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I believe it's my turn now.Now let me try again.
What you claim isn't what you've produced - in the vast majority of your posts you contradict Scripture with more violence than I see from most other members. And, no, I don't merely deny or accuse you of doing this, but rather I have documented how you have done so. Using Scripture that you haven't responded to, by the way.All you do is deny, accuse and reject when I've given clear and convincing evidence with dozens upon dozens of irrefutable Scripture.
Because you call God a liar when you claim His created law was eternal, and He gave us the means to document the time it began and the time it ended.When I say God's law is eternal, you say no.
False.When I say in the new covenant God will write His law on our heart, you say no.
I say God will write His law into us, that isn't according to Sinai. You claim that God is a liar, and has resorted to the former covenant He already identified as broken and faulty.
False.When I say we will keep the commandments if we love God, you say no.
I claim that we already abide by the commandments of God, while you have replaced the commandments of God with the first covenant that He concluded all disobedient to, with no exceptions.
False.When I say the new covenant will consist of the commandments of God and the testimony of Jesus, you say no.
Again you have replaced the commandments of God with the first covenant that He has called obsolete.
That's because there isn't any such thing, and you can't document it.When I say the spirit of the law is love, you say no.
No.Do you just deny for the sake of denying?
I wrote about my motivation to you earlier:
When I find the unBiblical posts you write, I respond in character in order to invoke the learning curve you have neglected to nurture. It would seem that you have no interest in learning anything, because your security blanket may get taken away and you might just be compelled to become a Christian.I came to discussion forums of this nature because I have found that it provides an accelerated learning curve that a university setting would be embarrassed by, as those who rely on Scripture press others for answers that we need to scramble for. Many times we discover in the process that beliefs we held dear to ourselves are foreign to what the Bible teaches.
That is a benefit a discussion forum offers to you. You have been pressed to find where answers are to be found in Scripture, and you leave when you can't - because the beliefs you continue to hold dear aren't Biblical, and those beliefs are more precious to you than the Gospel the Bible describes.
The truth is contained in that Bible you claim has the truth, but as Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 3:14 concerning unsaved Israel:2 Timothy 3:7 Always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ
Adventism's mission statement seeks to vindicate the first covenant, the ten commandments.
This is why you haven't been taught what the new covenant is.
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The first sentence in your post calls Scripture into question.If sin existed before the law on stone then the law must of had another expression.
There is no "if" - sin existed long before the law did.
The origin of sin was over 2500 years before the law mediated by Moses existed:
Romans 5
12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned 13 For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. 14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.
Not only did sin enter the world through Adam, but death did as well. Adam's transgression was eating of the fruit that he was forbidden to, and that ordinance isn't contained anywhere in the law dictated to Moses.
The Biblical record is further summarized in Galatians 3:
16 Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, And to seeds, as of many, but as of one, And to your Seed, who is Christ. 17 And this I say, that the law, which was four hundred and thirty years later, cannot annul the covenant that was confirmed before by God in Christ, that it should make the promise of no effect. 18 For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise.
There was a 430 year span between the promise to Abraham that in his Seed the nations would be blessed and the law that was dictated to Moses. This is again confirmed by the testimony that Moses gave in Deuteronomy 5, when he stated that the ten commandments didn't exist prior to his own generation.
In all of these, the same message is confirmed by the Biblical record: sin existed long before the law did, and as such exists as an entity separate from the law. The same condition exists now, where sin continues to exist - making God's promise to remember our sins no more after our redemption from the law. The law had a very limited time span, and sin exists either side of its tenure.
The rest of your post seems to capitalize on the error you made, when you fail to distinguish sin apart from transgressions of the law that knows no mercy. Having a faulty foundation leads to a house of cards, and hence I don't see a reason to address the cards that will fall down once the foundation is fixed.
Oh, and yes - circumcision is a part of the law mediated by Moses. The everlasting covenant made with Abraham in Genesis 17:13 ended when that ordinance was imported into Leviticus 12:1-3, and this was confirmed by Jesus in John 7:22 when He stated Moses gave them circumcision; circumcision is contained in the book of the law and is part of the covenant ordained at Sinai.
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Since we're using a familiar noun, we can remain with it for a while.The old covenant is that the chair is on one side of the room and the new covenant is that the chair is moved to the other side of the room.
