Mark 16:18 KJV
They had Gospel recently at church and I was thinking about those snake handlers in Appalachia.
Prove he wasn’t an Apostle.
Actually this quote is more appropos...
Matthe 4:7
Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
Snake Handling and other acts to “prove” God are the behaviors of fools and the ignorant. Tempt God to protect you, by willfully doing dangerous things to prove your faith in him, is idiotic and blasphemous.
Snake :1
Idiot :0
The only good snake is one dipped in cornmeal and fried.
Stupid is as stupid does.............
This is the going to be the next reality TV show.
Right now they are doing Amish, Gypsies and Hutterites on NatGeo. SnakeHandlers is next, I’m sure.
There was a Southern Gospel music group, “Wendy Bagwell and the Sunlighters.” They’d be getting pretty old by this time. On one of their albums, Wendy, a guy, told the story of how they were invited to sing at a church back in the mountains, possibly in West Virginia.
Once the service had started and his group had taken over with their music presentation, he noticed that the pastor and several others had come up front and were moving around right close to his singing group. When he finally looked around he saw that all of them were holding rattle snakes and dancing to the music.
He said a lady in his group then saw the snakes and blanced white with terror. He said to her, “Don’t panic! Just look around and find out where the back door is.”
She said, “I already looked, and there ain’t none!
Wendy replied, “Reckon where do they WANT one?!”
It was hilarious to hear him tell it.
How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard (him); God also bearing (them) witness, both with signs and miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost according to his own will? (Heb. 2:2,3)
You will remember that the giving of oral precepts of The Law, the Old Mosaic Covenant, was introduced with miraculous signs. But once written down, further stupendous and extraordinary events were not needed to bolster that the Law was continuously valid and binding upon all.
Likewise, in its own time the "Good News" of the New Covenant was given by oral communication by Christ, and further expanded in oral precepts that He gave to His Own primary disciple-apostles and relayed by them. God validated these precepts by confirmation of Christ's personal students, and by concurrent miraculous accompanying signs and miracles of these, and only these, witnesses.
Once thus recognized and validated at the first, written down into a body accepted as the perfected and completed Canon of the New Covenant, and closed upon the death of the last of The Christ's personal pupils, the 'time of the first' was closed and sealed, never again to be repeated in kind. Once "That Which is Perfect" (the complete inscripturation of the New Covenant) had arrived, the 'first' (first phase) of God-given temporarily effectual partial measures (predictions of the future, unacquired tongues, revelation of previously mysterious secrets of God) were also finished, and the practice of those sign gifts ceased because they were of no further use to the furtherance of Christian evangelism.
Thus in this time (since circa 100 A. D.), no further miraculous powers or events are required or desired to prove the efficacy and saving power of the Word preached forthrightly without the embroidery of further "spiritual pyrotechnics" (No "laughing revivals," no "spirit slayings," no speech unintelligible to anyone, no "faith healings" without any diagnosis, no "second-touch" fragmentary salvation, etc.), nor of overwhelming rhetorical persuasiveness (1 Cor. 2:1).
Handling of deadly snakes is a theologically unscriptural and pragmatically totally irrational wicked and foolish practice inferred as a result of mishandling of The Word of The God. God warns:
"Be not righteous over-much, neither make thyself over-wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not over-much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?" (Eccl. 7:16-17)
Are such practitioners giving their followers godly advice?
"To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, (it is) because (there is) no light in them." (Is. 8:20)
The answer is a firm and resounding, "NO!!"
Do I hear an "Amen!"?
I hear rattlesnakes are now found in upstate New York. A copperhead appeared in a Massachusetts basement.
Darwin +1; religious fruitcakes -1.
Bad snake.......
A man and a snake walk in a bar...
Rattlers don’t always inject a lot of venom, but when they really get pissed off at you they can dump a lethal dose.