From the Daily Sceptic... Matthew 24:9 is coming true: you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake...
https://twitter.com/01brain_dead/status/1790607386908201078
"Muslim candidates and elected representatives… need make no excuses for their personal faith. To criticise a Muslim, or any other minority, for the illiberal tenets of their faith would be prejudicial. But Christians? They’re fair game."
How do you typically respond when people say, “but we all come from the same source”? Which is true, God created everything. God also knows everything. Why create something you know is going to be eternally damned if you don’t follow a certain path (in our case, Christianity).
This is one thing I wrestle and struggle with constantly.
God knew from the beginning we were going to need a Savior. Jesus was in the plan from the beginning. God told Adam and Eve that in Genesis when they sinned, that through their bloodline a Messiah will come to save the world.
Jesus' blood covers all our sins. all that is required of us is to truly repent and accept Him as the Son of God and turn from our sinful ways.
we live in a fallen world and God made a way for us to be with Him for eternity. it is our choice. it's not easy, but that is why Jesus had to die the way he did, he took the sin of the world onto Himself so that we would have a way.
God wants true love from us. He could have created robots to do as He says, but He wants us to love Him because He loves us. He even gave the angels free choice knowing full well what was going to happen.
if you have children, don't you want them to love and respect you because they want to, not because you force them too?? Don't you teach them between right and wrong and when they do wrong, don't you scold them, tell them the right way again, but you don't stop loving them because they did wrong. you keep teaching and hope they learn and continue to love you for that.
Are you SURE about that?
Matthew 13:33-42 --
Here, Jesus is speaking to the "multitudes," which means all the people who have gathered, and NOT only His people. He tells them something, using a parable.
Jesus never told the full truth to the multitudes. He ONLY spoke the FULL TRUTH to His own people. If you don't understand that, then many passages in the Bible will not make sense to you. They will seem to say something the don't.
This means that the Old Testament, going back all the way to Genesis, did NOT tell us everything. Jesus came, in part to reveal more information (thus: Revelation, and all the books of the New Testament).
Nobody can understand the OT without also understanding NT, with both in context of each other. This is why both jews and muslims cannot understand the OT.
Go back to Genesis 1 --
So, Jesus says that He came to reveal things that had not been revealed in the OT.
In the OT, everything that God made was GOOD.
In the NT, Jesus tells that everything that God made was good, BUT THEN the Devil (Satan) came along and sowed the BAD seed.
Now, back to the earlier verses in Matthew 13 --
Jesus spoke the FULL TRUTH to His own people, but to the multitudes He only spoke in parables. He did this because ONLY HIS PEOPLE could/should/would undestand the truth.
So ...
What God created was good, which in the parable is the wheat. But then Satan came along and created the tares. One day, God will separate them, and burn the tares and bring the wheat into the Kingdom of Heaven.
If that is the case, then where did Satan come from and how did he create the tares?
Again, Jesus said that he came to reveal secrets that were kept from the foundation of the world.
Revelation 12:7-12 --
Satan was cast down into the Earth. But he had a short time to do his evil works.
Back to Genesis 5 --
IOW: This is the family tree of Adam, as in the genetic family tree, with is direct descendants.
You can trace his family tree from Adam down to Noah in this chapter:
Adam >> Seth >> Enos >> Cainan >> Mahalaleel >> Jared >> Enoch >> Methuselah >> Lamech >> Noah
So ... Noah was a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Adam.
Direct genetic lineage.
This is why all the "this man begat that son" is found in the Bible. It is a family tree.
But ...
Genesis 6:4 --
That is the KJV. But, I believe the meaning of this verse has been corrupted and changed, which makes the TRUE story indecipherable to most Christians. This is one of the BIG reasons that Christians and non-Christians find the Bible confusing.
In the Expanded Bible, we see:
The word in Hebrew was Nephilim (our English pronunciation) and it means "fallen ones," not "giants."
These fallen ones are the angels ("messengers") of Satan, which we see in Rev 12:7-12 was kicked out of Heaven, and fell to the Earth.
