by James S » Dec 9, 2002 @ 9:03pm
[edit] WOH, junk I wrote a lot!
1. That's not really what it says in Exodus 4:24. It says "At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met him and was about to kill him." but the first "him" is replaced with "Moses" in the English translation for no reason, since it's wrong. Others have "Moses song." but it only says "him" in Hebrew.
But I have no idea. I think it's refering to God's plague of the first borns, where all the first born sons are going to be killed, all the uncircumcised. Moses' son was uncircumcised, but in that passaged when it says "the Lord came to kill Moses' son." Zipporah, Moses' wife, circumcised him to keep him from dying. That's my best guess. Good question though.
2. The God of Abraham is often refered to as "Elohim," not "El." El is the sun god of the Canaanites. Elohim is translated in today's Bible as "God" and Yahweh, the name God told Moses to give to the Egyptians (God said, "I am Yahweh" Yahweh in Hebrew means "I am." God said "I am who I am." In the English Bible "Yahweh" or "YHWH" is translated as "Lord"). God never told anyone to call him "Elohim," only "Yahweh." Elohim is the word that the early author used to mean God. That's all.
3. Yes I do. And because most Christians go about saying something like "Turn or Burn" which secular people don't understand and take very much offense from it!
4. God always has been and forever will be. Nothing needed to create Him. It's just one of those things. The scientific version of that same answer is "How big is the universe." Well it's infinite, right? blah blah blah... so on and so forth. Unanswerable questions. Just wait until you meet Him and ask Him, that's what I plan on doing.
There was a beginning of the earth and human existance, but God just always was. He got bored of being without anything else so He created the universe and the angels and all that and now we have the world as it is today.
You can't escape the coming of Jesus and the final judgement. God has reign over everything everywhere. And who wants to evacuate to some other planet when Jesus comes? That's a time to rejoice, when Jesus comes again. It means we all get to go to Heaven, all the bad stuff goes away and we get to have fun up in Heaven for ever. And your body is going to die sometime anyway, even if you could escape the apocalypse then you'd only live another, what, 10, 20 years, just to die all alone. That's horrible.
5. You spelled it correctly. The rapture is the event that occurs before the apocalypse, the end days. It is the sign that the end is NO TIME from then. The rapture is when Jesus takes up all the Christians on the planet up to Heaven before the final plagues and judgement and all those earthquakes and stuff. It's just simply that, Jesus taking up all of His faithful into Heaven. Christians don't have to worry about the end days because we're going to be in Heaven before them. I'm sure if you're asking about this you must have read the "Left Behind" series by LaHaye and Jenkins. If not then they're a pretty accurate account of what will happen after the rapture.
6. Lucifer was one of the original angels that God created. angels have complete free will, just like humans. They can do whatever they want to. Lucifer decided it would be more fun to try to be god and destroy stuff so he told God, basically, to shove it. That's when Lucifer's name was changed to Satan, "one who destroys," because he came down here and started messing everything up.
God doesn't control the future, necessarily. He doesn't control your actions and the actions of everything, every event in every day, every fender bender and dead pet. God can, but God gave us the gift of free will. If He controlled everythign that happened then we'd have no free will at all and there would be no point to our lives. Also, God wants us to love Him willingly. He could create people that love Him without a choice, but that's not love. He wants us to get to know Him and love Him because we want to, that's the true reward for both us and God.
But back to why things happen. God doens't CONTROL the future. God KNOWS what's going to happen in the future. God knows everyone and everything so well that He just knows what's going to happen. He doesn't make things happen, He just understands so extremely well (because He made everything) what will happen. He knows the paths we're going to choose in life and what conscequences/rewards those paths hold. We have complete free will, we don't have to take those paths, but we will because that's who we are and God knows who we are and what we'll do better than we do. We have the choice, but God knows what our decision will be.
That's how prophecy works. Prophecying isn't predicting the future. It's saying what will happen which is very different. Predicting is guess. Prophecying is saying for certain what is going to happen. It's going to happen because it will. It's not like time travel on the sci-fi channel. It's not something that's going to be changed, but it's not something that's set in time. We CAN change it, but we're just not going to because of the choices we make, God already knows those choices and prophecying is saying what the outcome is, before we're even faced with the choice.
This is like Judas betraying Jesus in the Bible. Two weeks or so before Judas was going to betray Jesus, Jesus TOLD Judas at dinner in front of all the deciples that Judas was going to betray Him. Judas did in the end. Jesus said what was going to happen. God didn't MAKE it happen, He just knew exactly what choices Judas would make.
[EDIT] BTW, are you REALLY from Erie, Pennsylvania?
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