There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, “the faithful followers of God” (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, “the political entity” (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law, though some verses are certainly interesting in that direction.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing with our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me, for I have most definitely sinned knowingly.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?
• Does it not seem odd that if the Law was to be done away with, that Jesus himself wouldn’t have said so while he was with the apostles, rather than saying that it was not done away with and waiting for after his death to have that incredibly important matter be taught by just two apostles via only a few verses? This seems to me to indicate we are missing context on the parts that appear to say that we can disregard the Law (Torah/Genesis-Deuteronomy).

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!). Meanwhile, if it was done away with through abolition, that would seem to indicate that God changed His mind. That line of thought seems to lead to bad places.

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith (which is “obedient action that grows out of belief”). However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We similarly shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

Hope you find blessing in this comment. I think it’s very important information to consider. Be sure to check everything out for yourself, as I do not claim to be The Truth, this is only the lens that has made the scriptures make the most sense to me, and to finally actually start working on cleaning up the sin in my life.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, “the faithful followers of God” (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, “the political entity” (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law, though some verses are certainly interesting in that direction.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me, for I have most definitely sinned knowingly.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?
• Does it not seem odd that if the Law was to be done away with, that Jesus himself wouldn’t have said so while he was with the apostles, rather than saying that it was not done away with and waiting for after his death to have that incredibly important matter be taught by just two apostles via only a few verses? This seems to me to indicate we are missing context on the parts that appear to say that we can disregard the Law (Torah/Genesis-Deuteronomy).

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!). Meanwhile, if it was done away with through abolition, that would seem to indicate that God changed His mind. That line of thought seems to lead to bad places.

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith (which is “obedient action that grows out of belief”). However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We similarly shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

Hope you find blessing in this comment. I think it’s very important information to consider. Be sure to check everything out for yourself, as I do not claim to be The Truth, this is only the lens that has made the scriptures make the most sense to me, and to finally actually start working on cleaning up the sin in my life.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, “the faithful followers of God” (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, “the political entity” (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me, for I have most definitely sinned knowingly.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?
• Does it not seem odd that if the Law was to be done away with, that Jesus himself wouldn’t have said so while he was with the apostles, rather than saying that it was not done away with and waiting for after his death to have that incredibly important matter be taught by just two apostles via only a few verses? This seems to me to indicate we are missing context on the parts that appear to say that we can disregard the Law (Torah/Genesis-Deuteronomy).

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!)

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith (which is “obedient action that grows out of belief”). However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We similarly shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

Hope you find blessing in this comment. I think it’s very important information to consider. Be sure to check everything out for yourself, as I do not claim to be The Truth, this is only the lens that has made the scriptures make the most sense to me, and to finally actually start working on cleaning up the sin in my life.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, “the faithful followers of God” (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, “the political entity” (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me, for I have most definitely sinned knowingly.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?
• Does it not seem odd that if the Law was to be done away with, that Jesus himself wouldn’t have said so while he was with the apostles, rather than saying that it was not done away with and waiting for after his death to have that incredibly important matter be taught by just two apostles via only a few verses? This seems to me to indicate we are missing context on the parts that appear to say that we can disregard the Law (Torah/Genesis-Deuteronomy).

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!)

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith (which is “obedient action that grows out of belief”). However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

Hope you find blessing in this comment. I think it’s very important information to consider. Be sure to check everything out for yourself, as I do not claim to be The Truth, this is only the lens that has made the scriptures make the most sense to me, and to finally actually start working on cleaning up the sin in my life.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?
• Does it not seem odd that if the Law was to be done away with, that Jesus himself wouldn’t have said so while he was with the apostles, rather than saying that it was not done away with and waiting for after his death to have that incredibly important matter be taught by just two apostles via only a few verses?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!)

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith (which is “obedient action that grows out of belief”). However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

Hope you find blessing in this comment. I think it’s very important information to consider

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?
• Does it not seem odd that if the Law was to be done away with, that Jesus himself wouldn’t have said so while he was with the apostles, rather than saying that it was not done away with and waiting for after his death to have that incredibly important matter be taught by just two apostles via only a few verses?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!)

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith (which is “obedient action that grows out of belief”). However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

Hope you appreciate the post, that was almost 3 hours. I think it’s very important information to consider, though.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?
• Does it not seem odd that if the Law was to be done away with, that Jesus himself wouldn’t have said so while he was with the apostles, rather than saying that it was not done away with and waiting for after his death to have that incredibly important matter be taught by just two apostles via only a few verses?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!)

