesus, His blood “saves us” from Eternal Death, and gives us eternal Life.
These concepts as to the importance of the blood of Jesus; the obedience of faith; communion in personal relationship with Jesus; being led by the Holy Spirit (who is given to us to be the enabling POWER by which we are changed from our old carnal nature into the new nature of Christ), and the necessity of continuing repentance from whatever is transgression of the precepts of God for salvation, are all part of Christianity 101. It is not that knowledge saves us, but ignorance will kill us if ignorance keeps us in sin. At any rate, a belief in the “Power of the Blood of Jesus” is not optional in Christianity. It is as much a spiritual fact as is the fact that the sun has thermodynamic power. In fact, it is the basis for Christianity. If it were not for the efficacious power of the blood of Jesus, we would all have to live under the 600+ laws of the Torah to have any hope of eternal life. First century Christians knew all these things. They grew up with this knowledge. Today’s Christians don’t, but every word is in the Bible, and any theologian will confirm them.
I didn’t. That is @mitchellmckain’s take, not mine. Maybe you meant to reply to him, not me?
Ah, maybe I see the problem – I was quoting him, and you thought it was my voice? The vertical bars to the left of text is a quote bar, indicating another voice. A double gray bar means it is a quote within a quote.
OH! YEC. You mean, Yech, such distasteful doctrine for anyone who can actually read.
Your words are nested by the double bar here inside of @mitchellmckain’s where he was quoting you. My reply has no bar to the left.
Sounds good. I stand corrected. I agree that I was reacting to something I don’t like without enough justification.
But I don’t believe God made up any such thing. Blood sacrifice did not come from God or Israel any more than slavery did. Both are simply an example of God trying to turn accepted human practices towards something better. Everywhere else sacrifices were performed for the purpose of appeasing deities supposedly controlling nature. This is of course completely pointless. So what God did with Israel was an improvement to make this about repenting of our sins. But the point was never to win God’s forgiveness as if God needed some kind of payment or magical ritual in order to forgive people. Can you imagine asking for blood sacrifices in order for you to forgive people something (or imagine teaching children that they have to sacrifice an animal theyhave in order to be forgiven)? It is both bizarre and a little sick. The point was never forgiveness or appeasement but that we would make an effort to change. Jesus’ constant refrain was, “your sins are forgiven, so go and sin no more,” not “your sins are forgiven if proper payment is made.” The latter is how you end up with the medieval practice of indulgences.
Maybe you don’t understand about the Paschal Lamb, the Agnus Dei, and maybe about not about this, either:
I get the distinct impression that the attributes that you allow God to have are very much Mitchellpomorphic.
The Courts of the Lord, of course.
We have a right to request the rights God promised us, and to ask Jesus to speak for us before the Court, as our Advocate. I long and yearn for the courts of the LORD; my heart and flesh cry out for the living God.(Psalm 84:2) : “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). For all the promises of God in Him are Yes (2 Cor 1: 20).
In spite of what some prosperity preachers say, God never promised us either riches or a rose garden, but he did promise us peace. If we lose that peace, we just go to Jesus, our advocate, who takes our request that peace be restored before the Courts of the Lord, and it is. He has done it a hundred times for me.
Sorry. But it was you, who would rather remove “the blood of Jesus” from Christian theology.?
Dale just quoted the same scripture I did. The only way you could realistically say that God did not institute the rule that “for His forgiveness, there must be shedding of blood”, would be if you have never read the old testament, and have never read much of the New Testament. He does not require it NOW, but he required it under the Law. Therefore he required it of Jesus - just one time - and Jesus fulfilled the requirement of the Law, so it will never again be required.
If you say God did not require blood, then who was speaking at Exodus 30: 10, and Leviticus 23:27?
The comment wasn’t about God directly. So you have two choices here…
- It is just fine to require your children to sacrifice their pets before you would forgive them of things. And you don’t see anything wrong with that kind of behavior.
