Serving Zion
Seek First His Kingdom & Righteousness
Hello skepticlogician, I would like to preface my response to your inquiry with some gratefulness.. first of all, the patience and love you have for your son. I only imagine how challenging it must be, but truly, the way your heart responds to his tests just works to reinforce my faith in humanity. I too often see parents that condescend and unreasonably punish their children, but here you are making every effort of self-sacrifice, to afford him the basic rights to love that he deserves as a child. It really moves me bro, and I am going to pray for you too, that The Holy Spirit will become more present in your family so that these tests can become less demanding 
.. but secondly, I am grateful because I have known of your activity on this board for a while, and for a while I have wanted to engage with you in a serious discussion. The reason for this, is that you do have a great grasp on logic, and I do too. It is my hope that through discussion, I can assist you to understand Jesus the way He was and is, the way the authors of the bible have put it, and to lift your mind away from the place where you are presently right to object to it all. I say this because what I see in what you have been taught, amounts to a strawman of what Christianity really is.
Do you know the phrase "many hands make light work"? .. well, consider the inverse: lesser hands make heavier work. This fits well with one of the comments that Jesus made: "the harvest truly is great, but the workers are few". This is the reason that He laid down His life, because in doing this, He had a legal opportunity through God's law, to continue His campaign from heaven using His followers (that's us) to do the ground work. Now, because we are flawed creatures, we do make mistakes that He would not make, but that is the nature of the world in this present age.
The reality is that only Messiah can save the world, because only Messiah has the rightful authority to do so according to God's plan. But His life was cut short at thirty-something years (Daniel 9:26), and He was prevented by the religious leaders of His time from taking the appointed place of Messiah (Isaiah 9:6-7, John 18:36). This happened through no fault of His own, but through the wrongful judgement of the religious leaders who condemned Him to death on the charge of being a heretic, choosing instead to release a known killer (John 18:38-40, Luke 22:69-71).
But it isn't as though every person who calls themself Christian is in fact operating on behalf of Jesus as this covenant is intended to do, and I do not refrain my words for fear of offending those ones. There are many who call themselves "Christian" and who operate within churches and who teach ideas that they suppose to represent scripture, but in fact they are teaching doctrines of the devil in the name of Jesus. This is how 1 Corinthians 14:33 becomes relevant: "God is not the author of confusion", but of course, everybody will agree that Christendom is reputedly a religion of confusion (2 Peter 2:2 - bringing the way of truth into disrepute).
Basically, there is a central logical fallacy that the devil has achieved in Christianity (Matthew 12:25): if two people claim to represent The Holy Spirit, and yet do not agree, then logic states at least one of them must not be truly representing The Holy Spirit. And we can see that this is the case: there is a huge number of counterfeit spirits that love to misrepresent Him. They call themselves "The Holy Spirit", but they operate through sin (eg: hubris motivates many - Jeremiah 23:16-22).
These counterfeit spirits are empowered to teach their confusion when a Christian believes and promotes an untruth. It is because of false doctrines that Christians do this, and it is also the way false doctrines are formed (by sin - the teacher does not repent at the conviction of The Holy Spirit, and creates a teaching that twists the scripture so it becomes palatable to his sinful preference - 2 Peter 3:16).
The way a Christian is typically indoctrinated, is by yielding their belief to the authority of the one they have taken as their teacher. In most cases, a person has a life-changing experience with God, and they become associated with a group of believers, to learn from them. They will have questions, and sometimes a given answer will not make perfect sense, but they will yield to peer pressure in order to belong. Jesus warns against this though, when He says "do not be called "teacher" - for one is your teacher: Your Father in heaven" (Matthew 23:8-10). St. Paul warns similarly in Philippians 2:12 when he says: "now in my absence, work out your own faith with fear and trembling" - "making the best use of your time, because the days are wicked".
This is the real Christian faith: we do not yield the authority of our belief to any other than God Himself (Luke 9:23), and when we come to enter covenant with Him, we do in fact recognise His voice so that we are able to follow Him (John 10:4-5). In this way, we individually represent Him amidst the congregations, while with wisdom (Matthew 10:16), we tactfully oppose the rote believers, shining light in the darkness, promoting the truth that will set His captives free (Matthew 18:18).
While we ourselves are not the fullness of the perfection of Messiah, we are given a portion of grace and power according to His presence within us (Ephesians 4:7), and we are encouraged to keep growing in that measure (Ephesians 4:15, Galatians 4:19).
