What is the nature of God?

http://www.truthortradition.com/

Here is a great website for biblical answers to hard questions. Click on the "topics" button on the left side of the page.

God bless

The Bible is a dead letter without the Spirit of God giving you understanding. If you have not been baptized by water and the Spirit, do it ASAP. Trying to intellectualize the Bible gets you nowhere fast. Only by the Holy Spirit and prayer does true understanding and faith come.

Only by the Holy Spirit and prayer does true understanding and faith come.

Actually, "homeschool_dad" you are very lucky because you are about to enter a whole new world. Don't use your noggin at this point. Just say in prayer that if the Holy Spirit will guide you, you want to give your life to Him. And don't give up...even now He's nudging you along. Be determined and have faith.

He wants your love (and He wants to show you His love for you) but the only way you can give your love to Him is by faith. If you had proof, it wouldn't be love...it would be submission because of His power. He doesn't want submission, he wants your freely given love and affection (adoration).

Imagine you were a young man and fell in love with a beautiful woman. She was so beautiful you knew she could win the heart of any young man but she told you she loved you and that you could trust her to be true to that love. Now, imagine she went away for a while. What would strengthen your love for her and hers for you. Trusting her to be true (trusting in love)...or having proof by hiring a private investigator. Anyway, however clumsily put, you see my point.

Love is trusting without proof and that is what God wants. He wants you to love Him and that can only be done with trust (which is of course faith).

Best of luck and God bless you in this wonderful journey.

Oh, and by the way. You can trust Him.

God is, he has his own time, schedule and agenda, and he has done a lot to make it clear about how we are supposed to relate to our fellows.

But our 20th century sensibilities are not his.

Our concept of a loving God (too often one that validates us, pats us on our head, and says, Hey man, I understand, without demanding anything from us) isn't necessarily the way God sees being loving.

I see it as an interplay between our free will and God's ultimate scheme of things.

There are some hefty, heavy duty promises of divine intervention in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, and they are not all pleasant, and these are often something that doesn't fit into the world view and the image of God that a lot of people expect out of God. That's projection.

He has not left us bereft, but he hasn't promised us life without pain or sorrow, either. A lot of the test, I suspect, is in how we respond to the things that happen.

I can only offer you the response of God to Job, and the image of Christ on the days of his execution and ressurection. We do see through a glass darkly. Look into the depths of chaos, and darkness and see the light of his beacon, and kneel down in the presence of something that will be forever bigger than you are, not fully fathomable during your human days, and realize all of your preconceived notions and desires to put him in a box and make everything nice and tidy are flawed.

Looking into the face of an emmanence bigger than you can even imagine, the question really becomes: Welp, wherever you're at, there you are. So what are you going to do about it? Job faced God in the face of the whirlwind, fell to his knees, let his anger go, and moved on with God's blessing. Others stand up, curse him and die, sometimes in a fit of pique that the world wasn't made the way it was supposed to be.

As for me and my house, we will find our security at the foot of the cross. There in that place where heaven and earth meet, God shows us a human face, and the love beyond the terror of the whirlwind. There, I will find refuge, if not comfort; love, if not lack of persecution, and hope against the midnight.

***"So what does it all mean?That Jews Christians and Muslims Pray to the same god (Whilst calling him different names)"***

They absolutely do NOT pray to the same God as Christians.
Jesus is God and God is Triune (Father,Son and Holy Spirit)

The Jews and Muslims don,t believe this

John 11:26
Whoever believes in me,
though he should die,will come to life;
and whoever is alive and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?

The Jews and the Muslims Don,t!
Therefore they don,t pray to the same God!

"homeschool_dad"...curious as to why you would post a thread that is of great importance to you (and everyone) and then not respond to your own thread?

I can perhaps offer a few suggestions in addition to those you've already received. Please let me know by private post if you'd like to hear them.

Because I've been making supper! :) I'll write more in a bit.

1. God is infallible, period, end of story. Any book written on God's behalf by men is by definition not infallible since man has fallen.

2. Jesus of Nazareth condemned the Mishnah quite clearly, I refer you to Mark 7.

3. Judaism, Christianity and Islam do not worship the same God by definition. The Triune is Christian. Being a Christian, you should know that.

4. Lots of people don't like Old Testament justice but evidently God knows something we don't. In fact God knows lot's of somethings we don't.

