adam & eve

by gotcha 126 Replies latest watchtower bible

RWC

Pom.,
In John 17:6-19 Jesus is praying for God to protect his disciples who would continue his work after he leaves. He is not calling these people the chosen ones in the sense that there are others who are chosen and some in the world then or in the future who would not be. It is a very personal prayer for the disciples.
In John 17:20 he continues: My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message.
This is followed up by Paul who wrote in Romans 10:13 "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
To argue that no matter what you believe that Jesus may reject you through predestination makes faith in him meaningless. Clearly he chooses people for his purposes. he calls people to act as ministers, singers, evanglists, etc.. but that is different from saying that he rejects some from salvation regardless of their beliefs because he wants to. That would mean that you could say that you believe in Jesus which the Bible says is the key to salvation, yet Jesus says that is not enough because he rejected you. It doesn't fit.
God clearly knows what choice you will make. But his knowledge of your choice does not make it predestined such that you lose the ability to make that choice. And his knowledge of your choice does not start with his choosing which of us will chose him and which ones he decides will not. If that was the case what is the point? Why do any of this if the decision has been made for us?
pomegranate

>>To argue that no matter what you believe that Jesus may reject you through predestination makes faith in him meaningless.<<
You don't read too well. All the ones that Christ chooses shall be the right ones, because Christ does NOTHING wrong. Those ones shall believe the right way. Don't you have faith that Jesus will choose all the right ones without the demand of men telling him who to choose?
First, everything has been predestined to die, EVERYTHING, by Satan the Devil. You cannot deny that fact. Without intervention by God, ALL things would be bound to death forever. Now God intervenes by way of a plan. Out of ALL THE WORLD that is predestined to death by Satan, of which God already knows EVERY SINGLE PERSON that will come into being bound to death from birth, He PREDESTINES SOME of those bound to death, to life, by way of adoption.
That is His right. That is what He has done. That is what shall come to be.
ALL men being predestined is a fact by way of the simple truth that God is omniscient. If God already knows ALL THINGS, including the destiny's of all men, how is it you feel you can argue with omniscience? That's a pure lost battle. God knows EVERYTHING. NOTHING is hidden from him. Including THOSE CHOSEN and UNCHOSEN. It's written down. If God did not know ALL destiny's of every man, then God is NOT omniscient. The Bible CLEARLY shows he is:
Heb 4:13
13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
Did you get that? NOTHING is hidden. EVERYTHING is laid bare. Including your freewill choice. That's what makes you so naked before God. You can't hide ANYTHING. Even your destiny is as naked and laid bare as your two cheeked heiny.
>>Clearly he chooses people for his purposes.<<
He chooses who will live or die. That's HIS choice NOT yours, especially over your own life.
>>..but that is different from saying that he rejects some from salvation regardless of their beliefs because he wants to.<<
Then you are saying man's will supercedes God's will. Men have NO SAY in anything regarding their life. NADA. NITS, NUTTIN. They have NO RIGHT to even direct their own steps as even their very life does NOT belong to them.
Jer 10:23
23 I know, O LORD, that a man's life is not his own;
it is not for man to direct his steps.
But you DON'T know that man's life is not his own. You think your life is your own. To do with as you will. WRONG. Your life is in God's hands to do with as He pleases. You are not fit to direct your own steps, yet you feel you can supercede God and direct your own steps and believe something that will MAKE him save you.
Ha! Nothing you can do can MAKE God have to save you. You are saved by grace, NOT YOUR DESIRE to be saved. Even your desire is poo poo to God. He'll save you if that's what He darn well feels like doing. You can't do anything to stop it, or cause it.
Rom 9:16-17
16 It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy.
Your desires or efforts are MEANINGLESS regarding your butt being saved or not. It depend's on God, whether He darn well feels like it or not.
>>That would mean that you could say that you believe in Jesus which the Bible says is the key to salvation, yet Jesus says that is not enough because he rejected you. It doesn't fit.<<
Go read about the dudes who say "Lord Lord, didn't we beleive and do all this wonderful grandiose crap in your name" (paraphrased of course)...those guys are GONERS. Proof positive that saying you believe doesn't get you saved. Why? Because these dorks chose Christ, Christ did NOT choose them. They're outa here...
>>God clearly knows what choice you will make. But his knowledge of your choice does not make it predestined such that you lose the ability to make that choice.<<
That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. You just said without the circular confusion: God knows your end but that doesn't make it mean He knows your end. If God already knows your END, then you have no choice. All you are doing is going through the predestined motions. You are NOTHING. YOU are FULLY naked.
You have no free will. Freewill is a decpetion. Freewill is a lie from Satan the Devil. The person who thinks he gets to decide what's right and wrong is in for a reality slap. God dictates right and wrong...no one else.
>>And his knowledge of your choice does not start with his choosing which of us will chose him and which ones he decides will not. If that was the case what is the point? Why do any of this if the decision has been made for us?<<
That's the whole point. You're bound to sin ON PURPOSE so you CAN'T choose. Your being enslaved to sin from birth GIVES YOU NO CHOICE over being good or bad, because you come out bad from your mother's gut. Bound to sin with NO CHOICE on the matter. Now, God has to decide for every man, because EVERY MAN IS BAD.
Your only HOPE is that you are chosen to become good. That is my HOPE.
If you are NOT chosen, who are you to argue with God? I have texts to back this whole enchalada up. Want them?
pseudoxristos

