Biblical Common Sense – Death – Who Possesses Immortality?
One might ask, is anyone naturally in possession of immortality? Yes! Scripture in fact clearly indicates who already has immortality.
1 Timothy 1:17 “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”
1 Timothy 6:15-16 “which He will bring about at the proper time– He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen.”
Finally, after way too long of a delay since posting the first third (about Jesus) of my lengthy paper entitled “A Common Sense Approach to the Biblical Presentation of Jesus, Death, & THE Devil”, here is the 2nd main topic – DEATH.
Like the first section on Jesus (started on KR here: Biblical Common Sense – Intro – What & Why), this has several sub-sections that are best published in smaller, easier to read sections here on KR. So for my next several posts, I’ll add the sections that follow one another. I’ll also try to provide all the links at the end of each post to the entire series just for reference.
Alright, time for me to get back on track and start the New Year right with a post in Week #1! So here we go with something short & easy.
Before Christmas I uncovered in a packed-away attic box – a TON more pamphlets, books, leaflets, and other treasures of theology that my parents had collected back in their day. There’s a ton of stuff from individuals, Advent Christian publishers, The Restitution Herald (in Oregon Illinois), and the Layman’s Home Missionary Movement. This particular one here is from the Layman’s – or LHMM for short. There’s no copyright or published date on it so I’m not sure from when it originates. But I’d guess from the 1940′s – 1960′s. I saw the title listed on another site associated with the LHMM, but not the actual content of the piece. Therefore I thought I would re-publish it to the world-wide-web for all to enjoy.
Well, it’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted an article here. Far too long in fact. I apologize for my hiatus. No real good excuses, just the usual things in life that pull us in all directions – job, kids, family commitments, home projects, watching too much football (yes I really do enjoy watching college and professional football – maybe too much), etc.. And probably the worst and certainly dumbest thing is just getting out of the habit. Of course it seems that may be the case with a lot of my fellow KR contributors. But let’s see if I can start a trend of coming back to the well here. Let’s see if I can start off easy and work back into pushing out some fresh content for those have kept coming here and visiting the site.
Read the rest...(637 words, 1 image, estimated 2:33 mins reading time)
I thought I would publish here on KR an excellent paper by Ken Westby. Ken runs the great One God website www.Godward.org – also known as “The Association for Christian Development”. This paper actually just ran as a paid-for full-page ad in “The Journal”. This is the little newspaper that the Churches of God put out. And the interesting thing here (some might call it a bold move), is that the Churches of God (off-shoots of the Armstrong World-Wide movement) are decidedly Binitarian (the “God Family” belief). Ken sent a pdf copy of the entire newspaper (link is here) along with a note saying that his article (on page 19 – and printed here below), was followed up by a 9 PAGE rebuttal in support of the binity belief. I think he may have struck a nerve!
In this clip that has been edited by Jeff Campbell (a basic unitarian and fellow facebook friend to many of us here on the KR blog), he takes a segment of a debate featuring Sir Anthony Buzzard & Joseph Good vs. Dr. James White & Michael Brown and then does his own video commentary on Dr. White’s points.
Basically in the debate, Anthony was presenting the terrific argument he has brought up for years, that Psalm 110:1 shows two different lords. See the following links from Anthony for greater detail:
I was taking a break from most everything when I was out-of-town on vacation last week. This week I’m taking a break from getting into the second section of my paper/series to post something I ran across on the web awhile back. While I haven’t fully had a chance to dig real deep into this site’s content, what I have found I believe to be quite good.
Biblical Common Sense – Jesus – Not Equal, Not the Same!
The following common sense arguments regarding how The Bible clearly demonstrates that God and Jesus are not the same being are ones that tend to come up quite often among those promoting Jesus as God. Many times I have been told in discussions with those wishing to support a Trinitarian or even a Oneness/Modalist viewpoint that these are simply tired old arguments. Yes, the arguments are centuries old and people often tire of them. But that doesn’t mean that they still aren’t valid objections. And their validity remains all the more significant due to the fact each of these are easily answerable when one uses common sense as their guide.
The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans and 1st Corinthians detailed comparisons of Jesus and Adam. Paul even termed Jesus the “Last Adam”. This is because he recognized critically important parallels between these two individuals. Adam, the father of the human race brought death upon everyone because his disobedience took away the ability for humans to live eternally. The perfect obedience of the Last Adam, Jesus the Messiah, gave humanity a way to overcome death and live eternally as originally planned.
Throughout the “Original” Testament God goes out of his way to say over and over that He is the one and only God of the universe and that He alone is responsible for all of creation. But God also reveals something else there and then confirms it later in the New Testament. God says that he CAN NOT be seen by man. In Exodus 33:20 God flat out tells Moses that “no man can see me and live”. Then in the Gospel of John we have collaborating texts like “No man hath seen God at any time” (John 1:18) and “You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form” (John 5:37). And in 1st Timothy we have the added facts that God is “invisible” (1 Tim 1:17) and that He “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see” (1 Tim 6:16).
Read the rest...(511 words, 1 image, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)