Hiya

[SLN]

Hello everyone, nice to meet you all!

Since this is an introductory post, let me tell you a little bit about me; I'm a 19 year old male from The Netherlands. I was raised Christian, but rejected the religion around age 8 because of the ET issue. All my friends just happened to be non-believers in athiest families. From that point on, I wasn't a big fan of the Christian religion. It represented injustice and cruelty for me.  :sigh:

Fast-forward 11 years...  :clock:

I suddenly became very interested in religion again, and a couple hours later I found myself believing. I still didn't accept ET though. Something inside of me said It just couldn't be right and I had to find the truth. So I was determined to find an answer, something that could back up that "God is love".

After a couple days of googling for different denominations, I finally found a site about UR and immediatly knew this was what I was looking for. I just finished reading the New Testament, and feel like I now know the real message being conveyed. Partly thanks to the posts on here!  :ty:

Right now though, I'm still struggling with the Old Testament and its 'Meanie God'. I hope to find some answers regarding that issue here.


Sincerely,

SLN :newb:

[SeekerSA]

Hi SLN

:welcome: to tentmaker

Ask away, many fine scholars here.

Blessings

[Taffy]

Welcome and thanks for sharing a little of you..sure helps to break the Ice.
From the merry land of Wales me....

but know more than a few dutchmen...Dennis Berkamp ...Marc Overmars....Robin van persie...to name but a few

Blessings
Taffy

[martincisneros]

Hi SLN,

Welcome to Tentmaker.  I know you're going to love it here.  Thanks for joining.

Martin :icon_king:

[Loveroftruth]

WELCOME SLN!!!
:girlheart: :welcome: :newb:

[SLN]

Thanks for the warm welcome!  :cloud9:

Ask away, many fine scholars here.

I'll take you up on that offer! :happygrin:

My problems consist mainly of verses such as the following: Exodus 21: 21 (I've included :20 for the context)


20: And when a man smiteth his man-servant or his handmaid, with a rod, and he hath died under his hand -- he is certainly avenged;

21: only if he remain a day, or two days, he is not avenged, for he [is] his money.



So it's ok to beat a slave (it's ok to force another man to work himself to death for you to begin with?) till he's so wounded that he'll suffer for 1 or 2 days, and then dies from his wounds?

[martincisneros]

The whole Bible is a message of progressively growing liberty and a progressively growing revelation of Love, and it's chapters/books aren't necessarily in the right order in the modern expectation of a beginning/middle/end for a book.  Like in the United States and Britain with the whole slavery issue, in many countries the slavery issue wasn't resolved in a day, a week, a month, or a year, but had to be chipped away at by political and religious reformers and abolitionists with each new piece of legislation that would take one bite at a time out of the whole problem - I'm sure that God as THE King, Judge, and Master Chess player was merely introducing legislation that the people would swallow in their particular generation, and He was at the very least working towards making it more humane than it was in surrounding nations where slaves were routinely killed for absolutely any reason or for no reason whatsoever. 

The slavery problem seems to begin in these early chapters of the Bible and finds it's end in the book of Philemon where Paul leans on Philemon that Onesimus is a new man in Christ Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit and power and filled with the same wisdom as Paul, so that Onesimus should now be viewed as filling every ministerial office that Paul filled and freed from his former way of life.  The same Bible that seems to have horrific pieces of legislation regarding the whole slavery issue - when we don't view it in it's historical context as softening a harsh practice that wouldn't be resolved in one day, also has the strongest declarations of Independence from any type of slavery with the books of Galatians, Colossians, and Philemon. :2c:

[SLN]

Exactly the kind of answer I was looking for! When looked at it that way, it does make sense. Thank you for providing another piece of the puzzle!  :happygrin:

Some more issues I'd like to address are Exodus 32:14 & Exodus 34: 7

Exodus 32: 14: and Jehovah repenteth of the evil which He hath spoken of doing to His people.

Here Moses tells God not to do what he wants, and God accepts it. It seems to me that this verse would indicate God acts on emotion and can be talked out of stuff? (I guess you could argue they were wiped out anyway, but instead of doing it himself he made the people of Israel kill their own brothers  :mshock:)

Exodus 34: 7: Keeping kindness for thousands, taking away iniquity, and transgression, and sin, and not entirely acquitting, charging iniquity of fathers on children, and on children's children, on a third [generation], and on a fourth.'

Why does God make children pay for their fathers' sins?

P.S

Sorry giving you so many questions to tackle right away! It's not my intention to keep you busy for the rest of the day.  :laughing7:

[martincisneros]

There was a Dutch commentary published a few years ago called Het ene doel van God, which was republished in English a few years later as "The One Purpose of God: An Answer to the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment" by Jan Bonda that you might find helpful on some of these questions regarding evil, or judgment and God's people interceding against judgment being fully carried out with negative consequences.

