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NASB | Ecclesiastes 3:21 Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth? |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Ecclesiastes 3:21 Who knows if the spirit of man ascends upward and the spirit of the animal descends downward to the earth? |
Subject: where do animals go when they expire? |
Bible Note: People must be wondering what all this has to do with where animals go when they expire :-)))). To Steve Humbled By His Grace. You say. Note again your statement/question "Who are you going to make the arbiter of truth? A failing church which has distorted God's truth through the centuries? And which part of the church? Are we to look to Apollos? or Paul? or Peter? (1 Corinthians 1.12)." The latter part of the sentence was following Paul's pattern As he points out in 1 Corinthians 4.6, 'I have applied all this to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brethren, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written'. I could have said Tom, Dick and Harry. However I preferred a Scriptural pattern. And Paul said, do not look to Peter, Apollos and myself. Look to the Scriptures. My concern is that we also should not go beyond what is written. Paul was, of course, referring to the Old Testament Scriptures, and possibly The Testimony of Jesus. I include the New. There is only one arbiter of truth and that is the Scriptures, which of course includes Peter and Paul (but not Apollos) when they were speaking under inspiration. But they did not always speak under inspiration as Galatians 2.11 ff makes clear. In fact the church was a failing church from the beginning. We only have to read Paul's, Peter's, James',and John's letters to recognise this, as well as Revelation 1-3, and indeed the whole of Revelation. Once the Apostles died the church sank into even greater spiritual formalism. We only have to read Clement and Ignatius to recognise this (we tend to read them in terms of Scriptural ideas and can therefore see them as saying more than they actually did). The spiritual power and message of Paul is mainly absent. Where is justification by faith alone in Clement and Ignatius? The only thing (apart from God's power) that enabled the church to survive with any element of truth was because they so rigidly insisted on looking back to Apostolic authority and to the Scriptures. These kept the church alive. In fact to anyone who has studied church history in the first 500 years the miracle is that the church did not collapse under a weight of extravagant teaching. It was only due to the adherence to the Scriptures in spite of it that the church did survive. You mentioned looking to the Spirit guided teachers of the church. But that was precisely the problem that the Corinthians had. They thought that they were looking to the Spirit guided teachers of the church. It was by the word of God that Paul called them back to the truth, and emphasised looking for individual spiritual illumination. |