Since the thread has been thoroughly hijacked by non-pizza-eaters, I will just say that this is just like the question of why does the mirror reverse left to right but not up to down.
So if Jesus’ attoned for all our sins why wasn’t it game over at that point?
You mean, it’s a question that is easily answered with just a little bit of critical thinking?
A WAG of mine would be that as sin separates man from God, sin placed onto God does have some effect, which comes through as the visible wounds to us. It shows the extent and magnitude of what Jesus did for us. He took on the sins of every person who asks, the Father’s vengeance will not be denied and that was inflicted against Jesus.
The wounds are real and go deeper then the actual wounds to a body, they have become part of Christ, part of God, and have become something of beauty, like the cross and the crown of thorns.
What man could never pay back given a eternity, God paid not for one man, but every man who asked and did it in 3 days.
end WAG
You have to choose to serve the Lord as your king, not the devil to get this gift. You have free will to choose who to serve however.
Wait, so when we ascend into heaven, Jesus is going to have holes in his hands still and hole in his side? Will he have huge stippling bruises from blood pooling in his tissues as well?
By this logic, Jesus’ wounds are pretty minor compared to the rhetorical hugeness of sin. Maybe if Jesus had, like, skewers through both eyes and a hook hand, but pierced hands and a side-port? I see kids walking around in New York that display more magnitude than that.
His Father sounds like a nutjob. SOMEONE IS GETTING A BEATING!!! IF ITS NOT MY WIFE, ITS YOU, TIMMY!!! WHERE IS MY BELT!!!
We’re talking about the master of reality here: God can look like anything it wants. So God chooses to look like a cheap Halloween gore costume for all eternity?
Again, why can no one explain in any plausible fashion this “pay back” system? Exactly what measure of spiritual currency is sin measured in? How much is it worth when someone masturbates? Is like, every single sin infinite? That seems a little silly: who set that sort of price and why? All sin is infinitely, equally bad? Murdering someone is infinitely bad and so is being grumpy on a Sunday morning?
And how can one start to pay it back in any case if nothing we ever do is enough? If humans can’t ever pay it all back, can they at least pay back, say, ten percent? How much sin payback is helping granny cross the street exactly? 10 points? None at all
Because that would put the various priesthoods out of business.
I don’t know about pooping or breathing, but Jesus did eat after the Resurrection.
As to the purpose of the stigmata, it’s interesting to note that the wounds Jesus displayed were exactly the wounds which Thomas mentioned. Thomas is, in a sense, the patron saint of all scientists: He established clearly and a priori what his criteria were, and once those criteria were met, he accepted the conclusions. The stigmata, then, could be interepreted as Jesus’ personal answer to Thomas’ specific request. He could presumably have come back in His glorified body as a 14-armed 5-dimensional land dolphin, if He had so chose, but He chose to come back in a form that would convince His followers in general, and Thomas specifically, of who He was.
Oops. Wrong thread.
I don’t know how that works, Jesus will come back and rule for 1000 years, after that time the dead will be resurrected for judgment by the Father, the people who’s name is in the book of life will be allowed eternal life. This is a long time after the crucifixion before the first person gets to heaven, which by our earth standards seems like plenty of time to ‘heal’
I doubt it. I would further wag that those wounds were a very small percentage of the total wounds Jesus endured in death.
Or it shows the degree of separation between God and man, and how small man truly is.
He does seem like it to us, not just here but many places in the Bible, He has plan, and not even Jesus knows what it is at times, we don’t have a chance of figuring Him our the way I see it- until He wants us to.
God the Father seems more like a set it up and let it run by itself Creator, Yes He does interact here and there, and may be holding the whole universe together for all I know. He doesn’t like to change His design that often, remember when He created it, He already saw it was good, so why change anything.
here I can give you a answer, sin is not a cost so to speak, but a state of being, from your first sin you are not worthy to exist in the kingdom of God. It doesn’t matter what the sin is, it’s like a tamper resistant seal, either it’s unbroken, or it’s broken, it makes no difference how broken it is - any break means God is not going to take you back, as He can not, you broke it you bought it.