Pomegranate,
PS. One more thing. Para is a PREPOSITION and a PREPOSITION ONLY. How is it that some Bible's have turned a PREPOSITION into a NOUN???
Family is a NOUN not a preposition, PARA is a preposition of PROXIMITY and NOT a NOUN, RIGHT?
So you are saying that Family is a noun but, Friends is not a noun? Ok, I'm beginning to see your logic.
pomegranate

Dude, family, friends, people all wound be incorrect here, as they are ALL nouns. There is no noun in the Greek.
When rendering this passage all direct nouns should be avoided since the Greek word is NOT a noun in any way shape or form. It is a prepostion. A PRE POSITION. It is a description of WHERE some people are in relation to the topic JESUS (literal or figurative). So when rendering such, a multiple word phrase would be better suited for this passage. Again, the Greek nouns for FAMILY, PEOPLE, FRIENDS are not in the manuscripts.
Mark 3:20-21
21 When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind."
NIV
If I were to render this closer to the Greek, I would do it like this:
"When his own heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind."
If a noun is to be added to help clarify?
Mark 3:21-22
21 When His own [people] heard of this, they went out to take custody of Him; for they were saying, "He has lost His senses."
Then, what should be done is what I have done above and that is add a word that is NOT in the manuscripts, IN BRACKETS. I have NO probelm when it is done this way. An added word can be used to clarify the topic, as long as it's NOT being in the manuscripts is notated.
So NOW, who is "his own [people]" that were saying he was nuts? His family? NO! The next paragraph says PLAINLY who they were:
22 The scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, "He is possessed by Beelzebul," and "He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons."
"His own [people]" in verse 21 who HEARD about what Jesus was doing would be the JEWISH SCRIBES that came down from Jerusalem to SEE what the heck this Jesus was all about.
From afar in Jerusalem they said he was NUTS.
When the scribes got there from Jerusalem and saw what was going on, they said he is posessed and casts out demons by means of Satan.
All in the context, no guess work, all logical. It was the scribes from Jerusalem (HIS OWN PEOPLE) that thought he was nuts.
This topic is done. Go back to your studies.
Gozz

pomegranate,
you've succeeded in hijacking this thread with your mentally challenging posts. That's not a happifying result for some.
pomegranate

