Posted on 05/19/2013 12:21:32 PM PDT by HiTech RedNeck
Edited on 05/25/2013 2:44:13 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
"Where were You, God?" The question arises daily as news of tragedies abound, and even from time to time as the tragedy involves ourselves. Servicemen die in a bungled military defense operation that should have been a cake walk, and no government official has credible answers. A son is shot dead in his prime by a wanton criminal. A wife dies decades too soon from a deadly disease. A busy mother dies unexpectedly from a sudden heart attack. Maybe you were emotionally abused when a child and have been saddled with a destructive habit that you acquired in an effort to escape from the torment by the only means you knew, and prayer -- once you realized you were in a trap -- seemed scant help or comfort. In these myriad situations the bitter questions often arise: "Oh Lord, where were You? Dear God, why did You roll over for this? Almighty Father, I've always heard that you are righteous and omnipotent, so why did You not act when it would have been so simple for You to stop it from happening? Oh, the heart-rending woe! Why did You lose, God?"
This is not a modern question, and it was not discovered by modern atheists, agnostics, or freethinkers. It arose many thousands of years ago to a man named Job (pronounced with a long "o") who kept a tender conscience towards God about what he did, and as a result displayed a very upright life, and was blessed with a large, loving family and many earthly riches. And yet without warning this man's world came crashing down upon him. It began with the destruction and theft of his great riches, and was topped by the loss of most of the lives of his dear family. Then, the trouble soon escalated with an inexplicable illness that covered him with sores. His wife, in an apparent hint that God was fickle and undeserving of love, in great disgust told him to curse God and die. His friends, who initially wisely comforted him in silence, then began to lecture him sarcastically about how he must have done something terribly wrong to provoke God's wrath, and his agony grew as a heated argument erupted and Job insisted he had done nothing to deserve the tragedy. Finally a wiser friend suggested that Job look to God's sovereignty, and then God answered Job from a whirlwind, challenging the limitations of Job's knowledge about what God can do. With a deeper appreciation of God's capabilities, Job stopped complaining, and soon God blessed Job twice as much as he had been blessed before.
There is a simple enough answer to the question, at least to the mind: by allowing the world and even our selves to fail so dramatically at times, God highlights His capacity to save, a faith in which we sometimes are sorely lacking, and even if we know it in our heads, our hearts are slower and lag behind that and need to be taught. For God is not merely solving complex intellectual problems. He is solving problems that encompass our entire beings that He has created and bestowed with capabilities that are an image of His own.
That's an interesting question. In what way would God bless the tribe of Benjamin? Would you say God blesses Islamic nations? How about the Babylonians? Or the Ammorites?
God blesses all of us in simply giving us air to breathe. But I'm not sure if the Benjamites didn't anything special or significant that warrant a "special" blessing from God. Just because Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin doesn't mean very much. God pretty much told Paul what he was going to do and Paul obeyed-end of story.
Just LOL.
Capturing a virgin woman from a neigbouring tribe and forcibly "marrying" her is nowhere close to "spousal rape". It is rape, period.
Put your sister or any other female relative in such a woman's shoes, and pontificate, fella.
There are verses which specifically speak to that subject.
And this seems to be a rather skewed perception anyhow. It isn’t about “appeasing” God except inasmuch as the process of getting reconciled to God entails, and even then God furnished the appeasement Himself! It’s about accepting a new, spiritual relationship which entails getting filled with God’s spirit more and more and more, and which can involve passing discomfort but then yields access to an eternal sized joy which can be partaken in right here on earth, even BEFORE going to heaven. How neat is that? He is AWESOME....
First she brought the topics up together. Don’t pretend I mushed them together.
Second, you are assuming a viewpoint that Christianity taught! This is earlier in the slow, painful spiritual climb out of the fall of man at Eden.
I’d surmise you are an anti-dispy, and I am not ignorant of the existence of the controversy. It seems to be at MOST a matter of what verses you put more weight on. I am paying my money and taking my choice on the literal Jewish kingdom, and it’s no accident that the mostly dispy Southern Baptists are being very much blessed by God for their emphasis on blessing the literal Jewish people. That tells me empirically the Jews have by no means fallen out of the Lord’s plan.
If I may, I’d like to offer a few thoughts. I had a period of my life where my initial Calvinism, which was fairly wooden, was profoundly challenged. But for myself, though rough edges were removed, in my later years my confidence in the sovereignty of God, including His sovereignty over salvation and the fallible human will, has only increased.
For example, I notice you are using the temporal escape from the root problem of fallen human nature. No Calvinist worth his salt speaks of man’s will not being free. God does not compel us to choose against our own salvation. We do that to ourselves quite handily. The real problem, which putting God outside of time does not resolve, is the genesis of saving faith. Does it arise ex nihilo, without any aid from God? That is Pelagianism. Does it arise in all hearts by the mercy of God, only to be lost in some by the rejection of grace? Then it was not saving faith, and the problem remains unresolved.
You see, one of the problems of greater age is you begin to realize the profound truth of that Scripture which speaks of how, apart from miracle, the leopard does not change its spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin. At a certain age, you finally accept that what a person has done the will always do, for good or evil. Except sometimes there are miracles of change, from death to life, from darkness to light, and they always, always bear the fingerprint of God.
Indeed, it was the acceptance of this tendency of humans to remain bound by the inertia of evil that inspired the elaborate checks and balances of our Constitutional system. What Marx rejected, even more than capitalism, was the Calvinist belief that our sin nature cannot be cured by mere reprogramming of the human heart. The reeducation camps, the brainwashing exercises, the gulags and the populating of mental hospitals with political prisoners, the rise of the so-called therapeutic state, are all failed attempts to edit human nature into some soulless state of perfection, and of course they must fail, because only God can grant a lost soul saving faith and the changed nature that follows such a faith as sure as day follows night.
