cancer
That's the title of John Piper's most recent article, written on the eve of his surgery.Here are his ten points:
You will waste your cancer if you do not believe it is designed for you by God.
You will waste your cancer if you believe it is a curse and not a gift.
You will waste your cancer if you seek comfort from your odds rather than from God.
You will waste your cancer if you refuse to think about death.
You will waste your cancer if you think that “beating” cancer means staying alive rather than cherishing Christ.
You will waste your cancer if you spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God.
You will waste your cancer if you let it drive you into solitude instead of deepen your relationships with manifest affection.
You will waste your cancer if you grieve as those who have no hope.
You will waste your cancer if you treat sin as casually as before.
You will waste your cancer if you fail to use it as a means of witness to the truth and glory of Christ.
17 Comments:
your kidding hypie, i thought it was spot on
phew! that was lucky, was i the only one that bit. I feel silly for not seeing your sarcasm. :-)
Well, here is what the Bible has to say…
Some sickness comes from God
Exodus 4:11 (New International Version)
11 The LORD said to him, “Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD ?
2 Corinthians 12:7 (New International Version)
7To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.
Some sickness comes from satan
Job 2:7 (New International Version)
7 So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.
Some sickness is for the GLORY OF GOD
John 9:1-3 (New International Version)
1As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
3″Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.
wow i just said that that has happened to me to and that comment didn't make it either... you need to copy the comment then send just to make sure...
have another go mr chrome im interested in your thoughts
i will, but its also not saving changes to my site either
24He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.????
So that we may be healed of temporary ailments????? the context of that verse has nothing to do with the physical but talks about the the ultimate healing - the healing of our standing before God. No longer condemned but forgiven, standing in his righteousness.
as to the thorn in the flesh, are you suggesting that Paul was possessed?
If your interpretation of healing is correct then why do so many Christians still get sick and for that matter why do they die??? Healing is divine fiat ... Gods glory is not manifest in miraculous healing so much as the transformed life.
hi chromed - i am steve.. my hotmail doesnt work so good.. for some reason it wont load to send a message properly ever since i got wireless??? sorry about that
as for healing.. yes i believe that God can and does heal but this is not dependant on my faith but on Gods grace. I also don't think that God will heal as much as we would like him to as (i am speaking in broad strokes) it would be tantamount to him bringing back the garden of eden........ we have made our bed and we have to lie in it.
the biggest arguement against this sort of doctrine is in the lack of verifyable healing that is seen out in the real world... sporadic instances of healing maybe (bad backs, cancers, depression etc) but people don't come back from the dead and people don't grow arms and legs... i mean if it were really true our churches would be full of sick people coming from every hospital to be prayed for and people would have the faith because they would have seen healing for themselves
another problem is that i see people believing (or convincing themselves that they believe) in Gods desire to heal their temporal ailments just so they can be cured........ when they arent (themselves or relative,friend) their faith is shaken and they think that Christianity is a crock... they shouldn't have been given false hope.
God doesnt want you to have faith in him for healing, he wants you to believe and have faith in him because he is Lord.
re Paul's affliction - if this doctrine of healing was true and it was a Satanic affliction should not Pauls faith be even more capable of getting rid of it? If the power of the Holy Spirit was flowing through him, could he not have just rebuked it in Christ's name? yet he prayed 3 times for it to be taken away and his request was not fulfilled.
the pentecostal church over the years has been desperately trying to 'jump the wall of the garden of eden' as i term it... have faith and your ailments will go, you will be a mega overcoming super person with the blessings of money, power and infulence... in reality its fools gold, thats why everyone complains about the 'big back door' in the churches that preach this way... yeah it sounds great and tickles the ears which brings people in, but the reality is wanting and after a while they leave.. often never to go to church again as their faith has been shattered... you and i both know many names of people like this...
Christians want the good stuff but as for taking up your cross daily?????????
no i don't believe in a littoral 6 day interpretation of Gen 1
you seem to assume i dont believe in Gen 1.. i do - i just interpret it differently than you.
yesterday i flew to brisbane
did i fly the plane or was i a passenger?
did i get in a sports car and 'fly like the wind'?
did i flap my arms and break free from the pull of gravity to the extent that i made it to brisbane?
most people would assume that i got in a plane that was piloted by someone else, but with the structure of the statement 'yesterday i flew to brisbane' you could actually say that somehow flapping my arms was the more accurate interpretation of the statement, a littoral interpretation... but did i intend it to be that way? actually no...
further the bible says that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.. under a littoral interpretation the catholic church got into trouble with copernicus and galileo because it doesnt ... the earth revolves around it, but it is stupid to say that 'i saw the earth rotate to the point of exposing my patch of land to the suns rays'.. we say it as we see it and therefore 'the sun rises' makes sense but is not littoral... in my opinion to accept Gen 1 as littoral is an arbitrary decision that has nothing to do with the fact that God actually did to it (create ex nihlio)
Gen 1 is not meant to be a scientifically exact definition of God's actions but a general account from an oral tradition that was put to paper by moses (and someone else unknown)to explain our origins and purpose (being made for Gods pleasure) and explaining what went wrong (fall) leading onto the great narrative that came to a climax with the birth death and ressurection of Christ...
such a widespread belief in a littoral 6 days is a relatively recent phenomenon although the arguement has gone on for thousands of years.