5. I hope you restore you're faith but I hope you do it honestly. Quoting from the Mishnah to offer support for your loss of faith in Jesus Christ is kind of silly. Here's a couple of other quotes from Mishnah:
Sanhedrin 43a . Says Jesus ("Yeshu" and in footnote #6, Yeshu "the Nazarene") was executed because he practiced sorcery.

Gittin 57a . Says Jesus ( see footnote #4) is being boiled in "hot excrement."

Sanhedrin 43a . Jesus deserved execution: "On the eve of the Passover, Yeshu was hanged...Do you suppose that he was one for whom a defense could be made? Was he not a Mesith (enticer)?"

Thx...I wish my Dad had home-schooled me.

Your kids are lucky.

In a strange way, I am home schooling my dad. He is 87 and I am a caregiver for him and my mom (85 going on 39). Each day they still teach me...and I get to learn by giving.

See my tag...it says it all.

Says Jesus ("Yeshu" and in footnote #6, Yeshu "the Nazarene") was executed because he practiced sorcery.

Yeshua a sorcerer?

He leads the world into kindness and sweetness and courage (divided all time by his presence). He creates a world of democracy. He is love personified. He elevates women to the position that motherhood deserves. He never says a word that isn't demanding of sainthood. He loves humanity unconditinally and pays an ulitmate price for us...and you call Him a "sorcerer."

I think you have the wrong person in mind. Jesus a sorcerer? He is the Truth. Read Him and decide...don't make comments without digging into the substance of Jesus.

Consider that you might be in touch with the ultimate Truth. God bless you. Freep mail me please.

1: Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. 2: There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. 3: Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.

I'm not going to talk theology, but please let me draw your attention to the real difference betwen this account and the one of Mark. It's not about heads or feet - just read the last sentence. What we have here, in my opinion, is an eyewitness account. The detail is the detail an eyewitness would remember. There are many other narrative passages in the Fourth Gospel that support this view, even though conventional biblical scholarship denies it.

And note also that the narrator mentions himself - Lazarus of Bethany.

As others have said, the New Testament was written by fallible men. They agree to an amazing extent on the gospel itself - the "good news" of Jesus - but they often differ on the details.

Note that Luke (vii:28-50) records the same incident, with more detail that is almost certainly interpolated, making of the incident a small Socratic dialogue - very Greek. And he also says "feet".

What I think happened is that somewhere between the event and the Q version, on which both Mark and Matthew are based, somebody decided that anointing the feet didn't make sense, and substituted head - an obvious echo of Ps xxiii. In other words, he was imposing onto the narrative a Jewish perspective, and getting it wrong.

A final question,if I may. Does this inconsistency make you doubt Jesus? After all, the Bible is but a means to an end, and He is that end.

Best wishes.

On the subject of reconciling Genesis and observeable physical reality, I recommend Hugh Ross's ministry: http://www.reasons.org/ Hugh has written a number of books on the topic. His article, "Making Sense of Genesis 1 -- the importance of Point of View", can be found at http://media.isnet.org/off/Xtian/Triunity/sense.html

As for the slavery and brutality of the Old Testament, I can only offer the observation that those practices represented LIMITATIONS on the preexisting customs. (For example, "eye for an eye" meant ONLY an eye, you couldn't kill the man).

On the plus side, the kosher laws re: food, waste disposal, quarantining the sick, represent an effective infection control protocol that was thousands of years ahead of its time. Even the extermination of the 7 Canaanite cities may have been a health measure: those vile child-molesting, bestial pagans infected even their children and animals with STDs, so sparing the kids and animals would have brought disease into Israel.

On t Re: Ishmael, remember the prophecy: He shall be a "wild donkey of a man", "every man's hand shall be against him, and his hand shall be against every man". Is that not a perfect description of the Arabs through all recorded history? God promised the land to Isaac for good reason.

Actually, "homeschool_dad" you are very lucky because you are about to enter a whole new world. Don't use your noggin at this point.

I have to disagree strenously with this point. NEVER stop using the noggin. "Love the Lord... with all your MIND". Clear thinking isn't everything, of course, but without it, chaos results.

Clear thinking isn't everything, of course, but without it, chaos results.