- What is bizarre and sick for human parents to do is fine in the case of God. So God is not a good example for human beings and we should not try to be like God. God can be a sicko because He has the right and the only righteousness you really believe in is nothing more than being a craven worm to an evil sorcerer.
If your choice is number 2 then I am sorry then I can only say that you can worship the devil but I will never do so. For evil is defined not by the name of a person but by their behavior. So yes I definitely have standards of decent behavior for anyone I could ever have any respect for – especially God.
This would have to take into account differences that arise from skills and responsibility. For example sticking a knife into people is not something that people should do to others without the skills and responsibilities of a surgeon. In the same way we can justify the suffering and death found in evolution and much of the Bible by the fact that God has the skill and responsibility for the creation of life and the redemption of mankind.
But no I do not accept the justification of “potter has rights over the clay” to mean that God can do anything He chooses just because He is God and I am going to give Him my respect and obedience anyway. The difference between God and the devil MUST be more than just a name, otherwise the easiest masquerade by the devil will make you his servant.
Maggie you are just making me repeat myself. My answer remains exactly the same.
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|[Mitchell W McKain]
I have not fully figured out how to tell who is speaking to whom on this site, so I mistakenly addressed Dale, on comments actually made by you. I had not figured out the pale gray line. Anyway, I will re-post to you, Mitchell, what I first said to Dale, but with additions to clarify Christian doctrine that seems foreign to you.
MITCHELL: you stated “This idea that faith means God giving us the power to save ourselves” in response to my quoting John 1:12 " as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the children of God". Why did you misstate what I said? I said nothing by which we can save ourselves; I said the power God gives us when we have faith in Jesus Christ, is the Holy Spirit. He enables us to understand how to yield to the Lord’s will for us. How could you possibly interpret “the power of the Holy Spirit” as “the power to save ourselves”? It is not just my personal opinion the the “power” to become the children of God is indeed the Holy Spirit. this was a promise Jesus spoke to His disciples. He told them to remain in Jerusalem until they were given “power” from “on high”. This was he Holy Spirit, who came on them on the day memorialized as Pentecost in the church calendar. Jesus said it was the Holy Spirit whom He would send, who would be the “enabler” so we could do the same works He did. This is fundamental Christian theology.
Then concerning the blood sacrifice of the Torah you said “Now that is an example of some stuff in the Christian spectrum which I do not believe in. There is no magical power in blood.” As far as God having created the concepts of what does and does not have (spiritual) power, you are not contesting either against me or Christians when you say you do not believe “there is … magical power in blood”. You might as well say you don’t believe in the power of the moon to affect Earth’s tides. Don’t accost the astronomers; take it up with God. He made up the rule.
If you are going to make inquiry into how and why God does things, you can’t edit out of his book everything you don’t like before class. Christians did not make up the rule; “… under the Law almost everything is cleansed with blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness [neither release from sin and its guilt, nor cancellation of the merited punishment].” (Hebrews 9: 22) [Paul added the word “almost”, because according to the Law (the Torah) certain objects, but not sin, could be cleansed by water)]. I don’t have a choice about depending on the blood of Jesus for salvation, nor does any other Christian, nor do you, nor does God. God bound himself by his word. Because God demanded the shedding of blood for the forgiveness of sin in the Old Testament, he had to keep his own command in the New. In the OT, the blood from the sacrifice had to be poured on the altar every year. In the NT, when God’s own Son became the sacrifice for the blood, it only had to be done once, for eternity. Either way, you don’t have an option to remake God and his demand for life to be given, in keeping with 20th century American morals; God set the rules five thousand years ago when sacrifices were a given way of life. God does not ask YOU to shed blood; Jesus shed His 2,000 years ago. It is finished. God would not ask anyone to do so today. Accept that 2,000 years ago, God fulfilled what had been custom 1,500 years earlier, and move on. The first time God gave the rule that blood must be shed for the forgiveness of sin (upon repentance), he gave it to Aaron, Moses’ brother, the first priest. These are some of the scriptures showing how and why God established spiritual power in the blood:
(Leviticus 17:11) 'For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your sins; (Exodus 30:10) “Aaron shall make atonement on the altar with the blood of the sin offering of atonement once a year”; (Leviticus 23:27-28) Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement [Yom Kippur].