So with that said, I hope that you will grant me to have a rightful honour in your view of being associated with the truth in Jesus' name, so that you will disassociate me in your view from those who have come before me - those who try to sway you into the absurdity of the errors that they have concocted or have received without proper scrutiny.
I commend you for having resisted those absurdities to this day, even though within you and especially at the beginning, you know instinctively who God must be: a righteous, fair, just and loving person.
I do apologise that you have had to encounter so many evil doctrines that come in His name but that have denigrated His character, and I implore for your grace and mercy as you are able to understand that not every person who teaches from the scriptures in fact does represent what those scriptures are intended to convey. There is also no perfect English translation yet, and even while comparing all of the available ones, some of the more vital comprehensions just can not carry fully in the English language itself.
For this reason, I do encourage you to keep with logic and your own consciencious conviction as the baseline for your judgement of doctrine, and then look to see how scripture can build upon that, rather than going the opposite way. This is, afterall, how the writers of scripture had their authority to make those statements (2 Peter 1:20), and if you keep a clear conscience, you will know by it that God is not against you while you make statements of absolute authority of your knowledge (2 Corinthians 1:12).
At the end of the day, you need to give account for your own words just as I do (Matthew 12:36), and this is why it is essential to not yield the authority of our belief to the perceived authority of another man. There is only one mediator between man and God: Jesus Christ, and true Christianity will bring you to have a relationship with Him, to know your authority in His name, whereas the false Christian religions will assimilate you into a regime of human authority according to recognised qualifications (certifications). That is not the way that Jesus or His disciples come to have their authority. Remember, they were lay-persons, and they all opposed those who weilded superficial authority - St. Paul especially, by stating Philippians 4:3-9 - "All I gained through the law I count as rubbish, in order that I might gain Messiah: the righteousness that comes from God not based on lawful achievements, but from trusting in Messiah.
This is what I encourage in you too, to hold fast to the vindication of your conscience and seek to recognise His voice so that you may receive His approval.
Also do not take to heart everything people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you.
For many times, also, your own heart has known that even you have cursed others.
Ecclesiastes 7:21-22
Atonement is needed for us to let go of the guilt and shame of our error. Do you remember that Adam and Eve hid from God? This is what we do too, when we begin to oppose His Holy Spirit.
I would like to do some very important ground work with you, because part of the whole false teaching that has been formed in you is based upon this idea that original sin caused a genetic fault in the human. But that is a doctrine of the devil. Babies are born pure and then they are corrupted by the fallen world as they grow (Ecclesiastes 7:29). This is why young children smile more than older children: they are more pure, less adulterated (Titus 1:15).
St. James 1:14-15 teaches: each one of us is tempted by his desire, and when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin. Sin being mature, brings death.
How does this desire become conceived? I tell you, it is because the world encourages us to give birth to that wicked desire that naturally we are hesitant to indulge in. The world is notorious for corrupting pure minds in this way. Of the most heinous is the parent's authoritarian stance toward a child's innocent mistake. The parent does not consider that the child was innocent in making the mistake, because the parent possesses understanding that would convict them if they had have made the same mistake. But the child does not yet possess that understanding, because he is learning. Yet, the parent's judgement is rendered without that consideration, and invoking wrath to punish as though culpable, the one who was in fact innocent in his wrong. This teaches the child that it is better to use deceit that they should not be found responsible for error and therefore to evade punishment. From the child's perspective, they are right to do this, because they actually are entitled to mercy on account of their innocence (learning - not culpable for the error).
This attitude continues into adulthood, and when we choose to engage in sin, The Holy Spirit convicts us so we choose to harden our ears to The Holy Spirit. Even though The Holy Spirit still speaks to us and convicts us in our conscience, we choose to oppose what He is saying to us, because we perceive the opportunity of denial through deceit - nobody can prove our error, and we will pretend that nobody knows what our conscience convicts us of. (Pay attention to this tendency within yourself - it is our selves that give us a greater insight to human nature than anybody else ever can do).
When we begin to live in this way, we are no longer of good conscience in God's presence. This is why it is necessary for God to provide a means of forgiveness to us: so that we can have a real and true sense of mercy and acceptance, through having confessed our sin and made atonement for it (1 John 1:9). It is not until we come to acknowledge our error and to choose to do good instead of bad, that we can have reconciliation with Him, by knowing that there is no reason to hide from Him (Genesis 3:10).
