Jeshua disagrees.
"I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." -Luke 10:18
Joooooz
This Rabbi is a fool. Instead of just stating what Jews believe he starts out by mischaracterizing and denigrating Christianity. How does that help anything?
They've been provided a chance at salvation as those who believe in Christ after his crucifixion, resurrection and before the judgment.
Oy-vey. This guy needs to go back to Torah school.
I once saw an explanation of that, I don't recall where and when or the full text/context of it. It stated that Christ after His death and before the resurrection offered salvation to the souls of those who had not known Him, and those who accepted His sacrifice would be saved. As in life, an evil soul would reject Him, and a sinful but righteous soul (since ALL have sinned) would accept Him.
Loving and forgiving, slow to anger, rich in kindness...partially remembered from a hymn.
This is almost to the level of denying that there is evil in this world.
Let’s look at the book of Job. Was Satan the proctor in an exam. No, Satan wanted Job to fail, to curse G*d and die.
This is what sin meant then, and therefore its real meaning now. Few understands this! Try to understand this if you don't already. REAL-ize this! It's implications are rather profound, especially as it is counter to the collective-agreement-meaning most carry with them when they use the term internally or externally.
It means 'you shot your arrow, and you missed the bulls eye.' Period. Maybe you envisioned a target that was not the target, or maybe you just suck at aiming (bad character), or maybe you just aren't perfect (original sin.) Anything additional including judgement or the tacking on of ancillary attributes such as 'good' or 'bad' is embellishment, narrative, story and hence lies of commission or omission when compared to the truth as it actually is - as God created it - as opposed to the dramatic story in our heads.
Life in a universe that was there before you were, and out of which you are made and hence inherited all its attributes and are connected to all of it, is really quite simple, though I admit it doesn't always appear that way. It is the appearance that is the lie. The appearance is 'The World,' yes it is fallen, but it's not real. The original sin is to mistake The World - the appearance - for 'the world' as it was created, and simply is.
All sins - pride, greed etc. etc. etc. find a common root: The sufferer (and committer) mistakes The World for the world, acts as though The World were the world, and in doing so, shoots off arrows in every crazy direction like a Samurai in an LSD hallucination. His behavior makes no sense to anyone except perhaps his fellows caught up in the same collective hallucination. That is the default state of human existence, and why history, as Steyn has said, is an ongoing cycle of farce followed by farce followed by tragedy.
Satan? He neither cheers the human nor hates the human. He stands by snickering, but not malignantly so. He didn't cause any of it, unless you were to say 'Satan, thy name is ignorance, blindness and delusion - and further - the will to remain so!'
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“What about the billions...”
I guess they’d wind up in that Sheol thing. Not so much a “condemnation”, but a lack of salvation according to the new covenant.
Note, “new” implies there was once “old” which also implies some finite amount of elapsed time before everyone gets the memo.
I think the heavenly bean-counters administrated the uninformed souls of this transition period with “purgatory”.
It’s been my observation that Jews don’t need original sin to feel guilty, LOL.
bump
“To my mind, there is a basic flaw in this reasoning. Christians often picture Jews as believing in a dour, harshly judgmental Old Testament G-d, despite dozens of statements in Tanach (the proper name for what Christians call the Old Testament) expressing G-ds love of Israel and indeed, all humanity. They juxtapose this to the loving G-d of the New Testament.”
No, it was atheists who invented this idea of two different Gods in the Old and New Testament. Christians believe the New Testament God is the same as the God in the Old Testament.
“This invites the question: What about the billions of human beings who were born and lived their lives without knowing anything whatsoever about the Romans execution of a carpenter in Judaea some 2,000 years ago? If G-d is indeed rachum vechanun, merciful and gracious, as the Bible asserts (cf. Exodus XXXIV ,6), how could He allow such a state of affairs to go on?”
Jesus went and preached to the souls of those who had died already, so God did show mercy and grace to them, and didn’t just “allow such a state of affairs to go on”.
“On the creation of mankind, He pronounced it tov meod (very good), and there is no indication thereafter that He changed his mind.”
Well, sure, except for that time when God FLOODED THE ENTIRE PLANET TO KILL ALL OF HUMANITY, except for one family, because the rest were irredeemably evil. Doesn’t sound like he thought men were “very good” by that time.
“Think of the satan (the word means adversary) as the proctor of an exam. The proctor isnt actively rooting for you to fail the test; to the contrary, he wants you to pass.”
Yet in the Book of Job, Satan clearly is rooting for Job to fail, so this view doesn’t really hold up. God’s curse upon the serpent after the incident in the garden of Eden also strongly suggests that Satan is not simply a faithful servant of God’s like the rest of the angels.
Hebrews 2: 14 Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; 15 And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.
Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 1 Peter 5:8
As a FReeper (?) taglines: “Denial of Original Sin is the root of all liberalism.” (I would say, leftism.)
Judaism believes perfection in this life is possible - hence the Utopian Fallacy that so many Jews embrace - leading inevitably to leftism (collectivism or communism).
See Tikkun Olam.
False premise: false result.