The premise that sacrificial blood poured on the altar before God in conjunction with repentance, signified God’s forgiveness of the sin, saturated Jewish thinking. As God clarified Messiah’s first coming was to cancel sin for all repentant men, the importance of His blood was emphasized by the the NT writers, and correlated with the miracle working power the sacrificial blood had at the Exodus, in “saving” God’s people at the “Passover”. Remember, Passover and Yom Kippur are the two most important days of the Jewish calendar, and both are based on the power of blood as instituted by God.
If you recall the story, Moses had repeatedly pleaded with Pharoah “let my people go” into the wilderness to worship God. Every time Pharoah refused, a new plague was released on Egypt. The worst one was “the death of the first born”. God said if Pharoah would not let the children of Israel go, he would cause the death of the first born male of every household in Egypt. He said to Moses however, that his people would be :saved. Each family was to sacrifice a lamb, get ready to leave in a hurry, even eating the bread before it was leavened; they were to take blood from the lamb and put it over the doors of every house of the people of God, and when the death angel came to slay the first-born, he would “Pass-over” the houses wherever he saw the “blood of the Lamb”. This is what Passover means. The blood from the sacrifice had the power to save God’s people from death in the O.T. . The concept of there being “power in the blood” is not from Christianity", it predated Christianity by at least 1,500 years at the command of God. Today Christians refer to the blood of the Lamb, as the blood of Jesus which both cancels the penalty of sin, but also saves us from the power of the “death angel”, Satan, whose goal is to take us to eternal death. If we remain in faith and obedience to Jesus, His blood “saves us” from Eternal Death, and gives us eternal Life.
These concepts as to the importance of the blood of Jesus; the obedience of faith; communion in personal relationship with Jesus; being led by the Holy Spirit (who is given to us to be the enabling POWER by which we are changed from our old carnal nature into the new nature of Christ), and the necessity of continuing repentance from whatever is transgression of the precepts of God for salvation, are all part of Christianity 101. It is not that knowledge saves us, but ignorance will kill us if ignorance keeps us in sin. At any rate, a belief in the “Power of the Blood of Jesus” is not optional in Christianity. It is as much a spiritual fact as is the fact that the sun has thermodynamic power. In fact, it is the basis for Christianity. If it were not for the efficacious power of the blood of Jesus, we would all have to live under the 600+ laws of the Torah to have any hope of eternal life. First century Christians knew all these things. They grew up with this knowledge. Today’s Christians don’t, but every word is in the Bible, and any theologian will confirm them.
As I said before, blood sacrifices have not been required for 2,000 years. God does not ask you to make any sacrifices, and please do not assume he would allow any of us to ask our children to. However, the first blood sacrifice ever recorded in the Bible was when there were no human beings other than Adam, Eve and their children. Remember Cain and Able? The first-born (figuratively) humans? Cain raised crops, Abel raised sheep. Both gave God and offering of their best, God respected Abels’s offering of the life of a sheep, but rejected Cain’s offering because it did not cost blood. Life is the most precious thing that exists as far as God is concerned. He expects us to give him our best.
21st century more’s are irrelevant. Every principle underlying both Judaism and Christianity was put down sometime during a period between around 3,500 and 2,000 years ago. The writings from that time demanded that LIFE be given and blood be shed for the forgiveness of sin, in order for the penalty of sin to be avoided. That’s all folks. There are no more needed now, because Christ made the sacrifice once, for all, so that all who have faith in Him and follow Him, receive that benefit. Why argue against something God did 2,000 years ago do you can have eternal life under the rules that were in effect then? What’s your point? In your protest that God gave the most valuable thing in existence, the life of His Son, you will now say “I reject the sacrifice, God. Take it back. I don’t want eternal life on your terms.”
