Question for the 7th Day Community

[BobRyan]

I want it to be clear that I seek to exchange information for fellowship and edification, nothing extra. I have found many or even most of the members of this community that I have encountered to be very well trained in Bible study. I have an admiration for that and I learned so much about obedience in an exchange I had with someone. I was part of the group in a thread that believed the OT was basically dead and we only look to the NT for Christ's commandments. I was shown through scripture how Christ calls us to obedience, not just conversion and when he preached that, there was no NT to obey so he had to have been referring to the OT, especially in the places where he actually quotes the OT and basically says "why aren't you doing this?" I just wanted to share that. Ever since that exchange, I have had more very enlightening exchanges with this community.

All that is to say thank you for taking this time on the thread. I appreciate your insight and willingness to teach without judgement.

Thank you for sharing that... much appreciated.

 

[Dave-W]

These references can’t be to the one-time capital of the Babylonian empire. That Babylon had been reduced to an inconsequential village by the march of years, military defeat, and political subjugation; it was no longer a “great city.” From the New Testament perspective, the only candidates for the “great city” mentioned in Revelation are Rome and Jerusalem."

Why are we assuming that the Babylon John wrote about and the one Peter wrote about are the same?

 

[rturner76]

On the contrary - Revelation borrows heavily from the already understood books such as Daniel and Isaiah .. Daniel 9 uses symbols to predict the first coming of Christ and that is well understood.

Daniel 7 points out the timeline for the 1260 years of dark ages that can be seen in Rev 11 and 12 as the same period of time that happens at some point after Jesus ascends to heaven. All of it matching up but all of it in symbolic terms.

Yes, I remember someone in this very thread citing Daniel and his dream. And like I say, I am not here to dispute any 7th-day beliefs or understanding so I will just accept that Revelations IS supported by other Chapters/Books in scripture. I'll just add that prophecy can be interpreted in different ways by different people. I can 100% agree that your interpretation of Revelations and supporting cross-referencing fits with the "revelation" of end-time events.

 

[BobRyan]

Yes, I remember someone in this very thread citing Daniel and his dream. And like I say, I am not here to dispute any 7th-day beliefs or understanding so I will just accept that Revelations IS supported by other Chapters/Books in scripture. I'll just add that prophecy can be interpreted in different ways by different people. I can 100% agree that your interpretation of Revelations and supporting cross-referencing fits with the "revelation" of end-time events.

No doubt there are various interpretations for all sorts of scripture ... prophecy being one of those kinds of scripture. .Christ had the same issue in his day - He presented one view of how the prophecies predicting the Messiah were to play out and the Jewish leaders had a completely different view of how it should work.

That point about difference from group to group has always been a fact of life.

Which gets to the interesting point of an independent infallible standard that determines which is right.

In Mark 7 Jesus said the tradition of the magisterium was in error on some points.
They insisted that it was not in error.
In that chapter He refers them to scripture.

Now they had two choices at that point. They could insist that no such independent clear arbiter existed and so since they always said they were correct .. then it must be Christ who was in error.

The other choice was to look at the proofs he gave from scripture and decide for themselves if this indicated an error in their position or not. It is interesting that in Acts 6 we are told - "7 The word of God kept on spreading; and the number of the disciples continued to increase greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were becoming obedient to the faith."

Certainly it could be agreed that the magisterium for those priests converting to Christianity, would have been telling them to reject the teaching of the offshoot of Judaism (they called it a "sect") known as "Christians".