Posted on 08/05/2013 10:31:02 AM PDT by Gamecock
Question:
Does the OPC use the crucifix in the church? If not, are they opposed to it?
Answer:
Thank you for your question. The answer is, so far as I know, the crucifix is not used in OPC churches, and here is why:
1.The Second Commandment (Ex. 20:4-6 and Deut. 5:8-10) forbids any picture or image of God, and that would include the Son of God, even as man. At any rate we do not know what Jesus looked like as there is no physical description of him.
2.The crucifix will always end up being an object of worship—regarded as holy. History teaches as much. The bronze serpent Moses made became an object of worship and was not destroyed till King Hezekiah did it (Numbers 21:9; 2 Kings 18:1-5). Roman Catholics have worshipped it, kissed it and held it to have mystical powers.
3.Christ did not remain on the Cross. In the Roman Church Christ is said to be resacrificed each time the Mass is celebrated. This is heresy; he died once for all—Hebrews 9:25-28.
We in the OPC have learned not to trust our idolatry prone hearts not to do the same as others have in the past. Hence, no crucifixes are used. So, yes, we are opposed to it.
Do you REALLY wanna take this LITERALLY?
So those who DON'T have peace are easily offended.
I must prepare to travel this weekend, and therefore do not have the freedom to answer your sitting duck questions just now. Perhaps after the traveling is over. But I already dealt with literal interpretation in an earlier post. Your questions challenge the validity of some church denomination rather than the method of interpretation, so they are essentially indirect ad hominem type sideswipes anyway. So, later.
These are not translations. They are compilations of what the original texts ought to be in the Koine. However, note that the Critical Text is synthetic. It doesn't represent any real text anywhere. NIV is based on that.
I shook the dust from you a long time past. Why try to stir the pot, when you have no criteria but your own OPINIONS?
I have studied the Scriptures for more than 40 years, and we disagree on so many things, I do not wish to debate with you further. It would be fruitless (John 15). Thanks, anyways.
New International Version
Version and Copyright Information
The New International Version (NIV) is a completely original translation of the Bible developed by more than one hundred scholars working from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts.
The initial vision for the project was provided by a single individual – an engineer working with General Electric in Seattle by the name of Howard Long. Long was a lifelong devotee of the King James Version, but when he shared it with his friends he was distressed to find that it just didn’t connect. Long saw the need for a translation that captured the truths he loved in the language that his contemporaries spoke.
For 10 years, Long and a growing group of like-minded supporters drove this idea. The passion of one man became the passion of a church, and ultimately the passion of a whole group of denominations. And finally, in 1965, after several years of preparatory study, a trans-denominational and international group of scholars met in Palos Heights, Illinois, and agreed to begin work on the project – determining to not simply adapt an existing English version of the Bible but to start from scratch with the best available manuscripts in the original languages. Their conclusion was endorsed by a large number of church leaders who met in Chicago in 1966. ...
No more on this, I'm through. Bye.
Jesus is God. God is everywhere. You know that.
Not the HUMAN part of Jesus. You know that.
Well; maybe you don’t!
Philippians 2:6
Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
Repeating it over and over ad nauseum does not make it so. Catholics do not worship graven images or idols.
Please stop spreading this falsehood.
He is not everywhere, He is seated at the right hand of the Father and will be staying there for all time. Kind of like an eternal time-out. /SARC
You have apparently missed the point. Do you believe that it is a good idea for some johnny come lately church to tell the Original Christian Church that it is not spiritually mature. The Catholic Church is the one that infallibly defined each of these doctrines that most of these churches adhere to and did it before these newbies were glimmers in their founders eyes.
Speaking of the NIV, one of the translators, Stephen Paine was my Dad's Greek teacher at Houghton College, of which Paine later became the president. In their bachelor days, they roomed in the same house. That's just a coincidence, of course. However, I did read through his autobiography and got some feeling of his deep commitment to the NIV.
But to get another view, here are a couple of references tht might interest you sometime:
Sorenson, David H., Touch Not The Unclean Thing: The Text Issue and Separation, Northstar Baptist Ministrues, Duluth, MN (2001) ISBN 0-9711384-0-0, Lib. Cong. Control No. 2001132441
http://www.amazon.com/Touch-Not-Unclean-Thing-Separation/dp/0971138400
(See Customer Reviews for evaluation)
New abt. $14.00 plus shipping
(You will find a scorching evaluation of this by Doug Kutilek, who is extremely biased, but cannot be overlooked. He is effectively rebuked by Will J. Kinney, though. You are probably aware of both, just showing that I am also. Personally, I am a Life Member of the Dean Burgon Society.)
Salliby, Charles, If The Foundations Be Destroyed, Pine Hill Press, Inc., Freeman, S. Dak. (1994) Lib. Cong. Card No. 94-90335
http://www.amazon.com/If-foundations-destroyed-Chick-Salliby/dp/B0006F36A0
About $9.00 plus shipping
======
With no apology, but not offering nor caring to extend a debate --
?? Was I not told ON this thread, that a small little child sat at the feet of a large wooden crucifix and had her heart full of pity, because the crucifix reminded her that there is a place for sorrow and sadness over the death of Jesus.
