Mixed Messages.....

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

The very fact that God continually demonstrates His love by providing mankind with all they need, up to and including a Savior, seems to indicate that God is far from being absent, lazy or uncaring. BTW, where would even get the idea I suggested such a thing? I think it's obvious you're projecting you vision of God here.



Honestly, you seem to be projecting. I haven't written anything here that would begin to suggest that what you've written is anything close to what I believe.

It did not seek to characterise you or your viewpoint. It merely responded with what your previous post (now forgotten, sorry) suggested in its own mind. If that constitutes a "projection" so be it, but it always understood a "projection" to consist entirely in attributing the contents of one's own thought to someone else -- which it did not do (but which it cannot help but notice you did in your response, LOL. )

 

[RND]

It did not seek to characterise you or your viewpoint.

Then what was your point being other than to project your thoughts about God onto my comments?

It merely responded with what your previous post (now forgotten, sorry) suggested in its own mind.

Or, what you took them to be saying, hence your projection.

If that constitutes a "projection" so be it, but it always understood a "projection" to consist entirely in attributing the contents of one's own thought to someone else -- which it did not do (but which it cannot help but notice you did in your response, LOL. )

Actually, it would be the opposite simply because my comments couldn't "read" your mind. You could only tell us what's on your mind by informing us (projection). Hence you used my comments to lead us into a better understanding of the type of God you understand God to be.

Lastly, my last comment wasn't a projecting my thoughts based on anything you said, but merely stated the obvious. The fact you missed that isn't surprising.

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

And yet, after creation, God was able to talk and walk with Adam. Adam didn't find it necessary to hide himself from God until he sinned.

Yes, that bes essentially what it said about Separation. However, the separation itself began before the act of eating the fruit. It began with the first unbelief -- the actual sin here -- in distrusting God.

Darkness is always used as a metaphor for sin. Always.

Not sure it would agree with you there. But since you bes inclined to think as much, consider Psalm 139 in that regard then. Especially verses 7-12.

And yet Satan did rebel and choose to go to war with God in the Heavenly battlefield

He had his reasons. They bes valid ones. God knows too. You cannot comprehend the real nature of the rift between them or its ultimate end until you comprehend its beginning. Unfortunately, comprehending its beginning seems to be the one great secret kept from most humankind, the last great secret toward unlocking love and compassion, hidden from sight because it shakes the foundations of everything you've ever been programmed to believe constitutes "real". It effectively unplugs your sorry behind from the Matrix once and for all, and most humans bes not ready for it. That does not mean they can stop it though. God has ordained a time in which His Mystery will be fully complete, and He will get us all there if He has to drag us kicking and screaming across the barbed wire barricades we have erected to protect ourselves from Uncompromised Love even the barricades we have falsely called HIS Mind and HIS Truth.

to the point Satan through his pride and desire would even lead a third of the angels to condemnation, death and complete separation from God.

Your understanding here bes incomplete. Not worth arguing quantum physics with a devout Newtonian. Just consider this: death does not exist. It has been swallowed up in victory.

Satan was not an innocent bystander in all of this

Nobody bes an innocent bystander and that includes God. He could have handled "the situation" (the Wrong from the Beginning) in a multitude of ways. He chose THIS way, and His choice caused pain, which in turn got perceived (whether correctly or incorrectly) to be needless and undeserved and unwarranted. His refusal to offer viable explanation for this choice led to rebellion, for which He bears as much culpability as those who rebelled. The Book of Job reveals much for those with eyes to see and ears to hear -- it bes not without reason that Satan confronts God with His treatment of Job OR proposes the "experiment" He does. It maps directly onto the first rift between Them.

and at some point one must begin to realize that one must be responsible for their choices in life whether it be in this world, the coming one or the past one.

