God@TheTweetOfGod

"Jesus died for your sins, but he didn't really die, so it doesn't really count.

See you in hell, suckers."

12:33 am . 07 Jul 19

When Jesus was with His disciples, He healed a blind man and they asked Jesus whether he was blind because of his own sin or his parents sin. Jesus replied that he wasn't blind for his sin or his parents sin, but that the glory of God would be shown through him. This and other examples in scripture show that we don't always know the reason that bad things happen to good people. Job is a classic example of that. Also, if you read the psalms you will see many where the psalmist cries out to God because of wicked people prospering while the righteous were trodden under.

The conclusion of the matter is this: Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding. God has made a way for every human being to find forgiveness and eternal life through Jesus Christ. We will never know all of the reasons why God does what He does but we will see the final result when God brings every work into judgment, including every secret thing, for good or for evil.

"Keep off my pen.
This is my quill, and this is my pen. This one's for writing, and this one's for sin."

Brilliant! I love it.

But death calls now, gotta run.

EDIT: You hold on to that pen as tight as you can. But you may want to buy another one just... in.....case.

First, I said that about his arguments....but I'm not saying it DOESN'T apply to the person.

Second, those are my informed opinions supported with factual evidence and etymology, not stated flatly as fact, not repeated as facts. You know that....so no, it doesn't apply.

Discussing anything with Bob is never self serving, it's a distasteful public service. Using verifiable fact to contradict nonsense proffered as fact is a civil responsibility, not an enjoyable privilege.

Keep off my pen.
This is my quill, and this is my pen. This one's for writing, and this one's for sin.

Were you raised in a Christian home? The solution to this problem is that no one is ignorant. That’s what I showed you when I quoted Romans 1:18-21. It teaches that it’s not that you are ignorant of Gods existence, its that you suppress the truth in unrighteousness and thus deceive yourself. You made the comment about the stupidity of the generation of Noahs day rejecting their own mercy, but that is exactly the same thing you are doing by rejecting Jesus Christ.

It’s not about being good enough to come to God. My heart was wretched when God found me but I did respond when He reached out to me. I didn’t respond perfectly but He used it and led me to faith in His Son. If you began to reach out to God He would respond to you in a way you will be able to perceive.

When the bible says God is good, it means He is morally perfect. That is Gods definition of good. No man except one has ever met that definition and therefore is unable to qualify for salvation without an atonement for their sins. The one who met that requirement is the man who never sinned, Jesus Christ.

Well, it’s a fallacy to say that the origin of the message dictates the truth of the message. A good message can be spoken by a bad messenger.

Secondly, it hasn’t been debunked. I know the atheist websites you visit tell you it has been, but it hasn’t. There are good reasons to believe in God that a reasonable person can and should believe .

When I say too difficult, I don’t mean by sheer human effort. Human effort is completely useless in achieving a good result as a Christian. That is why it is found to be too difficult because to come to Christ means taking up your cross and following Him. Yet properly understood it isn’t difficult in the sense that it can’t be done. We can get into a discussion about that in another reply.

You are also using fallacious reasoning to compare Jesus, a historical person, to Xenu, a fever dream of scientology or the flying spaghetti monster. All possibilities are not equal, neither are all Messiahs equally credible. The life of Jesus is a matter of history and not our imaginations. I gave you lines of evidence which you dismiss without even investigating them. Jesus is the prophesied Messiah of the Old Testament. Indeed He is the only possible person who could be the Messiah since He is the only one who fulfilled the 70 weeks of Daniel prophecy which predicted the year of the Messiahs death. Are you interested in talking about that?

When you say you’re a good person, what do you mean by that?

I will do that by giving you an illustration from the scripture. In Mark Chapter 9:17-24 we read about a man who came to Jesus asking Him to heal his demon possessed child:

17 Then one of the crowd answered and said, “Teacher, I brought You my son, who has a mute spirit.
18 And wherever it seizes him, it throws him down; he foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid. So I spoke to Your disciples, that they should cast it out, but they could not.”
19 He answered him and said, “O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? Bring him to Me.”
20 Then they brought him to Him. And when he saw Him, immediately the spirit convulsed him, and he fell on the ground and wallowed, foaming at the mouth.
21 So He asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?”
And he said, “From childhood.
22 And often he has thrown him both into the fire and into the water to destroy him. But if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”
23 Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.”
24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The cure for unbelief in the bible is to ask the Lord to help your unbelief. When you begin to ask God to change your heart so you can believe, He will begin to do a work in your life that will you be able to perceive.

We are all deaf dumb and blind without God bringing light to our understanding. This is how you will be able to comprehend spiritual truth. This happens only through faith in Jesus. Faith in Jesus is turning from your sins and turning towards God to be forgiven

God gives people grace in many ways. One of those ways is by communicating His will through the preaching of His word. The hearing of the word imparts faith, which is a gift from God. You're wondering how you believe; when you listen to the word with a good heart God will give you the faith to believe it. He will also confirm His word with supernatural signs and wonders.

