Whole Reason

Hi Seeker:
In lis­ten­ing to your ser­mon, I think you make some very good points, but I think you are miss­ing the con­text of Matthew 7:15–20, and there­fore are miss­ing the point of the pas­sage. As you noted, Jesus warns of false prophets and gives us a lit­mus test to detect them: by their fruits we’ll know them. But in the full con­text of Matthew 5–7, Jesus seems to be con­trast­ing the ideas of the ser­mon on the mount with “reli­giously cor­rect” behavior–with RCism. The false prophets “prophes[ized] in [Jesus] name, and in [Jesus’] name [drove] out demons and perform[ed] many mir­a­cles”, they did all the things that one would asso­ciate with reli­gion, but they failed to fol­low Jesus’ man­date of love–including it seems to me his man­date to look at the big log in our own eyes before the tiny splin­ter in our brother’s eye.
To me that’s the con­trast; not whether or not the teacher teaches that homo­sex­u­al­ity is a sin. It’s the sin of self-righteousness replac­ing love that Jesus was spec­i­fy­ing here, no other sin.
your friend
Keith

RCism? Roman Catholicism?

And btw, I take as my con­text the imme­di­ate teach­ings before and after this one.
Before this pas­sage, he is start­ing a sec­tion on the nar­row way that leads to life. Of course, this doesn’t men­tion either purity or love, grace or truth, as I did in my ser­mon.
Aft of the false prophets teach­ing, he dis­cusses those who say they do the will of God, but in actu­al­ity, are not. And their sin? Law­less­ness, not grace­less­ness. That is, they are doing lots of reli­gious activ­ity, but do not pay atten­tion to Him or the *law*.
It is in the law that, among other things, sex­ual sins are con­demned, includ­ing homo­sex­u­al­ity. Again, I was not focus­ing on that, how­ever. What I was say­ing is that false teach­ers aban­don either love or truth, and the lat­ter end up jus­ti­fy­ing sins that are clearly con­demned in scrip­ture, of which I men­tioned both adul­tery and homo­sex­u­al­ity. How­ever, those were merely exam­ples. But you are right in that Jesus’ was usu­ally attack­ing legal­ists, not those who excused sin.
I believe, how­ever, that my address­ing both legal­ism and per­mis­sivism as here­sies is con­sis­tent with this pas­sage and Jesus’ and Paul’s other teach­ings on false teach­ers. It is also con­sis­tent with a pas­sage which applies to those who teach (among oth­ers), Isa­iah 5:20

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who put dark­ness for light, and light for dark­ness;
Who put bit­ter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Hi Seeker:
Thank you for your response. BTW you didn’t sound the way I imag­ined you would (no one does of course:-) and I must say I liked your tone and your styl­is­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties. I know that such isn’t the point–proclaiming the truth is the point–but I found a com­pas­sion in your voice that speaks well for your pas­tor­ship.
Any­way, you wrote:
Aft of the false prophets teach­ing, he dis­cusses those who say they do the will of God, but in actu­al­ity, are not. And their sin? Law­less­ness, not grace­less­ness. That is, they are doing lots of reli­gious activ­ity, but do not pay atten­tion to Him or the *law*.
I don’t see that law­less­ness was the sin Jesus was object­ing to here. This was all part of his Ser­mon on the Mount and it seems clear to me he was talk­ing about the sins referred to there, i.e. plac­ing self-righteous, legal­is­tic think­ing ahead of gen­eros­ity of spirit. Maybe you are tak­ing Jesus’ com­ment that “not every­one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the king­dom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” to be refer­ring to the law. But it seems to me Jesus was refer­ring to the spe­cific com­mand­ments Jesus just gave in the SoM.
your friend
Keith

Btw Seeker: here’s what I meant by “RCism”–religious cor­rect­ness, which is in my opin­ion con­sid­er­ably more seri­ous a threat than the made-up dan­ger of “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness”.
your friend
keith

“RCism”–religious cor­rect­ness
LOL! Never heard that, but of course, such things exist. You gotta be care­ful though, RC already has a pre-existing mean­ing in Chris­t­ian cir­cles ;)
Thanks for the com­pli­ments. As has been oft said on the web, the imper­sonal and imme­di­ate nature of the blo­gos­phere means that not only can peo­ple eas­ily mis­in­ter­pret your tone, but if you are not care­ful, you can eas­ily get into vit­ri­olic inter­changes, since you are not forced to face other peo­ple directly.
Also, though peo­ple do not always buy into this idea, I do think that per­sonal dis­agree­ment on spe­cific moral prin­ci­ples, or dis­ap­proval of cer­tain moral choices of oth­ers, does not mean that you hate oth­ers, even if they expe­ri­ence it that way.
What I mean is that I think to a large extent it is proper, even nec­es­sary, to vehe­mently oppose bad ideas, while at the same time not attack­ing peo­ple. The prob­lem is, if you attack ideas, peo­ple often feel like you are attack­ing them per­son­ally. I addressed this in my oft cited (by me ;) and not well-liked What is hate?, an arti­cle I am proud of. How­ever, I will admit that, when deliv­er­ing value judg­ments, even of ideas, we should be care­ful to not use overly pejo­ra­tive terms.

