Pelaides said:
I have been reading ,and sometimes been participating in various christian forums for 2 years,and here are some of the strangest things i have heard.
1.Christians worship a babylonian god naned gad?
2.There is no such thing as hell?
3.Jesus is an egyptian sun god?
4.The Holy Spirit is a person?
5.Saint John was senile?
6.There is nothing written in the Bible about satan?
7.The apostle Paul was a phony,and his writings were inspired by the devil?
Is there any truth to such statements,or are these people just misinformed?
None has merit, for genuine Christians worship the same God as Jesus (John 4:22), telling the Samaritan woman that "true worshipers will worship the Father with spirit and truth, for, indeed, the Father is looking for suchlike ones to worship him. God is a Spirit, and those worshiping him (that includes Jesus, verse 22) must worship with spirit and truth."(John 4:23, 24) God's name is identified in the Bible, not as "gad" (that is used at Isaiah 65:11 and means "fortune" and is translated as "god of good luck"), but as Jehovah as at Exodus 3:15 and Psalms 83:18.
Of the word "hell" that is used by various Bibles, it is rendered from the Hebrew word
sheol and the Greek words
hades and
Gehenna. However, neither
sheol and
hades mean eternal torment in a "fiery hell", but rather mankind's common grave and
Gehenna (as at Matt 5:29, 30) means everlasting destruction.(Matt 10:28)
That is why Jacob said that he would "go down mourning to my son into Sheol" at Genesis 37:35, thinking that Joseph had died and he may follow. Here the
King James Bible renders
sheol as "grave", but at Deuteronomy 32:22, it renders it as "hell".(as well in a number of other places, such as 2 Sam 22:6, Job 11:8; 26:6; Ps 9:17; 16:10)
And of Jesus Christ, the apostle Peter told Jesus when asked who he thought he was: "You are the Christ,
the Son of the living God."(Matt 16:16) And the apostle John wrote in conclusion of his book of John: "But these things have been written down that you may believe that Jesus is
the Christ the Son of God."(John 20:31)
Thus, Jesus is
not God, but his "only-begotten Son" (John 3:16), for the word "only-begotten" is from the Greek
monogenes that means "single of its kind, only".(
Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, pg 417) Jesus is Jehovah God's unique son, his "firstborn".(Col 1:15)
The holy spirit is God's active force,
not a person. At Isaiah 44, God says: "For I shall pour out water upon the thirsty one, and trickling streams upon the the dry place. I shall pour out
my spirit upon your seed, and my blessings upon your descendants.”(isa 44:3) Just as water and blessings are not persons, so neither is God’s “spirit, noted as “my spirit” as being the possession of Jehovah God.(Isa 44:2)
In addition, at John 3:8, the Greek word
pneuma is rendered as both “spirit” and “wind” in the same verse, with Jesus saying to Nicodemus: “The
wind (Greek
pneuma) blows where it wants to, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not where it comes from and where it is going. So is everyone that has been born from the
spirit (Greek
pneuma).” Hence, the holy spirit is Jehovah’s active force that in unseen, but produces visible results just as wind does.
At Proverbs 18, it says that “the spirit (Hebrew
ruach) of a man can put up with his malady, but as for a stricken spirit, who can bear it ?”(Prov 18:14) Hence, our driving force or spirit can put up with certain illnesses but can become “stricken” when we reach our mental and emotional limit.
The apostle John was not senile but very much in control of himself, writing the Bible books of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, the Gospel of John and the Apocalyptic book of Revelation under the inspiration of God’s holy spirit, some 65 years after Jesus death, at about 100 years old.
It is the Bible that establishes just who Satan (meaning “resistor”) is. At Genesis 3:1-6, it says that a “serpent” deceived Eve, so that she reached up and took fruit from “the tree of knowledge of good and bad” (used to establish God’s right to set moral boundaries for his creation). Then, the last book of the Bible, at Revelation 12, it identifies that the “original serpent (Gen 3), (is) the one called Devil and Satan.”(Rev 12:9)
At Job 1, it says that “when the sons of the true God entered to take their stand before Jehovah, and even Satan proceeded to enter right among them.”(Job 1:6) Satan is the archenemy of Jehovah God, who sought to derail the “kingdom” (Rev 12:3, 4) from accomplishing its purpose of destroying him and transforming the earth into a paradise.(Luke 23:43)
That the apostle was not a phony is seen at Acts 9, whereby Jesus Christ specifically chooses him, telling Ananias: “Be on your way, because this man is a chosen vessel to me to bear my name to the nations as well as kings and the sons of Israel. For I shall show him plainly how many things he must suffer for my name.”(Acts 9:15, 16) Thus, Paul was privileged to write 14 of the 27 books of the Christian Greek Scriptures by means of God’s holy spirit.