Results 501 - 520 of 701
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Results from: Answered Bible Questions, Answers, Unanswered Bible Questions, Notes Author: Sir Pent Ordered by Verse |
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Results | Verse | Author | ID# | |||
501 | Resurrection Sunday or easter? | Acts 12:4 | Sir Pent | 113147 | ||
The other side................................ Hello Justme, Makarios, and Morant61, I hesitate to come disagree with all three of you who I respect and appreciate so much on this forum. However, I suppose someone should make the case for Easter being OK :) There once was a car company called "Datsun". However, it is now called "Nissan". The Nissan company learned many things from the history of the Datsun, but has also added their own flavor to their cars. Similarly, there once was a holiday called "Passover". It was pretty much only celebrated by Jewish people in one small part of the world. However, it had a great purpose of remembering God's salvation of their people from death and slavery in Egypt. Now there is a holiday called "Easter". It is celebrated by people of all races, all over the world. It also has a great purpose to remember the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made in order to bring salvation to all people from death and slavery to sin. The word "Nissan" is also historically the name of a month of the year, but no one thinks of that when they think of "Nissan". They just think of the car. Similary, the word "Easter" may have historical roots in a false pagan god named "Ashtar", but no one thinks of that when they think of "Easter". They just think of the resurrection of Christ (and chocolate). It seems to me that Shakespeare was correct when he said, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet". Therefore, I don't think that calling the holiday "Easter" is a big deal or a bad thing. |
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502 | Resurrection Sunday or easter? | Acts 12:4 | Sir Pent | 113261 | ||
Personal Note................................................... Hello my forever friend, I think that your post reflects wisdom and balance. I like the name "Resurrection Day" myself, but I agree with you that it's not worth worrying about. Instead we should focus on spreading the news of what Easter means in our lives and can mean in the lives of the people around us. |
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503 | Forgiveness of What? | Acts 13:38 | Sir Pent | 23359 | ||
Forgiveness of What? .......................... There have been multiple discussions on this forum about whether a person who commits some sin or breaks some requirement in the Bible deserves permanent punishment of any sort. The basic line of reasoning that most people seem to support is that if the person is truly sorry for the wrong doing, and has changed, then they should be treated in all respects as if it had never occurred. Is this a Biblical perspective of forgiveness? |
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504 | Forgiveness of What? | Acts 13:38 | Sir Pent | 23373 | ||
Clarification .................................... Dear Searcher, It is this "still may bear the consequences of our sin" that I would like to investigate further. Perhaps you and others could elaborate on that topic. |
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505 | Forgiveness of What? | Acts 13:38 | Sir Pent | 23555 | ||
Clarification .................................. You also said that "sin does have its consequences", and then went on to talk about how after forgiveness we should no longer be angry with a person. I agree regarding the anger, however, what are the consequences that you speak of? For instance, if you owned a bank, and a forgiven, formerly convicted thief applied for a job, would you hire them. Yes you should not harbor anger towards them, but do you treat them as if it never happened? What about a child molester who turned their life over to Jesus in prison? Would you let them be your son's Boy Scout Leader? |
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506 | Forgiveness of What? | Acts 13:38 | Sir Pent | 23569 | ||
Clarification ................................. Dear Nolan, Yes you are most definately "on topic". This is exactly what I am wanting to explore. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the long-term punishment (ability to get a particular job) would vary depending on the number of times that a particular sin was committed. So let's say that a certain person was a Christian, and they became an drug addict. Although it is theoretically possible that this could happen after only experimenting once, that is almost unheard of. It would be a safe assumption that this was the result of a large number of bad choices. Then let's say the person repented and asked for forgiveness. Would you then after say 1 year of being "drug-free" hire them to run a Pharmacy that you own? This would be a case where they were not a repeat offender after repentance, but were one while claiming to be a Christian before repentance for that sin. |
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507 | Forgiveness of What? | Acts 13:38 | Sir Pent | 23571 | ||
Personal Note .................................. Thanks for the compliments on the thread, and I agree with you that remembering the lessons that we learned from past sins can keep us from repeating them. I would encourage you to "hug" the truths that you learned, instead of the sins themselves though. God puts them as far as the East is from the West, and I'd recommend following His lead :) |
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508 | Forgiveness of What? | Acts 13:38 | Sir Pent | 24067 | ||
Clarification ............................... Dear Nolan and other forumites, The general idea seems to be that our actions towards a person after they have been forgiven should depend on how reformed that individual person was. The problem that I see with that is that it is very subjective. It also is based on the idea that we as humans can accurately determine the heart of another person. Brian G. brought up a good point that unlike God (with Saul/Paul's conversion), we can't really know how changed another person is. Due to this limitation, wouldn't it be better to have objective guidelines for these situations. For instance, if a person has been a child molester then even though they are forgiven of that sin, and have eternal life, there remains an earthly consequence. They could serve God in many ways with adults, but would be prohibited from being a Boy Scout Leader for instance. Or a former drug addict could work at a automobile company, but not at a pharmacy. Does this sound reasonable, or is it too harsh, cold, and legalistic? |
