Response to Ian’s challenge: “The accounts of these things happening to Jesus are no more than copycat stories of mythological prior accounts found in Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Babylonian and Mesopotamian sources.”

“On the other hand there is more than adequate evidence from pre-Christian religions of exactly the same things that supposedly happened to Jesus. Scourging, whipping, suffering and crucifixion feature in these pre-Christian religions.

Conclusion: the accounts of these things happening to Jesus are no more than copycat stories of mythological prior accounts found in Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, Babylonian and Mesopotamian sources.

Of course, in that case, the gospels’ accounts are also mythological, not real historical ones which were completely misunderstood and misrepresented by the early Roman church. Another one of their historical blunders. Think about that this Easter.”

  • Ian on Quora

Introduction

What you are describing is no problem to Christian theology, Ian, and I would like you to read from my message to you now exactly how we account for these things, as of course it is a perfectly reasonable point, but thankfully one we have a very satisfactory answer to. I say “satisfactory”, meaning that those who want to believe will be satisfied by it, and those who want to disbelieve, well, they’ll obviously find holes to pick in it. I ask you to try to be open-minded.

The idea of “typology” in Christian apologetics

Here goes. We include in our theology something called typology. We see so-called “types” of Christ in the Old Testament. Jesus Himself gives an example of one when he tells us the brazen serpent in the wilderness was Him. In another case he states that Jonah prefigures Him, His use of Psalms indicate that in many respoects the life and sayings of David prefigure Him.  Look and Live: Christ as the True Bronze Serpent will give you more on that, including the scriptural references, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typology_(theology) contains more information from a not specifically Christian viewpoint about this idea in Christian theology. It’s an important idea and until you get to grips with it, you haven’t done justice to the claims of our faith on your heart.

We see clear types of Christ in numerous pagan religions, and if Christ demonstrates Himslein a brazen serpent then He can also be represented in a number of pre-Christian religions. What we notice is that that around the world as missions went into the field, they found many Christ figures, sons of God, who died for us, various sacrificial animals especially lambs, When they realised that these were forfigurings of the person and work of Jesus as shown in the New Testament, they readily exchanged their former belief systems for these. Nobody believes right now in Hercules or Osiris or various Norse deities that claimed to be sons of Gods.

The God who winks?

In Acts 17 we see from verse 15 onwards an account of St Paul’s arrival in Athen’s and his sermon to the Athenians from Mars’ Hill. He told them that their altar to the Unknown God wasn’t a different God that they worshipped, but the true God, only worshipped ignorantly. Today we might make the same Pauline comment to Muslims who state that the 100th Name of God is unknown to men. The Bahai’s already tried to claim this but we know that it is of course Jesus. The summary to Mankind of all that God is, in very human flesh.

I recommend you to read the whole passage but in particular please note these verses:

v30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent:

v31 Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

 

We see God being willing to “wink” or overlook ignorance, but now a day is appointed for the judgement of the workld, and we know from Jesus’ own lips that this day will only come when every tribe and nation has heard the true gospel of His sacrifice on our behalf, and each nation which has never heard the gospel is no longer limited to the hints of the way of salvation that the human conscience and the types scattered across the world’s native cultures can have given them.

Once we have properly heard the Gospel, there is no more excuse for ignorance, there is no more winking by God, no more “hyperidōn” as the Greek puts it, no more overlooking the fact that an idol was worshipped and instead gracious imputation of the worship of Christ as it was with the bronze serpent in the wilderness.  We now have the full Acts 4;12 scenario: “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” than solely in the name of Jesus Christ.

They want to place Christ in a no-win situation

But we are left between a rock and a hard place with atheists. When they hear that we preach those without Jesus are going to hell, they say “how unfair on those who lived in the past before the gospel reached them or before Jesus lived”. But when we show the myriad of these types of Christ, these brazen serpents, to whom the elect persons of all ages could look and live as they were deemed to be reacting toe the Gospel, had they encountered it, then atheists say “you see, there’s nothing original about Christ, all He is is a hodgepodge of pre-Christian religions!”.