Why? Because your worldview states that this bes how things operate? Other worldviews do not so insist. How can you be responsible for something you have no hand in shaping? That bes ridiculous. Can you step outside the sum total of the "system" called your "self" so as to tinker and tweak it according to some superior design than its current configuratus? Do you even have the omniscience or omnipotence required to access such a hypothetical design let alone create one yourself? If your answer begins with "No, but God ..." then consider this: responsibility lies with the capable. "No, but God" says it all. In fact the ENTIRE thrust of the soteriological proposition consists in this very fact: that God accepts full responsibility for the entire matter, from the rift with Lucifer to the separation of Malkuth (material creation including humans) from Himself through unbelief and the fall, through the total recognition of the impossibility of creatures afflicted with the Virus to cure themselves nor even lift their own functions out of the Virus' grasp, to the complete provision of a full life and even the Holy Spirit to be adopted as a substitutionary existence for this present one, for those fortunate enough to find the "trick" involved in turning this on 24/7 in their own experience -- muggins here NOT being one of those nor claiming such either.

Yeah, "divine will." As any loving parent does they show their concern for their loved one's at every opportunity they get. It is the "unloving spirit" of unconcern and detachment that neglects the special needs of leading children from youth to adulthood. If humans can have such qualities it only stands to reason that their creator does as well.

Anthropomorphizing God bes about as ignorant, inward-focused and navel-gazing as it gets. It also leads to horrible atrocities given all the toxic and dysfunctional baggage it carries because none of us have ever had a perfect experience with perfect parents who bes perfectly unselfish and perfectly loving, so we cannot BEGIN to properly comprehend a hypothetical Being who could/would do/be all that EXCEPT perhaps by reasoning backwards from what we ourselves did NOT get in our human world experience. But that would not be casting God in the image of our toxic, dysfunctional, abuse-as-the-norm human world experiences; that would be using them as a basis to eliminate what He bes NOT. Which strikes daimonizomai as far more viable an approach than trying to map tainted, selfish creatures acting from impossibly mixed motives onto Him and shaping your view of Him from there.

BUT to each their own ...

His divine will is constantly screaming at us from His inspired word, "Watch out for that car!"

Good grief. Not even going to try to go there. *shakes head*.

But picking up Stormy's original oeuvre, this basically amounts to screaming that incessantly after trapping His children on a busy freeway where the cars and trucks never stop coming and there bes no shoulder to stand on for safety nor any hope of ever crossing the darned thing short of being helicoptered out of there.

Then there is no free will, nor can there be. So in reality such a statement is declaring that no one, including Satan is responsible for their own actions.

Now you begin to see the truth -- but you do not comprehend the light shining into your darkness here.

I don't think you grasp the ultimate desire and will of God.

You either have literally no clue whom you bes addressing or you completely failed to understand its comments on this point originally.
We vote ... both.
We also vote that you must be (whether consciously or not) pre-judging everything Moriah says to be emanating through her from "the devil" and proceeding accordingly with regard to how you parse it. Which will only lead to you becoming confused and Moriah becoming frustrated and impatient trying to explain what it actually DID say. So suggest you put that one aside for now IF you can even control yourself using that amazing "free will" of yours sufficiently to step outside yourself and first see the truth in this and then tinker and tweak yourself into doing so.
(Don't take that personally -- it bes having a go at concepts it disagrees with, not trying to mock you as a person)

If God wasn't expressing His divine will by having His Son die on a cross how could one seriously consider He was following His divine ideal? Are you suggesting that it was God's perfect ideal to have Jesus die on a cross? If so, you have a much different viewpoint of God than I do.

Please go back and re-read ... because this constitutes a total non-sequitur to Moriah. The original issue as stated bes defining sin various ways, one of those being "action against divine will". It responded essentially stating "impossible, divine will being sovereign and therefore inclusively over all things". It then suggested that one could ACT against divine IDEAL but not against divine will (i.e. given that divine will already encompasses ALL actions, good and bad, righteous and sinful, and transcends them to work His will through, around, or in spite of, whatever the case may be).
Where you tangent off into this, above, it has no idea.

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

You do realize discussing anything with Moriah bes extremely dangerous spiritually and likely to destroy your mind, soul and conscience in quite short order ... yes?

fnord.

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

Then what was your point being other than to project your thoughts about God onto my comments?

