I could just pull an Elijah. If God is the one true God, let him show himself. Poof an apple up in front of me right now. I find it weird that he isn't as active as he was in the Bible.
He's been there, done that. He even got fancy, and showed Himself risen from the dead. Your problem so far, is that you do not accept eyewitnesses. He showed Himself enough on the mount, so that His finger wrote the ten commandments. He showed Himself to Adam and Eve a lot. He appeared in His flying ship to Ezekiel, and some saw Him in the fiery furnace with the Hebrew children. We saw Him at supper, and riding animals, and on boats, and walking, and in the temple. So don't give us ..'if only we saw a miracle' routine.
If I remember correctly, we had a discussion on the "different state past" in another thread (pillow lava and all of that). All I saw from you was "you don't know, you don't know, you don't know", rather than any decent rebuttals.
I think what really came down was that you did not know, did not know. If you wanna compare notes on our educated guesses of some formation, fine. My guess is as good as yours.
Very few of your claims are supported by the Bible, unless you consider taking vague verses and twisting them to match your beliefs.
A new heavens is bible 101. Find me any Christian that doesn't believe in that, and I will be surprised. Eden was like that, in so many ways, so one can assume they have a lot of similarities.
Question is, why does an all-loving God require a blood sacrifice?
The price has to be paid. I think that is something I need to learn, and mankind in general needs to learn. We need to be a good as our word. If we make a covenant, or agreement, we need to live up to our side of the bargain. God does.
Will we have free will in heaven? If I accept Christ as my lord and savior right now, will I still have free will on whether I want to sin or not when I get to heaven? If not, why?
Maybe some believer has a better answer than I, for that. My understanding is that we will have free will, just like Adam did. Let's hope this giant experiment of a sin world gone mad will be enough to make us want to not go that route again! Jesus was down here Himself, and was tempted in all things like as we are, yet without sin. So He knows the nitty gritty score, there. I wouldn't be surprised if He uses that knowledge, and experience, in helping us...
How would you know? Can you see inspiration oozing through a man's body thousands of years ago? Or are you just making an uninformed assumption based on a fallible man's interpretation of scripture? If not, do you have a direct link to God?
How would I know? I looked into it. I looked at the prophesies fulfilled. I looked at a lot of impacted lives over all time. For every action (impacted life) there has to be an equal an opposite reaction, as well as something that actually does the impacting. Like a crater on the moon, we know something had to do it! For us that are saved, we taste heavenly thing, and gifts, and comfort, and all sorts of things. So we know that we are not talking dreams here.
So if our "temporary state" interpretations can reliably explains observations in geologic strata, why assume otherwise? If pillow lava is formed in aquatic environments today, why assume it was different in the past?
That depends. Maybe there is no reason to assume it was not formed in this state? Depends on the formation. But as far as the strata in general, all they ever used was a same state explanation. It all has to fit that premise.
I would like to see a verse that explicitly says the physical state of the past was different from now. Secondly, when did the past state change over to the present state and when will the present state change over to the future state?
Well, there are oodles of verses that talk of things impossible in this state. Like the separation of water from land in creation week. Like the spirit level at the time of Babel, they tried to build up to. Like fast plant growth. Like long life spans. There is a point after the flood, where it talks of the earth being divided. That is where I deduce the big change happened, about a century and change after the flood. The word for divided, can be interpreted 'split'. The new heavens are after the thousand year reign of Christ on earth, after He returns.