Hebrews 8 describes the old chair:
Both Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8 contain a narrative of God making a new covenant, or a new chair, that is not according to the pattern of the old chair: I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah - not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt.
- The old chair is faulty: if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second.
- The old chair was violated, i.e. broken: they did not continue in My covenant.
- The old chair is obsolete: In that He says, A new covenant, He has made the first obsolete.
- The old chair is ready for disposal: Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.
While you assert that moving the chair across the room somehow made it new (which is ubsurd), the narrative you're confronted with tells a entirely different story: the old chair is disposed, and God made a new chair of an entirely different design.
I don't believe that I'm the first to break the news to you: Sinai is according to Sinai, and God's promise is that He would write His "My law" into His redeemed that isn't according to Sinai.The old covenant is that the law is written of stone and the new covenant is the law written on the heart.
Pretty simple...
Until you make this distinction that what (or rather, Who) has entered into us isn't from Sinai, you aren't going to make the smallest effort to determine what Scripture is telling us in its plain language.
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So, what you're claiming is that the Bible needs to be interpreted, instead of accepting the message that the new testament authors wrote in plain language meant to be understood by their recipients? Apparently so in your case, and your statement reflects the eisegetical process in which the commandments of God are to be replaced by the former covenant's law:We have to interpret these things in light of the big picture. The big picture is that God will one day have a people who love Him and keep His commandments. This has been the heart of God from the begnning.
This remains current Adventist theology, wherein the object of Adventism is to vindicate God's law, the same law of the former covenant God saw fit to redeem us from, with full knowledge that it will never be vindicated. It was designed to lead you as a tutor to Jesus Christ, and the SDA church's object is not the same object of redemption God designed into the created law.In the last generation God gives the final demonstration that men can keep the law of God and that they can live without sinning. God leaves nothing undone to make the demonstration complete. The only limitation He puts on Satan is that he may not kill the saints of God. He may tempt them, he may harass and threaten them; and he does his best. But he fails. He cannot make them sin. They stand the test, and God puts His seal on them. Through the last generation of saints God stands fully vindicated. (M.L. Andreasen The Sanctuary Service, Review and Herald, 1969 printing, pp. 318-19)
This observation is consistent with Paul's observation found in Colossians 2:We know that we are sinful by nature so any law given to make one righteous before God will fall short because of our nature but any person living without law will self destruct.
So what does He do?
He frees us from the law and it's condemning power, which is seen in the old covenant.
13 ¶ And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses,
14 having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.
15 Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.
16 So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths,
17 which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.
Freedom from the law is the same expression as redemption from the law, identified as the ten commandments in Romans 7:6-7, which has been quoted for you many times before. Consistent with this observation, the very reason that there are no grounds to judge another regarding their dismissal of the sabbath is because the law has lost its jurisdiction, and there is no ordinance driving sabbath observance outside the first covenant.
This continues to be the case, making God's promise all the more important to us: Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more. God doesn't expect anyone to vindicate the former law He redeemed us from. The official position of the SDA church is false.Through faith in Jesus we might be justifed. Justification has to do with a past wrong made right. In other words, we broke God's law.
Return to the context where this statement is made in Romans 7:12, and you will find the author testifying that he does not comply with this law, and tells us that the law that is holy, just, and good is lethal to all who are not, and God's disposition that all are disobedient is all inclusive; there is no exception for those trying to vindicate the former covenant God made obsolete.We have been set free from the law only to return to it freely because the law is righteous, holy and good and we hunger and thirst for that.
Several times I have requested that you make the effort to identify what -or, rather Who- God's "My law" refers to, and you haven't made any attempt to identify this reference. Remember, Jeremiah was specific when God stated that "My law" was not according to Sinai, and the author of Hebrews capilalized on that by stating that a new covenant makes the former covenant obsolete. Moving the location of the former obsolete covenant does not make it new, any more than moving a chair across the room makes the chair new.God is now able to write His law on our heart through Jesus and the work of the Spirit.
Hardly.Your observations tell me you need glasses.
Hardly.
