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Is this really what is preached "from most pulpits"? In my experience, Hell is rarely if ever mentioned.

As Jesus describes it in Luke 13:34. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing."

Actually, I never said that it did. My point was that we can't calculate the age of the Earth from the Biblical data.

Exactly - the prophecy was given to Jehu, not to Ahab. So it doesn't apply to any of Ahab's descendants.

You make it sound as though God is throwing a hissy fit because some people reject His love. God gave us (mankind) free will to choose - and we (mankind) chose to rebel against Him, trash His creation and murder His Son. This is why people go to Hell - not because God wants to send them there...

Average life expectancy is misunderstood by many people. They skim over the word "average" and fixate on the figures. 35-40 years was the average! People died younger, and also much older, than that. Now the reason it's much lower than today was the high mortality in infancy. Up to 50% of...

This is very ingenious of Hilary of Poitiers - but there are two glaring problems with it. "It was declared by the prophet that not until the fourth generation would anyone from the household of Ahab sit on the throne of the kingdom of Israel” 1) What the prophet actually said to Jehu was...

No, they were all kings of Judah. The kings of Israel are irrelevant because they weren't descended from David

I gave it in my opening post. Read Matthew 1 and compare with the books of Kings and Chronicles. There are three generations (that we know about) missing, and there may well be others in those parts of the genealogy where we don't have any independent information.

Good points, but the reason creeds were written and used is because they're practical! It takes time for a new convert (especially if from an unbelieving background, as I was) to make sense of Scripture. Scripture isn't always self-explanatory - it has to be taught. And in the meantime, someone...

The "Apostles' Creed" is much later than the apostles, but it's the oldest creed that we have and is a good summary of what they taught. And "summary" is a good word for it - it was never meant to replace Bible teaching, but to allow easy memorisation of the essential truths. (Which is why many...

Creeds had the function of defining what is true Christian belief and what isn't. Confessions are more detailed than the creeds, and tend to be specific to denominations. When used for their designated purposes, they are useful. By reading a confession, you discover what a particular church...

The absence of a number of generations from an ancient genealogy is NOT an error! Problems arise when we try to shoehorn ancient literature into modern ways of thinking.

That explains a lot

Where do you get your "science" from? Genetic evidence points to the human race being at least 100,000 years old.

Some people care a great deal, it would seem. And when atheists are using this issue to pour scorn on Christianity, we'd better get our facts right, and not make claims that don't stand up to scrutiny even from a Biblical point of view.

The Bible is full of numerical data: dates, lifespans, reigns, and so on. There’s enough of these in the historical books of the Old Testament to make up a reasonably complete timeline all the way from the creation of Adam to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC - so it’s very tempting to use...

There's a lot that we are not told. It's when we start filling in the gaps (which involves making assumptions) that we start to disagree. There were no birth registers in those days. So when Herod ordered all boys under the age of two years to be killed, I assume that he was including a large...

Some life experiences have caused me to come down on one side of a debate rather than another. For example: since the Spirit gave me the gift of tongues, I'm never going to be a cessationist! But from another angle, the unusual way in which I became a Christian has caused me no end of...

They're the ones whose writings have survived. That's how we know what Christians in the 2nd-10th centuries were thinking. According to Genesis 1:1, He "made the heavens and the earth". Out of nothing. There was a starting point in time - which is what the term 'big bang' refers to. Actually...