Ideas about the Kingdom of the Heavens around us and the unity of believers in Christ within it
Though God forgave David his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah, this sin had a traceable chain of earthly consequences which extends to the present and which includes the death of Christ on the cross.
On both of the occasions when David is said to have sinned in his administration as king, God sent prophets to correct him. God corrected David’s great sin, the one involving Bathsheba and Uriah, by sending the prophet Nathan to confront him. By contrast, in the matter of the census David recognized he had sinned and asked God’s forgiveness as soon as the census was completed. The prophet Gad was sent to him not to bring him to repentance, but to give him a choice of public consequences for not honoring God in the census and instructions concerning how to rectify his error. David repented and was forgiven of both sins, but the first one nevertheless had severe long-term consequences.
When Peter preached that the people should “repent,” he explained that meant that they were to “turn away from their wickedness” and so, in their behavior, “listen” to Jesus. Jesus did not come to entertain us or to offer advice, but to turn us away from our own way to obedience to him.
True repentance would have required high priest Eli to act to remove his sons Hophni and Phinehas from office. Hophni and Phinehas were using God and their offices as a magical charm and using others, as many in the Church do today. The people also learned to do these things from their example. Instead of removing them, Eli just nagged them, and he and all Israel paid the penalty.
The continued existence of ethnic Coptic and Assyrian Christian minorities in Egypt and the Middle East demonstrates God’s faithfulness and the possibility of a literal fulfillment of Isaiah 19:23-25. If God can preserve these ethnic groups across two millennia of persecution in order to fulfill a prophecy, can he possibly need my “help” doing anything in my own life?
Jesus contrasted the Jewish leaders, who refused to hear his words, with the Ninevites who repented at the preaching of Jonah and put away their bloodshed and violence.
The question whether God still speaks impacts a number of other issues, ranging from the nature of a believer’s relationship with God, to the miraculous, to church offices and authority.
This post is the beginning of my attempt to focus on the question of how God speaks (or permits Himself to speak) to us today. It presents a summary of the various positions commonly held, from which discussion will proceed in later posts.
This is an outline of the second part of my attempt to link early errors of organized Christianity to the state of the modern world–specifically, in this part, by showing the origins and entrance of specific errors before Muhammad which profoundly affected subsequent history. Links will be added as future posts are written.
A God who Speaks, Adoption, Authority Contests, Background Information, Church History, Islamic History and Secular History Interaction, Church purpose versus church growth, Complex unity, Compulsory Christianity, Discipline or Correction, Disputes about words, Disrespecting poor believers, Divisions in the Church, Forgiveness and Unforgiveness, Free will, God Never Stopped Speaking, God Speaks to Us, God's Existence and Nature, God's purpose for us, God's sovereignty, God's Voice, Greed, Heresy, Historical Background, Index, Injustice and Lawsuits, Jesus the Son, Leaving Our First Love, Male and female, Marriage, Marriage and Reproduction, Merit, Other Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Peril of Seeking Numbers, Peril of Seeking Power, Peril of Seeking Respectability, Prophecy, Purpose of the Church, Quarrels, Regeneration, Religious violence and persecution, Replacing Relationship with Morality, Salvation, Sin, Sins versus sin, Site Index Page, Social control and statecraft, Son of Man, The Bible, Through the church, To be in his image, Trinity, Unity, Wars as consequences, What is God's Word, What is sin?
This is the index to a series of posts on the voice, words and Word of God, the centrality of God’s voice to everything, and the argument that God both still speaks and still speaks to us, Links will be filled into the outline as future posts are written.