We can’t ‘pay it back.’ there nothing that would allow that to happen, except the gift offered to us by Christ. Our natural state of existence will lead us to death, it’s just the place that we are in.
Going by the Bible, God is a mass murdering megalomaniac loony. Especially the Old Testament God, which is the version most people seem to believe in.
Frankly, he’s not worthy of me, not the other way around.
That would make those sacred heart pictures even more freaky!
But I like your explanation. I don’t believe in it, but I like it.
Precisely.
Well I see your Old Testament God (Father), and raise a God that does all those things THEN resurrects all the dead, just to judge them, and the people who don’t believe in His Son will be thrown into the lake of fire where the smoke of their torment goes up forever.
I don’t pretend to know the Father’s plan, but yes when put this way He doesn’t seem like the nicest God in the universe.
Well, then talking about how we owe a debt is so much nonsense. It’s using words but without them having any meaning. I’m just trying to get a sense of the scale of this supposed debt here, and the answer is that there is no scale at all? Merely by being human, we don’t measure up, and there’s nothing we can do to make it up… except that there is. We have to swear fealty to Jesus. Ok, so once we do that, what happens? Not a theologian in history has been able to make sense of this.
This sounds like something L. Ron Hubbard would write. Jesus sounds like a boss from World of Warcraft. The question is what the heck is up with the picking and choosing of wounds. Now we have wounds caused by infinite sin that heal over a thousand years?
Again, it seems like we should at least have some sense of quantity here. If wounds take 1000 years to heal, then perhaps we can quantify the size of debt that causes them and the rate at which they heal up.
Again though, this takes us out of the realm of he infinite, and into the realm of finite and quantifiable power. So again, exactly how much sin causes, say, three minor wounds on an almighty God?
Well, tough on God then. You don’t get to act like a monster for most of history, accuse every person that ever lived of owing a debt of vengence on a completely illogical and nonsensical sense of blood sacrifices, and then beg off by saying “I’ll explain it all later” or even “you can’t understand, sorry.” It would be IMMORAL to accept anyone that said that, no matter how powerful.
Except that apparently, the laws of Judiasm had to be compeltely inverted and re-written. He never told the Jews anything about there being original eternal sin that only a blood sacrifice could atone for. In fact, the entire premise of Jewish purity laws is how one atones for sin and lives a righteous life. Human sacrifice is explicitly condemned. Then suddenly, it’s opposite day, and a super-duper god-in-human blood sacrifice turns out to be the shizznit and suddenly there is no point to atonement because none of it is good enough, ever.
What’s to say that god won’t switch up the rules again next Tuesday? If God’s plan is so unintelligible and beyond your understanding, this could all just as easily be a big joke at your expense… or a big trick question to see if you are immoral enough to go along with it. How could you know otherwise if God is beyond you?
What do you mean he can not? He’s the guy to whom the debt is owed to isn’t he? Since no one can explain what the point of killing Jesus is to the process, God can apparently wave away his own bizarre, illogical anger at sin away whenever he wants. So what’s the big deal?
And what is the kingdom of heaven exactly that it can accept people who are, frankly, no different than anyone else other than that they believe in one particular story about some guy who got killed (in other words, just as sinful as ever)? Does it have some sort of magical field that repels everyone who doesn’t believe that stuff? And what the heck does ANY of that have to do with morality anyway?
If it’s our “natural state of existence,” it’s not our fault.
What do you mean by “debt,” by the way? Why do I owe God anything?
The whole idea that God requires a blood sacrifice has never made any sense to me.
Another question: What’s with the three days business? I mean, if you’re gonna go to all the trouble to take a dirt nap, why make it so short? Why not something like a month or more? That way you show you were really dead, and not faking it. Or, why die at all? Why not come off the cross as the Two-Fisted Fightin’ Jesus[sup]TM[/sup]? Bet those Roman centurion’s would have been crapping in their skirts if Jesus showed them some real wrath of God type stuff.
Mary Magdalene,didn’t recoginize Him and she had just seen Him a couple of hours ago,she thought he was the gardener until He spoke to her.
Monavis
Eyes blurred with tears perhaps?