This is what it means to be "born again" (John 1:13): it means to have that life and relationship with God restored to us, that was lost when we began evading His Holy Spirit through denying His presence. His Spirit is also called "The Spirit of Truth" (John 14:17), and when it has an opportunity to convict us because of our error, then we need to make a decision: do we repent and do what is right so that we do not receive conviction? or, do we choose to believe instead that The Spirit of Truth is some sort of hallucination or coincidence, and seek to use an excuse to block His conviction against our conscience, knowing that nobody has any evidence against us, or that God's Holy Law is unreasonable?
This is where the depth of the truth comes in Psalms 51:1: "It is a fool who says in his heart "There is no God". Such one has done an abominable deed, and not one of them does good".
But everything that you are describing about your knowledge of Love and mercy, does in fact add up to describe God's character perfectly, and it shows that your expectation of His nature only conflicts with what you have come to understand that Christianity teaches of it. This isn't a surprise to me, because I know that the spirit of the antichrist has been operating amongst false teachers for 2,000 years already (1 John 4:3).
1 John 4:18 states against the false doctrine you are investigating and for your position against it: "there is no fear in love, because fear holds punishment", and 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 states "Love keeps no record of wrongs". This is why I gratefully receive this opportunity to approach you in such way to encourage you to press forward with your scepticism against what you think Christianity teaches but toward and for the truth that you know Christianity has: because you know in your heart the true character of Jesus, and you are determined to find it in His name!
It is a matter for you, of straightening-out your perspective of scripture that has been tainted and twisted by those who teach falsehoods in His name, essentially because they do not have such strength to resist falsehood as you do. In saying this, I only encourage that you do not commit the logical fallacy of thinking that Christianity is false based upon your present incapacity to understand it's proper truth - because that can change with time.
Be careful to stay patient, because I know how strong that serpent is that tempts you to hate our misled brethren, and that itself is a cause for The Holy Spirit to convict you and to contend your reconciliation (Genesis 3:1a). There is a way to weild righteous anger and to crush that serpent beneath your feet. I encourage you to pursue that (Genesis 3:15, Revelation 3:21).
BTW, nice to meet you at long last! Here, check out this gospel booklet I have put together, that shows what scripture says about some core topics without any selfish ambition or guilt trip. I did this very prayerfully, and even consider the pictures I chose to associate to the topics, because it speaks volumes:
Adonai Reigns : The Gospel : God did not send his son to condemn the world!
.. but secondly, I am grateful because I have known of your activity on this board for a while, and for a while I have wanted to engage with you in a serious discussion. The reason for this, is that you do have a great grasp on logic, and I do too. It is my hope that through discussion, I can assist you to understand Jesus the way He was and is, the way the authors of the bible have put it, and to lift your mind away from the place where you are presently right to object to it all. I say this because what I see in what you have been taught, amounts to a strawman of what Christianity really is.
Do you know the phrase "many hands make light work"? .. well, consider the inverse: lesser hands make heavier work. This fits well with one of the comments that Jesus made: "the harvest truly is great, but the workers are few". This is the reason that He laid down His life, because in doing this, He had a legal opportunity through God's law, to continue His campaign from heaven using His followers (that's us) to do the ground work. Now, because we are flawed creatures, we do make mistakes that He would not make, but that is the nature of the world in this present age.
The reality is that only Messiah can save the world, because only Messiah has the rightful authority to do so according to God's plan. But His life was cut short at thirty-something years (Daniel 9:26), and He was prevented by the religious leaders of His time from taking the appointed place of Messiah (Isaiah 9:6-7, John 18:36). This happened through no fault of His own, but through the wrongful judgement of the religious leaders who condemned Him to death on the charge of being a heretic, choosing instead to release a known killer (John 18:38-40, Luke 22:69-71).
But it isn't as though every person who calls themself Christian is in fact operating on behalf of Jesus as this covenant is intended to do, and I do not refrain my words for fear of offending those ones. There are many who call themselves "Christian" and who operate within churches and who teach ideas that they suppose to represent scripture, but in fact they are teaching doctrines of the devil in the name of Jesus. This is how 1 Corinthians 14:33 becomes relevant: "God is not the author of confusion", but of course, everybody will agree that Christendom is reputedly a religion of confusion (2 Peter 2:2 - bringing the way of truth into disrepute).