Which is why, although I respect the difficulties sometimes incurred by holding such a belief, I continue on with it. As you say, God does speak truth to us, and He has spoken truly about the need for His intervention in saving lost souls. That does not mean I am always ready to hear His message, or hear it accurately. Jesus held the Pharisees accountable for the truth He told them, even though they managed to hear it completely upside down. But as it says in Hebrews 10:39:
“But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul.”
Everything we see in life is consistent with what we should expect based on what the Bible says. Nothing contradicts the Bible.
Is there anyone who has never felt what seemed like doubt? Probably not.
But even if I wanted to lose faith, there’s no getting around the logical proof in Plantinga’s Modal Ontological argument.
Even more important is the historical evidence that Jesus died on the cross, was buried, and was resurrected in the flesh on the third day.
Second, you are assuming a viewpoint that Christianity taught! This is earlier in the slow, painful spiritual climb out of the fall of man at Eden.
A "show" produced by the same director. "Slow climb"? LOL
Whole tribes are 'civilised' overnight and these specimen needed a " slow climb"?
"You may capture and rape"
1000 years later...
"You may capture, 'marry' then screw."
1000 years later...
"Don't rape."
Yeah. So much for a "universal", "absolute" morality, so into keeping up with the times.
I love such moments of truth when they get openly, willfully revealed in public.
Not only was Israel the maintainer of the law, but they were give to us as an example and warning.
As far as the Jews, only those who believe in and obey the Son are saved:
God must intervene to provide means of salvation, and the savee must decide to accept the means. Having the individual causational (and provisional) vectors of that action be perpendicular to the time line known by man solves many philosophical questions. Fancy labels (this-ism, that-ism) don’t negate the basic truth that you can be offered something and refuse. Until accepted the Holy Spirit can’t save, He can only invite and warn. Preserving an accepted salvation to the end of physical time is a no brainer, intellectually. Spiritually it was an astounding burden for God.
You want an antiseptic heaven? With the cross sitting right outside Eden or sumfin? Go look in some other book or maybe smoke something. Rotsa ruck. Same author, but man’s spiritual state changed over physical time and this was per plan for God’s own glory. No problem here with some things being considered big deals today that were not considered big deals in the past.
Oh, and your objection is also based in the fallacy that salvation comes through “keep a bunch of rules.” No, salvation comes through acceptance of the Spirit’s power to reconcile one back to God. How such Spirit work is displayed is an implementation question — but all you have to offer are begged questions then a totally empty gloating that you “proved” what you never did prove.
>> “The last 12 years of my life causes me to question a higher power.” <<
.
The fact that you dismiss Yehova as “a higher power” is strong evidence that you are resisting the relationship that he desires with you.
“I’m in a similar ship as you are.
Sappy nonsense in the guise of comfort is more annoying than anything else. Then they’ll spout the Calvinist nonsense about a spirit in dwelling that is not by my choice.
Whatever.
There’s much happiness in harnessing the levers of life reminding ourselves all the time how little time in consciousness we really have. One in fifty human conceptions end in a spontaneous (natural) abortion, often with the mother not even aware she was pregnant.
What a grand design.”
I used to think as you do during a really dark time in my life (after salvation!), and I even used the same examples you do to defend the growing despair I felt, which really were just silly blasphemies such as what you wrote. It was like a dark hole I had fallen into, and more and more I started to think that if such unfortunate events happen to children, to even people in the prime of life, that there was no reason to believe that God had a plan for my life at all. It was all by chance, and by chance I had come to believe, and by chance I could be destroyed. But, in reality, I didn’t really understand what I believed.
Whatever the case, once I hit rock bottom, it was God who brought me out of it, proving the “Calvinistic nonsense” you mentioned. It is an incredible thing to witness the hand of God on your life, an answer to prayer so powerful that it cannot be denied. And since that time, I cannot tell you how often God answers my prayers in a very direct way. Not because I need the signs to believe, but because I believed, and therefore He answered.
Life isn’t about the enjoyment of life, but rather the enjoyment of what comes after in direct dependence on God. There is no guarantee of peace in this world, nor is it ever promised. Even Christ could not save us unless He was crucified.
>> “Am I missing something?” <<
.
Yes!
First, you have to call on Yehova, not a ‘priest.’
His son, Yeshua is the only priest we have, and he did tell us how to pray.
Yes; a Jew who trusts in Christ for salvation (and all that this entails) is a Christian. Almost all Christians known in the New Testament accounts were Jews. It was still common enough for that to be the general case when Revelation was written (and hence the references to “synagogues of Satan” and to being truly Jews). Christianity doesn’t supersede Judaism, it completes Judaism, it provides the capstone of the Son of the same God that the Hebrews worshiped and this Son’s unique ministry. The story is still being played out today with literal Jews who mostly haven’t believed yet that Jesus is the Messiah. One day it will become obvious to them too.
Rape within marriage is not addressed, and never will be, because the Bible is a relic from another time and place. People trying to reinterpret it now remind me of grad students writing up “Jane Austen’s feminist dialectic on colonialism.” And of course, people have long since pointed out that many of the rules of the OT have been relaxed as the all-knowing, unchanging entity changes his mind about polyester blends, and reasons for smiting your neighbor.
God took you off the devil’s wind and set you on the threshold of His spirit. You still said yes at that point, though you doubtless would have also said if asked what kind of idiot would ever say no to that kind of joy! Because you COULD have blown off the Holy Spirit had you chosen to, saying ah, you had a brain fusion or something else to explain what happen.
Ah, do you really want to address these issues? Or do you want to cling to the “relic” notion?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.