Featured What are the Essentials of Christian Faith?

I'm not sure what you mean Y.
If you mean the miracles, had others had sufficient faith they could have done so as well.
Prophets were known to raise folks from the dead.
Paul apparently did as well.

HankD

 

The gospel

 

An analogy I might use would be a King donning peasant garb in order to infiltrate his people and discover their views on him. He is still the King, and still has the same authority, but, if he exercised that authority it would interfere with his intention not to be known.


God bless.

 

Not sure I would agree with that. When Satan told Adam and Eve that they would "be like God," God affirms this. They came to know good and evil. God knew good and evil, and one specific evil that likely pained Him was Satan rebelling. I do not look at God as having to first experience life as a man to understand the hearts of men.

Especially rejection. All men to some extent have done that from day one.


God bless.

 

On and on it goes, one assertion after another, without providing actual support from scripture.
1. We were chosen through faith in the truth, a conditional election, 2 Thessalonians 2:13
2. We were chosen for salvation during our physical lifetime, after we had lived without mercy, 1 Peter 2:9-10.
3. We were chosen corporately in Him before creation, but chosen individually during our lifetime, James 2:5

Note that the advocates of the nameless doctrine have no rebuttal, they just say the verses do not mean what the say.

 

We would have to make a fewe assumptions, I believe, in order to embrace that view. One thing would be that the Spiritual Realm is a wispy existence with no physical characteristic. My view is that the Son of GOd is God, is Eternal, and that a physical manifestation is not something that began with the Incarnation. The sympathy that Christ can share with mankind is specific to mankind itself, who is a creation that we have a beginning for.

That Christ can sympathize with us is more for our benefit of knowing, rather than God's, for, as I said, God understands that which man goes through, because, after all...

...He is God.


God bless.

 

While God is Spirit, we do not limit God to a spiritual state only. Prior to the incarnation we have numerous instances where God manifest in human form and interacted with men.

Now you have a spirit brother, so I would ask you, is your spirit separated from your physical aspect in regards to hunger, pain, et cetera? The truth is that it may be your very spirit which causes you to experience these. You may have in the past brought about pain in your life because of your spirit. When your body is wounded, for example, it can be equally true your spirit is as well. You get mad, punch a wall, break your hand, and then feel ashamed. The consequences do not separate the results to what impacts your spirit and what impacts you on a physical basis.

So too with God, going back to "the knowledge of good and evil," men became like God in that aspect. If we think God cannot grasp or understand a concept that is specific to humanity, then we have just reduced God to a lesser state than man himself.

It is because God understood man that He took upon Himself the form of man and died in his place, not the other way around.


God bless.

 

Hebrews 4:15

King James Version (KJV)

15 For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.


The primary thrust of this statement is that we have a Priest that knows absolutely what we go through, and that He went through it without sin. It speaks to a removal of distance between God and man which exists, meaning, God is God, and man is not, so how would we think that God could understand what we go through. I think it is meant to deny the very argument you are presenting, which in one sense elevates man in regards to having a knowledge which God does not have.

It is inconceivable to me to consider God as being without knowledge at any time about anything. Kind of destroys a view that He is Omniscient, and essentially makes Him less than God.


God bless.

 

I meant to add to the previous post, in regards to assumptions, that I think most assume that the Spiritual Realm is devoid of substance. In other words, if God is a Spirit (and we know He is), then His Realm must be spiritual, and we transpose the state of spirit in our realm into His.

It is just my belief that not only is Heaven a place of substance, it is a place of far more substance than our own realm (the physical universe). We understand our own existence to be inside of His, whereas I think we have a habit of trying to place the Spirit Realm within our own.


God bless.

 

You can say that when God manifested to Abraham...He was not in human form?

What was He then?

And when God walked with Adam, you know He was not in human form (and of course I am not saying He was human, lol).


God bless.