Does any society on the planet put a greater value on anything, more than that on a man’s first born son? In God giving his ONLY Son, to provide the only possible hope of eternal life for humans, God gave us the very best he had to give, 2,000 years ago. It was not North America, third millenium. If God’s gift for your salvation, planned before the foundations of the world and executed 2,000 years ago, does not meet your standards of what is appropriate for a gift, I guess you will have to do without one. From the beginning of human life up until 2,000 years ago, God demanded blood sacrifices. He no longer requires them, but if the fulfillment of the Law that was achieved in the past is rejected, there is no way to replace it. The penalty for sin still has to be paid. I accepted the payment Jesus paid for me, on my behalf. If you reject it you have no hope for eternal life at all. You would have to pay the penalty yourself, which is eternal death. No matter how distasteful the concept is for you, the history of God’s interaction with man has always been that men have incurred the death penalty by their acts of rebellion against God; God in his mercy made a way back - the specific blood sacrifice he gave, of his Son. We accept that sacrifice, or we lose the hope of eternal life.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
For Christ died for sins once and for all, a good man on behalf of sinners, in order to lead you to God. He was put to death physically, but made alive spiritually (1 Peter 3:18)
1 Peter 2:21 For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. 22 He committed no sin; no guile was found on his lips. 23 When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he trusted to him who judges justly. 24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.
2 Cor 5 We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Jesus who was equal with God did not cling to this but emptied Himself of power and knowledge to become a servant, in the likeness of men, a helpless infant obedient to the laws of this world even unto torture and death (Phillipians 2). Jesus came that we might have life and have it more abundantly (John 10:10), and because of our sins we nailed Him to a cross. The Bible employs a number of metaphors to help us understand this.
- Ransom - Jesus life was the payment of a ransom to the devil for us to be released from him.
- Judicial substitution - Jesus became our sin and was condemned in our place.
- Sacrificial Lamb - John 1:29, 1 Cor 5:7 “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”
- Replacement Adam - 1 Cor 15:22,45 Jesus replaces Adam as our source of life and inheritance that in Him we have a new lineage connecting us to God.
- Healer - 1 Peter 2:24 “by His wounds you have been healed.”
But metaphors are only comparisons to say that one thing is like another in some ways and never to say they are identical. Jesus is like a ransom, substitute for our sin, sacrificial lamb, replacement for Adam, or healer. But how can we take any of these literally when none of these are the same at all. At some point metaphors always break down for in every case, while there are similarities there are also differences.
- Is God really powerless in the face of the demands of a kidnapper?
- If Jesus became our sins then destroying Him once and for all would solve our problems, so God bringing Him back to life was a terrible mistake. An innocent person cannot really pay for the crimes of the guilty. That would make Jesus a “patsy.”
- We cannot really support the practice of human sacrifice or believe that such a thing really has any kind of magical power.
- It is no more likely that we are all genetically descended from Adam than we are genetically descended from Jesus. But this metaphor works for a memetic inheritance though at most what we have from Jesus adds to what we have from Adam rather than replaces it.
- The sins and ills of the world remain so as a healer He would be a failure and His death on the cross as an surgical operation would be failure also.
The truth is that Jesus death and atonement for our sins is like nothing else. But these metaphors help bring us some understanding. And to these in the Bible I would add other metaphors from examples of modern life.
A. It is well known that person with alcoholism or other substance abuse problems often cannot find the will to change unless they hit rock bottom. This typically involves causing a great deal of harm to those they love. Even an innocent person may die before they start to change. And thus we can say that the innocent person died so that they might turn their life around. It is not a matter of any sane kind of justice system but more a fact of our own perversity that we do not change until innocent people have paid too great a price.
B. We say that soldiers pay the price for our freedom – that they die so that we can be free. So also we can say that Jesus went to war with the devil and with sin and was killed in action fighting for our liberation.
But am I going to push such metaphors literally to a point where “21st century more’s are irrelevant” and all standards of decent behavior go right out the window? I most certainly am not going to do any such thing!