God and the Holy Spirit are not perceived with the noggin...He cannot be grasped intellectually. He can only be grasped spiritually (which includes the body, soul, mind...and then some). God uses the human mind to an incredible degree. But the key is the spirit. His Spirit speaks to our spirit.

If what I am saying is chaos...ask Him in prayer. You will see, He is not chaos.

God bless.

prayers were simply repetitions of passages I had learned in school

That's definitely a problem. Prayer is not an incantation of some magical formula. There's no efficacy in reciting the inaccurately termed "Lord's Prayer". We are admonished against vain and repetitious mutterings and babblings. Neither does it say much about what should be an intimate and personal relationship that essentially is nothing more than meaningless, trite, formulaic ritual.

Is it essential to my salvation that I believe that God created the world in 7 days? Or is it enough that I believe that He *did* created it – somehow – and I really don’t care how long it took Him.

An outspoken evolutionist answered your very question in the American Atheist magazine with this reply:

Christianity is - must be! - totally committed to the special creation as described in Genesis, and Christianity must fight with its full might against the theory of evolution. And here is why.
In Romans we read that 'sin entered the world through one man, and through sin - death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned.' (5:12)
...the whole justification of Jesus' life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam's fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None.
Even a high school student knows enough about evolution to know that nowhere in the evolutionary description of our origins does there appear an Adam or an Eve or an Eden or a forbidden fruit. Evolution means a development from one form to the next to meet the ever-changing challenges from an ever-changing nature. There is no fall from a previous state of sublime perfection.
Without Adam, without the original sin, Jesus Christ is reduced to a man with a mission on a wrong planet!

Can an atheist understand the issues more clearly than most Christians?

The key to a correct understanding of any part of the Bible is to ascertain the intention of the author of the portion or book under discussion. Books in the bible can be poetic, prophetical, letters, biographical, or authentic historical facts. And according to rule of hermeneutics, Scripture is either interpreted literally according to normal natural, historical, grammatical, or allegorical usage. Moreover, nothing is spoken in a vacume and everything is to be taken within the context of how it is intended to be understood.

Chapters 12-50 of Genesis were very clearly written as authentic history, as they describe the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and his 12 sons who were the ancestral heads of the 12 tribes of Israel. The Jewish people, from earliest biblical times to the present day, have always regarded this portion of Genesis as the true record of their nation's history. The Lord Jesus Himself and the Gospel writers said that the Law was given by Moses (Mark 10:3; Luke 24:27; John 1:17), and the uniform tradition of the Jewish scribes and early Christian fathers, and the conclusion of conservative scholars to the present day, is that Genesis was written by Moses. This does not preclude the possibility that Moses had access to patriarchal records, preserved by being written on clay tablets and handed down from father to son via the line of Adam - Seth - Noah - Shem - Abraham - Isaac - Jacob, etc.

We see 11 verses in Genesis (2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12; 25:19; 36:1; 36:9; 37:2) which read, 'These are the generations [Hebrew: toledoth = 'origins' or by extension 'record of the origins'] of...' As these statements all come after the events they describe, and the events recorded all took place before rather than after the death of the individuals so named, they may very well be subscripts or closing signatures, i.e. colophons, rather than superscripts or headings. If this is so, the most likely explanation of them is that Adam, Noah, Shem, and the others each wrote down an account of the events which occurred in his lifetime, and Moses, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, selected and compiled these, along with his own comments, into the book we now know as Genesis.

In Psa 1:1 is an example of Hebrew poetry known as triple parallelism in the nouns and verbs used. If we put the nouns and verbs used into three rows and columns like this:

Walketh counsel ungodly
Standeth way sinners
Sitteth seat scornfull

As well as this overt parallelism, there is also a covert or subtle progression of meaning. In the first column, 'walketh' suggests short-term acquaintance, 'standeth' implies readiness to discuss, and 'sitteth' speaks of long-term involvement. In the second column, 'counsel' betokens general advice, 'way' indicates a chosen course of action, and 'seat' signifies a set condition of mind. In the third column, 'ungodly' describes the negatively wicked, 'sinner' characterizes the positively wicked, and 'scornful' portrays the contemptuously wicked.

Proverbs 27:6, 'Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful' is an example of contrastive paralellism, and in Psalm 46:1, 'God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of need.' is an example of completive parallelism.