Putting it all together:
God created everything that was good. But Satan showed up and made things that were evil. Satan's people mixed with some (not all) of God's people.
Jesus came, partly, to tell us this missing piece of the puzzle that was not told (completely) in the OT (it was a secret kept from the foundation).
The wheat and the tares are the good and the bad. At some point, God will separate them and only the wheat will live on.
Wow. Thank you for that extremely thoughtful reply. I feel like I understood every point you made. You are clearly well read on the Bible, I’d go as far as to say you’re a messenger.
So basically how I understand it is God created everything, but Satan rebelled and polluted the human lineage. This allowed bad seed (tares) to become sown into humanity, which have multiplied along with the good seed (wheat). Gods plan is basically to let the crop grow until the bad seed can be properly separated.
My question now is, what is growing? And how does God know when to “harvest”? All very interesting, thank you again.
now reading this in the context from my reply to Honor+Duty, i respond by saying we all are created by the One true God. it's who we decide to worship that makes man different from one another.
Totally agree. But where i struggle is when i tell people God knows everything. So if He’s all loving AND all knowing, why create them, then allow your creation to worship something that will lead them to damnation? It’s what I struggle with. My mind goes back to free will but that’s not enough for people.
i def understand what you are saying, but the Bible tells us that Gods ways are not our ways and His ways are much Higher than our ways.
i also struggle with this thought about creating something that i love and to know that creation might burn in eternity seems cruel. to be 100% honest, i don't know how God does this? i often think about how He sees all these children being sacrificed for centuries and how He can take it? but i have to always come back to He is God, He knew all of this would happen and yet He still created us. somethings are not for us to know.
i've been crushed different times and have vented on this site and there are some really, really great people on here that lovingly bring me back. a pede on here called Fractualization (sp?) was very gracious to me in his/her words. i will never forget the time and graciousness of his/her words about our Father. we all have bad days, some worse than others and that's why we have to lean on our brothers and sisters and much prayer because satan works OT on us.
i was asked one day, what happens if you don't believe and you die and there is a God? what happens if you do believe and you die and there is NO God? which one would you rather choose?
what do you lose if you die believing there is a God, and there is a God, you have eternal life. what have you lost if you die and have lived a good life and there is no God? you have lost nothing, you gained a good life. why take the chance? having God in your life is a win/win.
100% agree on having God in life is a win/win. But to your point on creation, imagine having a child and knowing it would become homeless before you conceived? It just seems like a wild concept. Like you said, Gods ways are not our ways. I am sure there’s a reason for all of it.
If God's people did not have free will, then they would be nothing but robots. They would have no option, which means it would not be their desire to do what is right. It would merely be programmed into them.
This desire comes from the spirit, which is the concept of God.
An AI compter can never really learn by way of taking in information from mutiple points of view and then discerning truth from falsehood or place a moral opinion on good versus evil.
The ONLY thing it can do is whatever it was programmed to do. So, the result will never be the truth. It will only be whatever information it can scrape from data sources, and then compile that data in a manner in which it was programmed. It does not KNOW that the answer is true, even if "true" is written into its program to spit out that word as part of its answer. To a machine like an AI computer, it is just 1's and 0's. It is not REAL truth as humans understand it.
It does not have a spirt, and therefore, it cannot be like God.
Imagine creating an AI, and giving it instructions that the ONLY source of data it has access to is Wikipedia. Then, you create a second AI, but with this one you give it instructions that the ONLY data it has access to is GAW.
You could ask any question, but you would get very different answers.
If humans were like that, they would not be capable of doing the work of God. They could only do what they were programmed to do.
Having free will allows humans who understand the spirit to follow the spirit, and those who do not will not.
Maybe God wanted TRUE warriors and not mere lemmings.
This might also explain why the lemmings of the Cabal do not have any spirit. They only do what they are told, without any moral compass.
What you’re saying makes sense. It’s just interesting because I have four siblings, we were all raised the same way. I stuck to my faith in Christ while a few of them have all fallen away. “Spiritual” is what they now call themselves. So what happened along the way that they drifted away and I stuck to it? It’s all confusing and something we probably won’t be able to fully answer until the end.