Then why are you here reading it? Is your mouse broken?
JosephAlward

Let me summarize my argument that Mark’s view of Jesus and his mother is different than Luke’s:
1. Luke begins his stories about Jesus by telling us that the virgin Mary was visited by God’s angel, Gabriel, who told her she would give birth to the son of God (Luke 1:34-35).
2. Mark begins his stories with an adult Jesus, and never has anything to say about Jesus’ birth. If he knew that Mary was told by God’s angel that Jesus was the son of God, he said nothing about it.
3. One of Mark’s themes is the abandonment of job and family to serve God. Jesus enticed two separate sets of brothers away from their families, and later set the example for others to follow, by himself abandoning his mother and brother. These events are recounted below:
The fishermen Simon and Andrew left their trade and, presumably, their family, to follow Jesus (Mark 1:16-18).
Later, James and John did the same thing, leaving their father behind (Mark 1:19-20).
After his mother and brothers had said that he was “out of his mind,” and appeared outside a house to “take charge of him (Mark 3:21),” Mark does not have Jesus invite her inside, nor does Mark have Jesus go outside to greet her. Instead, Mark has Jesus makes it clear to his followers inside the house that he does not regard the woman outside as his mother. He explains to his followers what his definition of a “mother” is: A “mother” is whoever does the will of God, (Mark 3:31-35), with the clear implication being that one who didn’t recognize Jesus as the son of God was obviously not in tune with the will of God.
Thus, Jesus effectively abandons his mother to serve God, thereby setting the example for the readers of Mark’s gospel to follow should their families, too, not believe that Jesus was the son of God. Thus, almost two thousand years before the practice of shunning of unbelieving family members was put into practice by Jehovah's Witnesses, the precedence for this behavior was established by Jesus himself.
4. Mark loves to use irony in telling his stories about Jesus. One of his ironies is the rejection of Jesus by those who knew him best. Surely, readers would expect that those closest to Jesus would be the first to recognize his divinity, but that was the opposite of what Mark has happen; therein lies the irony.
The first instance of rejection by those who knew him best is the one just described, in which Jesus’ mother and brothers declared him to be out of his mind and in need of care. It is obvious that if they knew he was God’s son, then they would have known that either Jesus himself or the all-powerful God had infinitely more wisdom than they had to know what was best for Jesus to do and to say, and they would have just have left everything in God’s hands--or Jesus’ hands. It is virtually absolutely clear, then, that--according to Mark--Jesus’ mother and his brothers could not have known that he was the son of God. Mark’s readers knew about God saying that Jesus was his son (Mark 1:11), but his mother didn’t. More irony.
The failure of Mark’s Mary to recognize that Jesus was the son of God is totally at odds with Luke’s Mary, who knew even before Jesus’ birth that he was the son of God because God’s angel told her so. Thus, either Mark’s “Mary” is the false Mary, or else Luke’s is, or perhaps both are false Mary’s. Either way, the Bible is in error.
The next instance of rejection of Jesus by those who knew him best occurred in his hometown, where he was ridiculed by those who referred to him as a common carpenter, and one whose mother, sisters and brothers were ordinary townsfolk (Mark 6:3). How could a god be related to mortal and quite ordinary common folk? Mark’s readers knew that Jesus was God, but the people who rubbed shoulders with Jesus did not know. More irony.
The final rejection of Jesus by one of those who knew him best is the one best known to readers: Judas, who dipped his bread into the same bowl as Jesus did (Mark 14:18-20), betrayed him to the Romans.
Other irony by Mark include his tongue-in-cheek naming of the man chosen by the crowd: As it was customary at Feast time for a prisoner to be released, Mark had Pilate give the crowd a chance to release Jesus, who the readers know is the son of the Father in Heaven, but instead they choose to have released another man whose name means, “the son of the father”--Barabbas (Mark 15:1-15). Mark just loved inventing incidents which dripped with irony. But it was irony which he hoped would serve him well: the message to the readers of his gospel was, Don’t you be as foolish as those in the crowd.
Yet another contrived irony occurs when the mocking soldiers pretend to crown a “king” by putting a crown of thorns on Jesus’ head, and calling him “king of the Jews.” Little did the foolish soldiers know that they actually were crowning the greatest king of all time.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
* http://members.aol.com/jalw/joseph_alward.html
pseudoxristos

pomegranate,
In an earlier post you argued that the statement declaring Christ "out of his mind" was a statement for protection.
Declaring Christ "out of his mind" is certainly NOT a statement of rejection, disbelief or anything of the sort. And anyone that reads that understanding into the context is really lost in the dark of his own self suppositions. It was not a statement of rejection but rather a statement for protection.
Now that you have twisted the meaning of the first part of that verse so that the "JEWISH SCRIBES " are now making this statement. Would you care to twist the second part of that verse now? Or, are we to understand that the "JEWISH SCRIBES" are now making the statement for the protection of Jesus?
I'm Curious to see how the meaning of the phrase "out of his mind" is going to change to suit your desire to believe whatever you would like.
pseudoxristos

Joe,
Thanks for bringing up the point about the irony theme. I found that Jesus telling his disciples to not tell anyone that he was "the Christ", to also be ironc. Mark 8:27-30
JosephAlward

Pseudo,
Yes, it is very interesting that Mark has Jesus try to hide his divinity, but the reason for this has less to do with Mark's tendency to embellish his stories with irony, and more to do with his need to have the readers believe that Jesus was dead set on having his life be lived out in the manner in which Mark believed was preordained for the savior described in the scriptures. Repeatedly we find Mark having Jesus refer to those things which were "written" about what would happen to the son of God. When Mark has Jesus try to keep his identity a secret (cautioning those he healed to tell no one), Mark is having Jesus make sure that those who would reject him and kill him would have the opportunity to do so: if they found out he was God, they would love him, not kill him, and this would not be a fulfillment of scriptures, as Mark saw them.
This explains why Mark invents the story of Jesus explanation of why he talks in parables: so that people who otherwise would be saved by his words of salvation, would not be saved (Mark 4:12). That's a pretty bizarre theology, but evidently Mark believed that God wanted some folks not to accept the word of God, so that they might perish.
Joseph F. Alward
"Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
* http://members.aol.com/jalw/joseph_alward.html

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