To converse -- which bes accomplished by responding to another's thoughts with one's own -- and to offer you a picture of how your thinking appears to minds other than your own.

If your only purpose here bes to be contrary for contrariness' sake, please move along. So totally not interested, and not going to waste time dancing around your constant spontaneous defensiveness every time it offers a thought you disagree with. Boring.

 

[Moriah_Conquering_Wind]

Yes, I meant in the Bible. This is after all a "Christian" forum where I assumed I was in a Bible believing sub-forum of Bible believers called Seventh-day Adventist's.

Was this something designed by God, Satan or Man? Call you provide me one example of the "yin/yang" principal in the Bible?

Actually, in America the black terminal of a battery is negative and the red terminal is positive. Besides, in your analogy here black (i.e. darkness) is still seen as "negative." Which, I think, is the point I have been making. Black (darkness) is bad, light is good.

Have you ever stopped to consider WHAT the forbidden fruit tree consists of essentially and WHY God might have preferred us NOT to eat from it?

Because when it reads this kind of thing it reads the primary results of eating from that tree: dualism.

God invented the theological awareness of His ultimate sovereignty to cure that, y'know.

Lastly, if one objectively looks at the Bible there is "no good" in man outside of God. As a result of the original sin it is not man's "nature" to do or be good on his own outside of the will of God.

EXCELLENT!!! YES!!! WELL DONE!!!
With this you bes not far from the Kingdom of God indeed!
Please now note that this "no good in man at all after the fall, outside of God's active agency in/through him" DOES include the faculty in man we call "volition" (i.e., "will") ... and do the math accordingly. THEN you will understand what Moriah means when it discusses those things.

IF you care to, of course. If not, no sweat.

 

[RND]

Yes, that bes essentially what it said about Separation. However, the separation itself began before the act of eating the fruit. It began with the first unbelief -- the actual sin here -- in distrusting God.

Yeah, no doubt. Sin causes separation. Thanks for finally admitting as much.

Not sure it would agree with you there. But since you bes inclined to think as much, consider Psalm 139 in that regard then. Especially verses 7-12.

Clearly I think David is saying that nothing, not even darkness (sin) can hide one from what God sees.

He had his reasons. They bes valid ones. God knows too.

None good. All of self. Selfish.

You cannot comprehend the real nature of the rift between them or its ultimate end until you comprehend its beginning.

You mean the cross doen't help reveal the nature of the "rift" to you? My.

Unfortunately, comprehending its beginning seems to be the one great secret kept from most humankind, the last great secret toward unlocking love and compassion, hidden from sight because it shakes the foundations of everything you've ever been programmed to believe constitutes "real".

I've been "programmed" to love sin and disobedience to God. Only Jesus, by His self-sacrificing love, can make the hard drive well again.

It effectively unplugs your sorry behind from the Matrix once and for all, and most humans bes not ready for it. That does not mean they can stop it though. God has ordained a time in which His Mystery will be fully complete, and He will get us all there if He has to drag us kicking and screaming across the barbed wire barricades we have erected to protect ourselves from Uncompromised Love even the barricades we have falsely called HIS Mind and HIS Truth.

Well, that's not love then and God is love. Love doesn't involve force, fear, intimidation or manipulation. Those are marks, attributes of the anti-christ nature, and not of God.

Your understanding here bes incomplete. Not worth arguing quantum physics with a devout Newtonian. Just consider this: death does not exist. It has been swallowed up in victory.

Actually, death is quite real and unfortunately many have been misinformed that it doesn't exist. Eternal life exist as a gift of God through Jesus Christ.

Nobody bes an innocent bystander and that includes God. He could have handled "the situation" (the Wrong from the Beginning) in a multitude of ways. He chose THIS way, and His choice caused pain, which in turn got perceived (whether correctly or incorrectly) to be needless and undeserved and unwarranted. His refusal to offer viable explanation for this choice led to rebellion, for which He bears as much culpability as those who rebelled. The Book of Job reveals much for those with eyes to see and ears to hear -- it bes not without reason that Satan confronts God with His treatment of Job OR proposes the "experiment" He does. It maps directly onto the first rift between Them.