Then you disagree with the use of the word, or the translation of that passage?
On that day many will say to me, ?Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?? And then will I declare to them, ?I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.?
Here's how oth­ers trans­late that word:

Note that the more “lit­eral” trans­la­tions (NAS, NKJV, ESV) all trans­late the word as “law­less­ness.“
What do you think this means?

The NIV trans­lates it as “evil­do­ers”. The more lit­eral trans­la­tions? I don’t know what that means since a trans­la­tion is meant reflect what the pas­sage really means. But given the con­text of the pas­sage in the Ser­mon on the Mount, I would say it is refer­ring to that stuff, not any ster­ile legal­is­tic stuff.
your friend
keith

The more lit­eral trans­la­tions? I don’t know what that means since a trans­la­tion is meant reflect what the pas­sage really means. But given the con­text of the pas­sage in the Ser­mon on the Mount, I would say it is refer­ring to that stuff, not any ster­ile legal­is­tic stuff.
Sure. Are you famil­iar with such terms as for­mal equiv­a­lence, dynamic equiv­a­lence, and para­phrase? These (among oth­ers) reflect dif­fer­ent philoso­phies of trans­la­tion. In the order listed, they range from word for word trans­la­tion to highly inter­preted and applied.
In fact, Zon­der­van has a nice dis­cus­sion of these and their “accu­racy”, as well as a nice trans­la­tion con­tin­uum chart show­ing the var­i­ous trans­la­tions and how they fall on the spec­trum between very lit­eral and very inter­preted.
Those that I called “more accu­rate” are less inter­preted, so they are in some sense closer to the intended mean­ing of the orig­i­nal word. But that is debat­able. But the orig­i­nal words are impor­tant. But schol­ars will tell you that often, the less “for­mal equiv­alant” trans­la­tions, like the NIV, can be more “dumbed down” into sim­pler ver­nac­u­lar and can often give the wrong mean­ing — I find that the NIV does this more than one would like, although I have a para­phrase (TLB) which I find to be very accu­rate when I como­pare it’s trans­la­tion to my exam­i­na­tion of the orig­i­nal lan­guages and context.

In the Spring of 2006 God sent a mes­sage. It is about the mean­ing of First is Last and Last is First. The mes­sage is this:
In the morn­ing I go to Heaven. In the after­noon I live my life. In the evening I die, death.
What does this mean? It means that Birth is Last and Last is Birth. God also gives an exam­ple so that you can under­stand this bet­ter. Exam­ple: Mike Dou­glas died on his birth­day, August 11. (note Mike Dou­glas and Michael Dou­glas are two dif­fer­ent people.)

Um, what?

Cor­rec­tion: to the mean­ing of First is Last and Last is First. It means that Birth is Last and Birth is First, In that order.
It also means that you haven’t been Born yet.
Daniel G,
Does that make more sense to you? I read your Um, What? I tried to make this as clear as pos­si­ble. For some rea­son a num­ber of peo­ple just don’t under­stand First is Last. Then some peo­ple get it right away and they are clever about it too. If you could tell me what is not clear, it will try to give you a bet­ter explaination.

What does this have to do with the sub­ject mat­ter? God sent a mes­sage to whom, through whom? What impor­tance is this ‘first is last’ stuff? I lit­er­ally have no idea what your point is. Yet.

Daniel, that is one of my favorite names. God told me the above mes­sages. God is now tel­ing you his mes­sage through me. The mes­sage comes from God, to me, to you. That is the cor­rect order. NOw God has a point he wants to make, or I should say he has an issue that is impor­tant to him. HIs big issue is the mean­ing of First is Last and Last is First. It can also be re-written to say, the First will be Last and the Last will be First. It means the same thing.

God sees every­thing, doesn’t he?
This is one small piece of proof that God talked to me:
J D Tip­pit. Now Tip­pit kind of looks like Rit­ter. Now I unjum­ble the let­ters of Rit­ter to get TIRRET. Now TIRRET looks more like TIPPITTip­pett to Tip­pit. So the next step I change the E to I. So Tip­pet is now Tip­pit.
Now I have FS Tip­pit and JD Tip­pit. The first two ini­tials are not the same. Next I go to Wikipedia, there I find; “Some thought that J D stood for “Jef­fer­son Davis” how­ever JD does not stand for any­thing”. That means his name is just J D. So the ini­tials F S , do not stand for any­thing. I just have two ini­tials that do not stand for any­thing. Are you fol­low­ing me?
Next what does “FRITTERS” mean. If your fol­low­ing my think­ing here, God is going to tell you what hap­pened to JD Tip­pit after he was shot. Frit­ters is a dough that is deep fried. Bread also means body, like in the last super Christ takes the bread and says this is my body. Look in the dic­tio­nary, PIT means HELL. TIP means money paid, gra­tu­ity. There are other mean­ings to. These mean­ings tell a story.

