Story of Gabriel and Mary,

thunder · Lion King Joined: 13 Sep 2003 Posts: 1222

Yes, and like the comic says ... " perhaps God is only slightly superior."

Maybe we are giving Him all this great and wonderful credit while He smiles sheepishly because He knows that we give Him more credit than He really deserves . . . well, some of us any way.

thunder

Van · Posted: Fri Jan 02, 2004 1:12 pm Post subject:

God is superior to the constraints imposed upon God by the limiting doctrines of man which are inconsistent with His revealed actions.

thunder · Lion King Joined: 13 Sep 2003 Posts: 1222

God is superior ... to the constraints imposed upon God by the limiting doctrines of man which are inconsistent with His revealed actions."

I am almost certain that this statement means something important ... but I will look at it again later ... after a cup of coffee or hot tea.

Jesus is the the Word of God.

thunder

thunder · Lion King Joined: 13 Sep 2003 Posts: 1222

Okay ... I will proceed by noting that my inerpretation of what you said and mean is that God is the one and only all powerful and that it is He who is consistent about the business of His activities, not us.

That said, I must add that the business of God often involves us, we the people, and that it would be shallow and vain on our part to think, believe or to teach that all of what God does continually, is directed toward us.

The existance and maintenance of humanity, when we know for certain per Job 38 that, God is very busy and working in realms of creation that may or may not be near the end of their time on this planet.

I believe that the Almighty is some where in the middle parts of His promised creative activities and that He is active, even at this very instant, in creative acts that we know little or nothing about, and yet He may have established and put into motion a giant cataclysmic series of events that are simply finishing their course with, with little or no help from God, and without our involvement, as spectators to some of them, recipients to other's and that all of them will some day be finished.

We as people, His people, as it were, do very little in comparison to His efforts. His are gigantic, our's are very tiny, but ours are important.

A cake or brownies must have sugar to taste right. If we forget to add the sugar, both the cake and brownies will taste like something, but they won't taste like what they were suppose to.

By remembering that fornula, we are way ahead in how to best live for God and to best serve and meet His requirements of us.

There is much more but it is late.

Allow me to say one more thing, always remember that He is God and humanity was made by Him for Him. All that we really have to do is follow Him

Once that sinks in for real, we automatically begin to consider that we should seek Him out, follow Him when we find Him, love the Lord with all that we call we and never allow the voice of other's, even a tempter, okay, especially a tempter, to dissuade our faith from existence.

We should be all about making Him look good, every moment of every day. There is a payoff at the end and I want what He has for me.

God is superior.

Love

thunder

Van · Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2004 8:43 pm Post subject:

Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by (1) delighting in self-abasement, (2) the worship of angels, (3) basing beliefs on visions which are inflated without cause by a fleshly mind. Set you mind on Christ, His teachings and commands which are from above, not on the things of this world, the doctrines of man which undercut the teachings of Christ.

The Divine Matrix (God in exhaustive control of our every thought) is a fiction, a tradition of man, a false doctrine. God has set before us a choice between life in Christ and death apart from God, so choose wisely.

thunder · Lion King Joined: 13 Sep 2003 Posts: 1222

Choose wisely ... indeed!

The key word is " C H O O S E ."

We all will make that choice too.

Either by purpose and intent or by imposing self will, which is another word for unsubmissiveness.

So, choose wisely, indeed.

I will say something I know to be important.

When Jesus committed acts of the miraculous, opening blind eyes, deaf ears, raising the dead and feeding thousands with little or what his own disciples called," virtually nothing," He did not do those things to impress the people, to show off as it were, He did them to let everyone know that His ministry was not based on the things that we see and hear every day.

His ministry was and is to break the mold of what we perceive with our five senses to be true or false.

Jesus went out of His way to prove that what He represented was a creative force that not only made the world we live in but the same creative force is at work then, now and forever in Him.

We have to believe in the unbelievable.

If we don't, well then, we're not christians!

Because that is what Christ is about ... doing the unbelievable.

If you can't see that in His ministry then you have missed the point all together.

Jesus is the Word of God ... He does the unimaginable ... and it isn't sin.

Jesus said," eat my flesh and drink my blood."