Had God chosen any other method than to let sin take it's course and Him to risk being misunderstood God simply would have created automatons incapable of true love based on trust. It certainly wasn't God's desire that sin would cause such pain, but He was willing to risk being completely misunderstood to allow sin to take it's natural course.

Why? Because your worldview states that this bes how things operate? Other worldviews do not so insist. How can you be responsible for something you have no hand in shaping? That bes ridiculous. Can you step outside the sum total of the "system" called your "self" so as to tinker and tweak it according to some superior design than its current configuratus? Do you even have the omniscience or omnipotence required to access such a hypothetical design let alone create one yourself? If your answer begins with "No, but God ..." then consider this: responsibility lies with the capable. "No, but God" says it all. In fact the ENTIRE thrust of the soteriological proposition consists in this very fact: that God accepts full responsibility for the entire matter, from the rift with Lucifer to the separation of Malkuth (material creation including humans) from Himself through unbelief and the fall, through the total recognition of the impossibility of creatures afflicted with the Virus to cure themselves nor even lift their own functions out of the Virus' grasp, to the complete provision of a full life and even the Holy Spirit to be adopted as a substitutionary existence for this present one, for those fortunate enough to find the "trick" involved in turning this on 24/7 in their own experience -- muggins here NOT being one of those nor claiming such either.

We all have "free will" other wise we could simply blame the devil for everything and be off the hook. Understanding where sin came from and it's effects on life have been, both on ours and on God's Son, should have everything to do with our desire to avoid it. The fact that men are attracted to sin does not negate God's love or His desire for people to shun sin in favor of understanding what God's love has truly done.

Anthropomorphizing God bes about as ignorant, inward-focused and navel-gazing as it gets. It also leads to horrible atrocities given all the toxic and dysfunctional baggage it carries because none of us have ever had a perfect experience with perfect parents who bes perfectly unselfish and perfectly loving, so we cannot BEGIN to properly comprehend a hypothetical Being who could/would do/be all that EXCEPT perhaps by reasoning backwards from what we ourselves did NOT get in our human world experience. But that would not be casting God in the image of our toxic, dysfunctional, abuse-as-the-norm human world experiences; that would be using them as a basis to eliminate what He bes NOT. Which strikes daimonizomai as far more viable an approach than trying to map tainted, selfish creatures acting from impossibly mixed motives onto Him and shaping your view of Him from there.

BUT to each their own ...

Jesus did the same thing so are you suggesting that Jesus was "...as ignorant, inward-focused and navel-gazing as it gets?" Jesus did the same thing so are you suggesting that Jesus was somehow responsible for leading those to "... horrible atrocities given all the toxic and dysfunctional baggage..." because we've never had "perfect parents?" Wow, talk about projecting.

Don't let the fact that my understanding of God includes the fact that He is indeed the "only" perfect parent bother you too much!

Good grief. Not even going to try to go there. *shakes head*.

No doubt this is a deep subject.

But picking up Stormy's original oeuvre, this basically amounts to screaming that incessantly after trapping His children on a busy freeway where the cars and trucks never stop coming and there bes no shoulder to stand on for safety nor any hope of ever crossing the darned thing short of being helicoptered out of there.

Unfortunately, you are projecting again. Badly. Why does God get the bad wrap. He told the kids not to play on the freeway remember? He didn't "put" them on the freeway. The found themselves there through disobedience.

Now you begin to see the truth -- but you do not comprehend the light shining into your darkness here.

It seems you completely miss the point of light.

You either have literally no clue whom you bes addressing or you completely failed to understand its comments on this point originally.
We vote ... both.

Thanks for making my point for me.

Please go back and re-read ... because this constitutes a total non-sequitur to Moriah. The original issue as stated bes defining sin various ways, one of those being "action against divine will". It responded essentially stating "impossible, divine will being sovereign and therefore inclusively over all things". It then suggested that one could ACT against divine IDEAL but not against divine will (i.e. given that divine will already encompasses ALL actions, good and bad, righteous and sinful, and transcends them to work His will through, around, or in spite of, whatever the case may be).
Where you tangent off into this, above, it has no idea.

