Posted on 06/18/2014 11:58:15 AM PDT by lilyramone
If we are saved by God, what are we saved from?
Personal understanding is fine but the answer to the question from the Bible is we are saved from God’s Wrath.
We are not saved from hell. We are not saved from going down the wrong path. We are saved from a God that must be just. Or another way of looking at it is we are saved FROM God BY God. Now that requires some thinking as to the nature of God.
To expand on this, think about the story of Abraham offering Isaac as a sacrifice. Think to yourself what the purpose of the story is. Now read Gen 22:12 and you will find God’s reason for doing what he did. “.....for now I know that _______________”
That should also lead us to thinking who God is. It is not something our human ears want to hear or think about. That He would take Abraham through that experience for that one purpose should give us pause.....................
You equate love with sentiment. Love is the highest discipline, the source of Godliness and the most intense of works. The price of love is absolute sacrifice, surrendering oneself with no attempt to find oneself worthy of any good. Only God is love just as only God is good. There is no love and no goodness outside Him. If you wish to have the love of God you must surrender every aspect of your life to Him. I get none of that from your understanding of love.
Love is a word that quickly goes over our tongue and we think we know what it means but we really don’t.
Finally in Mal 1:2,3 I got a better answer. There is a very visual picture there if you think about it. I finally was able to distill it down to one word that gives me understanding. I wonder if you come to the same word or if it is just me. Remember, this is God’s answer to the question, not mine, so it has a pretty high authority.
Love is sacrifice. In loving one surrenders oneself. God’s love is the sacrifice of His son for the redemption of His lost children. Love is a gift, not earned. One does not merit love.
The difficulty with Taoism, Buddhism and Confucious is that they are at heart humanistic disciplines. They rely on human values for their foundation. They cannot reach beyond human endeavor because they do not acknowledge any ethic beyond the human condition.
No, he meant to love yourself.
You can't love your neighbor AS yourself, if you don't also love YOUR self.
That means this self-abasement that reflects your understanding of what God wants, directly violates Jesus's command to love yourself.
You cannot love yourself AND also be ashamed for existing.
How can a loving God have wrath?
Answer: because God has set us up a Law. And so, violating that law makes us experience suffering. Peope who suffer for violating God's law call it wrath, but the idea that God can actually hate us is nonsense - God loves us. God feels pain when we violate the Law and hurt ourselves. But if we do not learn from teh law, we would go astray forever, and never find out way back. So, ultimately, even though it can cause us great pain, God's Law is given to us in love, for us to learn from - by a loving God.
Divine Love is not conditional. Human love is conditional. Human effort is limited. Human mistakes are constant. But Divine Love is unconditional the essence of Grace, even when we mistake it as wrath. And eventually, it brings us to itself - no matter how stubborn we are - not through force, but because we finally learn from the Law, rather than fight it.
Or he was scolding those whose narcissism did not allow themselves to consider the needs of others. I fail to comprehend the ways in which Christ loved himself. Jesus never preached self love except as the foundation of sin. Self love yields all sorts of abuse. Love God above all and His love will flow into you in sufficiency.
You seem to want to believe you are capable of goodness. That is only true so long as God has no place in your life. Surrender the notion that you are capable of self improvement and allow God to use you in what ever way He chooses. By no means should you center your hope on self love.
LOL, so "love your neighbor as yourself" is a scolding for narcissism?!
Wow, billions of people have been completely fooled for two thousand years, and finally - finally - you cleared this up!
I fail to comprehend the ways in which Christ loved himself. Jesus never preached self love except as the foundation of sin. Self love yields all sorts of abuse. Love God above all and His love will flow into you in sufficiency.
As I posted, from the Bible, Jesus COMBINED the two concepts - loving God and loving our neighbors. YOU separate them.
You seem to want to believe you are capable of goodness. That is only true so long as God has no place in your life. Surrender the notion that you are capable of self improvement and allow God to use you in what ever way He chooses. By no means should you center your hope on self love.
