Posted on 10/18/2008 12:03:58 PM PDT by Truth Defender
A Preliminary Study on The Biblical Meaning of “Soul”. In the Old Testament the word for soul is “nephesh” and in the New the word is “psuche” — with both terms having the same meaning. “Whoever touches the dead body of anyone and fails to purify himself defiles the LORD's tabernacle. That person must be cut off from Israel” (Numbers 19:13). The bold words in the above verse is the Hebrew word “nephesh”, commonly translated as “soul” in numerous places in the OT Scriptures. Is it valid to question WHY the translators didn’t use the word “soul” in these two places in this verse? We judge that it is very valid to ask that question, for that is the only way we can find out the WHY. We will address that in this article as a part of our study.
(Excerpt) Read more at kenfortier.com ...
I submit:
- Who wants to know?
- No I don't. Hey, wait! Am I in the right place? The IS the casting call for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, isn't it?
- No, and believe me, it was nothing but trouble. And think of the money I save on mirrors. Shaving's rough though ....
Feel free to contribute.
Why? Are you missing one?
The problem being that given an All-powerful God, EVERYTHING is a moot point.Which makes you null and void.
Wait.
True. The level of free will of the various classes of entities in the Bible isn't explicitly called out, but we know that when given a direct order, angels seem to have little choice but to comply.
He created time, and if He created time, then He exists outside of time.
Perhaps, but more than one person has 'been hoist by his own petard'. I wouldn't say that it necessarily follows that the creator of a system can't fall victim to the implications of his creation.
I think the problem with your understanding is that you think of God as both too small/weak and impersonal; my God is neither.
Not both, limited in the sense that He can't both create a rock too heavy for Him to lift, and lift any rock He can create. Impersonal only in the sense that He is impartial (or maybe He isn't, and He plays favorites)...
*ouch*
Not being a Christian, myself I can only offer something that was e-mailed to me by a friend:
There was once a man who didn’t believe in God, and he didn’t hesitate to let others know how he felt about religion and religious holidays, like Christmas. His wife, however, did believe, and she raised their children to also have faith in God and Jesus, despite his disparaging comments.
One snowy Christmas Eve, his wife was taking their children to a Christmas Eve service in the farm community in which they lived. She asked him to come, but he refused.”That story is nonsense!” he said. “Why would God lower Himself to come to Earth as a man? That’s ridiculous!” So she and the children left, and he stayed home.
A while later, the winds grew stronger and the snow turned into a blizzard. As the man looked out the window, all he saw was a blinding snowstorm. He sat down to relax before the fire for the evening. Then he heard a loud thump. Something had hit the window. Then another thump. He looked out, but couldn’t see more than a few feet. When the snow let up a little, he ventured outside to see what could have been beating on his window. In the field near his house he saw a flock of wild geese. Apparently they had been flying south for the winter when they got caught in the snowstorm and couldn’t go on. They were lost and stranded on his farm, with no food or shelter. They just flapped their wings and flew around the field in low circles, blindly and aimlessly. A couple of them had flown into his window, it seemed. The man felt sorry for the geese and wanted to help them. The barn would be a great place for them to stay, he thought. It’s warm and safe; surely they could pend the night and wait out the storm.
So he walked over to the barn and opened the doors wide, then watched and waited, hoping they would notice the open barn and go inside. But the geese just fluttered around aimlessly and didn’t seem to notice the barn or realize what it could mean for them. The man tried to get their attention, but that just seemed to scare them and they moved further away.
He went into the house and came with some bread, broke it up, and made a bread crumbs trail leading to the barn. They still didn’t catch on. Now he was getting frustrated. He got behind them and tried to shoo them toward the barn, but they only got more scared and scattered in every direction except toward the barn. Nothing he did could get them to go into the barn where they would be warm and safe. “Why don’t they follow me?!” he exclaimed. “Can’t they see this is the only place where they can survive the storm?” He thought for a moment and realized that they just wouldn’t follow a human. “If only I were a goose, then I could save them,” he said out loud. Then he had an idea. He went into barn, got one of his own geese, and carried it in his arms as he circled around behind the flock of wild geese. He then released it. His goose flew through the flock and straight into the barn—and one by one the other geese followed it to safety.
He stood silently for a moment as the words he had spoken a few minutes earlier replayed in his mind: “If only I were a goose, then I could save them!” Then he thought about what he had said to his wife earlier. “Why would God want to be like us? That’s ridiculous!” Suddenly it all made sense. That is what God had done. We were like the geese—blind, lost, perishing. God had His Son become like us so He could show us the way and save us. That was then meaning of Christmas, he realized.