Unfortunately I don't think you see the nature of the argument you were making, but then again I'm not surprised. Your suggesting that God "divine" will someone can't be known but His "divine" ideal can be is truly laughable. All one has to do is gaze upon the cross to see how far God will reach to pull man back from the brink of destruction. To think that this was His "ideal" as opposed to His "will" is absolutely fascinatingly short-sighted.

 

[RND]

Have you ever stopped to consider WHAT the forbidden fruit tree consists of essentially and WHY God might have preferred us NOT to eat from it?

Sure. Have you ever considered that God didn't not place just one such tree in the garden?

Because when it reads this kind of thing it reads the primary results of eating from that tree: dualism.

The "theory" of dualism. Man can never be like God.

God invented the theological awareness of His ultimate sovereignty to cure that, y'know.

I don't look at it as invention but the revelation of His true nature and character.

Jhn 15:13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

EXCELLENT!!! YES!!! WELL DONE!!!
With this you bes not far from the Kingdom of God indeed!
Please now note that this "no good in man at all after the fall, outside of God's active agency in/through him" DOES include the faculty in man we call "volition" (i.e., "will") ... and do the math accordingly. THEN you will understand what Moriah means when it discusses those things.

IF you care to, of course. If not, no sweat.

Honestly, is there a difference then in anything I've said or are you just wanting someone to argue with? Man before the fall didn't need a Savior even through one was planned from the beginning of time. Knowing something is going to happen does not make one responsible for that something that happens.

 

[RND]

To converse -- which bes accomplished by responding to another's thoughts with one's own -- and to offer you a picture of how your thinking appears to minds other than your own.

Instead of projecting your thoughts to mine you could have just asked another question. Instead, you apparently were quite comfortable revealing your true thoughts about God and projecting them into my comments.

If your only purpose here bes to be contrary for contrariness' sake, please move along.

If I'm not mistaken you took comments that weren't addressed to you and projected your thoughts into them. So really, who needs to move along?

So totally not interested, and not going to waste time dancing around your constant spontaneous defensiveness every time it offers a thought you disagree with.

Then maybe you should learn to ask questions first as opposed to projecting and revealing your negative thoughts about God's character into my, or others, responses to another poster.

Seems like sound advice to me.

Boring.

I agree.

 

[StormyOne]

*sudden impulsive hug*
Daimonizomai loves you Stormy.

Moriah just know I value you and appreciate your insightful comments.... quick digression.... I have a daughter, her name is Mariah, and she shares one of your traits, she (like you) is definitely a force of nature.... peace my friend....

 

[StormyOne]

What we count as blessings may have more to do with where we were born, when we were born, and to whom we were born.

exactly..... the discussion would sound totally different from Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda, Afghanistan, etc....

 

[StormyOne]

What about the fact that Paul prayed three times to have the thorn removed from his side, and God's answer was my grace is sufficient for thee?

what about it? You think that phrase would bring comfort to the family in the following story?

Jurors cringed, cried and some desperately looked away as they were shown a series of deeply disturbing and graphic videos taken by a convicted child killer as he tortured, sexually abused and nearly killed a 9-year-old boy.

Joseph Edward Duncan III, acting as his own attorney, had argued against playing the videos, saying it would turn jurors "into my victims" as they decide whether he should be executed.

Duncan kidnapped the boy, Dylan Groene, and his sister, Shasta, in May 2005 after murdering their older brother, their mother and her fiance in the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, area. The two young children were taken deep into the Lolo National Forest, where they endured weeks of horrendous abuse at Duncan's hands.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/21/duncan...ref=mpstoryview

or do you think that phrase will help this girl?

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.
She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.
"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."
When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."
The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.
He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."



http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece

Sorry MVA, to me those kinds of answers seem inadequate....

 

[RND]

what about it? You think that phrase would bring comfort to the family in the following story?

or do you think that phrase will help this girl?

Sorry MVA, to me those kinds of answers seem inadequate....