Please give this your heartfelt consideration.

I want you to be ready

There are wars increasing around us, new plagues, famine is coming, awful plans by people whom we are paying taxes to be trustworthy, yet they merely work out the agenda of the demons who possess them, often fully convinced they are doing humanity a great service, and completely unaware of the lethal tools of Satan that they are. If I did no know that Jesus is victor, I would be walking around with a cold feeling of fear in the pit of my stomach, a feeling many know today and need to know that Jesus is the answer.

Sooner than we know, history comes to a conclusion, Jesus returns in glory and power. As He does so, there are all over the world groups of people working in offices and factories together, or asleep in the same houses – one is taken, others are left, to their destruction and endless regret. They see Him, but the age of grace is over. The call to repentance and faith which we proclaim today then no longer maintains its validity. This age is soon gone, whether by your own death or the end of the entire world, which rolls nearer and nearer with Newtonian acceleration.

I want you to be ready.

Part of a discussion on whether we have free will in Heaven, and if not, is it a problem for theology.

Just as faith has significance in the life of a human where there is room for doubt, so what we would refer to as doing the will of God, or good works, has meaning only when there is a meaningful temptation to do the opposite.

These two things, faith and works, are placed on apposition if not outright opposition to each other in various passages of the New Tesstament, whether we are talking about Paul, James or the Lord Himself. Moreover much discussion of the faith Vs works dichotomy informs writing and philosophy throughout Church history, but I would invite you to consider that faith and works is all there is to behaviour in terms of seeking to please God, and then you can make a matrix of four windows with faith and works along the horizontal and doing God’s will Vs the credible or meaningful alternative to doing God’s will along the vertical, so that you get four panels, like the square window in CBeebies, with such labels as “doubt” “belief” “temptation” and “obedience”. Of course there is another set of windows you could add in showing what happens if you succumb, namely “unbelief” and “disobedience”.

Here’s a version I made including the third way of pleasing God, ie He decides to set His love on us, this is seen as the real deciding factor by Calvinists but in any event this we cannot change, we influence the criteria on the two more left columns but in fact those who are not in the elect will never want to do so. The fact that you want to do so means you are most likely in the elect, so it is not something you should use as a barrier to God.


Having set up this image, I would like to suggest that before we are in Heaven we are afflicted by these alternatives and can therefore fall into the lower categories of unbelief and disobedience despite having chosen not to do so. It is the result of what theologists have described as the three-fold problem of the World, the Flesh and the Devil. I could enlarge on that if need be, but for economy I will not do so now. I will also skip over the issues of the New Heart, the Church and the Holy Spirit, which are the opposite three-fold chord. This we can discuss separately.

Once we have attained the end of the age, whether by our death and entering the next life, or because we are alive at His coming, we will be resurrected in a perfect and uncorrupted form so the flesh has not its old power over us. The world is passed away for us, we are entirely beyond the reach of societal pressure, and the Devil is entirely bound from us.

Faith is no longer actually a criterion for us, once we reach that point, as we know at that point.  “We shall know as we are known”. Faith as it is described by Jesus and also by the writer of Hebrews 11 is only possible to have while you don’t actually know, although some are confused on this point, and will state that they know when in fact they do still only believe, however there are some who have experienced enough to be able to know for sure that God exists and loves them, but this is not always as good as having faith in the face of doubt, as the risen Lord explained to Thomas.  This is why God severely limits His direct manifestations to people unless they are in fact already believers, and even for believers very sparingly, as He loves to see our faith. Moses saw God face to face but in the end never saw the promised land, while those who believed his reports without seeing did see the promised land.