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509 | Forgiveness of What? | Acts 13:38 | Sir Pent | 24068 | ||
Anwer to Question (I think) ................... Dear Lisa, I must admit that I had a somewhat difficult time understanding your last post. I think that you meant to ask if I had ever had an experience where I obeyed God and received a blessing as a result. I think that this happens all the time (even when we don't recognize the blessing right away). However, one time that comes to mind is the verse in the Bible that commands believers to "not stop meeting together". I interpret this verse to be God's way of telling us that, as Christians, we need each other's fellowship. This is why I feel that it is so important to regularly attend church and to not just sit in a service once a week, but to truly participate in worship and fellowship there with other Christians. So I have obiediently gone to church for many years now, and not just the morning service, but the evening service as well. So where does the blessing come in this obedience? Well it just so happens that at one of these evening services at my church, I met my future wife. And she has been the biggest blessing (besides salvation) that God has ever given me :) |
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510 | what is the longst name in the bible? | Acts 20:15 | Sir Pent | 120526 | ||
A bit of comedy...................................................... Hi Voliefe2, Perhaps the longest name in the Bible is the place where Paul went after Samos and before Ephesus. That place's name has a "mile" in it. P.S. Where do these trivia questions come from? |
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511 | Is there middle ground? | Romans | Sir Pent | 21645 | ||
Clarification ................................... Dear EdB, Just to make sure that I am interpreting your last post correctly, are you being sarcastic? Or have you actually decided that you agree with the Arminian interpretation of scripture? |
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512 | Ninevah did. | Rom 1:18 | Sir Pent | 20785 | ||
A new perspective ............................... I just wanted to throw in an insight that an elder at my church shared with me about this appearant contradiction on God's part. At first He says that He will destroy the city of Nineveh, and then He doesn't because they repent. The idea that was helpful to me was that the fact that God sent Jonah to preach to the people there, is a strong implication that the final outcome is not completely determined. If God decided to destroy the city no matter what, then why waste time by sending Jonah to preach there. Not to mention all the trouble that had to be gone through to even get Jonah there. Therefore, since God sent Jonah to begin with, it indicates that He was at least giving the Ninevites the chance to repent and be forgiven. They responded to this call and repented, so God forgave them. |
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513 | God repented | Rom 1:18 | Sir Pent | 21136 | ||
Personal Note ................................. Dear Joe, I think you bring about some good thoughts here. There are many threads which are either of minimal value (see Kalos' questionable question post), or which leave little room for discussion. I think I will start a new thread to work through this problem. I have some ideas, but they don't really relate to this thread's original purpose. Thanks for provoking my thinking though. |
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514 | God repented | Rom 1:18 | Sir Pent | 21139 | ||
Personal Note .................................. Dear Lionstrong, I'm pretty impressed that in just over a week, just the two of us have been able to take a thread into the realm of being mocked in other posts. It took about 50 people, several months to do that with the "wife of Cain" posts. Please don't be offended by others who think that the rationality of animals thread is superfluous. I must say that I can see their perspective. However, I linger, in the hopes that this will eventually get somewhere of significance. This seems to be an important issue for you, Lionstrong. And I respect you enough to assume that therefore, it must have some relevance. |
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515 | How to know God just from seeing nature? | Rom 1:20 | Sir Pent | 22206 | ||
Finding God in Nature, part 1 How can this verse be true? How can someone be responsible to know "God's divine nature" based only on nature? I will try to answer this in a series of posts, as I have many thoughts on this. First a little background about myself. I am a research scientist, and therefore, have spent a lot of time studying the world around me and the scientific theories about the universe. The result of this study has been that I believe that just examining nature around us "shows" us who God is. Notice that I don't say "proves". It is been my experience that nothing can actually be "proven". In life, we must make choices about what we "believe". And it is most logical to choose to believe what is more likely than what is less likely. For instance, the theory of gravity has never been actually "proven". However, our vast experience of seeing effects indicating its presence (ie. seeing balls drop, etc.) and its ability to fit into other scientific theories make it a much more logical to believe in gravity, than to disbelieve it. Therefore, we live our lives based on it being true (ie. we don't jump off tall buildings, thinking that we won't fall). Similarly, I have found that on every issue where we must choose what we believe, one option is more reasonable than any others. Therefore, in this series of posts I will try to explain why I find Christianity to be the most logical choice of belief. |
