Thank you for your response. No, they are not logically acceptable, perhaps, but I'll accept any effort to explain a puzzling concept as a valid and enlightening exercise. So . . .why wasn't Abram blown to bits? (Gen 12:7, 17:1, 18:1) "The Lord Appeared to Abram". Or Jacob? (Gen 32:30, 35:9, 48:3) "For I have seen God face to face" In God's own words (Ex. 6:3) "And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob...." Or Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel, (Ex. 24:9-11) "And they saw the God of Israel ... They saw God, and did eat and drink." Well, that was the question. Oh. I remember. However this does not answer the question-Why would he not include all the humans on the planet in this enlightenment? I couldn't agree more. It is the God business that requires our money.
Yes. There are a bunch of parables about this. If you repent on your death bed you are no less rewarded than someone who is good their whole life. There is no good without God. Maybe alot of non-Christians are saved because they accept Jesus in ways we don't understand. No way to know this. Rejecting God's graces gets you into hell, pretty grey. Remember, to those who are given much more is expected Most I know think its figurative. I know I do. Heaven is oneness with God. Hell is seperation from Him. That hell is in the ground and Heaven is in the sky is for little kids. Nothing wrong with it beyond that it is nonsense. Existinialism blows. Have you read the Stranger by Camus. What a crappy boring outlook on life. I wasn't thrown into anything. Kierkagaard and Sarte and Heidegger are just glorified emo kids. Because ours is real.
Well, I think you are in the minority, but I do accept and appreciate your explanation of Heaven and Hell as figurative. Much of the Bible is figurative and this makes conversation with most literalists futile.
Being that it does not say concisely in any of those passages exactly the manner in which The LORD appeared, and it does mention entirely in Exodus that Moses saw his back, it would follow that Abram did not see His full Glory.[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] [/FONT] God was in the form of a man there. I need not explain this to you. o Learned one. All explained above. No man has seen the full Glory of GOD. Same explanations as above. It does not say clearly in what form the Lord appeared... but from Exodus it must follow that it could not have been in His full Glory. Your question was "Why was Israel chosen vs all other nations". I answered it. Israel is the descendants of the promised Child. All other nations are from the descendants of Ishmael, Abraham's faith failure.
Not exactly. Religion is man's attempt to earn himself good standing with a Deity. This could be physical (forced tithing, mandatory church attendance, burning incense, ceremonies) or spiritual (prayer repetitions). Christ is a Person who wants your relationship with Him. It's all about your faith and belief in what God did and said. Really all throughout the Bible the same themes are there.
I don't particularly care about what all those Existentialists believed or wrote about, although I have read most of The Stranger. I just mean the basic idea that there's nothing after this life. How is that nonsense? I mean, other than the fact that you don't believe it due to a book. Eh, surely you realize that they believe there's is real as well...
What about the 10 commandments? I mean, aren't those acts that a Christian should be committed to? I would agree that Christianity is based mostly on having faith, but there's other parts of it as well.
No. Once you start "committing yourself to acts" then you start getting bound by legalism. If Christ changes your heart (and that's what it's all about) why would you steal, kill, adulterate, covet? Christ produces the changes that the Law was never able to produce. The Law existed to point people to Christ. It was holy and good, but unfulfillable!