Basically, there is a central logical fallacy that the devil has achieved in Christianity (Matthew 12:25): if two people claim to represent The Holy Spirit, and yet do not agree, then logic states at least one of them must not be truly representing The Holy Spirit. And we can see that this is the case: there is a huge number of counterfeit spirits that love to misrepresent Him. They call themselves "The Holy Spirit", but they operate through sin (eg: hubris motivates many - Jeremiah 23:16-22).
These counterfeit spirits are empowered to teach their confusion when a Christian believes and promotes an untruth. It is because of false doctrines that Christians do this, and it is also the way false doctrines are formed (by sin - the teacher does not repent at the conviction of The Holy Spirit, and creates a teaching that twists the scripture so it becomes palatable to his sinful preference - 2 Peter 3:16).
The way a Christian is typically indoctrinated, is by yielding their belief to the authority of the one they have taken as their teacher. In most cases, a person has a life-changing experience with God, and they become associated with a group of believers, to learn from them. They will have questions, and sometimes a given answer will not make perfect sense, but they will yield to peer pressure in order to belong. Jesus warns against this though, when He says "do not be called "teacher" - for one is your teacher: Your Father in heaven" (Matthew 23:8-10). St. Paul warns similarly in Philippians 2:12 when he says: "now in my absence, work out your own faith with fear and trembling" - "making the best use of your time, because the days are wicked".
This is the real Christian faith: we do not yield the authority of our belief to any other than God Himself (Luke 9:23), and when we come to enter covenant with Him, we do in fact recognise His voice so that we are able to follow Him (John 10:4-5). In this way, we individually represent Him amidst the congregations, while with wisdom (Matthew 10:16), we tactfully oppose the rote believers, shining light in the darkness, promoting the truth that will set His captives free (Matthew 18:18).
While we ourselves are not the fullness of the perfection of Messiah, we are given a portion of grace and power according to His presence within us (Ephesians 4:7), and we are encouraged to keep growing in that measure (Ephesians 4:15, Galatians 4:19).
So with that said, I hope that you will grant me to have a rightful honour in your view of being associated with the truth in Jesus' name, so that you will disassociate me in your view from those who have come before me - those who try to sway you into the absurdity of the errors that they have concocted or have received without proper scrutiny.
I commend you for having resisted those absurdities to this day, even though within you and especially at the beginning, you know instinctively who God must be: a righteous, fair, just and loving person.
I do apologise that you have had to encounter so many evil doctrines that come in His name but that have denigrated His character, and I implore for your grace and mercy as you are able to understand that not every person who teaches from the scriptures in fact does represent what those scriptures are intended to convey. There is also no perfect English translation yet, and even while comparing all of the available ones, some of the more vital comprehensions just can not carry fully in the English language itself.
For this reason, I do encourage you to keep with logic and your own consciencious conviction as the baseline for your judgement of doctrine, and then look to see how scripture can build upon that, rather than going the opposite way. This is, afterall, how the writers of scripture had their authority to make those statements (2 Peter 1:20), and if you keep a clear conscience, you will know by it that God is not against you while you make statements of absolute authority of your knowledge (2 Corinthians 1:12).
At the end of the day, you need to give account for your own words just as I do (Matthew 12:36), and this is why it is essential to not yield the authority of our belief to the perceived authority of another man. There is only one mediator between man and God: Jesus Christ, and true Christianity will bring you to have a relationship with Him, to know your authority in His name, whereas the false Christian religions will assimilate you into a regime of human authority according to recognised qualifications (certifications). That is not the way that Jesus or His disciples come to have their authority. Remember, they were lay-persons, and they all opposed those who weilded superficial authority - St. Paul especially, by stating Philippians 4:3-9 - "All I gained through the law I count as rubbish, in order that I might gain Messiah: the righteousness that comes from God not based on lawful achievements, but from trusting in Messiah.
This is what I encourage in you too, to hold fast to the vindication of your conscience and seek to recognise His voice so that you may receive His approval.
Also do not take to heart everything people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you.
For many times, also, your own heart has known that even you have cursed others.
Ecclesiastes 7:21-22
No, it's not about His forgiveness, but our reconciliation. God does forgive in the way that you said that we do here.
Atonement is needed for us to let go of the guilt and shame of our error. Do you remember that Adam and Eve hid from God? This is what we do too, when we begin to oppose His Holy Spirit.