Nevertheless, while there certainly is repetition in Genesis chapter 1, e.g. 'And God said . . .' occurs 10 times; 'and God saw that it was good/very good' seven times; 'after his/their kind' 10 times; 'And the evening and the morning were the . . . day' six times, however, these repetitions are statements of fact and thus a record of what happened, and possibly for emphasis - to indicate the importance of the words repeated, and not forms of poetry previously mentioned. Hebrew scholars of substance are agreed that Gen 1-11 do not contain information or invocation in any of the forms of Hebrew poetry, in either overt or covert form.

Can the first 11 chapters be considered parables then? When Jesus told a parable He either said it was a parable, or He introduced it with a simile, making it plain to the hearers that it was a parable, as on the many occasions when He said, 'The kingdom of heaven is like . . . .' No such claim whatsoever is made or is such style used by the author of Genesis 1-11.

Except for two prophetic promises of God in the sense that their fulfilment would be seen in the future, none of the first 11 chapters can be perceived as prophetic.

If Adam knew the events of Creation Days 1-6, they must have been revealed to him by God, as Adam was not made until Day 6, and so he could have known them only if God had told him. This view is reinforced by the words, 'These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created . . .' in Genesis 2:4a. The details of Day 7, the rest day, are included before this in Genesis 2:2-3, thereby completing (as we might expect) the record of a full seven-day week, before this subscript or closing signature appears.

The events of Genesis 2:4b-5:1a tells us about Adam, his wife Eve, and their sons, and reads very much like a personal account of what Adam knew, saw, and experienced concerning the Garden of Eden, and the creation of Eve, their rebellion against God, and the deeds of their descendants, albeit written in the third person. This section ends with the words, 'This is the book of the generations of Adam'.

There is no problem concerning Adam's ability to have have written Genesis 1:1-2:4a as the result of his pre-Fall conversation with God, and Genesis 2:4b-5:1 as the record of his own experiences. Adam was created a mature man, endowed with all the DNA, knowledge and skill he needed to perform all the tasks assigned him by God. No cave-man was Adam! He knew enough horticulture 'to dress and to keep' the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15), and ample intelligence to recognize and name the distinct kinds of animals (Genesis 2:19). Given that he (and Eve) could converse with God without ever having learned an alphabet, is it logicially incongruous to suppose that he was not fully skilled in writing also?

What about alleged inconsistencies - contradictions - between the creation accounts of Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. Suffice it to say, that upon close and intellectually honest scrutiny, these objections evaporate.

In all frankness, if the normal principles of biblical exegesis (ignoring pressure to make the text conform to the evolutionary prejudices of our age) are applied, it is overwhelmingly obvious that Genesis was meant to be taken in a straightforward, obvious sense as an authentic, literal, historical record of what actually happened.

If Genesis is not to be interpreted literally according to normal natural, or historical usage, or according to grammatical syntactical construct, then it can only be interpreted as allegory without any rules, being purely symobolic metaphor (its meaning open ended and subject to any interpretation). It literally could mean anything. It would be akin to two people in a burning building contemplating the sign that said "In case of fire: PULL". One person could be commenting on the sign's (or the handle's) beauty, and the other could be deriding their oppression of freewill. Except for one thing: in all of Scripture each occurance of allegory is specifically stated as being such: the following is allegory...

Theistic evolution gives a false representation of the nature of God because death and ghastliness are ascribed to the Creator as principles of creation. (Progressive creationism, likewise, allows for millions of years of death and horror before sin.)

Theistic evolution allows the only workspace allotted to God to be that part of nature which science cannot "explain" with the means presently at its disposal. In this way God is reduced to being a "god of the gaps" for those phenomena about which there are doubts. This leads to the view that "God is therefore not absolute, but He Himself has evolved - He himself is evolution".

Theistic evolution undermines the basic way of reading the Bible, as vouched for by Jesus, the prophets and the Apostles, reducing events reported in the Bible to mythical imagery, and an understanding of the message of the Bible as being true in word and meaning is lost. This aspect of theistic evolution as implications of opening the door to the revision, or discarding of subsequent doctrine contained in Scripture.

Evolution denies sin in the biblical sense of missing one's purpose (in relation to God). Since sin is made meaningless, and that is exactly the opposite of what the Holy Spirit does - He declares sin to be sinful, then one has lost the very reason one needs to find God in the first place. Something that, incidently, is not resolved by adding "God" back into the evolutionary scenario by holding to theistic evolution. The whole thing becomes a perversion. Would you knowingly drink water that has a drop of feces in it even though you couldn't actually see the feces in the water?