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith. However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

Hope you appreciate the post, that was almost 3 hours. I think it’s very important information to consider, though.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?
• Does it not seem odd that if the Law was to be done away with, that Jesus himself wouldn’t have said so while he was with the apostles, rather than saying that it was not done away with and waiting for after his death to have that incredibly important matter be taught by just two apostles?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!)

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith. However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

Hope you appreciate the post, that was almost 3 hours. I think it’s very important information to consider, though.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice? (And sure enough, a few short years after Jesus’ resurrection, it became impossible to operate the sacrificial system and it has not been operated since then. Hee!)

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith. However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, or no benefit to trying to follow the Law, or even worse if the law is a curse (!!) (Galatians 3:10-14, totally out of context), why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible, and the very direct statements of Jesus himself. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice?

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith. However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training. We have also found out that there is a difference between knowingly breaking the law and accidentally or unintentionally breaking the law, in terms of dealing witth our government criminals. God looks at sin the same way, please pray he has mercy upon me.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice?

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith. However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46 - seriously, go read those verses and tremble). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice?

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith. However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training.

For Acts 15, as with “Judaize”, what matters is context and meaning. I do not claim to be able to guarantee the proper meaning of that verse, as there is disagreement on it. There are people who say that it is referring to not treating gentiles as being unclean (Jews held tradition of not eating with them, which was often gasped toward Jesus’ act of doing so by the leaders of the synagogue). You are presenting it in its traditional church context of “it is ok to eat anything”.

What I do know, is that for it to be acceptable, under any conditions, to eat anything we want (what is meant by the word “food” is also important - in biblical context, if it wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t “food”, though it might be “edible”), then it has to abolish the law. That brings .. a lot of questions up.

• How does a vision of Peter override the very direct statement of Jesus? Matthew 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to >>fulfil<<..
• Why do the Ten Commandments selectively remain in play?
• Assuming those are still in play, why do we continue to obey other parts of the law, and only disregard the laws on food and appointed times? We still do not approve of tattoos or cuttings (though this has changed in the last 20 years, and for the same reason!). We still do not approve of bribery. We still do not approve of anyone copulating with their grandmother, or their brother’s wife (that means you, Hunter!). We still believe the poor should have equal standing in court as the rich.
• If there’s no need to try and follow the Law, why did the founding fathers draw so heavily on it to construct the Constitution?
• If the law is done away with, what constitutes “sin”, specifically?

There are a handful of NT scriptures, mostly by Paul, that seem to be taken out of context and used to overrule 75% of the Bible. I do not think this is the correct approach, and has also led to a lot of corruption working in, as the church as a whole no longer accepts that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16-17), but rather, effectively, “those guys were supposed to do that”, rather than “we are called to do this as part of preparing our bodies to be a temple and living sacrifice and bringing our nation into righteousness.”

Now, something that I don’t think is in play anymore, it’s the sacrificial system. That was tied to the Law of Sin and Death, and I believe has been done away with through fulfillment, and not abolition. Read Hebrews 7:11-28 with an eye toward the purpose of the sacrificial system. If the sacrifice was for atonement, and was imperfect and thus needed to be done often, and a perfect sacrifice has since been made, what need is there for any further external sacrifice?

If I had to sum it up… the Law, in and of itself, does not provide salvation. Salvation comes by grace, through faith. However, disobeying and disregarding the Law sure seem to be really good paths to condemnation. The food thing, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily the biggest issue, but thinking that the Law is done away with and inapplicable is a huge issue. We shouldn’t try to pick and choose which laws to follow based solely on if we’re trying to get backing for an opinion of ours, but rather our opinion should be based on what the law says, and tested constantly to ensure that our understanding is contextually correct.

(If you see this, I’m still writing. Just don’t want to lose what’s written. I’ll delete this note when I’m closer to done)

It would be nice to address this as a normal comment, but as with my comment, there’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why? We are currently unfaithful and we are currently losing our land. As you noted: However, if they disobeyed and turned away from God, they would face consequences and lose their land. See Deuteronomy 28:15-68, Leviticus 26:39
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training.