THAT is worship.
YOU stop spreading falsehood that it is something else.
Thou shall make no graven image??? Hello..
We shall not worship Idols..
Read what the Lord says about being saved by wooden or carved image. Read what we are told about grieving the Holy Spirit.
There are many example of these concepts in the Bible. I just read the word of God. I didn’t make it up.
The Dean Burgon Society is an organization that promotes and defends the King James Bible and the underlying Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. ...
Hahahahahahahahaaaaa....
With no apology, but not offering nor caring to extend a debate --
Great! Faith in the veracity of the KJV is enough for me to know how out of touch one can get. Archaic English from another era which has no place in a modern societal conversation isn't understandable by most people alive today. Of course, we all know that the Holy Spirit only speaks Elizabethan English (/sarcasm).
You know about opinions, don't you? I have my own! I keep a KJV on the shelf where it belongs. I take it down sometimes because it has a good concordance (Strong's version and I have a Dake's, too, which has as much relevance as the underlying KJV!), but rely on the NIV for daily reading.
Thanks for playing, but sorry, you are not a winner.
Ps the Jewish Church worships on the first day of the Week (Saturday), the Sabbath, which you are to observe.
I also attend church on Sundays, on occasion, as it is a good free day ... however, to Jesus who is a Jew and to God who made the rules, the first day of the week is Saturday.
You should some respect here.
Not exactly. Let me suggest you go back to Posts 180 to Mad Dawg, Posts 199 to boatbums, Post 200 from boatbums to Not gonna take it anymore, and Post 223 to you.
Furthermore, it is my contention that the Fathers of Tradition, the patristics, hijacked the control of the local Christian assemblies, and made it into a sacral society from which few escaped with their lives, texts, and true faith until the 1600s. Dr. Thomas Strouse is right in his description, "Constantine embraced the Platonic catholicity of the Patristics to form the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), with its one head in the bishop of Rome, with its entrance through the baptism of infants, and with its persecution of all dissidents. This visible catholic ecclesiology, initiated by Ignatius and his ilk, propagated by Irenaeus and Cyprian, and popularized by Augustine, became the orthodox position for Christendom until the Reformation."
Having read through not only Kenneth Latourette's 1477 pages of "A History of Christianity" as well as many other works and treatises over the 42 years of coming to saving faith, having been raised as a PK in the Methodist Church, I find Dr. Strouse hits the railroad spike smack on the head and drives it deeply into the morass of Romanist doctrine and culture.
Of the post-Apostolic "church fathers" (to me seducers), "Many of these writings are extant and indicate that these Patristics embraced Platonic philosophy and practiced faulty hermeneutic principles,resulting in proto-Roman Catholic theology" and were influenced by, rather than rejected, the worldliness of the Greco-Romasn society into which the Christianity of Jesus and His believing Disciple/Apostles came.
There's more, a lot, and justly applied. This is the answer to your question regarding the very early submersion of The Original Faith until the day that Luther escaped the hangman's noose, when the seeds of both religious and political freedom sprouted, and it became possible to announce the Gospel of Free Grace without facing the auto da fe in free countries, like the nascent United States of America a hundred or so years later. Is the point getting across?
Ah, I thought that He rested on the yom after the 6th yom. Wouldn't that be the last day of the 7-day cycle? Am I mistaken?
Yes- you are mistaken.
In Jewish custom, “days” start at sunset. It is a sunset to sunrise , not sunrise to sunset.
Understanding the context of the commandments makes a huge difference. That is why we are to learn the ancient ways and seek that ancient understanding. The Sabbath starts at sunset on Friday.
I believe that people can worship either day, but we are commanded to observe the Sabbath, and for a very, very good reason. The placement is important and the context, as always is for a very, very good reason.
The Lord does not just throw things around willy nilly. You can still go to church on Sunday and worship and sing.. (from my understanding) but to observe a Sabbath on the first day of the week is profound.
I hope you will try it and see for yourself, because that is really the only way to understand. :)
Some people even in this life seem to have been favored with some preternatural gifts: deathlessness (Elijah and Enoch), bilocation (Abbess Mary of Agreda, Padre Pio of Pietrelcino), levitation (St. Teresa of Avila), infused knowledge (St. Jean Vianney, St. Joan of Arc), being able to change one's bodily form, and the like.
All quite inexplicable.
Bottom line: if even some saints while living in this mortal flesh, were able to bilocate, isn't it possible that the Resurrected Lord Jesus could omnilocate -- be at the right hand of the Father in Heaven, and at the same time be anywhere He chooses? Possibly in different forms? For instance, His Eucharistic Body?
After all, He's beyond the bounds of time and space.
Who's to say He can't?
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