God is Love. Whatever is not love is not God. Easy to get. The Bible is not God’s word it is man’s word all of it. Jesus teaches love because He understands. It is not difficult. I think you are trying to use the Bible to disprove God in the same way others use it to prove God. But just believe as you want anyway.
You don’t know what you’re saying … you’re flinging accusations. You should learn to read and learn to understand what you’re hearing before you attack people.
Sounds like all you’re saying is that every part of the Scripture that pleases you is Truth and every part you don’t want to accept is somehow a mistake … and so, is each one of us the arbiter of the Holy Scriptures for our own purposes? That’s handy, I’ll just pick and choose what suits me like you pick and choose what suits you.
Where did you find ‘Jesus Words’ if not in the ‘Bible’ ? (if this is to be yet another one of your ‘God talks directly to me’ bits, perhaps you should realize that is not the topic of the thread).
Since this is a thread about ‘Christian Theology’ and specifically his sacrifice, perhaps you could attempt to stay on point and quit spouting ‘your theology’.
No I guess I don’t. But I do know enough to live a positive live instead of one filled with negative thoughts and self pity.
I am feeling a bit of pity, but not for who you think. Sorry reality didn’t work out for you, and that you needed a dream you mistook for a NDE in order to cope.
Can’t you just feel the love, folks? Would you happen to have anything to say that pertains to the OP, lekatt?
As far as Jesus’ supposed great “sacrifice” is concerned, I liken it to someone cosplaying for a weekend. Millions have suffered much more than the character Jesus did in the Bible, didn’t have any followers, and didn’t get to wipe all the pain away three days after they died. If anyone could be said to die for any sins I may have acquired over the years, if anyone earned that right, it would be them-not Mr. “See, I put human clothes on-I’m just like you!” God.
From some points of view, the amount that Jesus suffered is relevant, but if you look at Jesus’s sacrifice as a sort of ultimate or final analog of Old Testament sacrifices, OT sacrifices aren’t about the suffering of the sacrificial animal; that isn’t their point.
But your post reminded me of the old thread Jesus gave up a weekend for our sins, which I should maybe go back and reread in conjunction with this one.
What I was taught growing up seems to differ from a lot of what has been said here, so I’ll put it out there as best as I can. Mind you, this isn’t exactly what I believe anymore, for reasons not relevant to this thread, so hopefully I won’t misrepresent it.
But the basic idea is that sin separates us from God, separation from God is tantamount to spiritual death, and thus the wage of sin is death. This is where sacrifice came in in the old covenant, that we could atone for our sins and substitute the sacrifice. The idea behind Jesus’s crucifixion is that the penalty for sin never changes, but now we need only accept him as our sacrifice and atone our sins.
Personally, that all seems to be pretty reasonable, given the rules, that sin requires death. But it seems to me that’s the part that most people have trouble with, but without understanding that, it makes the question like the OP seem more relevant. Yes, sin angers God, but as I understood it, it’s not so much that God sees that we’ve sinned and casts us away. Rather, think of the presence of God more like a furnace and us like glass. If the glass is pure, it can be heated in the furnace and then blown and shaped into something beautiful; if it is impure, the glass could be destroyed or even explode. So, it’s not a sacrifice to God per se, rather since we must be pure to enter the presence of God, we must separate the impure sins from ourselves and from the presence of God, and since separation from God is death, the only way to cleanse our sins is with death.
And my point is that there wasn’t any real sacrifice-God palmed that sacrifice, squibbed the altar, then took a bow.
In ancient Israel (pre-monarchy) it was against custom to conduct sacrifices outside of Israeli-held lands and it was performed mainly by heads of households. Starting in the era of judges and into the monarchy it transitioned from the old-style head-of-household, to regional temples, to the Jerusalem temple becoming the only place you could perform a sacrifice (this was NOT strictly followed and many heads-of-households continued the old traditions well into the monarchy. They just weren’t supposed to.) After Israel split (into Israel and Judah), this tradition was held by both successor states in their respective capital cities, even though Jerusalem was considered “home” to the religion to most of it’s followers. These sacrifices were for favor of God (give me a good harvest/success in battle, etc)
Israel (the post-split northern Kingdom version) was threatened and conquered a lot more than Judah and was more “liberal” to borrowing ideas from other cultures. Judah became the place to be for strict adherence to traditional Judaism.