I don't know how true your appraisal is of those who have told you about the Lord, but your situation is better than those who have never heard. Plus you have me, newtboy, and I'm sure that makes you feel extremely fortunate. Yet scripture tells us that even if the messenger is bad it doesn't negate your responsibility. Faith and reason are complimentary. I think this quote is true: Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found too difficult and not tried.

I can't speak for the myriad of pretenders but there has only ever been one man who died for your sins. Jesus Christ is the promised Messiah that Moses and the prophets wrote about in the Old Testament. There are exact prophecies like the 70 weeks of Daniel which predict the exact date of His death for our sins. I believe what I believe because I have been changed by His grace. That's my only motivation in telling you or anyone about this, because He is real and you can know that for yourself. You can know that by putting even a slight intellectual effort into understanding the problem. You will find that there are good reasons to believe that God is real and good reasons to believe Jesus is who He said He is. I am a flawed vessel but I serve a God who doesn't need me to prove that He is real. He sends me because He is inviting you to seek Him and be saved.

Romans 10:9-10

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved

When you do that, believing that Jesus died for your sins, God will save you and make you a new person. You're good if you don't care where you are going after you die, if you leave it as you believe up to chance. Yet the evidence that God exists is undeniable, and the coming of His Son Jesus Christ was predicted by prophecies going back thousands of years. So you're not really leaving it up to chance because the scripture tells you that you have no excuse for ignorance.

Romans 1:18-20

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse

You would say, I am sure, that you haven't seen any evidence for God but the scripture says you have and you have suppressed the truth about it. I believe scripture and in our conversations I am sorry to say you are always poisoning the well of reasoned debate with mockery and ridicule. What is behind that is a heavy bias and angst which keeps you from seeing who God is. Being obstinate against the truth of Gods word is foolish. Why not give God the benefit of the doubt and at least ask Him to show you if what I have been telling you all of these years is true?

When you want to paint your own picture, it's helpful to leave out a few details. An important detail that you left out is that it took Noah 100 years to build the Ark. The scripture tells us that Noah was a preacher of righteousness and he pleaded with the people of the pre-flood world to escape the coming judgment. He didn't have a single convert proving the truth of what God had said about that world:

Genesis 6:5

And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually

You also mentioned that you think Gods requirements are impossible. That is true except for one exception; they are not impossible when the Lord Jesus Christ has come into your life and changed you. As a Christian who is far from perfect I meet Gods requirements. His requirement is this, that we believe in His Son Jesus Christ and live for Him.

It's impossible without Christ to do what God wants. If you have Christ in your life you are well able to meet Gods requirements because what God is looking for is faith. He requires that you repent from your sins and receive the forgiveness He has provided for you through Christ. When you do that God will adopt you as His son and give you eternal life. That isn't the MO of a despot.

We here in America like to believe we are good people morally and that is how people present themselves in the public square. Yet we see all of the crime statistics and civil unrest in the country which is the spillover from the greatest character crisis this nation has ever faced. God sees it all, every wicked thing done in the dark and He knows what man is really like. It takes humility to admit that about yourself and realize that God is right about the carnality and futility of what men do in this world. It is only through Christ that men have received light to do what is eternally significant instead of living for their own selfish ends.

THE test? Hardly. That's not even the only test for your small sect.
If you've been saved, "born again" then sin again, or question dogma or your own belief, you have to do it all over again....according to your particular group's belief...right? It's not a one and done thing, it's a constant subjugation and supplication, incessant adoration by the congregation, suffering degradation without protestation.

What happens when one side has been saved and doesn't change but the other side no longer believes after surgery?

There is no innocent....we are all guilty of the sin of existence.

Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon say the F-35’s superiority over its rivals lies in its ability to remain undetected, giving it “first look, first shot, first kill.”

Hugh Harkins, a highly respected author on military combat aircraft, called that claim “a marketing and publicity gimmick” in his book on Russia’s Sukhoi Su-35S, a potential opponent of the F-35. He also wrote, “In real terms an aircraft in the class of the F-35 cannot compete with the Su-35S for out and out performance such as speed, climb, altitude, and maneuverability.”

Other critics have been even harsher. Pierre Sprey, a cofounding member of the so-called “fighter mafia” at the Pentagon and a co-designer of the F-16, calls the F-35 an “inherently a terrible airplane” that is the product of “an exceptionally dumb piece of Air Force PR spin.” He has said the F-35 would likely lose a close-in combat encounter to a well-flown MiG-21, a 1950s Soviet fighter design.

Robert Dorr, an Air Force veteran, career diplomat and military air combat historian, wrote in his book “Air Power Abandoned,” “The F-35 demonstrates repeatedly that it can’t live up to promises made for it. … It’s that bad.”

The development of the F-35 has been a mess by any measurement. There are numerous reasons, but they all come back to what F-35 critics would call the jet's original sin: the Pentagon's attempt to make a one-size-fits-all warplane, a Joint Strike Fighter.