St Augustine of Hippo who has probably had the most major influence over Christian theology said this in about 350 ad
"“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although ‘they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions.’ (1 Timothy 1:7)”
This wonderful passage comes from Augustine's "On the Literal meaning of Genesis", written over 1600 years ago
you say
"
Who am I to say wether or not a person is healed. No evolutionary doctor or publication would verify a healing even if you paid them. That would force them to have to re-think their views."
i say of course... but this doesnt mean the doctrine of healing is true
and of course there is starlight
A young-universe creationist is in a very difficult spot. If he holds that God created the light in transit, he also has to hold that we have no way of knowing that anything further than 10,000 light years away actually exists. We can't see it. We're not seeing it; we're seeing an image that God created in transit. The light from it won't reach us for a billion years.
You see, the argument from young-earthers regarding star light is that God not only created the galaxies in deep space, but He also created all the light between that star and earth. This is why we can see them now even though the universe is young.
My question is, how do you know the stars are really there? You don't see the light of anything that existed. You're seeing an image created in transit of an event-- watch this-- that never took place.
If all we're seeing is an image that God created in transit, then the only way we're going to see the actual thing that exists is if we wait around another billion years for the light of the actual star to reach us. Who of us believes the Lord will tarry that long? Not a billion years. Which means we'll never see it, will we? We'll never see what God actually created, not the thing itself.
Doesn't that throw into question the existence of anything in outer space at all? Because, in fact, since we'll never see the thing itself-- and what we see is not the thing, but an image God created in transit-- well then, why would God ever need to create the thing in the first place? The image would be fully adequate for God's purpose. The only thing God would have to create is the light image, because we'd never see the thing itself anyway. But doesn't the Scripture seem to indicate that what we see are the very things that God created?
You see, this "God created light in transit" view is kind of misleading, because we think of it like the steady glow of a light bulb. There's a light bulb way out there in space and just a steady glow in between. God could put that glow from me to it and I could see the glow.
But the images we actually see in outer space-- that, according to young earthers, were allegedly created in transit by God-- are images of turbulent events, not just a steady glow.
Let me give you an illustration. Astronomers looking through their telescopes see a super nova explosion a billion light years away. (Super nova is when a star explodes and sends its material spewing out into space.) What exist now, at this moment, are the random bits of the old star which, allegedly, is the condition God actually created six to ten thousand years ago.
What this means is that the star the astronomers saw explode never existed. The super nova never happened. This seems to suggest that God created the illusion of the universe and not the universe itself, because that which allegedly exists, we will never see. That which allegedly exists, we'll never see, and that which we actually see never existed.
If that's the case, then I think it's fair to ask ourselves what else we think exists, but doesn't? How much more of the world is just an illusion created by God? How do we know what is real and what is not?
At this point, you can't fall back on the Bible, for two reasons. First, the Bible seems to say that God created actual heavenly bodies, not just images to aid us in some way. Yet in this view, that is not the case. Second, even the words on the pages of my Bible reach my mind through light images. Why should I trust that what I see looking down when I'm reading is real when I can't trust what I see gazing up at the night sky?
Doesn't this begin to create a skepticism about the existence of real things? A skepticism that could collapse into solipsism, the theory that the self is the only thing that can be known: I'm the only one that exists, and my perceptions.
This view, then, undermines all observational disciplines, including science and history. Because we don't know if we're seeing the thing itself or merely a fabricated image, an illusion of something that doesn't exist.
Let me say it again. What's really there, we never see. What we do see was never there. There were no super nova explosions billions of years ago. Those things never happened. The only thing we see are images of explosions that never took place.
This would mean that virtually everything I see in the heavens-- anything outside our solar system-- isn't real. It's simply a light image of events that never took place, an illusion.
Why make stars so far away that we can't see them? Why make events appear to our eyes that never happened? There's a simple word for it. It's called deception. That's what God would be guilty of if that's really the way it happened.
As an old-earther, I'm going to say that evidence for an ancient universe is in the heavens because scientific testing shows us that these stars are far away and their light takes a long time to reach us. Therefore, if we're seeing light from those stars, and they're a billion light years away, then those stars must have existed for at least a billion years.