Thomas was still saved because he was able to say “My Lord and my God”, whereas the Resurrection in itself was not empirical proof of the Deity of Christ in as much as there are those who assent to the Resurrection but do not know Jesus as their Lord and God. Had Thomas had no more confession than what he had seen empirically, I am persuaded that this would not have constituted saving faith and therefore the detail of his confession of our Lord’s deity is a vital inclusion in the holy text.


We therefore at that point of entering that next world which we call heaven, know God, we have a perfect physical reset and no reason nor pressure whatsoever to be distracted from doing the will of God and worshipping Him purely. But this is what we have chosen now, in this life, what we have asked Him for and what we now thirst for every day of our lives, whilst being too weak in the flesh to bring about what our Spirit is certainly willing.

The Agroletnica site is practically ready

For those of you interested in the Agritourism ranch we have taken over and are now running near Zielona Góra, the new website for it is here.

 

We invite you to have a look, and also make a booking. The place offers you excellent value for money even without a discount, but for regular visitors to this website we can offer you 20% off the published prices, mainly because I would like to meet with many of you and interact in real life.

For polyglots or language students this would also be a great place to run immersion courses for three or four days.

For visitors from America, Japan, etc, who would like to see some major world cities in Europe, thos would be an ideal base from which to day-trip out to four major cities: Poznań, Berlin, Wroclaw and Dresden. Zielona Góra is a pleasant and historic city in its own right, and the countryside around Letnica is often viewed as the nicest in the country, with its rolling hills, clean rivers and lakes and seemingly interminable forest.

Zapraszamy!

Silence is Goldlist?

Just thought I had better drop a note to let my faithful subscribers know that there is no cause for alarm that I have fallen off the wagon for regular posting.

In fact it is all down to a major sea change in how my family and I are going to be be living, and where, from now on.

After many many years being based in Warsaw, 18 of which in our current home, we decided to go for a new phase of life further west in Poland, in fact almost as far west as it is possible to get without needing special permits for buying property as a foreigner in the zone near the German border, which is half and hour by car from where we are going.

More will be revealed as it happens, and regular updates about that project will be interspersed with the other streams of material, namely the categorisation of my YT channel and the re-purposing of my Quora stuff which they’ve been threatening me to remove. Certainly the most interesting of the content will be the new project.

I will not promise to do much on here before the 1st of July, as the move and also the year end at work is really a case of everything happning at once, but I do plan to get back to regular posting in the second half year with this new mix of content including regular updates on this new project and place that we will live.

Suffice it to say that the main part of this project for now is actually a hotel, so regular readers of this blog could, if they so wished, come and stay at our hotel near Zielona Gora and have discussions in person about any of the things on here that may have entertained you over the years. Anyone who is a follower of this blog will get a special deal.

So if anyone was thinking that my silence was all down to increased goldlisting, I am sorry to say that this is not the case, my average lines per week has also fallen right down to about 40% of usual, and will need to be resumed with renewed vigour later in the year.

 

Can I keep my aquarium in my bedroom?

The important thing is a nice even level service on something strong enough to take the weight, which could well be a chest of drawers in a bedroom.  Certainly you do have to check it will take the weight you want to put on it.

You will probably be OK sleeping with the noise of a quiet filter. One should never switch the filter off for the night and then switch it on again in the morning.  And neither can you do that to the heater. The light you do switch off, and then it is a question of either remembering to switch it on in the morning or having a timer switch.

Just make sure there’s still room for the bed!

There is nothing unhealthy about sleeping next to a fishtank, if that’s what you are worried about. As long as you keep it clean. The exception is if you keep an octopus as this will wait till you go to sleep and then lift the lid, sneak out and get on your face like that thing out of alien. Just kidding.

 

My own case

I personally have been sleeping with a tank filter in the room working all night for maybe twenty years or more as indeed I did as a boy. I rarely get disturbed by the filter noise – only if it is lying against something which reverberates. If you have this problem then either use suction pads or adjust the position of the filter vis a vis the hood.  This is actually a good argument for avoiding the kind of tank sets where everything is built together.
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