History is littered with illustrations of multi-mission aircraft that never quite measured up. Take Germany's WWII Junkers Ju-88, or the 1970s Panavia Tornado, or even the original F/A-18. Today the Hornet is a mainstay of the American military, but when it debuted it lacked the range and payload of the A-7 Corsair and acceleration and climb performance of the F-4 Phantom it was meant to replace.

Yeah, the F/A-18 was trash when it first came out and it took YEARS and multiple changes/fixes to allow it to fully outperform the decades old aircraft it was designed to beat when it was released.

The F35 is not the best at anything it does, it is designed to fully be mediocre at all roles in order to allow it to be a single solution aircraft. That may change with more money, time, and data retrieved from hours spent in actual combat, but as it stands it is what it was designed to be. A jack of all trades and master of none, not something I would want to be flying in a role where I could encounter a master of that role.

As @ChaosEngine says, it is far beyond time that we move to a design where the pilot is not in the plane. There is no reason at this time that we cannot field a plane that could successfully perform it's role with the pilot in a secure location nearby. Such planes could be built cheaper, could perform in g-forces that humans cannot withstand, and would be expendable in a way that current planes are not. However, this would mean that our corporate welfare system for huge defense contractors would take a massive hit. We can't have that, can we?

RFlagg, do you realize nearly 1/3 of the worlds population identifies as Christian? I’m not sure why you think the Republican party is the standard bearer for Christ in the world, but the majority of Christians don’t live in Western democracies. About a quarter billion of them face daily persecution from hostile governments. You are grossly mischaracterizing the faith by conflating it with the worst elements of the American church, which actually in many Christian circles is commonly referred to as the church of Laodicia. Have you ever read Christs letter to the church of Laodicia? Its in Revelation chapter 3.

So you may be shocked to find out that a lot of Christians will agree with you that the American church is backslidden. I also agree with you that too many Christians are too political and have said and done things which are morally repugnant.

I support this president, I also supported the president before him. Christians are commanded in Romans 13 to support and pray for our leaders. It doesn’t mean that we have to agree with them. I certainly didn’t agree with how the church as a whole overlooked quite a bit about Trump because of their desire to win a political victory. That doesn’t mean that any Christian who voted for or supports Trump is anything like what you described, so filled with hate. Many of us hate what is happening to the country, but we don’t hate the people who are doing it.

Your testimony about finding Christ revolves around attending church services and watching TBN and Fox News. Your reason for falling away stemmed from your disillusionment and disgust with the republican party. All of that is really the epitome of cultural Christianity. You may have had an experience, or felt some emotions, but you weren’t changed. There are millions of people sitting in pews all across America who are in the same situation; completely lost and thinking they are okay. This is the unfortunate side-effect of post-Christian culture; everyone has heard of Jesus and no one knows how to be saved or even what that means. They just know that if they add Jesus to their life, they will somehow make it to Heaven. So they just slap a Jesus sticker on everything they’re doing. They are still the same old rotten people, but now Jesus is with them and justifies all of their bad behavior. That’s cultural Christianity. Christianity is spiritual, not cultural.

John 3:3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God

You need to be born again, RFlagg, and that didn’t happen to you. It can happen to you if you surrender your life to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Attending church services won’t make that happen for you. Attending church doesn’t make you a Christian. Watching Christian programming on TV, conservative news shows, and agreeing with creation science doesn’t make you a Christian. You become a Christian when you repent of your sin and fully surrender your life to Jesus Christ. It is at that moment that He will make you into a new person. It’s so simple a child could understand it but man has overcomplicated it to the point of totally distorting the message of the gospel.

I think this statement illustrates your issue “If being in Heaven means being around the people who say they will go, Trump supporters, then Hell is a billion times better.”

You’re looking to man instead of God. It’s God that you have to contend with, not man. As a person who has rejected Christ, you are under Gods judgment and that is why you need Christ. It’s easy to say I’d rather be in hell, but I can guarantee you that no one in hell currently feels that way. Rather they are in eternal misery because they forfeited their eternal life with God. What did they forfeit it for? Sin, plain and simple. Your issue is sin and not the many reasons you have come up with to reject the Lord.

"The fact that God doesn't care enough to tell his followers that they are following the literal antichrist system, is telling. "

The Lord has detailed everything to do with that in the scriptures. Jesus railed on the Pharisees for exactly the same thing:

Luke 12:54-56

Then He also said to the multitudes, “Whenever you see a cloud rising out of the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming’; and so it is. And when you see the south wind blow, you say, ‘There will be hot weather’; and there is. Hypocrites! You can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern this time?

The Lord outlined how the end times will proceed in the scriptures. There isn't much excuse for not understanding the times that we are living in. There will be a one world government run by the Antichrist, and the whole world will worship him.

"I do appreciate the higher degree of kindness you tend to show than certain others, and my family... almost all Trump supporters I personally know..."

Thank you, and I appreciate that you are willing to engage and talk about spiritual matters with me without trying to belittle me. That's not typical and I appreciate your civility friend.

Overall I am saying this to you because I care about you, not because I am judging you. I need Christ as much as you do RFlagg. It’s because of that, that I know how much you need Him that I am writing this to you. God bless.