I would like to do some very important ground work with you, because part of the whole false teaching that has been formed in you is based upon this idea that original sin caused a genetic fault in the human. But that is a doctrine of the devil. Babies are born pure and then they are corrupted by the fallen world as they grow (Ecclesiastes 7:29). This is why young children smile more than older children: they are more pure, less adulterated (Titus 1:15).
St. James 1:14-15 teaches: each one of us is tempted by his desire, and when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin. Sin being mature, brings death.
How does this desire become conceived? I tell you, it is because the world encourages us to give birth to that wicked desire that naturally we are hesitant to indulge in. The world is notorious for corrupting pure minds in this way. Of the most heinous is the parent's authoritarian stance toward a child's innocent mistake. The parent does not consider that the child was innocent in making the mistake, because the parent possesses understanding that would convict them if they had have made the same mistake. But the child does not yet possess that understanding, because he is learning. Yet, the parent's judgement is rendered without that consideration, and invoking wrath to punish as though culpable, the one who was in fact innocent in his wrong. This teaches the child that it is better to use deceit that they should not be found responsible for error and therefore to evade punishment. From the child's perspective, they are right to do this, because they actually are entitled to mercy on account of their innocence (learning - not culpable for the error).
This attitude continues into adulthood, and when we choose to engage in sin, The Holy Spirit convicts us so we choose to harden our ears to The Holy Spirit. Even though The Holy Spirit still speaks to us and convicts us in our conscience, we choose to oppose what He is saying to us, because we perceive the opportunity of denial through deceit - nobody can prove our error, and we will pretend that nobody knows what our conscience convicts us of. (Pay attention to this tendency within yourself - it is our selves that give us a greater insight to human nature than anybody else ever can do).
When we begin to live in this way, we are no longer of good conscience in God's presence. This is why it is necessary for God to provide a means of forgiveness to us: so that we can have a real and true sense of mercy and acceptance, through having confessed our sin and made atonement for it (1 John 1:9). It is not until we come to acknowledge our error and to choose to do good instead of bad, that we can have reconciliation with Him, by knowing that there is no reason to hide from Him (Genesis 3:10).
This is what it means to be "born again" (John 1:13): it means to have that life and relationship with God restored to us, that was lost when we began evading His Holy Spirit through denying His presence. His Spirit is also called "The Spirit of Truth" (John 14:17), and when it has an opportunity to convict us because of our error, then we need to make a decision: do we repent and do what is right so that we do not receive conviction? or, do we choose to believe instead that The Spirit of Truth is some sort of hallucination or coincidence, and seek to use an excuse to block His conviction against our conscience, knowing that nobody has any evidence against us, or that God's Holy Law is unreasonable?
This is where the depth of the truth comes in Psalms 51:1: "It is a fool who says in his heart "There is no God". Such one has done an abominable deed, and not one of them does good".
But everything that you are describing about your knowledge of Love and mercy, does in fact add up to describe God's character perfectly, and it shows that your expectation of His nature only conflicts with what you have come to understand that Christianity teaches of it. This isn't a surprise to me, because I know that the spirit of the antichrist has been operating amongst false teachers for 2,000 years already (1 John 4:3).
1 John 4:18 states against the false doctrine you are investigating and for your position against it: "there is no fear in love, because fear holds punishment", and 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 states "Love keeps no record of wrongs". This is why I gratefully receive this opportunity to approach you in such way to encourage you to press forward with your scepticism against what you think Christianity teaches but toward and for the truth that you know Christianity has: because you know in your heart the true character of Jesus, and you are determined to find it in His name!
It is a matter for you, of straightening-out your perspective of scripture that has been tainted and twisted by those who teach falsehoods in His name, essentially because they do not have such strength to resist falsehood as you do. In saying this, I only encourage that you do not commit the logical fallacy of thinking that Christianity is false based upon your present incapacity to understand it's proper truth - because that can change with time.
Be careful to stay patient, because I know how strong that serpent is that tempts you to hate our misled brethren, and that itself is a cause for The Holy Spirit to convict you and to contend your reconciliation (Genesis 3:1a). There is a way to weild righteous anger and to crush that serpent beneath your feet. I encourage you to pursue that (Genesis 3:15, Revelation 3:21).
BTW, nice to meet you at long last! Here, check out this gospel booklet I have put together, that shows what scripture says about some core topics without any selfish ambition or guilt trip. I did this very prayerfully, and even consider the pictures I chose to associate to the topics, because it speaks volumes:
Adonai Reigns : The Gospel : God did not send his son to condemn the world!
Upvote
0
