That is a Christian dogma that is probably impossible to prove, but it is almost essential to justify the murder of Him. Christianity needs all people to need the forgiveness of Christ. I wonder what would happen if just one person could be proved to be sinless without Him?
If you agree with my definition of sin there would be quite a few, from infants to the mentally innocent. But, if I suggested that someone could not need Christ because they have followed another route to God…
RIchard
You jump to a lot of assumptions based on one little statement.
In what way did thinking Christ had no sin justify the murder of Him??? And I do think He was murdered. But who do you think murdered Him? Christians? How bizarre!
Do you make the assumption that I think Jesus had to die? You would be wrong in that assumption. I name the whole idea that Jesus pays for our sin with a blood sacrifice, black magic and necromancy. I don’t believe in any of that stuff. I believe He gave His life for our sins in much the same way as soldiers have given their lives for our freedom, by standing up for what is right and refusing to back down.
But I certainly do believe in the incarnation, i.e. that Jesus was God. And that is why I think He was without sin. He had the guidance of the Father in His life – a relationship that was broken for us and which Jesus came to restore.
And what are you assuming my definition of sin is??? LOL
That is a topic I am very interested in BTW. I very much dispute the definition of sin as disobedience and think that was an invention of people using religion as a tool of power. So if that is your definition of sin then I will NEVER agree with you. I likewise disagree with the identification of sin with the making of mistakes. Making mistakes is part of how we learn. I define sin as self-destructive habits, which began with Adam and Eve blaming everyone and everything but themselves for their own mistakes. Cain expanded this with another bad habit of dealing with problems by simply murdering people who make your life difficult in some way. All of these bad habits get in the way of the growth and learning which is the essence of life itself.
Well I will agree with you on the infants, anyway. The Biblical statement is that nobody can say they have not sinned, and I take that to mean that by the time we learned to talk, then it is inevitable that we have fallen into some of the self-destructive habits of sin. But that fits what I said, because what I SAID was, that only one man managed to AVOID them and that hardly includes infants which never even had the chance to do so.
There again you make wrong assumptions and show that you really haven’t read very much of what I have written on this forum… 
Then you completely missed the point of the essay. It is not about ‘the original meaning’, but what it foreshadowed.
Absolutely. It is about resting, the Godhead’s resting, resting from the most unimaginably taxing work and laborious ordeal there ever was or will be. And our recognition of and rejoicing in, and celebrating what it accomplished… on the first day of the week.
No way. If God wrote the Bible and the Bible is not true, then God is not God. Then God is not the God of Truth. The fact is that God did not write the4 Bible, humans did and humans make mistakes, and this is one of them. Fortunately, Jesus pointed this out to us.
Exodus establishes God’s will for the Jews to observe the Sabbath as a mark of God’s covenant with Israel. Gen 1 establishes that God created the universe as a home or habitat for God’s people. The misuse of the six day motif has caused confusion, which Jesus came to straighten out.
I read the essay again. It is true that the text mentions that the Lord’s day is a shadow of what is to come. The text focuses so heavily on the weekly rest that this side of the message does not pop up strongly.
I do not fully agree with the essay. I don’t know what the writer was thinking when writing it, so I can only look at what has been written. My impression of the essay is that it tries to convince the reader that the Sabbath of Christians is Sunday. I do not support that interpretation.
Sabbath is still the last day of the week and part of the covenant which God made with Israel through Moses. If you follow that covenant, then you should keep the Sabbath. If not, then that commandment is not valid anymore, not in Saturday and not in Sunday.
The principle of rest is still true. There is a need to rest weekly and it is good to gather together weekly to praise and pray God. For practical reasons, Sunday has become the most common day of rest. Also our church has the main meeting in Sunday.
I assume that one reason to gather together during the first day of the week was originally practical. Christians included believers coming from hebrew and hellenistic backgrounds. Jews went to synagogue during Sabbath, hellenistic Christians not. The first day of the week was a possibility to gather together independent of the background, and the first day of the week was also a good day to rejoice together from the gospel that our Lord conquered and has risen from the grave. During persecutions of Jews, there was also the advantage that meetings during the first day of the week were not associated with the Jewish practice of keeping the Sabbath and going to synagogue.
Jesus kept faithfully the commandment of Sabbath but we should remember that he was a hebrew (Jew) who followed and fulfilled the commandments written in the Old testament.
Traditionally we celebrate the 1st day because of the sequence of Easter. Christ rose on the 3rd day, which was the day after the Jewish Sabbath.
RIchard
True, that is the tradition. Tradition is something that stems from some practices and needs some kind of justification. The practice of having meetings during the first day of the week produced the tradition of having the weekly day of rest during Sunday. Celebration of the risen Christ was probably one of the reasons why the first day of the week was selected and gave also a proper justification for the tradition.
I wonder how many Literalist YECs worship on the Christian Sunday as opposed to the Biblical Sabbath?
Richard
I think you glossed over the implication about Father’s heart.
In his book 'The lost world of Genesis 1", John Walton gives an interesting interpretation of the story. He claims that the way we understand the text is not how the ancient people would have understood it.
He claims that the story is not a description of the material creation of the universe. It is an ancient ‘temple text’, a description of how the cosmos was made functional, got functionaries, and how God took His place (rested) in the cosmos-temple. He compares the rest of God to the way how the president of US sets in the White House, not to be lazy but to govern things from that place.
A more detailed explanation and justification can be found in the book. Walton uses many chapters to describe the interpretation, so it would be difficult to give a good description here.
That reminds me of when I was discovering I had kidney cancer and 2 Corinthians 12:9 from the devotional hit me in the face immediately after the busy signal at the urology clinic (What?! No voice menu?! – some of you may recall my nephrectomy account ; - )…
I had known for a long time that the most frequent mandate in the Bible is “Do not be afraid” or one of its several variations – “Fear not!”, “Be anxious for nothing”, “Fret not” and the like, so I was sure that was part of what resting meant, but a little further investigation suggested also that it is like resting under a strong shelter, or the power of strong wings resting upon me, reminiscent of the early verses of Psalm 91:
So I was resting in the temple of God, too, so to speak.
I don’t see how that is analogous to the commandment to rest as we see it in the rest of scripture, however. There are definitely ceasings involved (mercy is not one of them).
My 2 cents is this: nothing in the Bible is what it seems, in my opinion. Earth is a term used for the place where all life lives. It has four corners and it is flat. Our conscious mind IS Earth. The four corners are located as focal points in our brain. The light of language is processed in our left hemisphere, and the darkness of prosody exists in our right. The separation between the two hemispheres is the firmament, which is a very complex divide that allows you and I to exist in an internally perceived consciousness that is so intricate in design that mankind has not yet perceived its nature. You probably disagree, but read “The Boundary Between Light and Darkness : my 6-6-6 experience” and maybe you’ll find a way to accept my opinion as a possible scenario.
Everything in the Bible pertains to our minds and spirits within a body living in a physical universe which itself is structured to ultimately contain the mind and spirit of God. I am certain that when this planet fully comprehends our brain, people will begin to see that I am not too far off.
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