The counter from a young-earther is, No, wait, you don't understand. God actually created the light in transit. If God created everything in six days, then He had to create the star, too, because it does say He created the heavens and the earth. I'm thinking this is what they're going to hold.
So, He created the star and the earth and the light in between, which sounds fine if you're thinking of the star like a light bulb that is giving off a steady glow. But what we have in the galaxies are not just simply light bulbs giving off a steady glow, and you have this undifferentiated stream of glow flowing through the universe that God creates. Rather, what we have are light images of specific events in the universe, like super nova explosions, for example. So, if we see a super nova explosion that appears to be a billion light years away, this suggests, from my view, that it actually happened a billion years ago.
But a young-earther is going to have to say, No, that image is just something God created in transit. He just created it. It didn't really happen because there was no "billion years ago." Instead, the only thing that God actually created are all these little bits and pieces floating around in the universe that look like they were the result of that explosion that never happened.
You call that deception? That's my point. God doesn't do that, I suspect.
There's one other point to that, too. If this is the case, actually-- if the earth is only six to ten thousand years old-- then nothing outside of our solar system...
What a young-earther is going to have to say is that the tar never exploded because it's just a light image that was created in transit. It looks like it exploded a billion years ago, but there was nothing here a billion years ago. What we actually have here now are just bits and pieces floating around. And what we see that looks like a billion years ago is not the super nova that exploded and gave us the bits and pieces we have now, but instead is simply an image that God made in between.
My point is simply that we have observational evidence that seems to indicate an ancient universe. And the solution-- the way young-earthers would get around that-- creates an absolutely unacceptable situation in which we'd have to admit that all galactic phenomenon are simply images and illusions created by God. And we have no way of knowing whether things actually exist out there today that somehow correspond with those phenomenon, because we can't see those things yet. It will be a billion years before we actually see those things.
I think that this view leads to an absolutely untenable situation and encourages incredible skepticism. Because if that's the case, and what I see are simply images created in transit, then I have no confidence that there's anything beyond those images. Because, actually, God didn't need anything more than the images. He doesn't need the thing itself, because we won't see the thing itself for a billion years.
were there no rainbows before Noah stepped off the ark?
i take it as it was written but interpret it a different way, i think it is rather arbitrary to say that your way is the only true way..
"Bible states them all and I either agree with it all [ even if I can't always explain or prove the point ] OR I have to dis-believe all of it. There just isn't any point taking bits and pieces of scripture and say they are true and other bits and say they must be interpreted a certain way."
but i think that you would do this yourself.. some parts of the bible are obviously not litterally true but analogies metaphors etc just as our speech today is filled with such devices used to convey meaning... not accepting a litteral 6 days has nothing to do with accepting the bible as truth or not and there is a big difference between the writing down of historical stories with contemporaneous notes taken from the time of the exodus onwards.
I try to read the Bible with the precision the writer intended, taking the words the way the writer expected them to be taken. I take the text at its plain meaning unless I have some good reason to do otherwise. When you think about it, this is the basic rule we apply to everything we read: novels, newspapers, periodicals and poems.
the text of Genesis that we read is itself an interpretation of what the oldest copies of the pentatuch that exist and the original Hebrew says that after Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit that God came to them as in a thunder storm, yet we read in english that God 'walked' in the garden and called his name. Lucifer 'the shining one' is viewed as a serpent, yet there is confusion around the interpretation of the Hebrew where 'the shining one' and snakes (ostensibly with shining skin) use the same root word....??????????
Abtruth = Absolute truth i'm guessing.
How can anything absolute be open to interpretation. It either is or it isn't. If it requires interpretation then every reader could interpret it differently and therefore would not surely be an absolute.
I think this affects both our arguments if we both believe that the Bible is absolute truth. Because even from literall reading there are still many different versions of the Bible. Which is the most accurate??? I'm not even going to begin to take up that argument.
I have 6 days, you don't have to.
What counts in the long run, are you saved? Where will you spend eternity?
Doctrinal and Denominational differences will be with us for long time I reckon. So i am not going to argue over who/which is right or wrong.
Do I help my fellow human? If I can. Do we all do it the same way? thankfully not.
Lets celebrate our core Christianity with out getting hung up on the colour of the pastors car. [some believe you shouldnt drive a red car, show me scrioture for that one!]
ahh yes the bible is absolutely the truth i believe, but some parts can be construed in different ways. so there can be a couple of interpretations but only one would actually be true and this is what we should debate .. as long it is done with grace argueing is one of our most important virtues because it will help keep us from falling into error, like a government without a strong opposition.
with the rest i agree
chromed
you havent allowed others to post on your site .. only team members
oopps
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