If you think this is just crazy. Remem­ber I am just the mes­sen­ger. Jesus is the one that had to talk about JFK. So he had a rea­son for doing that. Only God knows who the killer is. This is proof that Christ talked to me and that is the rea­son he told me “Who killed JFK”. It is proof. I had for­got­ten about the case years ago. This is a cold case now, it been 45 years since the shoot­ing.
I also read the part about giv­ing false proph­esy. God says false prophets go to Hell or some­thing like that. I only repeat what God told me. Now what I wrote above is from God. He told me who killed JFK in 2006. The above is not a lie or a joke and I am going to HEAVEN with­out fear.

Who are the co-conspirators? Turns out that there are two police­men named Tip­pit, and one Tip­pett work­ing in the Dal­las police Depart­ment that same year(1963). Back to the clue word Frit­ters. That is plural, you know about plural. We have two frit­ters. The co-conspirators name is Gayle M. Tip­pit.
Now the Dal­las Police Departt­ment obvi­ously cov­ered up and framed Oswald. He was the Patsy. They did it cause it is very pos­si­ble that one of the other police offi­cers rush­ing to the scene saw Tip­pet flee­ing the scene car­ry­ing a rifle. They cov­ered it up because of the embar­rass­ment of one of their own was the man that killed JFK? And the War­ren com­mis­sion must have also fig­ured that out so they stuck with the Dal­las Dept. story say­ing that it was Oswald. It could have been a National embar­rass­ment. Now if you look at the evi­dence like I did. It is easy to see that the DAl­las Police Dept tam­pered with the evi­dence over and over again. And they did a very bad job of it too.


See if you can make up a word that is a fried food (like frit­ters). Unjum­ble the let­ters to reveal the name of the killer (Tip­pit). Then divide the word Tip­pit into words that describe what hap­pened. Tip– means that JD Tip­pit was paid for the job and the pres­i­dency was over turned. Pit — means that he went to Hell for what he did. Pit means the worst Hell.

Then the two remain­ing let­ters F. S. stands for Fence Shooter. It’s INGENIUS!

This is where it gets intest­ing. Does Gayle M. Tip­pit
Now if Gayle M. Tip­pit
Gods mes­sen­ger, Melanie

So why are you post­ing your spec­u­la­tions on my “False teach­ers” post­ing? If noth­ing else, I’d say that you are show­ing us exactly how false teach­ers oper­ate — on obscure spir­i­tual impres­sions and pre­mo­ni­tions.
Now, the holy spirit most cer­tainly can and does com­mu­ni­cate through images and other meth­ods that go around our very lim­ited intel­lects. My own expe­ri­ence with prophecy is that God often gives a pic­ture, then inter­prets it for us.
But Melanie, I sus­pect that you are not being led by the Holy Spirit in these things, but prac­tic­ing div­ina­tion and soul­ish­ness, because this ‘work’ you are doing does not look like the work of the Holy Spirit at all, since His work is to con­vince us of the gospel and per­sonal holi­ness. Or in the case of prophecy, edi­fi­ca­tion and exhor­ta­tion and com­fort (1 Corinthi­ans 14:3).
Your post is so seem­ingly unre­lated to the sub­ject of this post, you come across even more fanat­i­cal and crazy than you oth­er­wise might.

I though it was satirical.

I guess I missed it in the bizarreness of it all. If it’s satire, it’s obscure.

The satire was obvi­ous.
Want to hear some­thing I think is cool? My lit­tle brother, who is a police offi­cer, is guard­ing Barack Obama’s house tonight. He’s com­plain­ing that it’s going to be cold tonight. I told him to take a cam­era with him just in case. My Dad had lunch with Obama when he was a state sen­a­tor. I don’t think he’s going to get another lunch with him any time soon. :) I was able to attend the Grant Park cel­e­bra­tion, which was pretty cool!

Search and you will find. Go look up the mean­ing of the word Jesus. It is the com­bi­na­tion of two words Je — Sus and it is a Greek word. You will be sur­prised to find out that it means Pigman.

Melanie,
I don’t usu­ally humor trolls, but, um, let me ask you.
Are you famil­iar at all with the fact that Jesus is not a Greek word but a translit­er­a­tion of the Hebrew name “Joshua” which means “God is our sal­va­tion”?
http://tinyurl.com/62jpof
But let me ask you, can you pro­vide the sup­posed greek words that trans­late to ‘pig man’?
And I can’t wait to hear what sig­nif­i­cance you think that the word ‘pig man’ might mean — are the Jews pigs? Was Jesus a pig? A gentile?