"Our God is a Consuming Fire" - Hell is burning in God's Love which Souls of Darkness cannot hand

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

Its quite alright... Im used to it believe me

And there is a middle ground... the gospels

a reply to: arpgme

Physical references to God in New Testament is mostly figurative. Problem is that there's another false god who has similar features.

We're faced with a 2 headed dragon by religion. And there's a riddle that must be answered.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

the Bible describes the Church as the Bride of Christ.

It doesn't.
en.wikipedia.org...
It talks about the bridegroom, in the gospels, where it is assumed that there would be a bride to go with that.
Revelation, which is full of metaphorical illustrations, alludes to a wife in very vague terms, mainly in regards to its righteousness, and is probably really talking about the church in the sense of an institution rather than as a group of people.
There are comparisons made between the relationship of Jesus and the church using a bride analogy in Ephesians.
Paul makes an analogy to a chaste virgin.
In Romans, Paul uses a supposed legal way of thinking about marriage, to describe our personal relationship to the Law.

But it doesn't actually describe the church as a bride in any literal sense of the word.

The marriage between man and woman is designed to show the relationship between God and humanity: God being husband and the human race being wife.

No.
Men are said to leave their families to be married, to join their wives, because God created man and woman.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

This is why the works done apart from the Holy Spirit are burnt away as wood, hay, and stubble. Believers in Christ are baptized and identified in the righteous works of Christ. These works are purified by fire. Non-believers only have human works, therefore they too will burn as wood, hay, and stubble.

Paul was talking about spiritual leaders who were "building the church", using the analogy of a building to make a point about what those teachings are, exactly.
He wasn't talking about the personal lives of believers vs. unbelievers.
The actual verse lists building materials, "gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw", all together, without making it into two separate lists, one that good people do, and one that bad people do, they are all things people do, as they take positions in the church as teachers.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

Eternal Life is through the Son only. I hope you understand that as a biblical principle. The "love" of man is an emotional chemical reaction. The love of God is faith. The Holy Spirit supplies faith to those who express a desire to know God, therefore the love that a believer expresses to God is a reciprocation of God's initial love. We (believers) love God because He (God) loved us first.

By your standard, an atheist can have salvation because he is capable of emotional love. That is a stumbling block in the way of the truth.

People have "a desire to know God" because of Jesus.
People have the capacity for love, naturally.
What is lacking is the inclination to love others who are not related to you.
God realizes that we need to love everyone, just as God loves everyone.
The point of this explanation you are quoting is that love of God is expressed in loving other people.

"Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar."

"Faith" is the law that God writes on our hearts and is not proof of salvation but the invitation.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

That is exactly my point. The "love" of the flesh is a bio-chemical reaction. The true love is of the spirit. Since man is born with a dead spirit, we must be born again through faith in Christ. Only then is man able to express the same love that God expresses toward us. An atheist has a dead spirit, therefore an atheist is incapable if spirit-love.

I think you are just making things up here.
The "same love" is how your love is distributed, it isn't some special quality of love.
A love to your brothers and sisters, applied to people who could be completely unrelated to you, is the definition of a love like God's.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

You are misunderstanding me. Only those who are believers in Christ and therefore born again have the Holy Spirit. Only they are capable of love.

This is you making yourself a prophet greater than God Himself to make grand proclamations purely out of your own imaginings.
The problem is directing your love to things like money and power and prestige according to worldly values.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

What about the fact that He died as a payment for our sins on the cross? Do we have to believe in that for Eternal Life? That is very different than just calling Him Lord.

That's a made up theory, rather than a biblical teaching.
"By his stripes we are healed" is what the Bible teaches, which is not a form of payment but is a way of being us, the strips representing the consequences of sin, which he sustained in his experience in humanity, then being accepted and honored by God, despite all of that.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

But it does line up with what He said. Its easy to distort Jesus' words, as you constantly do, when you ignore the OT and NT context. There is no justification for that. Jesus came as a Jew to fulfill the Jewish prophecies. The Temple was His father's house. The history of the Temple, its function and symbolism is the OT. You cannot discard that...its irresponsible. Jesus did teach love, but He also taught rebirth. First comes rebirth, then love.

Jesus was not subject to a written script that made him have to follow through like a ceremonial ritual.
Jesus was a son of David in that he is connected to the songs of David, as being an expression of Messianic expectations as a rulership of God through His anointed.
Jesus called the temple a house of prayer, and spoke of us as being the spiritual houses of God, where He dwells.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

My question was, do you believe Jesus died as payment for our sins?? Yes, or no?

It would help if there was somewhere that actually said that in the Bible.

My point is that we must first have Jesus inside of us, by faith in His atoning sacrifice before we can truly love.

Faith is the law of life.
Jesus being in us is metaphorical to being connected with Jesus by being kin to him, being like him as if we were blood related having the same nature.
It isn't capturing the person of Jesus to make a possession of him.

The love of humans is not love. In God's eyes it is filth. It isn't until we are born again that we are capable of love.

You are taking metaphors as if they were literal.

All sons of Adam are born as "children of wrath" by nature, not love (Ephesians 2:3).

It probably just means that they were the gentiles that the OT prophecies expected to be the subjects of God's intervention on Israel's behalf.
The idea being that in the OT point of view, they were the virtual Gog and Magog, but God was reaching out to bring them under His protection.

It is not until the righteousness of Christ is credited to us by faith that we are then capable of expressing the same love that God has.

We, the entire world, have imputed onto us a higher status because of the righteousness of Jesus, who lived that way of life as a human like us.
That was "credited" to us, whether we knew about or not.
Our having "God's love" is to recognize that same elevation of the worth of humanity that God has recognized, to not devalue people in our own evaluation of people.

a reply to: BELIEVERpriest

I have love AND faith in Jesus payment for my sins. You have love. Which one counts in the end?

"Payment for sins" is a bad attempt at doctrine making based on an actual biblical teaching of redemption, which was in practical terms freedom from the Old Testament Law.
Faith is the law to love, which is actually the point of the gospel, not belief in theories.