Even in the New Testament Paul tells us to pray for the salvation of all men in 1Timothy 2 because this is the plan of God.  There are issues with 2Corinthians 4 where it talks about the god of this age blinding many, and many interpret for various reasons that I don't have time to get into that this god of this age is a reference to Satan.  There's a whole issue about an earth lease that some Bible teachers get into, treating Jesus' parable of the vineyard quite literally as God having leased the earth to man and mankind having signed it over to Satan in the garden of eden, and hence we've had evil ages ever since until that lease expires when everything reverts back to God.  This is taught particularly in a lot of the prosperity teacher circles, and seems to have some Biblical weight when you examine all of the Scriptures that they cite on this.

Sin entered into the world and death by sin, according to Romans 5.

The evil that Jehovah repented of was a judgment of destruction that He'd spoken of working against Israel.  It says in Psalm 90:4 that God turns man to destruction so that afterwards He can call man back to Himself.  Moses was requesting that less extreme measures be used with the people - if at all even remotely possible.  It's as though he were a good lawyer that's arguing a case before a judge and he's asking for a more gentle sentence because of the circumstances involved, the lack of maturity involved, or the ignorance that the one being tried had of the laws involved.  This is over in the area of what it says in Proverbs about those that spare the rod hate their children and the whole modern debate about what's too much punishment and what's a punishment that fits the particular crime involved.

We're told throughout the Bible to pray for mercy to be carried out rather than judgment.  Where is that passage?  Perhaps in Isaiah where God laments that there was no intercessor that would stand in the gap and then there's a passage that suddenly indicates that that's a major reason why Jesus came and took upon Himself the full armor of God.  Job laments the fact that there was no intercessor to have prevented all of the evils that came upon him.

Until Jesus took away the sin of the world, there was a very real gap between God and mankind and I'm not sure that it's always clear when God was specifically trying to punish man for his hardness of heart, or if because of the blindness of man, God was allowing what some people would view as the myth of Satan to stand for that impassible pit between man and God until God had provided a means to reclaim His man(kind) from the damage done between God and man(kind).  Some argue that this damage was predestined while others argue for the free will of mankind that created the damage between God and man's access to God.  But whether by divine choice or man's "right," the damage had been done.

Judgment issues in the Old Testament are a little difficult to fully clarify for us these days, because it was a different age.  [Many many things that I could say here would be viewed by many at these boards as speculation, my clinging to my Pre-Universalism Church days, etc.]  Some theologians such as Jakob Jocz have argued that books like the book of Leviticus were theological treatises only that were never fully carried out in the practical day to day lives of the people.  He'd also argue about a lack of harmony between the priests and prophets of the Old Testament whereas the law and many of the writings reflected the views of the priests, but the prophets spoke an entirely different message of redemption.  Sort of an Old Testament version of the struggle that some scholars have read into the text between St. Paul and James.

This conflict between priests and prophets in the Old Testament could partially explain your difficulty with hereditary sin, while on the other hand, it could simply be a warning about the predisposition to commit the same sins because of the constantly self correcting nature of our psychological make up and of our body's genes that'll try to keep us honest with our choices and lifestyles - where by the choices we make we're sorta re-wiring our descendants and making things just that much more difficult for them to live the lives that the Bible seems to indicate that God demands of us.

Looking at the Mosaic law again in terms of being the national laws of Israel, isn't it true in any country that the children pay for the sins of their fathers with the debts that their entire nations incur with other nations, the treaties that are made with other nations, etc.?

No problem on all of the questions.  Lots of things so far that I hadn't thought of in a really long time.

[hopeful]

Welcome, SLN!  :hiya:

Glad you're here!

In Him was life and the life was the light of men!   :dsunny:

[Cardinal]

 :cloud9: Welcome!

[Pierac]

 :hihat:  SLN

:welcome:

Paul

[dboutwell]

Welcome SLN, good questions..... :grin:

Debbie

[SLN]

Thank you all again for the welcomes, and thank you Martin for that (very) elaborate answer. I might take a look at that book sometime.  :thumbsup:

[martincisneros]

Thank you all again for the welcomes, and thank you Martin for that (very) elaborate answer. I might take a look at that book sometime.  :thumbsup:

Your welcome, SLN.  And the other book that I refered to by Jakob Jocz was called "The Covenant: A Theology of Human Destiny."  He was a major theologian of the 20th Century from Canada.  I happened to find that book in a discount bookstore in the U.S. and I just sorta had a feelin' about it when I noticed the word "universalism" in the index used a few times in the book, as well as a mention of the Church Father "Origen," and I believe that the Greek word "apocatastasis" is mentioned in the book according to the index.  When I got the book home, that's when I read some of the footnotes in the book that indicated he was fairly prolific, and as I read through it, I personally formed the opinion that he's a scholar of the same rank as William Barclay, if not just a teeny bit better.  Jakob Jocz was apparently a major Old Testament scholar, although I've not found another person in UR circles that knows the name.  I got the impression that the book might be considered "graduate school" theology.  It wasn't heavy with Hebrew/Greek, as far as I remember, but there was a bit of theologian vocabulary, if that makes any sense.

[Yahschild]

:bigGrin:

Welcome, SLN, from the Netherlands!