When He said that, most of His disciples left Him because they could only think in carnal terms. In the things of the flesh and not in the spiritual. After all, who wants to eat human flesh and drink human blood?

What Jesus was saying was simply that we must be given to believe what ever He says then wait for the miraculous to happen.

He was talking about communion ( communication / connecting ).

Something that most people know very little about.

Most of His disciples left Him because they couldn't connect with Him.

He was too excentric, too rediculous, too outspoken, too everything.

They were embarrassed at the very thought of what He had said. Like the words He spoke to Nicodemus, the words went right over their head and rather than sticking with the project, figuring them out, learning by asking questions or just believeing, like Jesus had told them," just believe," they left Him and lost their communion with Him along with it.

Your choice to follow Christ, when choosing, means that you believe in the unbelievable, you rely on the impossible and that you wait with faithful anticipation for His return to redeem His faithful believers.

No one said it was easy being christian.

thunder

Van · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 2:05 pm Post subject:

It is a false dichotomy to place predestination in opposition to free will choice. Both co-exist under God's dispensation. As usual, what Calvinist do is extrapolate limited predestination affecting some specific individuals and some circumstances concerning groups of people, and assert everything is predestinated. In the same way, Calvinists take passages that say God's knowledge and understanding is beyond what we can know, and assert this means God must know all things past, present and future, every thought and choice that will occur in this age. Calvinist do not allow for God choosing to learn things based on our free will decisions because that is His purpose and plan. Thus they contort God on their Procrustian bed.

RevJP · Moderator Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 6845 Location: USA

Van, are you then proposing that God is not all knowing?

Van · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 2:49 pm Post subject:

RevJp, give me the Biblical reference for the idea that God is all-knowing and I will provide my understanding of the text. I provided you with the reference to the story of Abraham and Isaac, which clearly shows that God did not know before He tested Abraham, that Abraham lived in fear of God. Thus God can choose to limit His access to knowledge, just as we can choose to read the paper.

RevJP · Moderator Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 6845 Location: USA

Perhaps I am misunderstanding you or you are mixing what you intend to say.

Van · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 4:37 pm Post subject:

thunder · Lion King Joined: 13 Sep 2003 Posts: 1222

This spiritual ministry ... that Jesus brought with Him to earth is what also got Him killed.

In fact God counted on the dead spirit in mankind to be what it has always been and destroy that which appears spiritual or impossible for them to understand and therefore kill the one with it.

There had been millenia with soothsayers, sages, witches, worlocks, demonologists, and so on and so forth but, each relied on one thing, getting the attention of the dead spirit in each man, woman and child to pay attention to them and thereby, like a sorcerer magician, simply pull the wool ( so to speak ) over their eyes for long enough to trick them into believeing a lie that said they were gods, super spirits, that they talked to the dead, etc.

And the people even gave them money to hear their lies and ongoing tales of demonic enfluences, rather than leading them God.

Why didn't the spiritualists lead people to God? They couldn't! They had no contact with God. They only lied by saying they were gods, super spirits and the people believed it because people have no measuring rod with which to distinguish and evil spirit ( lieing spirit ) from a holy ( pure spirit ) spirit, because their spirit was disconnected from God in the garden, when God applied the curse on man, satan and earth.

It frustrated the manly side of Christ because He was a man and was God too and avidly wanted to connect with people, but could only display His creative force in the miraculous things that He did, hoping people could see Him for who He is, was, will forever be, the Almighty.

Only when men approached Him, beginning in the upper room in Acts chapter one and two, as ordered by Christ before and after He died and arose, was He then in a position to re-connect the spirit of man and the supercharged spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, and re-start the inner most being of each of them who visited Him that day, to become what they could be on earth, during their time here.

To initiate that act, God had to become a man in Christ, die on a cross, be buried in death, resurrect and ascend back to His place in heaven and only then did He become glorified in such a way that He could contact men and not hit them with a power so strong ( inherent within God ) that it would not instantly kill their fleshly body or wear off over time, like Moses did when his " shine " diminished.

The body of Christ tempered, so to speak, the Holy Spirit so that, after His glorification, He could initiate the re-start of the spirit in mankind, begin a regeneration process, without implementing death in the person.