Theistic evolution does not acknowledge Adam as the first man, nor that he was created directly from "the dust of the ground" by God (Genesis 2:17). Most theistic evolutionists regard the creation account as being merely a mythical tale, albeit with some spiritual significance. However, the sinner Adam and the Saviour Jesus are linked together in the Bible - Romans 5:16-18. Thus any view which mythologizes Adam undermines the biblical basis of Jesus' work of redemption.

Theistic evolution (and progressive creation) disregard the biblically given measures of time in favour of evolutionist time-scales involving billions of years both past and future (for which there are no convincing physical grounds). The ramifications to this are:

1) Not all statements of the Bible are to be taken seriously.

2) Vigilance concerning the second coming of Jesus isn't important.

Theistic evolution ignores all such biblical creation principles and replaces them with evolutionary notions, thereby contradicting and opposing God's omnipotent acts of creation. And finally, theistic evolution breeds nihilism. The source of this is through that of erosion of the purpose proclaimed in Genesis. Man is God's purpose in creation (Genesis 1:27-28), Man is the purpose of God's plan of redemption (Isaiah 53:5), Man is the purpose of the mission of God's Son (1 John 4:9), We are the purpose of God's inheritance (Titus 3:7), Heaven is our destination (1 Peter 1:4).

However, the very thought of purposefulness is anathema to evolutionists. "Evolutionary adaptations never follow a purposeful program, they thus can not be regarded as teleonomical." Thus a belief system such as theistic evolution that marries purposefulness with non-purposefulness is oxymoronic. No, strike that, drop the oxy- prefix and you've got it right.

We are in HIS image, but with a bad case of a sin nature.
We are not so wise as to understand God beyond what HE tries to teach us through the Bible and Christ?

How can man hope to figure out God when we can't even figure out women? :-)

However, a friend of mine pointed out one instance in the bible where 2 of the apostles record a specific incident one way, and a 3rd disciple has a quite different recollection. See below:

Or an instance where two similar events were recorded and a false assumption by you and your friend that they are the same event is being made.

From Jewish doctrine: “Although we do not follow this dictum, technically speaking, a girl can be betrothed the moment she is born, and married at the age of three” (Shulchan Aruch, Even HaEzer 37:1).

Humans make up all sorts of silly rules and justifications for their actions. Equating those with scripture will no doubt lead to such errors.

If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.

There is nothing particularly evil about an indentured servant contract. Slavery is considered evil from today's standards, and in isolation that assertion is no doubt true. But when the requirements of Jewish law are added, or the Christian requirement that slaves be treated as brothers, the institution of slavery is far more just than a lot of the abominations that we "modern" people tolerate or even embrace.

Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.

Oh horrors; once the indentured servant contract is up, if the "slave" wants to stay with the family he gets his ear pierced as a sign of family membership. Many people do far worse with daughters before they are even old enough to understand what they are doing (I have seen infants with pierced ears).

September 11th for me was another milestone on my journey. I wanted to understand what makes those people (Muslims) hate us so much

Because they are victims of a perversion of faith. Throughout history, a variety of entities have claimed to be God. Obviously, only one of these entities can be telling the truth. The entity going under the assumed name of "Allah" fails the tests of reason in a variety of ways, but unfortunately its first victim Mohammed wasn't wise enough to see through its deception; and a great deal of misery has been the inevitable result. Islam is a tragedy in realtime, and the Mohammedans are victims of the dark lord Allah every bit as much as those who died on 9/11.

So what does this all mean? That Jews, Christians, and Muslims all pray to the same God (whilst calling Him different names)

Such a conclusion cannot be drawn from the available evidence. Considering the fundamental contradictions that immediately arise from such a claim there is no way for it to be logically valid. Faith is the evidence of things unseen; it is not an excuse to abandon fundamental reason.

Thanks to all for the thoughtful posts; this is exactly what I was hoping for. There are so many philosophical questions here, not the least of which is, "do I blindly accept the bible as it's written, or do I use the faculties that God has given me to ask and to search"? If God didn't want me to think and to question, why make it possible for me to do so?