Posted on 11/04/2012 6:35:36 AM PST by Paladins Prayer
When actor and director Mel Gibson was asked some years ago about certain difficulties he had when making his film The Passion of the Christ, he registered a countenance of unease and said (I'm paraphrasing), "Something doesn't want this to happen."
Being just a couple of seconds of his interview, it was perhaps hardly noticed by many. But it might have made the ears of people of faith, particularly Christians, perk up. And they would have known precisely to what he was alluding.
Of course, any talk of spirits not confined to the local liquor store is now often considered the stuff of children and crackpots. Yet is such scoffing logical?
Modern man, ever the materialist, may scoff at that question. "Matters of faith are anything but logical," says he, "so making light of them is eminently so." But this betrays a misunderstanding of logic.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
It turned out to be a witness acclaimed by Christians both Roman Catholic and Protestant/evangelical. The more surprising thing would have been if it were easy, not if it were difficult.
However, the greatest thing about God is that He never lets go of us or gives up on us. He always gives us 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. chances. Perhaps the Lord was using Satan to sift Gibson and for him to rid himself of whatever earthly passions he might still have. It wouldn't surprise me if Gibson came back from wherever he's come from, spiritually stronger and humbler.
James Garner wrote that Mel Gibson was flaked out and often drunk when they made “Maverick” in 1994. His personal problems long predate “The Passion” ... they were just covered up better before he got on the wrong side of the Satanic left.
Lot’s of evidence for God in the universe.
No evidence whatsoever for angels, demons, hobgoblins or the Devil before they are abstracted from the minds of human beings.
I have never met the Devil, at least he has never announced himself as such. I have met Charles Manson, and he will do until the real thing comes along.
He’s human. Of human depravity. But human.
“No evidence whatsoever....”
Hmmmm. Pretty sweeping statement, FRiend.....and also dead wrong. You can start with the Bible itself, for example. Then you can add the collective human experience over millennia.
I won’t even go into personal experience(s), and first hand (to me) accounts of individuals directly interacting with both angels and demons.
They’re very, very real and doubting their existence doesn’t change that.
If Jesus was indeed God, as He claimed to be, given that he talked of and interacted with both the Devil and demons it would be folly to reject their realities.
Well said. That’s what rather quickly broke any faith I may have had in Christianity.
Well, that’s an unwise conclusion. I’d recommend that you read the G.K. Chesterton essay, “Why I am a Catholic.” It’s not primarily about angels and demons, but he mentions why belief in them matters.
Thank you for your wisdom about this. I think that Satan was really angry and threatened by Gibson’s work, and so attacked him. That plus Satan likes to hunt trophies. When he can tempt and turn a good priest or other person it is a personal victory for him, a real feather in his cap so to speak. He’s all about him and his ego.
It’s a real b*%$h being cut off and separated from God.
bookmark
I don’t knock Christianity because I think it led directly to the founding of the United States, which could not have happened, and will not be able to continue without it.
More power to the purity of Christian faith, by whatever demonation.
In that sense Jesus was moshiach. Though moshiach is not a concept of divinity.
I believe Jesus to have been a fine rabbi, though not divine for myriad reasons, one of which is that the Devil undermines monotheism. There cannot be One God for goodness and another for Evil. Whatever one wants to call it does not change that polytheistic effect.
If someone could point to one example of this so-called Devil, or Evil being at large in Creation before Man came on the scene, I’d be all ears and eyes. But unless some similar concept has been experienced by intelligent beings elsewhere in the cosmos...I’d yet be inclined to think it invented too, thus to pass off their own malfeasence on some agent other than themselves.
I see. But the Devil isn't a God, nor even a god, but rather a [self-]corrupted spiritual being.
If someone could point to one example of this so-called Devil, or Evil being at large in Creation before Man came on the scene, I’d be all ears and eyes. But unless some similar concept has been experienced by intelligent beings elsewhere in the cosmos...I’d yet be inclined to think it invented too, thus to pass off their own malfeasence on some agent other than themselves.
Is 14:12-14As you can see, his was the sin of pride, saying I will make myself like God.
How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star {Satan}, son of the dawn.
You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!
You said in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain.'
'I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.'
Job 38:1-7As you can see, God is talking with Job, describing the creation of the world, there is the "sons of God" shouting with joy, but this is happening before Adam, so there couldn't be 'sons' in the plural sense. {Also, note the genealogy of Jesus in one of the Gospels refers to Adam as son of God.}
And Jehovah answereth Job out of the whirlwind, and saith: --
Who [is] this -- darkening counsel, By words without knowledge?
Gird, I pray thee, as a man, thy loins, And I ask thee, and cause thou Me to know.
Where wast thou when I founded earth? Declare, if thou hast known understanding.
Who placed its measures -- if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched out upon it a line?
On what have its sockets been sunk? Or who hath cast its corner-stone?
In the singing together of stars of morning, And all sons of God shout for joy,
So there's some period of time between the creation of the universe and the fall of Satan. ('Fall' not being a literal/geographical, but more like the phrase "fall from grace.") Do I know exactly when? No.
Is. 14:12 How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star {Satan}, son of the dawn...
Rev. 22:16 I Jesus have sent my angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.
and you my fine feathered friend are wrong and you need to be really careful if that is your opinion.
you are blind and it is not your opinion that matters. greater men than you believed
In the predominance of Jewish literature, this poem (Is 14) is interpreted as referring to the death of an Assyrian king, probably Sargon II who was slain in battle 705 BC, and was layer reinterpreted as predicting the death of a Babylonian king.
Verse 9 makes reference to Sheol and his arrival there. Verse 11 of my “Jewish Study Bible” reads,
“Worms are to be your bed,
Maggots your blanket.”
and are close enough to the King James Version to suggest an amalgam of Sheol as a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem is being suggested. There are several other such verses which tend to reinforce this view.
“O Shining One, Son of the dawn...” is also seen in rabbinic literature as the planet Venus, and is thought related to Isaiah’s knowlege of Greek and Cannanite mythology where an insolent young king is thrown down to earth by a higher deity.
The Book Of Job exibits at least four compostional styles, and likely as many different authors from the mid 6th to 4th centuries BC. It is also generally considered in the Talmud to be a work of fiction.
And again, it is the human mind and nothing else that this Devil affects. While God appears to have been quite active in the universe before the appearance of mankind, where is this thing elsewhere?
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