I'm so grateful that I don't have to listen to this swill from the pulpit.
Your grasp of Hebrew and Greek is just... breathtaking....
It would be better to be accurate.
/johnny
pastorbillrandles wrote:
“The subject is the new birth.”
The subject is baptism, and why Nicodemus hadn’t listened to John or, more properly, God speaking through John. And therefore the subject is the importance of baptism, and why God commanded it.
As you probably know, Deuteronomy 12:32 warned the Israelites not to add anything to the Torah, but after returning from the Babylonian exile, that is exactly what they did...with good intentions, so that they would not repeat the sins that got them exiled in the first place.
Unfortunately, these extra-curricular laws they came up with took on a life of their own, to the point that people who sincerely sought after God had become oppressed by all this hair-splitting minutiae, promulgated and enforced by those who held themselves in authority. (Comparable to today's volumes of government regulations.)
This, I believe, was Yeshua's (Jesus') real beef with the Pharisees. Not their keeping of the Torah, which Yeshua himself kept perfectly, but rather all the extra man-made nonsensical traditions that did not come from the Torah at all. He was very "in their face" about those.
As the Pharisees were the only sect ordaining rabbis through semicha means Jesus himself was one.
Good post.
The way I remember the difference between Sadducees and Pharisees, is that one group believed in life after death and the other didn’t. The Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection,.....which is why they were Sad,...U sees?? ;^)