My observations confirm my original two points:
You attempted to respond to the second point, but you never showed where the Gentiles were ever charged with the sabbath. And, you aren't going to - Moses testified they never did in Deuteronomy 4, and so did Paul in Romans 2:14.
- You have rejected God's rest to return to the sabbath, and have rejected the new covenant.
- You failed completely to show us where we have ever been instructed to remember the sabbath we -as Gentiles- never received.
The first point you ignored.
You left Christianity to return to Judaism.
So you and freeindeed2 don't want to answer my question?
It really all boils down to the Sabbath.
The Sabbath testifies of a Creator and a creation.
Keeping the Sabbath testifies that it is God who is sanctifying you.
Keeping the Sabbath tells everyone around you that you worship the God of creation.
This is why Satan has a problem with it and is why he has devised a belief that does away with it.
God blessed, sactifed and called holy the seventh day at creation even before sin or Jews and Gentile were even in the world. The words, blessed, sanctifed and holy have some very powerful meanings you need to look up.
Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man so that pretty much includes everyone.
Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath and He is my Lord so I will honor Him by obeying His commandments.
What sets you apart from the Jews who determined to hold onto the former covenant that was their national identity?So you and freeindeed2 don't want to answer my question?
It really all boils down to the Sabbath.
The Sabbath testifies of a Creator and a creation.
Keeping the Sabbath testifies that it is God who is sanctifying you.
Keeping the Sabbath tells everyone around you that you worship the God of creation.
This is why Satan has a problem with it and is why he has devised a belief that does away with it.
God blessed, sactifed and called holy the seventh day at creation even before sin or Jews and Gentile were even in the world. The words, blessed, sanctifed and holy have some very powerful meanings you need to look up.
Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man so that pretty much includes everyone.
Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath and He is my Lord so I will honor Him by obeying His commandments.
So, the old covenant then. I gotcha ya.I'm talking about the commandments that God wrote with His own finger, which includes this Sabbath.
Leviticus 23:3 You will work for six days, but the seventh will be a day of complete rest, a day for the sacred assembly on which you do no work at all. Wherever you live, this is a Sabbath for Yahweh.
So now once again...Do you believe it's okay to lie, steal, murder, commit adultery, worship other Gods, forget the Sabbath and so on?
So you and freeindeed2 don't want to answer my question?
It usually does for sabbatarian groups. That's why whole scriptural passages are dissected and divided into sound bytes. For Christ-followers it ALL comes down to Jesus Christ.k4c said:It really all boils down to the Sabbath.
Yes, just like all things that were created do. It also testified of God's grace in Deut. 5. God led the COI out of slavery in Egypt. No mention of creation there.k4c said:The Sabbath testifies of a Creator and a creation.
The sign of the covenant made with Israel, the weekly Sabbath, is a shadow of the 'My Rest' that God sanctified on the 7th day of creation week.k4c said:Keeping the Sabbath testifies that it is God who is sanctifying you.
For Israel, who it was given to, it set them apart from the Gentiles around them. Nobody Christ-followers look at sabbatarians today and see a testament to worshiping God by trying to observe the sign of the old covenant. They see legalism, moralism, and the religiousness of the Pharisees.k4c said:Keeping the Sabbath tells everyone around you that you worship the God of creation.
According to who? You think the Sabbath was about church which wouldn't begin until Christ's resurrection? Think!k4c said:This is why Satan has a problem with it and is why he has devised a belief that does away with it.
What did he do on the eighth day? Repeat creation? There is a difference between the 'My Rest' of God and the shadowy weekly rest that was a sign of the old covenant.k4c said:God blessed, sactifed and called holy the seventh day at creation even before sin or Jews and Gentile were even in the world. The words, blessed, sanctifed and holy have some very powerful meanings you need to look up.
Who was he speaking to in that passage? And why will you use that to blanket the Gentiles, who didn't have the law, but not allow Paul to include all of humanity in Romans 1-3 as having no righteousness?k4c said:Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man so that pretty much includes everyone.
God is not honored by human effort at obeying the letters that brought death in the old covenant. God is honored by those who believe in Jesus for their salvation. Attempting to combine the two is spiritual adultery. Death and life cannot co-exist. Choose Jesus.k4c said:Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath and He is my Lord so I will honor Him by obeying His commandments.