For Acts 15

(If you see this, I’m still writing. Just don’t want to lose what’s written. I’ll delete this note when I’m closer to done)

It would be nice to address this as a normal comment, but as with my comment, there’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.
• Deuteronomy 28:1-2, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God." I believe this has applied, and can apply again, to America. There were a mixed multitude present at Mount Sinai. Not everyone was descended from Jacob. Further, Matthew 3:9 and Romans 11. Falling into unbelief and coming into fairhfulness change who “Israel” is across time, though there will always be a remnant of the first seed.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). There may even be many people who are of the lost tribes without knowing who they are. Broken branches, sadly. We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why?
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training.

For Acts 15

(If you see this, I’m still writing. Just don’t want to lose what’s written. I’ll delete this note when I’m closer to done)

It would be nice to address this as a normal comment, but as with my comment, there’s a lot of ground covered here, so I’ll try to address it by subject, starting with agreements and moving to answers/discernments.

• His followers are standing in the gap in the meantime and mankind as a whole is benefitting. - Amen.
• though the world looks insane right now if you consider what was common place 100, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago, <list of human insanities>. Today this would be received with almost unanimous horror. - Depends on where you’re at, but there are certainly a lot of places where this has been improved. I’d love to see us get back to Detroit before going off to foreign lands (though I repeat myself), but that’s me.
• I also lean towards Zion being spiritual now, and the more people who come in to that spiritual land, the more it will manifest physically in the world. I believe we are marching towards Zion, worldwide. I don't think it is limited to a plot of dirt in the middle east. - I tend to lean toward Rev 1:5-7, and think it is both spiritual and physical, with the physical being called to emulate the spiritual. “On Earth as it is in Heaven”. We are presently seeing legal/political mechanisms being revealed that may make it possible for Americans to reattain kingship rather than serfdom/slavery. Pray it be so. There may or may not end up being something special about that specific plot of land. We’ll see. Perhaps even the Red Shield ends up being used as Herod was, but we likely agree that’s up to God, not us. The “future proves past” lens applies nicely to things like this.

To other questions:

• Also wouldn't you get more mercury from fish than shrimp? Jesus ate fish This is somewhat muddied today by how we farm fish rather than simply catching fish, but it’s also not only about mercury. Generally speaking, “you are what you eat”, and the farther up the chain we go, or if we go down to creatures that feed on dead matter, the more untoward things we take in and make a part of us, generally speaking. If our body is a temple (1 Corinthians 19:20), presented as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1), would we seek to take the remains of a rotting corpse and smear it around a church, or do we not try to keep what we eat as pure and as close to living as we can? There are times where the choices are starvation or malnourishment, or eating things we shouldn’t, or times where we might be presented things to eat where we can make inroads with unbelievers on weightier matters. Romans 14:23 seems to indicate that eating such things can fall under grace through [more general] faith.
• My point was that until Israel believes in their Messiah they remain in exile. - Christianity is grafted into “Israel”, the faithful followers of God (Romans 11). We are not grafted into “Israel”, the political entity (well, we are, but not biblically or by choice). A big part of what triggered me to look at scripture this way is how we appear to be in exile and under quite a few biblical curses in our own lands right now (Leviticus 26:14-46). Israel in exile, or becoming close to it, if you will. If we are completely under boundless grace, why?
• [Paul] also mentions elsewhere that whoever has the faith to eat a food let them be, and likewise to whoever abstains let him be. Please don’t take this as me trying to harass or pursue, but discussing how we understand scriptures and how we engage with sin and righteousness are certainly within the range of our calling, and is the same way you are engaging with me. It would most certainly be untoward to sit next to a man eating shrimp and make a gross issue of it and try to shame him, but by the same means, if we aught not do something (“sin”), not bringing it up for discussion, inspection, and correction is also a problem, yes?
• Are you striving to fulfill the Law of Moses? - Fulfill? No. Keep? Yes. I doubt anyone but Jesus is able to fulfill the law.
• The way I understand it is through faith in Christ you are changed into a holy person as you grow in Him. Paul says in Galatians not to let anybody "Judaize" you as a believer. - This is true, but it also matters what “Judaize” means. Even at that time the leaders had created a heavy yoke of tradition that was required to be followed in order to be considered faithful. The Talmud is full of these sorts of things. I agree with Paul here, just with a different concept of “Judaize”. You wouldn’t catch me with a black cube taped to my forehead any time soon, as I disagree on that tradition being needed to keep that scripture.

Regarding Acts 10 and Acts 15. Acts 15, to me, says to bring unbelievers into the faith slowly, so that they might not fall into knowing sin while trying to bring their actions into righteousness. It seems like how one would go about exercising. Don’t start running a marathon with no training.

For Acts 15