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516 | How to know God just from seeing nature? | Rom 1:20 | Sir Pent | 22207 | ||
Finding God in Nature, part 2 ................. When I look at the world the first thing that I notice is that it exists. I know this is obvious, but it is important. I also know that it is illogical for something to exist without having a beginning. So how did everything get here? One must believe that either it was always here and had no beginning, or "Something" else was always here and made everything. Now since it is illogical for anything to exist without beginning, then the most logical answer would be that only one "Thing" broke this logic as opposed to all things breaking the logic. In other words, it makes more sense to believe that only one "Power" always existed than to believe that the star in the sky, and the bird in the air, and rock on the ground, etc. have always existed (in some form of either energy or matter). Similarly, the existence of nature leads one to believe that there is an Eternal Power, who created the universe, because it is the most logical explanation. |
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517 | How to know God just from seeing nature? | Rom 1:20 | Sir Pent | 22209 | ||
Finding God in Nature, part 3 .................. The second thing that I notice about the universe is that there is an enormous amount of energy and matter in it. The laws of entropy state that systems always go from a state of order and high energy to a state of disorder and low energy. A good example of this is a child's bedroom, but we can see this in nature constantly. The lesson that we learn from this is that it is not possible to for a creative force to make something with more energy than it had to begin with. Therefore, the "Eternal Power" that made the universe must have more power than all the energy in the universe combined. In fact, that "Eternal Power" must be practically infinitely powerful. Thus one can learn that there is an "Omnipotent, Eternal Power". |
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518 | How to know God just from seeing nature? | Rom 1:20 | Sir Pent | 22327 | ||
Finding God in Nature, part 4 The third thing that I notice about nature is how complicated it is. From my studies in biology, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and physics, I have seen how we humans have only begun to understand the complexities of the world around us. Yet it is not even neccessary to have this level of education. Just from experience of watching seasons change, flowers bloom, and children grow, one can clearly see the how much more intellegent the "Omnipotent, Eternal Power" must be than we humans. In fact, the more one learns about how the entire world is connected and interacts, the more impressed one becomes. Then, by extrapolating that to the entire universe, it becomes clear that the "Omnioptent, Eternal Power" must also be of practically infinite intellegence. Therefore, nature shows us that there is an "Omniscient, Omnipotent, Eternal Power". This brings us to an important point. Now that we have discovered these things from nature, we can now begin to call this "Omniscient, Omnipotent, Eternal Power", a being. The fact that there is that level of intellegence forces us to accept that this Power is a living persona. And being so much smarter, more powerful than humans, as well as breaking the laws of nature (by always existing) would cause us to classify this being as "supernatural". |
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519 | How to know God just from seeing nature? | Rom 1:20 | Sir Pent | 22368 | ||
Personal Note ................................... Dear Kalos, Apology gladly accepted. I am glad that you and Nolan both value my experiences of discovering clues in nature that point to God. I also appreciate all feedback from everyone regarding my observations. In addition, I would add that as a general comment, your warning is appropriate. We should all be careful to always worship the Creator and not the creation. I think that we all agree that it is wrong to worship nature in and of itself. |
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520 | How to know God just from seeing nature? | Rom 1:20 | Sir Pent | 22371 | ||
Finding God in Nature, part 5 .................. Summarizing the last four posts, nature has shown that there is an "Supernatural, Omniscient, Omnipotent, Eternal Being" (S,O,O,E,B). The fourth thing that I observe about nature is that the universe has been created in a way that values life. In fact, it appears that the S,O,O,E,B has done so much to sustain life, that it is most reasonable to believe that this being cares extremely about that life. There are many examples, but let me share just a couple. On a large scale, if our planet were just slightly (on a interplanetary scale) closer to or farther from the sun, there would be no life on Earth. On a smaller scale, let's think about density. Almost all materials on earth become more dense as they get colder. However, there is one notable exception in nature to this rule of science, and it is water. This is due to complicated issues dealing with molecular bonds, and energy levels of electrons in molecules, but that isn't the point. The question is not how does this happen, but why does this happen. Why would the S,O,O,E,B create practically everything else one way, and then make water differently? The only reasonable answer that I can come up with is that is saves life. Think about a pond or even lake that is filled with fish. If water was like everyhing else, and became more dense, then there would be serious problems in the winter. The top layer of water would freeze and sink to the bottom, then the next layer would freeze and sink to the bottom. This would keep happening until the entire pond or lake was frozen, and all the life in it was dead. But this is not what happens. As you know from seeing ice cubes float in your drink, the frozen water becomes less dense, and floats on the top of the pond or lake. This creates a shield from the cold, and keeps the rest of the pond or lake from freezing. Thus all the fish and plants are able to survive. Therefore, nature shows that there is an S,O,O,E,B, who cares extremely about all life. |
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