I don't think you realize the peril you invoke for yourself, when you blaspheme God by calling Him "satan".This is why Satan has a problem with it and is why he has devised a belief that does away with it.
So, the old covenant then. I gotcha ya.
So do you observe all of the other feasts and festivals listed in the chapter you quoted? Do you worship the WHOLE cycle of Sabbaths God gave Israel, or only the weekly? Do you worship the new moon, the yearly, every 7 years, and every 50th year too (Jubilee)? You do see the cycle, right?
Please describe the morality of the Sabbath. Thanks.
I, a Gentile, get the morality of murder, stealing, sleeping with another man's wife, etc. But the sign of the old covenant that the Gentiles were never given...? Where's the MORAL link to the old covenant sign, the Sabbath? And why would a Gentile like myself, who is under the new covenant, the blood of Christ, try to go back under what I have died to through Christ to be raised and joined with him who is my righteousness???Why would you try and Judaize me into observing that which has been made obsolete?
In CHRIST alone...
How could you die to the old covenant if you say it had nothing to do with you? Here is what God says about you as a Gentile, "You are aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world".
But now through Jesus you don't have to be a stranger having no hope and without God. God will take what He has give to Israel and give it to you He will put His Spirit in you and write His laws in your heart. You can be the wild branch that is grafted in. If you let Him. I guess it all boils down to whether you truely love God or not.
You turn off the TV on Saturday because Ellen White had a vision where she saw a halo around the 4th commandment. Think about it. You think there is any way you would have come to this belief if she never existed?
Highly highly unlikely. So, did God really give her this vision? Did He give her other false visions? Did she just get extremely lucky and get this one thing right?
Everything comes down to EGW. You cannot escape her.
This is a pretty epic battle. Just from an outsiders perspective, I might recommend taking it just 1 verse at a time.
For example, couldn't you just take Matthew 19:17 and try to look at it in context? It seems like you never sit and address a single verse, but instead keep running off to 20 others. It just keeps going in an endless circle.
Not sure exactly how you got to this "ploy to discredit the truth" thing...
Again, I was SDA until I was 28, 2 years ago. It is hard for me to even name a person I am friends with who isn't SDA still. Entire family still SDA blah blah blah. I would be perfectly happy if it were all true. Sadly, however, it is not.
I'm wondering your opinion on EGW. Was she a true prophet? did her visions come from God?
The followup is obviously, if so then how did she get so much wrong?
If she wasn't a real prophet, then did she just get lucky?
This idea that God gave her a couple true visions and then she made up all the rest just doesn't sit well with me. That is exactly what you have to believe though if you are going to pick and choose what parts of what she said to follow.
It's funny to me that most SDA's throw out every single little thing she said, but they keep the big things! They don't follow her dietary stuff at all, or even her specific Saturday guidelines. Most of them have no idea what this 1844 investigative judgment thing is. They threw it all out the window and just kept church on Saturday and state of the dead.
k4c you obviously have less of a stake in it. You came to it for your own unique reasons and you can kinda just pick and choose what you like out of the church. It works well for you because you can dismiss anything you can't defend with regards to EGW. Most SDA's don't have that luxury, and that's probably why there aren't many around these parts...
I'm happy to see that you're able to distinguish the two groups that the Gospel of God's redemption address. FreeIndeed's comment referred to Romans 7:4, which says "Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another----to Him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God." Remember that this chapter starts with a qualifier telling us who it addresses: "I speak to those who know the law" in verse 1.How could you die to the old covenant if you say it had nothing to do with you? Here is what God says about you as a Gentile, "You are aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world".
But as you discovered on your own, the Gentiles were not grafted into the promises of Abraham -who was not a Jew- and the heritage of believing Israel until the first covenant came to an end. And, as both Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8 specify, the law of the first covenant wasn't written into anyone, but rather God's "My law" that was not according to Sinai. You still haven't made an effort to determine what this refers to, since it isn't the ten commandments.But now through Jesus you don't have to be a stranger having no hope and without God. God will take what He has give to Israel and give it to you He will put His Spirit in you and write His laws in your heart. You can be the wild branch that is grafted in. If you let Him. I guess it all boils down to whether you truely love God or not.