God was willing to plan and carry out that plan in Christ, but it involved He himself being put to death.

Of course much, much more was happening in Him and His acts simultaneously within His passion on earth and himself becoming glorified. His blood was being released by plan in order to become a cleansing power over sin, to blot it out so that, the former sins are simply no longer evident for viewing by anyone.

It's like blottong red ink out with red ink. You can't tell where the blood of Christ begins or ends. The sin is wiped away.

His ministry was filled with earthly and spiritual aspects for sure, but the spirit aspect is what got Him put to death.

He wanted the Christ Ministry to be very, very successful, and it is.

Men, however, continue to miss the spirit side of Christ's ministry even today, because the spirit in unregenerated man is just as dead today as that of men in the days when Christ was on earth as a man.

The formula to begin regeneration is exactly the same today as it was in Acts chapter 2:38,' repent by changing your intentions during life, turn to God and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ ( not father, son and holy ghost, not mother mary, not ben franklin, but only in the name of Jesus Christ ) ( why in the name of Jesus Christ? Because He is the one and only saviour ) so that your sins are forgiven. Then invite and receive the baptismal gift of the Holy Ghost into you. This promise is just as effective for you as it is for your sons, daughters, and their children later on, as each are are called to God by Him.

Get out while you still can, Peter went on and on, and escape the carnal culture that you live within, who cannot see the Holy Spirit at work in Christ.'

thunder

Van · Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2004 3:16 pm Post subject:

thunder · Lion King Joined: 13 Sep 2003 Posts: 1222

God is a person ... His name is Jesus ... and He resides in no box ... man made or other wise.

He inhabits all space ... that we know of.

It is we who are in a box ... that is humanity ... we live in the physical world where He put us and it is our mission to examine the evidence available to discern the work of God, when we find it, and to keep that information separate from the work of man.

Most of the work of man is fiction since it is founded on physics that only apply in the environments where we test them and when it comes to arts, such as writing and philosophy, which include man made religion and possible this or that concerning how we got here and how we are suppose to get out ( assuming you want out ), it's all based on mans imagination or what we want to see when we look into the microscope.

For all we know, we create the evidence when we look into that microscope because of a creative force inherent within our nature, possibly handed down to us by our maker.

Why did God give the revelation of His creation to Moses? Why tell any human who and why He made us? Why not keep silent and just watch the bugs at play?

Why tell Moses, or Nathan, or Ezekial, or John The Baptist, or Paul or John the Apostle any thing? Why has God revealed His creative acts and intentions to mere humans? Why place that information in what is now an ancient book that most modernized people consider to be inappropriate for even being mentioned in public school?

Because that is what He determined to do and He does not answer to us, we answer to Him.

It's called omniscience and soverignty and Lordship.

Hey ... it is His book and His universe ... not our's.

I just look for facts like some of you do. I find some in the bible, some other's in prayer and other's when I look at God's creation, then I know for sure who I am, why I'm here and what His purpose for my life is.

To be a witness for God in Christ and a witness against sin.

I pray that gets me out of this box.

thunder

nobdysfool · Newbie Alert Joined: 03 Feb 2008 Posts: 1

It seems that Van apparently believes that God's Creation is self-sustaining, requiring no more than the occasional tweak from Him to keep it humming merrily along. Is that what scripture shows? Or does scripture show that God is intimately involved with His Creation, feeding the birds of the field, clothing the flowers of the field, and knowing the needs of all men, especially of believers, even before they are aware of them, or ask Him to provide? Scripture speaks of Him knowing the number of grains of sand on the seashores, the number of hairs on our heads, knowing the end from the beginning. I believe I'll stick with scripture.

Van postulates that God chooses not to know certain things, like the contents of our hearts, and points to Abraham as an example of this. However, would it not be more correct to see that as teaching Abraham what was in his heart, rather than God trying to find out what was there, by testing? I believe God already knew, the test was for Abraham's benefit, not God's. Our character cannot be developed or strengthened without trials and testing, which God allows and directs, not for Him to learn about us, but for us to learn about Him, and ourselves.

To say that God does not know everything, which is a factual reduction of what Van has postulated, would lead to the discredited "Open" view of God, which is not scriptural.