The tradition of sacrifices in the temple (being the most “recent” mandate from the priest caste) was later carried by the ancient Israelis that were displaced from Jerusalem and/or oppressed by the conquering Assyrian Empire. When the Jewish religion eventually rebuilt the temple, the remnants of the religion worked to reinforce what was “pure” Judaism and ostracize and condemn was was “not” including the mandate that sacrifices weren’t to be performed by anyone but the priesthood at the temple. Regional temples were discouraged but tolerated in a Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell way.
Israel (both kingdoms in general) continued as a subservient state with Judaism centered around the priesthood for around 700/800 years before the coming of Christ. Several empires came and went, with a few instances of Israel rising to prominence in the region for a short time when the greater powers had interests elsewhere. The sacrifices from this time on became about atonement (please make us great again, etc).
By the time of Jesus Christ’s teachings, the Temple was a topic of debate within the Jewish clergy. Some of the Jewish faith were hardcore “ONLY IN THE TEMPLE” and some were more a more moderate “We are, like, 15 days from the temple. It’s a pain to do offerings there.” Sacrifices, of course, were made outside the temple, but the clergy in Jerusalem didn’t like it.
With that history in mind, the sacrifice of Jesus was seen as a mark of departure between the old Judaism and the new Christianity. The new testament used it to signify that not only were sacrifices no longer necessary, but that the “Temple” was a bond with God (depending on your interpretation, either through the clergy or the individual) that went with you wherever you went. You needn’t perform sacrifices or return to Jerusalem as a tenant of the faith. Fellowship emerged (as early as Paul) as the mark of a Christian’s adherence instead of sacrificial offerings.
His sacrifice was, understandably, perceived by some during the early days as a mark of atonement for human kind because that’s where the then recent roots of Judaism came from. This was a belief in the early days that translated throughout the Christian history fairly intact.
Disclaimer: This is abbreviated (But still long) and I don’t hold myself to be a biblical scholar, but ancient Israel is a topic I read extensively about. I consider myself an educated layman on the topic.
This, I don’t get. Why? How come? In real life, we have “life in prison without parole,” even for the worst crimes we can conceive of or commit. Can we actually be more merciful than God himself? Apparently!
The kids steal food from pop’s pantry… Death? Eternal death? How about, the penalty for separation from God is twenty minutes sitting in the corner, separated from God? It’s the same as death: why does it have to be forever?
There’s no sense of proportion here.
There never was, thus there never shall be. Thus sayeth the Lord. Amen.
I touched on it a bit earlier in my post, but I’ll try to expand on it. The basic idea is that God is the source of life and thus if we’re cut off from him, we are spiritually dead. This is where I tried to use the analogy of the furnace to illustrate. We see it as “you did something wrong, I will punish you with death” or, to a less harsh extent, “your sin makes you unworthy to be in my presence”; but really, the way I learned, was that it makes us unable to bear his presence. So, if our sin makes us unable to be in the presence of God, the source of life, then all there is is death. So, in this context, I don’t think any comparison to prison or the death penalty is accurate.
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I can’t think of a better one right now. I remember as a kid, I would go outside and play in the wood, often I would get muddy or at least dirty. But while I was out there, my mom would mop the kitchen floor. If I want to come inside, I’d have to take off my shoes, sometimes even hose off the mud and dry myself so I wouldn’t track dirt and mud on the nice clean floor. As a young kid, most not being fond of having to put forth that effort then take a bath, it might appear as a hassle, or even a punishment. It’s not “you got all dirty, you will be sprayed with the hose as punishment” but rather “you got all dirty, you need to be clean before you come inside”. So, this is basically the best I can explain it. We just cannot enter God’s presence burdened with sin, and not being in his presence is spiritual death. It’s not a punishment, it’s just the natural consequence of our choices.
And I get that it also seems harsh that being out of the presence of God is death, but you have to remember that in Christian theology, God created all life. Without him, there is nothing. He is the source of all life. If you’re non-Christian, I can understand why this idea might be confusing as, naturally, not believing in Christian theology, you necessarily perceive life as not depending on God, so it would seem like death is taking away life that we have without him, but in Christian theology, we are only alive because of him, so perhaps it’s better said that we lose the life that he gave us by being separated from him.