The qualifier "To me" that you lead your comment with makes yours a subjective statement that divorces it from anything objective that can be documented. And as you likely know, I was never within the SDA church - my introduction to Adventism is via interaction with members of the church who challenged me to consider their "prophet" Ellen White (aka EGW) and the "truths" of their unique message. And so I did, and discovered that the heresies of Adventism needed to be addressed once I learned the significance of 1844 and the events Adventism ascribes to this date.To me, the SDA has the most truth of all other denominations even with all it's baggage.
The qualifier "To me" that you lead your comment with makes yours a subjective statement that divorces it from anything objective that can be documented. And as you likely know, I was never within the SDA church - my introduction to Adventism is via interaction with members of the church who challenged me to consider their "prophet" Ellen White (aka EGW) and the "truths" of their unique message. And so I did, and discovered that the heresies of Adventism needed to be addressed once I learned the significance of 1844 and the events Adventism ascribes to this date.
My wife and I just had dinner with a former SDA member who is about my age. She was within Adventism much of her life, 4th generation on one side of her family and 5th generation on the other. Her family tree includes those who have met Ellen White, evangelists and docters who were revered within Adventism, and tons of of lay members as well. She has intimate knowledge about what Adventism's perfectionist message of overcoming sin has done to more people than you will meet.
First hand knowledge of marriages destroyed, children abused, and an incredible frequency of mental disfunction are peppered throughout her detailed narratives, and she drops names of specific people without batting an eye. This comes as the human mind subject to Adventism tries desparately to reconcile Ellen White's message that you need to stand sinless during a time when Jesus Christ leaves His role as your intercessor in heaven when He embarks on a long journey to earth to rescue the survivors of the Sunday law fiasco. That's the deviation that you will never reconcile with the Gospel: salvation is not by grace for the last generation, lending credence to Ellen White's firm statement " It means eternal salvation to keep the Sabbath holy unto the Lord. {6T 356.4}".
And the claim to be a Christian denomination is well known to be the marketing of the SDA church to those outside Adventism, while within Adventism the SDA church regards themselves to be the remnant church, while all Protestant denominations are regarded to be the daughters of the harlot Roman Catholic Church.
The baggage you just got handed recently as a relatively new member of the SDA church contains dirty laundry you haven't even learned of yet.
No doubt that's the reason that the Adventist congregational forum was split into two subsections. Many Adventists aren't going to abide by all 28 Fundamental Beliefs, and hence we have this forum to address those who are in a transition between the SDA church's official stance on doctrine and somewhere outside Adventism altogether.Like I said, people can believe whatever they want to believe. You can quote someone who has been dead for hundreds of years if you must and I'm sure you can go into the past of any denomination and find baggage. Some baggage that was approved of by the church and some that was not approved, some of it true and some of it false. Today the church is different like many other churches that had baggage in their past. Even many of God's people within the Bible have baggage in their past, praise God for His grace and mercy.
Now I can't speak for all SDA churches because there is a wide range of beliefs under the umbrella of Adventism but I can say the church that we're building is different. Most Adventist would struggle finding fellowship of a like minded legalistic faith in our church.
And as you had pointed out previously, that didn't happen until the "the law of commandments contained in ordinances" (Ephesians 2:15) that contained the sabbath came to an end. This is a primary reason Christianity doesn't affirm the sabbath: Christianity didn't exist until after the end of the sabbath.To me salvation from sin is just that. God saves us from the penalty of sin (the cross), the power of sin, (we are perfect in Christ) and as time moves on with the grace and help of God, the presence of sin in that we can see that we are not where we could be but we're at least not where we use to be.
Remember, salvation is of the Jews, not the Gentiles, we are invited into the commonwealth of Israel as both Jew and Gentile become spiritual Israel in Christ.
No doubt that's the reason that the Adventist congregational forum was split into two subsections. Many Adventists aren't going to abide by all 28 Fundamental Beliefs, and hence we have this forum to address those who are in a transition between the SDA church's official stance on doctrine and somewhere outside Adventism altogether.
And as you had pointed out previously, that didn't happen until the "the law of commandments contained in ordinances" (Ephesians 2:15) that contained the sabbath came to an end. This is a primary reason Christianity doesn't affirm the sabbath: Christianity didn't exist until after the end of the sabbath.
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