I am capable of goodness so long as God has no place in my life?
Loving my neighbor as myself is a scolding for narcissism?
You divide Jesus command to love God AND each other because YOU fail to comprehend it?
I will no longer listen to your absolute reversal of Jesus's teachings. I find what you say to be a perversion of everything Jesus said.
BY YOUR LOGIC, your words, your teachings do not come from God or Jesus or goodness, but your own sin. By your logic, and what you have told me, the only way you can presume that what you are saying is true and from God's love is if you have rejected God. By your logic and teachings, you have no business posting here or teaching anything, for you can know nothing, and should abase yourself before God.
Denying the heart of love from human beings is satanic - and that's exactly what you argue. The Bible says God mad us "in His image" - that image is love.
Keep your hell and death and horror and self-hatred away to yourself - no one in the universe wants it. It is your own foul creation. I reject you utterly.
Get thee behind me.
I don’t want to think was Jesus might do with single-blog blogpimps.
Notice the love and kindness emanating from your words? Neither do I. Physician, heal thyself.
You see nothing because you are blind. You denounce and reject the love in the souls of human beings, and then you can't notice love or kindness? You reject people's goodness, cut out entire teachings of Jesus that declare we should love one another as mere "narcissism" and then you can't see my love? My love consists of rejecting your rejecting of love. My refusal to accept your reversal of the love in our hearts, our very creation in the image of the love of God, the goodness of our souls and Jesus's abiding compassion and forgiveness of us IS your medicine - from a physician you are far too ill to recognize.
As well, why speak you of love? IF you are right in your hideous interpretations of scripture, and IF therefore I cannot possibly have any love in me, except to show that I have rejected God (your actual complete reversal of scripture, that the love in a person shows rejection of God) - THEN, should the lack of love in me that you now claim show that I am right? Shouldn't the fact that you see no love or kindness in me PROVE that - according to you - God is using me to teach you about love?
Except of course that that would be complete madness, which is what I have been patiently pointing out to you all along. Which leaves what? Exactly what I am saying - my love towards you consists in rejecting your rejection of love.
Your darkness is your darkess. It does not come from God or Jesus, who bring the light of love. You pretend a call for God, after rejecting love, teaching self-abasement, and throwing out scriptures which directly contradict you. I see nothing of Jesus in what you say - only your own twisting of the Bible. verse after verse I point out and you simply toss it aside, in favor of rejecting love in the name of love.
It won't work, and it doesn't work.
What you teach is empty.
I agree that ‘tolerance’ is not biblical.
It is an emotive meme straight from the pit of hell.
YOU wrote:
"You seem to want to believe you are capable of goodness. That is only true so long as God has no place in your life."
In the name of the love of Jesus Christ, I reject your teachings as anathema.
For you my words are indeed anathema. You wish to show you are capable of goodness without God. You, quite simply, are not.
And with what authority do you decree that God is not speaking through me?
isn't that how you say it works? You surrender to God so God can work through you?
Well? How do you know that isn't what has happened to me? Where is your authority to make that judgment? Are you speaking on your own? With your own understanding? According to you, isn't that evil? How can you have any understanding of your own?
Or are you saying that God is speaking through you, and telling me, through you, using you only as an instrument, that my belief in love, in goodness, in - lterally - my own experience of the love of God inside me - is false.
Is that what God is tellng you? That my experience of the love of God is false?
Or are you telling me that, on your own?
Well?
Q: Do you believe in Hell and if so, who do you think will go there?
A: And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested Him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
He said to him, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?”
So he answered and said, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’”
And He said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.”
But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Then Jesus answered and said: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho ... so which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?”
And he said, “He who showed mercy on him.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
- Luke 10
Great. So:
Do you believe in Hell and if so, who do you think will go there?
What part of my answer didn't you understand?
“What part of my answer didn’t you understand?”
The part where you answered it. You didn’t mention Hell or going there.
Your answer was ambiguous as if you didn’t want to give a definitive answer.
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