You also bring up the “why forever?” I think that depends on various denominations. I know some will say you have to do or say or belief certain things while alive, some will say you get a chance at final judgment. But, generally, Christians believe that the soul is eternal (for the purposes of this, regarding differences in damnation and annihilation as close enough for this point). I wasn’t raised Catholic, but I’d imagine this is generally where the idea of purgatory comes in, as a temporary means of cleansing the sins, which might assuage the “why forever?” question, but I imagine someone who was raised or believes that can attest to that better. Rather, how I was taught was that Jesus’s death was literally a replacement for us in damnation, and that at the final judgment we get our last chance to either accept him and have life, or reject him and have death. Now, personally, I have a hard time defending these perspectives fairly, as I just don’t believe them anymore, but I think the idea is that if faced directly with God, with absolute certainty, and with the consequences absolutely clear for the choice we’re about to make and we still reject him, what else is there?
I sort of get it… But I can’t agree with it. If I have, indeed, inherited my knowledge of good and evil from Adam and Eve…then I can only say that God, in the Bible and in modern Christianity, exhibits far too much evil ever to be defined as perfectly good.
The fact that I, a mere mortal, can conceive of moral values higher than those attributed to God, is, I think, the death-blow to the concept of perfect divine justice. If a crummy little schlub like me could do a better job, then certainly the All That Is All could.
Obviously, too much of this depends on interpretations, underlying assumptions, hidden premises, individual values, and the lot. I will always endeavor to study and understand theology, but I know I can never possibly practice or believe it. Too much is simply flat-out incompatible with what my soul knows is right.
(Were I to become a Christian, it would certainly be in one of the Universalist sects. As someone once said, “Because I believe in the Bible, I know there is a Hell. But because I believe in God’s perfect love, I know that Hell is empty.”)
I think a more apt analogy would be if your mother carried you out there, put you in the dirt, and said if you come back dirty she’d set you on fire.
**Moderating **
lekatt, razncain, and Czarcasm: all of you knock it off with the personal sniping or take it to The BBQ Pit.
lekatt, this thread was intended as a specific discussion regarding the Christian theology of a particular Christian belief. Your “God is love” schtick does not address that issue and you are back to posting little snips of witnessing and then resorting to condescension when you lure someone in to respond.
You are free to post your witnessing in your own thread. You are out of line when you interrupt this discussion to inject your personal beliefs that do not even address the topic of the thread.
Quit it.
[ /Moderating ]
It was Eddie Haskell. He said it’d be okay. “It just washes right off,” he said…
that’s pretty funny
My background is in the RLDS church {now Community of Christ} and that’s how I remember it to. I remember reading a verse in the Book of Mormon that specifically says, if we stand before God guilty and his light shines through us and exposes that guilt , that would be more painful than being away.
Kind of like the sun is great and lifegiving indirectly, but we can’t stare directly into it
About the sacrifice of Jesus. According to the LDS if not for Adam’s fall mankind wouldn’t exist, and there would be nthing to choose from. Adam’'s fall was part of the plan of creation. 2nd Nephi explains it,
"8 Wherefore, how great the importance to make these things known unto the inhabitants of the earth, that they may know that there is no flesh that can dwell in the presence of God, asave it be through the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah, who blayeth down his life according to the flesh, and taketh it again by the power of the Spirit, that he may bring to pass the cresurrection of the dead, being the first that should rise.
" 9 Wherefore, he is the firstfruits unto God, inasmuch as he shall make aintercession for all the children of men; and they that believe in him shall be saved.
11 For it must needs be, that there is an aopposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.
21 And the days of the children of amen were prolonged, according to the will of God, that they might crepent while in the flesh; wherefore, their state became a state of dprobation, and their time was lengthened, according to the commandments which the Lord God gave unto the children of men. For he gave commandment that all men must repent; for he showed unto all men that they were lost, because of the transgression of their parents.
22 And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end.
23 And they would have had no achildren; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no bjoy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin."
So through Adam , all mankind got to experience choice and duality, but that meant physical death entered as well. Jesus conquered death and created the path through which all others could conquer death as well.
So it seems that the sacrifice of Jesus was that he was willing to do that. Knowing the plan meant suffering and crucifixtion, he came to conquer death so that all of us would have that opportunity.