As the winds and blinding snow died down, his soul became quiet and pondered this wonderful thought. Suddenly he understood what Christmas was all about, why Christ had come. Years of doubt and disbelief vanished like the passing storm. He fell to his knees in the snow, and prayed his first prayer:”Thank You, God, for coming in human form to get me out of the storm!”
Author unknown
Thanks. I sometimes bring up Job 14:14 to start when I talk about life and death, in addition to many verses of the NT.
When I was an Episcopal priest, I always urged the passages from I Cor 15 for funerals of somebody who had died "full of years" and, so to speak "well". As a pastor, of course when there was much sorrow, I might suggest more consoling passages. But it seemed to me that, ceteris paribus, we ought to just put it right out there every once in a while.
Yes, there are many passages of scripture that console a person who is in mourning. Sometimes they are the hardest ones to face in a sermon, which I find should be done one-on-one in a peaceful setting - even loaning my shoulder to lean on. But for moving groups of people sitting in a pew, I find a sermon on I Cor. 15 to be very moving. After an 82 year old man I had developed as a friend, he listen to one and was moved to be baptized - something he had never experience. I never spoke to him of that; he brought it up out of the blue. God's word works in mysterious ways, and He said it would never come back without the results He desires. Anyway, I look forward to more conversations with you. God bless you as do His work here on earth.
Continue to post 51...
That doesn’t get all of it, but it gets a lot. Fine story. (I read it in, wait for it ... Reader’s Digest.)
Uhhhhh. It's the Reader's Digest version of the Reader's Digest version?
It's not exactly analogous, but it's kind of like saying that God's power is limited because He can't make a circle with corners.
To say that He is limited because there's nothing He can't do, which is what the "rock so big" problem comes down to, amounts, I'd suggest, to saying that the unlimited is limited by the definition of unlimited.
And even so, He chose in some way to be limited by the Incarnation.
Well, to get all formal and ever'thang ...
Jesus came not only to show us the Way, but also to wrassle Satan to the ground and crush his head, excuse me, haid; to offer a perfect sacrifice releasing his life so that it could be shared with us all as the "blood, which is the life" of the sacrificial victim could make us strong enough to bear the approach of the God who is a consuming fire; and to pay the debt of our sin.
This wonderful story "fleshes out" (interesting phrase in the context, huh?) the "showing the Way" aspect of the "work of Christ", but leaves the rest implicit.
He is Teacher and Guide; Conqueror who leads captivity itself captive; Expiation; and Satisfaction.
Or so I think of Him.
He can't? I can.
problem comes down to, amounts, I'd suggest, to saying that the unlimited is limited by the definition of unlimited.
Pretty much. Kurt Gödel nailed it when he determined that a complete and consistent set of axioms for all of mathematics is impossible, as it is in philosophy.
I call it
but I don't think that word means what I think it means...
(What is the picture from? That actor, outside of being wonderful in Clueless, was also in Dinner with Andre, wasn't he?)
Okay. I'm cooked. It's been a long day and it figures to be a rough week.
The picture and the line are from “The Princess Bride”
Every Persian rug ever made has deliberate flaws, because only allah can create perfection.Is that true? That doesn't make much sense (but then again, not much in Islam does.) If only God can create perfection, then the rugs that people make will be flawed whether they intend to make them flawed or not. Besides, if you intend to make an error, then is it really an error?
Inconceivable!How delightfully apophatic! :)
Probably the scenes he is now witnessing will not provide material for an intellectual attack on his faith--your previous failures have put that out of your power. But there is a sort of attack on the emotions which can stil be tried. It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that this is "what the world is really like" and that all his religion has been a fantasy. You will notice that we have got them completely fogged about the meaning of the word "real." They tell each other, of some great spiritual experience, "All that really happened was that you heard some music in a lighted building"; here "real" means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had. On the other hand, they will also say, "It's all very well discussing that high dive as you sit here in an armchair, but wait till you get up there and see what it's really like": here "real" is being used in the opposite sense to mean, not the physical facts (which they know already while discussing the matter in armchairs), but the emotional effect those facts will have on a human consciousness. Either application of the word could be defended; but our business is to keep the two going at once so that the emotional value of the word "real" can be placed now on one side of the account, now on the other, as it happens to suit us. The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are "real," while the spiritual elements are "subjective"; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality, and to ignore them is to be an escapist. Thus in birth the blood and pain are "real," the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death "really means." The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"--in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments. The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting "to eat the cake and have it"; but thanks to our labours they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it. Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.
Your affectionate uncle
Screwtape
Fortunately there's netflix to help amend this defect. Thanks.
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