HEB

HEBREWS 2

[3] How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him;
[4] God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will?

If one posits that miracles have occurred, how does one get from that to the existence of a God? Why not just conclude that miracles are part of the natural world?

Depicted here is the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes. Suppose a number of people drink some Lourdes water, and later discover their stage four cancer has fallen into complete remission. What is it about this evidence that makes you believe in God, as opposed to believing in something else?

Lourdes water has been analyzed and found to contain, dissolved within it, oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic acid, carbonates of lime and magnesia, a trace of carbonate of iron, an alkaline carbonate or silicate, chlorides of potassium and sodium, traces of sulphates of potassium and soda, traces of ammonia, and traces of iodine. Suppose this combination of compounds somehow had an objective therapeutic benefit for cancer much the way they discovered a certain cocktail of drugs were effective against HIV. Would believers, defending the miracle qua miracle, attempt to debunk this research as vigorously as atheists debunk a young earth creation? Would the Catholic Church attempt to suppress this research, along with stem cell research and the like, lest doctors end up putting the miracle in a bottle and ending the lucrative pilgrimages to the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes?

Why should anyone identify a self-aware entity with superpowers as the cause of any purported miracle? It’s the same question that pops up in the various metaphysical arguments for God. How do you go from the First Mover directly to the Father of Jesus Christ, discarding Zeus and Cthulhu along the way?

Jesus was without sin (Hebrews 4:15).

Jesus: “Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.”

Also Jesus: ” Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?”

Open your Bible and have a look at Genesis, specifically 1:30 and 9:2-3. You will find that the concept of eating anything other than vegetables only came to be after the fall of man when sun entered the world. It is against god’s will to kill his sentient creations.

Eating meat cannot be a sin because Christ did not sin (Hebrews 4:15), yet he ate of the Passover lamb (Luke 22:15) and also barbecued fish (Luke 24:42)

Matthew 11:25 At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes

Also Bible (HEB.5:13): “For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe.”

WindowsGuy: “Jesus had no earthly father.”

LinuxGal: “Melchizadek did one better than Jesus: he had no earthly father and no earthly mother.”

Hebrews 7:3 – “Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.”

We should present our bodies as living sacrifices unto God, recognizing that this is just our reasonable duty to the One who gave His life for us (Romans 12:1).

On the contrary, it is written (Hebrews 10:10) By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

HEBREWS 11

[1] Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Faith, or the interior emotion of assurance, is said here to be, entirely by itself, the evidence of undetectable things. In other words, faith, the emotion of assurance that divinely-revealed things are true is the evidence that divinely things are true

Skeptics reject the existence of undetectable things by the very fact they are undetectable.  Emotions are not valid epistemological tools.  If they were, then anything could be demonstrated to be true.

[11] Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.

Except that Sarah laughed in disbelief when God first told her that, and when he complained, she lied to his face and said she didn’t laugh.

[17] By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son

Sounds great on the surface, but Abraham also begat a son named Ishmael, who became the father of the Arabs.  Naturally, Evangelical Christians would like to erase that biblical fact from existence.

As a category, innerrancy this can only really apply to propositions. As soon as we grasp this, immediately we see that vast amounts of the Bible are simply not candidates for being either ‘inerrant’ or ‘errant’. For instance, was Jesus’ prayer, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” errant or inerrant? As a prayer it was not even a proposition so it cannot be factually true or factually false.

But on the cross Jesus was not actually uttering a prayer on the fly, he was reciting Psalm 22:1 “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”

Inerrancy would apply to Christ’s meta-meaning when he made that citation. Inerrancy would say that Christ really was forsaken by God, and it was not just a cry of self-pity. And this leads in turn to a whole theology of atonement that says Christ was cut out of the Trinity briefly, which is heterodox in terms of historical Christianity, because either Christ was demoted from godhood for a time, or there were two gods for a time.

 “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible”. -St. Aquinas. Miracles are all around us. Evidence of God is everywhere. Yet they look at it and still cannot see it. This is because they are of this world and reject God.

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Scripture teaches that faith itself is the evidence and substance of invisible things. According to scripture, a god’s existence is factual because people believe in it.

Hebrews 11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son.

Ishmael: “Only begotten son? What am I, chopped liver?”