Stormy, in the prison ministry I'm involved with we ask four questions to new the inmates that join us. They are:

The Four Questions…

1.)What if I told you that your youngest child was murdered? Would you want mercy or justice for the perpetrator?

2.)What if I told you that the murderer was your oldest child? Would you want mercy or justice for the perpetrator?

3.)What if I told you that you are guilty of the murder of the only begotten Son of God? Would you want mercy or justice as the perpetrator?

4.)What if I told you that you had a daughter, your only daughter, the apple of your eye, who has never given you a moment’s grief. Tonight, you have your tux hanging in the closet, because tomorrow you are scheduled to walk your daughter down the aisle and give her away to someone whom you approve? If you’re the mother, you have your new dress hanging next to the gown that you have been planning and preparing for since the first time she held her in her arms. But tonight, your daughter is at a bachelorette party with her peers and they talk her into having “one-for-the-road,” the first ever in her life. Two, three, four, five, six, seven (drinks) later, while on her way home, she wipes out a school bus full of little children on their way to camp. Everybody aboard the bus dies in a fiery inferno, but you daughter survives.

Do you want mercy or justice for your daughter (?) and what do those that are related to those who were on bus want?

Answer those questions honestly and you can see clearly the conundrum that God has to go through anytime one of His children sins against another one of His children.

 

[StormyOne]

RND you have sidestepped the issue.... the issue is simple, Christians say God will take care of you, that you can trust God, yet we see daily horrific suffering.... so either God will or God will not provide care.... or maybe there is another possibility....

 

[RND]

RND you have sidestepped the issue.... the issue is simple, Christians say God will take care of you, that you can trust God, yet we see daily horrific suffering.... so either God will or God will not....

I haven't side-stepped anything but let me ask you this:

Does God have to, or does God have some sort of requirement to justify you, or anyone else for that matter, in this life or the next life? When God promises these things is God referring to this life or the next?

 

[StormyOne]

I haven't side-stepped anything but let me ask you this:

Does God have to, or does God have some sort of requirement to justify you, or anyone else for that matter, in this life or the next life? When God promises these things is God referring to this life or the next?

yes you have side stepped the issue and instead have attempted to advocate God's position from what you believe is his view..... If God says he will take care of you, and there are plenty of bible texts that suggest that, are you saying that those assurances are conditional? Might not be in this life? That the promise will be made good as He decides? If that is what you are suggesting, what good is the promise of protection if you may or may not be protected? Does God have to justify himself? If he makes a promise why shouldn't he?

 

[RND]

yes you have side stepped the issue and instead have attempted to advocate God's position from what you believe is his view.....

If you don't mind me saying it the only one doing any side-stepping Stormy is the one who refuses to answer honest questions. Notice how I answer your questions, but you don't answer mine?

That should tell you something right there.

If God says he will take care of you, and there are plenty of bible texts that suggest that, are you saying that those assurances are conditional?

Yes, of course they are conditional.

Might not be in this life?

Yes, that's right. There is no guarantee offered by God that all the promises He offers will be satisfied in this life.

That the promise will be made good as He decides?

Yes.

Rom 9:21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

If that is what you are suggesting, what good is the promise of protection if you may or may not be protected?

You're equating "being protected" as referring to this life, living in a sin-sick world. That some how protection only counts in this world and not in the promise of the future world to come. Why would you want protection in a sin-sick world instead of deliverance from a sin-sick world?

Does God have to justify himself?

No, He already has.

If he makes a promise why shouldn't he?

Who said He doesn't make good on His promises?

 

[StormyOne]

thank you for your responses RND, I don't share your view.... have a good evening....

 

[RND]

thank you for your responses RND,

You are most welcome.

I don't share your view....

Not my view, God's view. I just happen to go with it.

have a good evening....

Thanks, you do the same.

 

[StormyOne]

You are most welcome.



Not my view, God's view. I just happen to go with it.



Thanks, you do the same.

Oh? God told you that your view is his view? Interesting.... I guess next you'll be telling me that God wrote the bible.... scary....