What you and your congregation have been taught is how to twist the clear meaning of the epistle by breaking it up into easily managed sound bites, a little twist here, a little twist there, and voila! the meaning is conformed to easy grace churchianity, and the threat of Matthew 7:23 is averted for another set of pew warmers. (until the great white throne, that is)
Of course it is “good enough” for your nicolaitan; if he lets you find out what it really says he’ll loose you to Yeshua. Bye-bye parsonage, bye-bye steady pay check, hello job search.
I understand the one-verse-at-a-time apostasy. Been there, done that, wore out five t-shirts and a key chain. Now I demand the real word of Yehova.
The context is what proves what I said, and demolishes what churchianity wants it to say.
“Grammatical sense” of a single verse is facetious for a text that has gone through three or four translations to get to your sunday school lesson book. You have to at least take the chapter to solve the cultural murder mystery that all of the epistles are. The epistles had no verses nor chapters, and the present break-up of them makes no sense at all.
Every “rightly divider” of God’s word has a date with the great white throne. Paul’s use of those words was to separate the junk you love from the truth, to keep Timothy out of the trap you’ve fallen into.
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OK, spoudadzo on 1 Jn 3:9 for us, and apply 2 Tim. 2:15 to yourself, as Paul commanded Timothy (and his imitators) to do.
Show that your rants are approved by The God. Dissect this segment of The Word correctly into its component parts, down to every Greek particle. Do the work of proving from those verses that you can make sense in this language--if you can, which you have not, so far.
The challenge is still the same. The Greek was given to you, with two widely-approved English renderings which themselves correspond at least to the inherent Koine sense.
I've only asked you to do what Paul directed his disciple Timothy to do, to demonstrate that he was not just a big phony. Which as yet you have not proven in this thread, nor have you done in other similar discussions in the past.
You force other participants to tolerate you as a recalcitrant child, a test of their generosity. Give us something more than your inflated estimate of your own opinion.
From now on, I'll be waiting, responding to no more of your baseless verbosity.