Revelation is revelation of what is happening in the heavens, not earth, and is stated as truth.
We on the earth will experience a ‘watered down’ version, a shadow of what is in heaven, for instance we won’t have a physical black horse ride across the land, but will suffer the effects, which is bio-fuels, and what will happen to the price of food when a farmer can chose to plant food or fuel crops. Price of food will directly equate to what a barrel of oil costs.
Black (horse) = color of oil, wine and oil = bio-fuels ethanol and bio-diesel, scales = the linking of the prices of food and fuel, the price of wheat and barley is the price that food will be (very high), in heaven the angels have a black horse directly.
I started a post before reading this which became vapor, and after reading this, it’s just as well.
In response to what Ted said and these two posters said I was going to say just WHY I think some questions about the Bible (giving a specific example) are meaningful even for skeptics and others MUST lead to a morass of speculation, even for believers, as a practical result.
But nevermind.
I don’t feel like starting a Pit thread over this.
So, what…? Maybe a fresh Great Debates thread? Or the ATMB option?
Thatr is your intrepetation,but the people that were standing there are not alive and the generation of David to Jesus is used by Matthew to mean the same as we do now. You have the right to believe your translation but it doen’t mean it is the correct one.
Again I am obviously a little late joining the conversation here, but according to the book of Hebrews Jesus is fulfilling the role of High Priest in Heaven. Which simply means he is applying the sin offering (himself on the cross) to those who believe. Without Jesus actively working in heaven as the High Priest there is never an application of his redemptive work on the cross.
I think Ted is very close to on target here. Even supposing Him to be able to command Man’s obedience to God’s Will, which is by no means a certainty from anything in Scripture, the result is a race of stagnating robots. And I do not believe the Old Testament is in any way self-contradictory, except on the very facile level of its alleged verbatim word-for-word dictation-style inspiration (which most Christians do not adhere to, though many of the noisiest do) – I think it’s the record of Man’s growing understanding over time of the Divine Purpose, brought out more fully in the New Testament. In short, God wants humans to follow Him out of love for Him, and because it’s in their own enlightened self-interest to grow into people who are humble, forgiving, compassionate, seeking after justice and mercy, loving as God loves. Whatever the human Jesus, even resurrected and empowered, is able to do, He can only reach one, or at most a few, at a time. Instead, He departs in order to send the Parakleitos, the “Comforter” or “Counselor,” identified with the Ruach Adonai, the Pneuma Kyrioi – the Lord’s Spirit which had inspired the prophets, able to work within men’s hearts, able to be everywhere at once. This is in fact half the reason He gives for departure, along with going “to prepare a place for you.” When He goes, He will ask the Father, who will at His behest send the Parakleitos to lead us “into all righteousness.” (Dont take that as synonymous with sanctimonious self-righteousness; Jesus explicitly denounces the latter – by it I think He means the mindset and heart He has instructed us to have in the Gospel discourses, and which the Holy Spirit is equipped to inculcate in willing hearts.
Originally, Jesus planned on getting all this straightened out and having the Last Judgment before the current generation passed away (Matthew 24:34). But you would not believe the paperwork involved.
Likewise, the atheist could say that Jesus didn’t come back, because Jesus hasn’t come back. The story is written to excuse the facts, not to provide a coherent model of reality.
BUT…the OP asked us not to go there, so…let’s not…
The most reasonable version I’ve heard is simply that the time was given to mankind for the word to be spread, so that more people might come to God via Christ. My objection to this is that this also leads to a great many more people going to Hell. It is a very poor theological system that can only save one soul at the price of condemning ten.
Another argument is that we’re being made to wait as punishment, the same way that the Children of Israel were made to wander in the desert, rather than being led directly to the Promised Land. We don’t deserve to see the Messiah’s arrival in the fullness of his glory.
A variant of this is that there are preconditions that haven’t been met yet. The re-building of a Temple in Jerusalem is one that is often cited. This seems a little awkward, as, if interpreted too literally, it puts it in man’s power to hasten or defer the Messiah’s arrival.
And, of course, another variant of this is the one that Harold Camping was relying (too heavily!) on: that there is a fixed date for the Messiah’s arrival, firmly decreed in Scripture, and the cycle of Jubilees and so on give this date for those who have the wisdom to understand.
(And the big problem with that is that people have been using divine numerology to determine this date – which is always “Real Soon Now!” – for nearly two thousand years! A system of prediction that has been wrong 99% of the time is not one I want to rely upon today!)
Trinopus (does feel vaguely sorry for poor old Harold Camping…)
Well…there is a 400 meter asteroid cruising by us on November 8th. It will pass within the orbit of the moon. Or so our best minds have calculated.
If such a thing were to actually strike us (at tens of thousands of miles per hour) the effect would kill most of a continent, and throw the rest of the world into…a new economy.
But; hooray!..it will miss us by justthismuch.
The international space agencies are treating it as a chance to study an asteroid close-up without spending money on firing-off a probe.
But this is knowledge arrived at by a posteriori epistemology, not by a priori reasoning… We’ve built radars that can see asteroids, and calibrated them, and tested them, and used them to land spacecraft on the moon, etc. Religious knowledge usually depends upon faith, since we have no means of testing and calibrating issues such as trinitarianism, the resurrection, whether hell is a real place with physical flames or a metaphorical spiritual state, etc…
We need a science of experimental theology!
Also…will we ordinary blokes out here be able to watch the asteroid pass by? I presume naked-eye observation won’t let me see a thing, but will NASA be providing a real-time telescopic internet feed? Whether or not the dang thing hits us, I wanna watch it!
Same way that no 3 yellow butterflies are not flying around your head controlling what you do… because no 3 yellow xxxxx actually do that.
Anyone can make any unsubstantiated claim. The way as our society has decided to evaluate such claims is only by using reason and logic and dismiss any imaginary statement someone can make.
That’s why no volcano gods exist. That’s why no religious gods of any kind exist either.
Hey buddy… I can’t go back and read your previous posts to determine if you are a “believer” or not… but I’ll take it that you agree that unsubstantiated claims are to be ignored
