Posted on 06/14/2013 12:35:01 PM PDT by Colofornian
Years ago...I had lunch with a conservative Protestant clergyman and his wife...Personally friendly and pleasant, they were nonetheless outspoken critics of Mormonism who frankly considered its claims about God “blasphemous.”
Our conversation...turned to the ultimate fate of the unevangelized...To make the question specific, I proposed the hypothetical case of a medieval Chinese peasant who...had never traveled more than perhaps 20 miles from his home and who had never so much as encountered the name of Jesus.
“He’s damned,” the clergyman said...I responded that such a fate seemed terribly unjust, since this Chinese peasant had never had a fair chance — actually, he’d had no chance at all — to hear the gospel....
...I pointed out that their God seemed not only to hate the Chinese — not to mention Africans, residents of the pre-Columbian New World, and sinful, unredeemed humanity in general — but to be inordinately fond of the (historically Calvinist) Netherlands and Scotland.
“You say that my view of God is blasphemous,” I observed. “But your view of God seems to me infinitely worse. You believe that he created us out of nothing. He was under no obligation to create us, but freely chose to do so. Then, historically speaking, he put the overwhelming majority of us into situations where they could never possibly have accepted Christ. And, because those people haven’t accepted Christ, he intends to torture them forever. Forever. He could have given them another chance...”
SNIP
“Maybe God’s justice is different than our justice,” proposed the clergyman. “Yes,” I said. “It sounds much more like our injustice.”
SNIP
One of the very many aspects of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that I treasure is its belief in the vicarious redemption of the dead...Joseph Smith offered a fair and solid solution to it.
(Excerpt) Read more at deseretnews.com ...
So, a precise rendering of this phrase would take the form "...in order that He sanctify and cleanse Her with the bathing of the water by means of Spoken Word ...".
The action, figuratively, is bathing; the cleansing medium, figuratively, is water. But literally, in apposition, the action is cleansing and the literal medium is the Spoken Word, or the Sayings (of the Holy Ghost, of course).
So you cannot force "through" to have any other sense than "by means of" and not "immersed in."
With regard and respect --
You missed the point. Exercising oneself to go through, apply, and receive, though symbolic, is a voluntary gratuiitous work by the will of the flesh, the will of a (hu)man. Regeneration, the gestation by the sperma, the generative seed, of the received Spoken Word, by which the Holy Ghost brings forth a new spiritual babe, is a gift of The God, not of a man or of flesh or of mankind. In the regeneration spoken of in Mt. 19:28, Jesus refers to Himself being reborn into a spiritual body from the dead, as He was (he had yielded up His spirit to The Father God at the Cross), on Resurrection Sunday, thus becoming the first-born from the dead of many brothers (Rom. 8:29, Col. 1:18, Heb. 12:23).
I guess you have confused water baptism (a gratuitously offered human work) with regeneration (a gift of God). They cannot be equated. Sorry. I think you completely missed the gist of Paul's exhortation to Titus.
Well, the comparison is correct, but your application is not.
(Case 1) In the flesh, life is in the blood. In the flesh, the public circumcision rite (a work) is applied to a live flesh human; when possible, at the soonest appropriate time after the new birth as possible, in a blood covenant initiated by the brit mila. (a) Note: the circumcision is not performed on an unborn child. (b) Note: the rite does not cause the birth--rather the rite is conducted to recognize the birth and the covenant.
(Case 2) In the spirit realm, Life is in the Spirit. In the spiritual life, the water baptism rite (a work) is intended for application to a spiritually (re)born person (there is no gender differentiation here); when possible, at the soonest appropriate time as convenient, in a publicly conducted spiritual covenant recognized by water baptism. (a) Note: it would be foolish to attempt to conduct the baptism on a human not yet spiritually reborn. (b) Note: Water baptism does not cause spiritual birth--rather the rite is applied to one who has already claimed and evidenced to be (re)born spiritually.
This rite would never properly be applied to an infant neither yet accountable to God's Law, nor capable of making decisions thereto.
Regarding Paul's discussion of baptism in Romans 6, this is a public external symbolic reenactment in the medium water of what has already occurred privately, inwardly, and literally in the spirit, with new life being imparted by being raised from a state of spiritual death.
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Your whole picture of the nature, sphere, function, and purpose of both water and spiritual baptism is so bass ackward as to be totally non-functional. I'm done with this. If this, being explained, cannot be grasped, so be it. It's up to God, now.
Here's another...
Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
1 John 3:21-24
Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.
Otherwise, if you are not teachable, I can't help you more than I already have.
Good enough, Elsie!
Over and over and over and louder and over and louder....
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